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Increasingly, schools are embracing action research as an innovative strategy to develop collective teacher efficacy and expertise in a bid to improve learner outcomes. In this chapter, what follows is an exploration of the challenges frequently faced by middle leaders implementing and facilitating action research in schools. These include low levels of collective autonomy, clouded evaluative thinking, and the siloing of success. To support middle leaders in overcoming these challenges, Sarah and Pamela offer an array of practical solutions they have witnessed working successfully in varying contexts. In doing so, they spotlight the work of educational thought leaders, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus Helen Timperley, Dr Kaye Twyford, and Simon Breakspear.

Food sector supply chains have significant negative environmental impacts, including the expansion of global food commodity production, which is driving tropical deforestation – a major climate and biodiversity problem. Innovative supply chain monitoring services promise to address such impacts. Legislation also designates “forest-risk commodities”, demanding supply chain due diligence of their provenance. But such data alone does not produce change. This study investigates how theory in performance measurement and management (PMM) can combine with sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and decision theory (DT) via case study research that addresses paradoxes of simplicity and complexity.

Given existing relevant theory but the nascent nature of the topic, theory elaboration via abductive case study research is conducted. Data collection involves interviews and participatory design workshops with supply chain actors across two supply chains (coffee and soy), exploring the potential opportunities and challenges of new deforestation monitoring services for food supply chains.

Two archetypal food supply chain structures (short food supply chains with high transparency and direct links between farmer and consumer and complex food supply chains with highly disaggregated and opaque links) provide a dichotomy akin to the known/unknown, structured/unstructured contexts in DT, enabling novel theoretical elaboration of the performance alignment matrix model in PMM, resulting in implications for practice and a future research agenda.

The novel conceptual synthesis of PMM, SSCM and DT highlights the importance of context specificity in developing PMM tools for SSCM and the challenge of achieving the general solutions needed to ensure that PMM, paradoxically, is both flexible to client needs and capable of replicable application to deliver economies of scale. To advance understanding of these paradoxes to develop network-level PMM systems to address deforestation impacts of food supply chains and respond to legislation, a future research agenda is presented.

The conceptual foundations of performance measurement and management (PMM) are predominantly rooted in control systems research. However, the appropriateness of this paradigm for volatile and uncertain environments has been questioned. This paper explores whether grounding PMM in social systems theory and viewing uncertainty from an organisational behaviour perspective provides new insights into the PMM theory–practice gap.

A framework, rooted in social systems theory and practice theory, is created that describes how organisational behaviour shapes the social processes associated with organisational change. Semi-structured interviews of 35 people from 16 organisations coupled with thematic analysis are employed to identify the organisational behavioural characteristics that influence how PMM is executed in practice. PMM is then reconceptualised from the perspective of this social systems-based framework.

This investigation proposes (1) performance management is concerned with elements of PMM-related practices open to flexible interpretation by human agents that change the effectiveness of organisational practices, whereas performance measurement is concerned with elements of PMM-related practices not open to interpretation but deliberately reproduced to provide a consistent comparison with the past; (2) the purpose of PMM should be to achieve organisational effectiveness (OE) and (3) the mechanisms underlying performance management and performance measurement are social intervention and embeddedness, respectively.

This first social systems perspective of PMM advances the development of PMM's theoretical foundations by providing a behaviour-based interpretation of, and framework for, PMM-mediated organisational change. This competing approach has strong links to practice.

There is increasing interest in the UK in developing environments that support people who are neurodiverse. This paper aims to report on a project to develop a cognitively supportive environmental assessment tool to improve the design of health centres, where the majority of National Health Service consultations take place, for all users, including people living with dementia and those who are neurodiverse.

A three-stage process was used: a literature review; the development of a matrix of key design features for people living with dementia, autism and other neurodiverse conditions; and the development of an environmental assessment tool and guide for users, which included easy-to-read versions to maximise service user involvement.

The overarching concepts of dementia-friendly design can be adapted to create designs for everyone, including those who are neurodiverse.

There is a paucity of research in environmental design for primary care from the patient’s perspective, and, more generally, further research on design for adults with learning disabilities and autism is needed.

The tools are free to download. With adaptation, they have potential applicability across health and care settings.

This project has confirmed that the principles of dementia-friendly design are applicable, with modifications, to a wider group of neurodiverse people. Critically, each person’s response to sensory stimuli is individual rather than determined by their condition.

Refugees and asylum seekers worldwide face numerous barriers in accessing health systems. The evidence base regarding who and what helps refugees and asylum seekers facilitate access to and the navigation of the health system in the UK is small. This study aims to address this gap by analysing 14 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with refugees and asylum seekers of different countries of origin in the UK to identify where, when and how they came into contact with the health-care system and what the outcome of these interactions was.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were chosen as the key method for this study. In total, 14 individual interviews were conducted. A trauma-informed research approach was applied to reduce the risk of re-traumatising participants.

The paper identifies key obstacles as well as “facilitators” of refugees’ and asylum seekers’ health-care experience in the UK and suggests that host families, friends and third-party organisations all play an important role in ensuring refugees and asylum seekers receive the healthcare they need.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first qualitative study in the UK that looks at comprehensive health journeys of refugees from their first encounter with health services through to secondary care, highlighting the important role along the way of facilitators such as host families, friends and third-party organisations.

The study aimed to listen to refugee survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and/or torture and explore what justice meant to them in exile. This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. The research was funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

Using a survivor-focussed justice lens combined with a trauma-informed approach, narrative interviews were held with 41 women and 20 men refugee survivors living in refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. The researchers also conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 key informants including refugee welfare councils, the UN, civil society, non-government and government organisations. Thematic analysis of the data resulted in the following themes being identified: no hope of formal justice for atrocities that occurred in South Sudan; insecurity; lack of confidence in transitional justice processes in Ugandan refugee settlements; abuse and loss of freedom in refugee settlements; and lack of access to health and justice services in refugee settlements.

This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. That is justice that is survivor-centred and includes elements of traditional and transitional justice, underpinned by social justice. By including the voices of both men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and getting the views of service providers and other stakeholders, this paper offers an alternative form of justice to the internationally accepted types of justice, which offer little relevance or restitution to refugees, particularly where the crime has been committed in a different country and where there is little chance that perpetrators will be prosecuted in a formal court of law.

The research findings are based on a small sample of South Sudanese refugees living in three refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. Thus, wider conclusions should not be drawn. However, the research does suggest that a “viable justice” approach should be implemented that is gender and culturally sensitive and which could also be trialled in different refugee contexts.

Improvements in refugee survivors’ dignity, resilience and recovery are dependent upon the active engagement of refugees themselves using a “survivor-focussed approach” which combines formal and community-based health services with traditional and transitional justice responses.

The provision of a “viable justice approach” ensures those who have experienced SGBV and/or torture, and their families, feel validated. It will assist them to use their internal, cultural and traditional resilience and agency in the process of recovery.

The research findings are original in that data was collected from men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and service providers. The empirical evidence supports this study’s recommendation for an approach that combines both formal and survivor-focussed approaches towards health and viable justice services to meet the needs of refugees living in refugee settlements. This is a response that listens to and responds to the needs of refugee survivors in a way that continues to build their resilience and agency and restores their dignity.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.