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The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of lived experiences, as complementary knowledge to that provided by the sciences, for policy and intervention on climate change.

This conceptual paper draws on several strands within the context of climate change: knowledge and power; human engagement; the meaning of “lived experience” (and its association with “local/indigenous knowledge”); its capture through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiry; post-normal science; rationalist and public action approaches to policy and intervention. The paper combines these strands from their different literatures, previous work by the authors and interdisciplinary deliberation in a European climate change education project.

The case is made for taking account of lived experiences in climate change policy and intervention, and the dangers of not doing so. The paper, however, also identifies the challenge of establishing the validity of lived experience alongside forms of scientifically derived knowledge, and the practical challenge of capturing it in a form that is accessible to practitioners. It concludes by arguing that a public action approach to policy provides a better lens than the conventional rationalist approach to analyse the contested nature of climate science and the potential of lived experience to inform debates through active engagement.

There has been no empirical study on climate change that addresses the research concerns. This would be necessary to forward the paper's agenda.

The paper makes a case for formalising evidence that is based on lived experience in policy making and intervention, and the approach that is needed.

The work develops the concept of lived experience in the context of climate change. Its public action theory of knowledge provides a novel means of analysing and meeting the challenge of diverse knowledge on climate change.

The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of female spouses’ lived experiences of changes in everyday life while living with a husband with dementia.

Nine individual interviews of female spouses were conducted in 2017. A phenomenological narrative approach was applied during data collection, and the analysis was inspired by Amedeo Giorgi’s analytic steps.

Female spouses experienced changes in their marital relationships, and found ways of managing these changes, although they realized life was marked by loneliness and distress. The identified themes reveal how female spouses experienced changes in everyday life as the disease progressed. Everyday routines gradually changed and they actively sought ways to uphold everyday life and a marital relationship.

Research should focus on developing supportive interventions, where the people with the lived experiences in relation to dementia are involved in the research process, to better target the needs for support, when developing interventions.

Insight into everyday life can help health-care service providers to better the support to female spouses and contribute with more individualized support, which may contribute to the quality of care.

In this study, the authors disclose the invisible and silent work that takes place in an everyday life, when living with a husband with dementia during the time span of caregiving. Spouses’ experiences are important to include, when developing intervention to support spouses to better tailor the interventions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore time dilemmas in ethnographic research and develops a facilitating frame for thinking about temporality. Core concepts developed include: temporal awareness that refers to widening of the understanding and sensitivity to time issues; temporal practices which relate to how the researcher learns to deal with, for example, contradictory conceptions of time in the pragmatics of conducting fieldwork and in the analysis of competing data; and temporal merging which is used to refer to the interweaving of objective and subjective concepts of time, and to the way that the past and prospective futures shape human experience of the present.

An extended case study on workplace change is selectively drawn upon in discussing time and ethnographic research. Two closely related stories are used to illustrate aspects of temporality. These include a discussion of the way that stories in organizing, representing, simplifying and imposing structure (become theory-laden) often compressing the subjective experiences of lived time into a more formalized linear presentation that may inadvertently petrify temporal sensemaking; and an examination of how the polyphony of storying during times of change highlights temporal sensemaking and sensegiving through asynchronous features that emphasize volatility and non-linearity in explaining the way that people experience change.

The conundrum that competing concepts of time often present for the researcher is in the juxtapositions that generate loose ends that appear to require resolution. Temporal merging in being able to accommodate the intertwining of objective and subjective time, temporal practices in being able to use different concepts of time without trying to resolve them during the collection and analyses of data, and temporal awareness in being able to accept the paradox of time in the use of a relational-temporal perspective, all open up opportunities for greater insight and understanding in engaging in ethnographic studies on changing organizations.

There are a number of practical implications that arise from the paper in doing longitudinal research on workplace change. Four summarized here comprise: the significance of sustained fieldwork and not trying to shortcut time dimension to ethnographic research; the importance of developing temporal practices for dealing with objective and subjective time as well as the interweaving of temporal modes in data collection, analysis and write-up; the value of engaging with rather than resolving contradictions; chronological objective time is good for planning the research whilst subjective time is able to capture the non-linearity of lived time and the importance of context.

A new facilitating frame is developed for dealing with time tensions that are often downplayed in research through the concepts of temporal awareness, practices and merging. The frame provides temporal insight and promotes the use of a relational processual perspective. It is also shown how stories present in the data, in the writing up of material for different audiences, in chronologies and events, and in the sensemaking and sensegiving of individuals and groups as they describe and shape their lived experiences of change – are useful devices for dealing with the conundrum of time in ethnographic research.

The purpose of this paper is to advance spatial studies of change interventions by conceptualizing them as liminal spaces and examining how these spaces are conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

The paper explores change interventions as liminal spaces in the empirical context of LEGO serious play workshops through participant observations and interviews.

The study shows that in change interventions an abstract, conceived liminal space is created, maintained and closed down to enable the planned change to take place. While practicing the space, the change participants may indeed perceive this space as liminal, but the space is less manageable because of their both prescribed and unprescribed interpretations. Furthermore, as subjectively experienced, the space may hold a spectrum of liminal, liminoid and everyday (business as usual) notions.

The study contributes to the research on (1) the spatiality of change interventions and (2) artificially created liminal spaces of organizing.

The paper reminds consultants and organizations embarking on change interventions to pay attention to the spatiality of such interventions. The study shows that it is not enough to plan how these spaces are to be used, but also it is equally important to consider how the participants use and experience them.

The study provides a novel insight into change interventions by examining them as liminal spaces that are simultaneously conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.

In this paper, we responded to recent calls for the use of a greater variety of qualitative methods in the study of inter-organizational encounters, including mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The paper provided a reflection on the authors’ experiences in carrying out two studies of merger processes in the UK and Finland, one ethnographic and one combing also auto-­ethnographic methods. Contrasts between the former case of an “outsider” entering into an ethnographic study and the latter case of an auto-ethnographer with a dual role as a researcher and integration team member were highlighted. The paper offered three contributions to extant research. First, the paper extended the methodological debate in the study of M&As to the level of individual methods. Second, the paper identified the finding types that emerge when using ethnographic methods in the study of mergers. Third, the paper discussed the unique challenges posed when conducting ethnographic work investigating organizational combinations in times of mergers as opposed to ethnography in traditional, single organizational settings.

This article aims at reframing organizational change from a processual perspective to transcend the polarized tensions between planned and emergent approaches to change and to better align with the lived reality of practitioners. It informs the field of learning and development with fresh insights on how to broaden sensemaking repertoires of managers and employees in realizing organizational change.

To understand how change agents conceptualize organizational change at a conceptual level, this article relies on Heidegger’s three modes of being-in-the-world to identify three dominant conceptualizations of organizational change and subsequently theorizes on corresponding phenomenological qualities of sensemaking.

This article develops a theoretical scaffolding that posits the emergence of organizational change as dialectic process of three different conceptualizations of change, i.e. wayfinding logic, managerialistic logic and reflexive logic, that translate into three different phenomenological qualities of sensemaking, i.e. absorbed sensemaking, detached sensemaking and mindful sensemaking, respectively.

A processual reframing of organizational change informs learning and development scholars and practitioners in at least three ways: raising awareness of and probing underlying managerial assumptions of what change is and how change should be managed, training managers and employees to deal with sensemaking processes to effectively realize organizational change, and actively assist in developing a broader sensemaking repertoire to deal with the equivocality associated organizational change.

This processual reframing contributes to the sensemaking literature on organizational change by reframing change as a dialectic process of different underlying assumptions of change agents, and different qualities of sensemaking of change. It pinpoints to concrete actions that learning and development professionals can initiate to contribute to more effective change management practices.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

The purpose of this paper is to study how reflection affects the teacher change with a focus on teaching practices under education reforms in Hong Kong.

This study adopted narratives as the research design to unveil the contents of teachers’ reflection and how the contents affect their change in teaching practices under education reforms.

The study finds that teachers’ reflection starts with completion of curriculum (“technical level”), then consideration of students’ learning needs (“practical level”) and finally, the social justice and equality (“critical level”). The levels of reflection teachers engage have significant influence on their change. The higher the level of reflection teachers have, the more motivated the teachers to explore new teaching practices not only for the learning needs of students in classroom but also for the society outside classroom.

This study underlines the value of reflection in the process of teacher change in their teaching practices.

This paper explores the documentation of social and spatial transformation in the Walworth area, South London. Spatial narratives are the entry point for my exploration, where official and ‘unofficial’ representations of history are aligned to capture the nature of urban change. Looking at the city from street level provides a worldly view of social encounter and spaces that are expressive of how citizens experience and shape the city. A more distanced view of the city accessed from official data reveals different constructs. In overlaying near and far views and data and experience, correlations and contestations emerge. As a method of research, the narrative is the potential palimpsest, incorporating fragments of the immediate and historic without representing a comprehensive whole. In this paper Walworth is documented as a local and Inner City context where remnants and insertions are juxtaposed, where white working class culture and diverse ethnicities experience difference and change. A primary aim is to consider the diverse experiences of groups and individuals over time, through their relationship with their street, neighbourhood and city. In relating the Walworth area to London I use three spatial narratives to articulate the contemporary and historic relationship of people to place: the other side examines the physical discrimination between north and south London, the other half looks at distinctions of class and race and other histories explores the histories displaced from official accounts.