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Building on the thematic intersection of architectural waste and conservation, the purpose of this paper is to look at the demolition and deconstruction of Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village – an iconic site in downtown Toronto. In doing so, it examines contradictory site values and tensions inherent in sustainable heritage practices.

This article uses a “follow-the-thing” methodology – an approach developed by the cultural geographer Nicky Gregson (Gregson et al., 2009) – to demonstrate how engaging with processes of building demolition and deconstruction can begin to reveal the site’s multiple legacies.

Recognizing that materials are not lost, but instead move through and are determined by various physical, spatial and cultural conditions, this piece demonstrates how an attention to the choreography of demolition and deconstruction may deepen our understanding of notions of ownership, responsibility and stewardship.

Exposing material trajectories and various actors in the chain, this work challenges the save/discard binary which underpins conventional heritage practices and provides insight into new ways of considering the significance of demolition/deconstruction sites as well as broader social and environmental landscapes implicated in its reconfiguration.

Whereas heritage value is often defined in contrast with perceptions of loss, this piece suggests that engagement with processes of demolition and deconstruction constitutes a form of conservation that simultaneously acknowledges the difficult heritage of these procedures, while also commemorating the site’s ongoing transformation.

This paper delineates the proprietary contest developed around a highly valued prestige item: a silver roofed tankard owned by a Romanian, Gabor Roma man.

The author applies “methodological fetishism” (Appadurai, 1986, p. 5), the perspective of things-in-motion, as well as the biographic method to interpret data collected during 31.5 months of multi-sited anthropological fieldwork carried out in the Transylvanian Gabor and Cărhar Roma groups.

As the tankard in question crossed the borders of three Transylvanian Roma groups, and thus went through the processes of de- and re-contextualization three times, it is characterized by a transethnic/transcultural biography. This paper pays special attention to the agency associated with the tankard (the social and economic practices, processes and emotions it caused or influenced), the transformations concerning its symbolic properties, and its movement between various social contexts and value regimes. Furthermore, it examines how the analysis of these issues contributes to a deeper understanding of prestige relations and consumption, morality and business ethics, and measures of success in two Transylvanian Roma groups.

This paper reveals how subjects create, manipulate, and represent their identities, and social and economic differences through the construction of commodity biographies and ownership histories interpreted as symbolic pantheons. By combining the terms of Marcus (1995) and Fowles (2006), it argues that analyses based on multi-sited fieldwork focusing on commodities crossing cultural or social boundaries, and their transnational/transcultural biographies, should be defined as multi-sited commodity ethnographies.

This chapter concerns itself with a garment factory in Trinidad, West Indies, producing brand-name clothing for the Eastern Caribbean market. Workers in this factory not only stitch garments for an hourly wage; but also stealthily operate a secondary assembly line, creating precise duplicates of the factory's products for themselves to take home and wear. Manufactured on the shop-floor alongside “legitimate” production, the copied garments are identical in every way to the genuine ones they mimic. In this chapter, I argue that workers have created a “loop” in the value chain: a simultaneous moment in which they are both producers and consumers of the factory's products. While “genuine” garments circulate through market-capitalist networks of exchange, copied garments only circulate through social networks – thereby accruing and representing forms of “value” that are distinct from market value. By looping the value chain, factory workers create non-market values alongside market-oriented ones, showing both sets of values to be interdependent. Workers’ own commentary on these processes offers a unique window onto contested meanings of “value” at work on the shop-floor.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how and why formal mentoring support reduces newcomers' intention to leave from the perspective of uncertainty reduction theory.

Time-lagged data were collected from two sources, mentors and newcomers, and 193 paired data sets were included in the analysis.

The results showed that formal mentoring support was positively related to newcomers' person–organisation fit (P–O fit) and person–job fit (P–J fit). In addition, P–O fit and P–J fit mediated the relationship between formal mentoring support and newcomers' intention to leave. Moreover, newcomers' uncertainty avoidance orientation strengthened the relationship between formal mentoring support and perception of fit, and it strengthened the indirect effect between formal mentoring support and newcomer's intention to leave, via the perception of fit.

This study enhances our understanding of the underlying mechanism between formal mentoring support and newcomers' intention to leave. Moreover, it demonstrates that uncertainty avoidance orientation is an important boundary condition during the process of organisational socialisation. The findings also contribute to the organisational socialisation and the mentoring literature by providing evidence from a blue-collar sample.

This paper aims to outline an approach to study the implementation and adoption of information technology systems in healthcare.

The authors use the introduction of electronic health records, part of the English National Programme of Information Technology, as an example to illustrate how theoretical lenses need to be effectively integrated with practical considerations in order to help researchers to overcome the theory‐practice gap in relation to research in this area.

Integrating actor‐network theory (ANT) with other theoretical lenses can usefully inform the design of evaluation of the implementation of electronic health record systems into healthcare settings, but it is necessary that such deliberations are informed by guidance on how to use conceptual considerations in practice.

The paper outlines how combining a case study‐based approach informed by multi‐sited ethnography and drawing on ANT offers a method for a theoretically‐based approach to such evaluations.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a co-design process that was initiated between government and the private sector in Botswana to redesign current ISD practice with particular focus on finding a solution for learning failure. Learning failure was analysed retrospectively using concepts of “task conscious” and “learning conscious” learning.

On the basis of a typical Botswana ISD project in which the lead researcher participated, inefficiencies and shortcomings in the standardised Botswana ISD process in terms of full utilisation of learning processes to support systems success were examined. Through the Developmental Work Research (DWR) methodology, which is based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) principles, IS practitioners from government and the private sector, together with users collaborated to redesign the current Botswana ISD work practice in order to address this shortcoming.

The result has been the incorporation of activity-based learning and reflection into a proposed improved ISD practice framework for Botswana.

Through collaborative redesign between government and industry, a new Botswana ISD practice model that incorporates activity-based learning and reflection has been designed, and findings from examination of the model suggest that it has potential to address current learning deficiencies and thus contribute to efforts of avoiding IS failures. There have also been contributions to DWR resulting from the way in which the methodology was applied.

This is the first known study that uses concepts of “task-conscious” and “learning-conscious” learning to analyse learning retrospectively and at the same time adopting the DWR methodology in the social context of a developing country such as Botswana.

In southeast Asia, international companies are growing to serve customers with multiple faiths. This study aims to focus on Thailand and it is one of Southeast Asia’s nations and it has Muslim minority customers. To represent Thai Muslim companies, Thai Muslims are marketing their goods by bearing the tagline “we are Islamic”. Scholars described it as “Islamic brands”. This research describes the significant feature of Islamic brands between Thai Muslim people. It examines, which of the Islamic brand dimensions motivates Thai customers towards buying Islamic brands.

The current study’s conceptual model was the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and 281 Thai Muslims responded via a standardised survey. The data was collected from four southern Thailand provinces (Narathiwat, Pattani, Satun and Yala) and the statistical application Smart-partial least-squares 3 was used for data analysis.

The most significant factor motivating Thai Muslims towards purchasing Islamic brands is the customer’s Islamic brand. The second factor was the Islamic brands by compliance and Islamic brands by country of origin.

Three regions in Thailand have been researched, as well as the results concentrate only on three Islamic brand attitudes as independent variables and the development of behavioural expectations of TPB. This research also presents a model that could help understand the consumer perceptions about Islamic brands and established brands amongst various consumers.

The present research applies to small companies and multi-national businesses, as it illuminates and recognises the image of Islamic brands and suggests the preferences of customers in selecting the brand of Islamic brand.

The current study aims to explain Thai Muslim customers’ buying behavioural intentions while purchasing Islamic brands in Thailand.

Family Justice Centers, or “one-stop shops” that enable domestic violence victims to access a range of services at one location, are becoming increasingly common. However, there is a limited body of research examining the outcomes and planning processes of these Centers. The early phases of planning Centers are critical to their initial and ongoing success. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues.

In total, 15 stakeholders in a community in the early phases of planning a Center were interviewed.

Content analysis procedures were used to identify themes related to participants’ ideas about what the Family Justice Center should look like (e.g. services to include and perceived benefits and challenges for the Center), the steps required for planning it (e.g. identifying the purpose of the Center, getting key people involved, and building collaborations), and desired technologies.

This paper is the first known research effort to examine the early phases of development in constructing a Family Justice Center.

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an ethnographic study that used object biography with an archival collection of police surveillance files, the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files, housed at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center in Portland, Oregon.

Document analysis, participant observation, semistructured interviews, and object biography were conducted over four years, from 2013 to 2017.

Using object biography with the Police Historical/Archival Investigative Files uncovered numerous personal and public relationships that developed between people and this collection over several decades as well as how these records acquired, constructed, and changed meanings over time and space.

This paper argues that the biography of objects is a useful way for studying the relationships records form, the values people assign to them, and how people and records mutually inform and transform one another in shifting contexts of social lives. Recognizing records as having social histories and applying object biography to them contributes to and grows the greater biography and genealogy of the record and the archive—a genealogy important not only for discovering something about the lives of those who create, encounter, steward, and use records and archives but about our shared human experience.

As a method in sociology, urban ethnography is rather straightforward: it conducts participant observation in cities. In essence, urban ethnographers study place, and yet how place is portrayed is too often absent from ethnographic descriptions. Indeed, place is always present in the lives of people, but it becomes difficult to understand how place works in an ethnographic context. To reflect upon this puzzle, the following text offers a language for how we may make better sense of place as urban ethnographers and the role of place as a central actor in urban life. By revisiting classic and current ethnographies, we consider how place is constructed as an object of analysis, reflective of social phenomenon occurring within a city. Further, in identifying six tensions (in/out, order/disorder, public/private, past/present, gemeinschaft/gesellschaft, and discrete/diffuse), we demonstrate how descriptions of place are either present or absent in these ethnographies. To understand these tensions as they depict place, we maintain, it is to better understand how place is represented within ethnographies claiming to be urban. In conclusion, we present future directions for urban place-based ethnography that may offer more robust interpretations of place and the people who inhabit it.