Search results

Smallholder families in Papua New Guinea (PNG) feed the nation and produce income-generating cash crops such as coffee and cocoa. However, agricultural extension has not yet effectively reached many farming families in the country, and many families still work with semi-subsistence practices. As a result, the majority of farming families have insecure livelihoods, with many living below the poverty line. This chapter explores a collaborative research for development project that sought to address this issue.

Using data from two highlands sites in the Western Highlands and Jiwaka provinces, we outline the empowerment processes we developed in both our research and our learning activities. We illustrate how the experiential learning processes enabled women, especially those with low education, to confidently engage in this form of agricultural extension. Our work surfaced the knowledge of both women and men and supported families to determine how to work together in effective and equitable planned farming.

The nonprofit sector has come to deliver the majority of state-funded social services in the United States. Citizens depend on nonprofit organizations for these services, and nonprofits depend on government for financial support. Scholars have begun to ask important questions about the political and civic implications of this new organizational configuration. These questions have direct ramifications for the anti-prison movement given the explosive growth of nonprofit prison reentry organizations in recent years. To see how such organizations may impact political engagement and social movements, this chapter turns its focus on the intricate dynamics of client-staff interactions. Leveraging a yearlong ethnography of a government-funded prison reentry organization, I describe how such organizations can be politically active and at the same time contribute to their clients' political pacification. Staff members engaged in political activities in surrogate representation of their clients. While staffers advocated on their behalf, clients learned to avoid politics and community life, accept injustices for what they are, and focus instead on individual rehabilitation. By closely studying what goes on within a nonprofit service provider, I illustrate the nonprofit organization's dual political role and its implications for social movements and political change.

In this chapter, we explore perceptions of exclusion and inclusion among students registered with the office of disability services at a large urban university in the United States. Our goal is to extend the current discourse on inclusion in higher education settings by drawing attention to social and cultural participation as an underemphasized aspect of educational inclusion and by bringing the perspectives of university students themselves into the discourse. While the general consensus among our interviewees seemed to be that schools and universities do a reasonably good job of developing classroom accommodations to meet their individual academic needs, stigma and social exclusion persist in damaging ways, in and outside of the classroom. A number of participants found solace and empowerment in interactions with other students with disabilities and suggested that until the forces of exclusion and stigmatization can be entirely eradicated, disability-friendly social and cultural activities and spaces designed by and for students with disabilities might provide an oasis of relief in a disabling world. Thus, we conclude that in addition to working towards the ultimate goal of making all aspects of university life disability-friendly, universities might better serve needs of current students by providing social spaces in which students with disabilities can socialize with each other and through which they might co-create and promote their own agendas for future institutional change.

Purpose – Trust and justice are generally considered distinct but closely related constructs. Individual perceptions of procedural justice and trustworthiness have been shown to reciprocally influence one another, each independently promoting trust (Colquitt & Mueller, 2007). We consider instances where these may instead diverge: how intentional efforts to build trust may unintentionally erode justice, and how the use of fair procedures may reduce trust.

Approach – We argue that the anomalous divergences between trust and justice are evident only when simultaneously considering judgments at two levels: the interpersonal level (i.e., within dyads inside the team) and the team level (i.e., shared perceptions of all team members).

Implications for research and practice – The unintended effects described in this chapter describe a “dark side” to a number of taken-for-granted practices in organizational life (favor-paying, punishment processes, and approaches to redress). We expect that this chapter should promote new research using the team context to bridge the trust and justice literatures, and provoke a careful reconsideration among practitioners of these approaches.

Originality – We propose three previously overlooked disjunctures between trust and justice. First, we show how procedurally unfair approaches to allocating favors may be beneficial in building dyadic trust between team members. Next, we describe how fair (open and transparent) group processes for punishing perpetrators may erode trust by skewing group members’ perceptions of the prevalence of trust violations. Finally, we describe how the most effective forms of redress at the interpersonal level may provoke perceptions of injustice at the team level.

In this chapter, the author critically examines the relationship between sociology and the identities/experiences of disability and ‘mental illness’ (referred to throughout as distress). The author argues that despite sociology having an ethos of social justice and frequently producing critical accounts of inequalities – such as anti-racism and gender equality – it nonetheless uncritically reiterates the marginalisation of disability and distress. As such, sociology not only reflects the increasing ‘medicalisation of everyday life’ and shores up the essentialist discourses of genetics and neuroscience, but also consigns research and knowledge production about disability and distress to the medical sciences. The author challenges these sociological conventions and highlights the ways in which both disability and distress are socially structured, embodied experiences. The author argues that a sociological account of distress and disability are important not only in and of themselves, but also because they highlight the ways and means to challenge essentialism, inequality and the ever-narrowing definition of what is considered a normal or acceptable part of human experience. Furthermore, vibrant streams of user-led research, activism and practice-interventions – resulting in widespread social, legal and identity transformations – have emerged from the experiences of disability and distress. These user-led perspectives highlight the importance and potential of knowledge produced from the margins, not only for those experiencing disability and/or distress but also for the ways in which we perceive, theorise and research the social world more broadly.

Present research on Concurrent Engineering (CE) mainly focusses on technological aspects like information sharing, and common communication platforms, or coordination systems such as CE-Tools like CAD, CAM, DFA or QFD. In the European context, the implementation of Concurrent Engineering certainly involves changes of organizational management and people. traditional way of work. For the success of Concurrent Engineering, organizational, managerial and human issues are very important.

This chapter presents the results of a current research project that is being carried out at the Chair and Institute of Industrial Engineering and Ergonomics of the University of Technology in Aachen, Germany. It shows the results of a study about cross functional teams in a Concurrent Engineering environment. Based on a multi-dimensional model of self directed work organization for teams in Concurrent Engineering, preconditions were generated to design and develop learning organizations which use Concurrent Engineering. Based on this team model for a learning organization in CE, requirements for soft skill qualification for team members were developed.

In the core of the Concurrent Engineering Team research, there are three levels: individual issues, team issues and organizational issues. Individual issues focus on the differences among team members that may influence the cooperation in the team (different specialization, different work departments, different values, different socializations etc.). The team level issue focusses on the internal management of a CE team (goal system, distribution of tasks, sharing of team rules, interaction style, interpersonal relations, team leadership etc.). Finally, the organizational level can be regarded as a team-external support environment for team management (management, commitment and involvement, empowerment of the team leader etc.). The individual and organizational levels influence the team level factors.

But cross functional organization effectiveness in a Concurrent Engineering environment is more than the design of teams. The implementation of Concurrent Engineering must change the whole organization. An effective organization can be based on eight principles of the Learning Organization, as pointed out by Senge or Probst. The objective for the design of this organization is to be self-organized.

To reach these principles in a CE team environment, the involved team members must be qualified to be prepared for new work in a crossfunctional organization. A soft skill qualification system for Concurrent Engineering will be presented at the end of the research project. Contents of this qualification model include communication in teams, techniques of group discussion and project management.