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The purpose of the paper is to propose a systems change lens to current approaches to assessing social impact in social ventures. Many existing tools for measuring social impact are limited in their capacity to assess the inherent complexities and interconnected nature of the work done by social enterprises.

The paper uses in-depth interviews with sector experts to gain insights into their needs related to impact assessment, as well as issues they face when attempting to understand and measure their impact.

Expert interviews provide insights into how social impact occurs through interconnected systems. It also highlights the need for impact assessment to better consider interaction within systems and networks. Results support previous work concerning the need for methods that can better account for complexity, interacting problems and the place of power in influencing actions.

Following results from interviews and review of existing literature, symbolic interactionism and Social Worlds/Arenas theories are used to gain insight as to how impact can be conceptualized in terms of systemic shifts in social equilibria. The model proposes to capture the contested definitions of problems and their negotiation in social structures.

Grounded in sociological theory, the model brings a new theoretical approach to social impact assessment, one that provides a different view of social structures than existing models that are grounded in economic metrics. The proposed model, therefore, provides a new lens for the detailed assessment of the complex interactions between systems.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between information and coping from the experiences of young people coping with long term illness.

Situational analysis was used as a methodological approach. It has roots in the Chicago Symbolic Interactionism School. Cartographic approaches enabled the analysis, mapping the complexities emerging from the data.

As the young people became more informed about their health conditions, and gained knowledge and understanding both about their illnesses, their own bodies and boundaries, their confidence and capacity to cope increased. Gaining confidence, the young people often wanted to share their knowledge – becoming information providers themselves. From the data, five positions on an information-coping trajectory were identified: information deficiency; feeling ill-informed; needing an injection of information; having information health; and becoming an information donor.

The research was limited to an analysis of 30 narratives. The paper contributes to information theory by mapping clearly the relationship between information and coping.

The study establishes a relationship between levels of information and knowledge and the ability to cope with illness.

The information theories in this study have originality and multi-disciplinary value in the management of health and illness, and information studies.

During Strauss's formative years as a sociologist, neither sex nor gender, nor for that matter race/ethnicity, was central to the broader American sociological agenda. Social class and mobility were, and Strauss wrote on these issues, both in terms of their social psychological dimensions vis-à-vis transformations of identity (1959) and their situatedness (1971b/2006). Immigration issues were also vivid for American sociology (especially for Chicago School sociologists) and for Strauss, a child of German Jews. He took up these concerns most directly in his urban sociology (Strauss, 1961, 1991, pp. 287–312), and in his work on large-scale symbolization (1971a, 1971b/2006, 1993, pp. 162–167).

Prenatal genetic testing is fast becoming standard practice in the medicalized arena of pregnancy in American health care provision. The interest of this paper, using empirical research data from participant observation and semistructured interviews of genetic counselors, geneticists, perinatologists, and obstetricians, is to explicate the provision of genetic care by the care-givers themselves, paying close attention to the ways they deal with the inherent uncertainties and ambiguities in medical genetics, especially prenatal genetic testing. Ambiguity and uncertainty are omnipresent in prenatal genetic testing, most obviously through the absence of an individual to examine in conjunction with test results. The test is for fetal abnormalities. Rarely are test results able to be interpreted with a clear, straightforward definition of what type of individual the fetus could eventually be. Through analysis of genetic intake meetings, departmental meetings, and quarterly interdepartmental meetings, the way providers order their work is elucidated; it reveals two work ideologies implemented to handle ambiguity and uncertainty: assessing the patient and tailoring the information to the patient. These work ideologies are examined through a social worlds/arenas theory and a sociology of work lens informed by symbolic interactionism. Analyzing providers' interpretations of their clinical practices allows an explication of their (re)construction of genetic medical knowledges through the individual providers' social worlds.

Kathy Charmaz, a developer of constructivist grounded theory (CGT), advocated the use of grounded theory as a tool to attain social justice through research. We developed the grounded text mining approach (GTxA) method by integrating Charmaz's CGT with text mining. This technique is aimed at facilitating the systematic and comprehensive understanding of textual data. GTxA helps researchers engage in abductive reasoning by encouraging them to transition between CGT and text mining analyses. This chapter illustrates an example of how GTxA was utilized when a group of researchers analyzed depositions and semi-structured interview data of a defendant in an actual criminal case in Japan and, thus, detected the possibility of a coerced false confession. The chapter concludes by encouraging researchers to utilize GTxA for attaining social justice.

This contribution argues that Kathy Charmaz's career did not burst into full intellectual bloom until the last 25 years of her life – from 55 to her death at 80. I examine why and how this scholarly blossoming happened so late in her life and the nature of its many manifestations, especially research on a wide variety of social justice issues. After her initial focus on medical sociology, specializing in chronic illness, Kathy became an innovative and renowned qualitative methodologist, developing constructivist grounded theory (CGT) method taken up in many amazingly heterogeneous scholarly fields transnationally.

Medicaid home and community-based services (HCBS) support community living for three million disabled people in the United States. As a state-federal partnership, these programs are highly variable across states. Because eligibility determination and services differ from state to state, this Medicaid structure becomes a barrier for those HCBS users whose desired futures include cross-state moves.

I examine narratives of citizenship and personhood for Medicaid HCBS users circulating within policy arenas and explore tensions between these and the stories Medicaid HCBS users tell of their own lives. Specifically, I explore the degree to which narratives about Medicaid HCBS users include an affirmation of the right to cross-state movement. My analysis includes data from public statements from policy makers, legislative texts, organizational framings of Medicaid policy, and 18 semi-structured interviews with Medicaid PCA users who desired or pursued cross-state moves.

I conclude that institutional narratives of Medicaid HCBS users are an inadequate representation of the stories told by those who rely on this program and, in consequence, programs stemming from policy fail to offer services that would allow service recipients to pursue their objectives.

Medicaid HCBS policy is part of a broader story of disability rights progress over the last four decades, making its role as an obstacle to cross-state movement a bit of a paradox. This paradox points to the value of narrative analysis in calling attention to invisible contradictions and the need for institutional and organizational change.

To explore whether deliberate organisational change of a public sector organisation (a local municipality) would create an avenue for organisational learning.

A case study was set up to study the means by which the organisational change towards a digital administration was to come about. The organisational change was interpreted through the optics of theories of organisational learning. A pragmatic version of these theories is presented and applied in the study in which learning is understood as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty and the relation between the individual and the organisation (subject‐world) as transactional (a continuous mutual formation).

Viewed through the lenses of a pragmatic understanding of organisational learning it is possible to extend this understanding to an understanding of organisations as arenas made up by social worlds created and held together by commitments to organisational activities. Further, elaborating the idea of learning as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty into the organisational arena, it is possible to characterise organisational tensions made up by different commitments to the organisational change and development as tensions between social worlds. It is argued that these tensions may act as closures or openings towards organisational learning understood as the continuous transformation of the organisation.

This paper offers an understanding of organisational learning that ties the subject‐world, the individual‐organisation, together in a way that is coherent with the learning theory. Further, it offers possibilities for working with the enhancement of organisational learning by way of paving a way for joint critical thinking or inquiry.

This paper aims to examine how academics enact trust in e-learning through an inductive identification of perceived risks and enablers involved in e-learning adoption, in the context of higher education institutions (HEIs).

Grounded Theory was the methodology used to systematically analyse data collected in semi-structured interviews with 62 academics. Data analysis followed the constant comparative method and its three-staged coding approach: open, axial and selective coding.

The resulting trajectory of trust factors is presented in a Grounded Theory narrative where individual change and integration through shared collective understanding and institutionalisation are discussed as stages leading to the overcoming of e-learning adoption barriers.

The paper proposes that the interplay between institutionalism and individualism has implications in the success or failure of strategies for the adoption of e-learning in HEIs, as perceived by academics. In practical terms, this points to the need for close attention to contextually sensitive trust-building mechanisms that promote the balance between academics’ commitments, values and sense of self-worth and centrally planned policy, rules, resources and exhortations that enable action.