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1 – 6 of 6Linda Kvarnlöf and Roine Johansson
Incident sites can be described as the joint work site of the emergency services, where one of their challenges is to interact with the public. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
Incident sites can be described as the joint work site of the emergency services, where one of their challenges is to interact with the public. The purpose of this paper is to study how this interaction is structured by the emergency personnel's jurisdictional claims.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper rests upon qualitative method and in-depth interviews. In total, 28 people have been interviewed, out of which 13 are emergency personnel and 15 are unaffiliated volunteers. The interview material has been analysed qualitatively and thematically by the authors.
Findings
The findings show that the interaction between emergency personnel and unaffiliated volunteers can be described in terms of three different boundary practices: cordoning off, division of labour and conversation, varying in degrees of inclusion and exclusion. The result shows that the emergency personnel's relationship to volunteers is ambivalent, as they are both seen as an uncertain element at the incident site in need of control and as a valuable source of information.
Originality/value
While most other studies have been focusing on the interaction between emergency organizations, the authors have investigated the interaction between emergency organizations and a group previously unstudied: unaffiliated volunteers. While sociologists in the field of boundary work normally describe boundary practices in terms of negotiation, sympathizing with the concept of negotiated order, the results point to the fact that boundaries are not necessarily a subject for negotiation.
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Svante Leijon and Arne Söderbom
The purpose of this research paper is to contribute to strategy theory by differentiating different types of top management narratives and trying to understand the interplay…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research paper is to contribute to strategy theory by differentiating different types of top management narratives and trying to understand the interplay between them as well as the dynamics over time.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was designed from an interpretative narrative approach. Narratives were produced from deep interviews and organisational documents covering a period of more than 25 years.
Findings
Two kinds of narratives were detected – builders and cleaners. The builders' narratives illustrate how personal life‐stories are embedded in the strategic development processes but the cleaners' narratives are organisational stories without personal life‐stories and cover no actual development. The concept meta‐narrative helped to understand strategic changes over time and was embedded in the myth‐periods involved. The meta‐narrative identified was built on an idea of a going concern and on the role to produce physical large objects for long‐term use.
Research limitations/implications
Owing to the longitudinal design of the study a cyclical pattern with related managerial narratives were produced. The dichotomy builders and cleaners could be developed studying other longitudinal business strategies and also by connections to meta‐narratives derived from more general economic theories.
Practical implications
Builders and cleaners focus on either business or organisational/financial aspects but neither of both. Awareness of this, learning strategic management requires co‐operation between different actors.
Originality/value
The longitudinal design describes and analyzes a cyclical pattern of managerial patterns, while other studies based on narratives cover more limited organisational events in time and space.
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Therese Nilsson and Andreas Bergh
There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to…
Abstract
There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.
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