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This chapter discusses the institutional contextual narratives provided as part of the evaluation of universities in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in England. The purpose of the TEF is to allow differentiation between higher education institutions on the basis of teaching quality, but the equality challenge unit has expressed reservations about the TEF’s ability to make sense of, or reflect, diverse student experiences of being taught. The authors follow the methodology of critical policy ethnography using higher education and government policy documents as a field of anthropological data and contend that, in order to understand large-scale transformations, such as the educational experience of students, the authors have to examine the ‘policy field’ and then locate more precise sites, in this case the TEF, for understanding the larger environment. The authors have systematically determined our search terms and used text-mining tools to search all the institutional narratives and obtain a broad ‘policy field’; we then select some key examples to analyse particular cases in more detail. This provides us with evidence from the statements to determine both how the perspective of students has been included in preparing the TEF contextual narratives and how diversity is being addressed.

The history of Nepal gives some insight into its current status as a diverse and multilingual nation with more than 123 languages. Multilingualism is part of the founding philosophy of the country but since it was unified in 1768, government attitudes to language and language education have fluctuated. Though historically education in Nepal has been delivered exclusively in the Nepali language and, more recently, in English, the Government of Nepal is now committed to introducing mother tongue-based, multilingual education (MLE).

Nepal has among the lowest literacy rates in the world (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2015) and the government seeks to turn this trend around, particularly for students who do not speak Nepali as a mother tongue. The commitment to strengthening mother tongue-based MLE features prominently in the Constitution of Nepal (2015), the Act Relating to Compulsory and Free Education (2018) and the School Sector Development Plan (MOEST, 2018). This new constitution declares that “all the mother tongues spoken in Nepal shall be the national language” (2015 article 6).

Implementing these policy commitments in over 120 languages across seven provinces and 753 municipalities is the next challenge for the fledgling democracy. As a “wicked hard” policy area, doing so will require a solid understanding of local attitudes, beliefs, resources, and capacities. This chapter gives a unified review of the history, languages, ideologies, beliefs, and trends that currently influence MLE in Nepal and are likely to play a role into the future.

The authors aim to contribute to conceptual and empirical understanding of publicness in public sector accounting research by analysing how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values of the UK tax authority.

The authors develop a conceptual framework for analysing public values in terms of relational power. Combining governmentality and actor–network theory, the authors focus on the complex relationships through which human and non-human actors interact and the public values that emerge from these evolving socio-material networks. Based on a critical-interpretivist ethnographic study of interviews, documents and secondary survey data, the authors identify the emergent properties of accounting technologies in their case study.

The authors explain how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values in the tax authority by reshaping relational power. Traditional public values were eroded and replaced by neoliberal values through a gradual change process (“frog in the pan”) of (1) disconnecting workers and citizens both spatially and socially; (2) losing touch with the embodied nature of tax administration; and (3) yielding to a dehumanising performance management system. Neoliberal accounting technologies transformed the texture of relationships in such a way that workers and citizens became disempowered from effective, accountable and humane tax administration.

Further research is needed that gains wider access to tax authority workers, extends the scope of the empirical data and provides comparisons with other tax authorities and public sector organisations.

The authors show that a relational approach to public values enables identification of what is “valuable” and how public sector organisations can become “value-able”.

The authors offer an interdisciplinary conceptualisation of publicness based on public administration literature, develop a relational conceptualisation of public values and provide original empirical evidence about the changing publicness of the UK tax authority.

This paper examines how digital reforms affect the relationship between frontline workers and citizens in Danish public sector institutions. Using ethnographic research in two branches of public administration, the study highlights how frontline workers act in accordance with seemingly contradictory modes of ordering. Their acts problematize linear conceptualizations of change that often prevail in digital reforms.

The paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of frontline workers in the Danish tax and customs administration and municipal citizen service centers. The concept of modes of ordering is used to highlight new tensions that arise as frontline workers adapt to make digital reforms work.

Frontline workers act according to two different modes of ordering based on the separation between helping citizens help themselves and helping citizens directly. National policies and strategies promote the underlying rationale of the first mode but, as this paper shows, this mode is sustained by a second mode, which involves the intervention of professionals when citizens cannot be helped to help themselves.

The paper, which contributes to our understanding of how digitalization is changing public administrations and the relationship between frontline workers and citizens, challenges applying a linear, technocratic focus in discourses on public sector digitalization and highlights the contradictory practices of frontline work. It demonstrates the necessity of going beyond policy narratives and calls for increased attention to how frontline workers adapt to make reforms work.

The chapters in this book focus on how higher education can cultivate and promote a more inclusive and equitable environment in higher education, especially with regard to gender diversity as well as those non-conforming, non-heteronormative groups. The chapters in this volume cover the broad picture/context of diversity in various countries as well as a specific focus on gender. The chapters discuss the factors relating to inclusion and equity, what is driving campuses to be more inclusive, and practical steps and case studies that higher education institutions can implement to create more inclusive and equitable learning environments. Finally, this volume discusses the need for inclusive leadership which involves building institutional capacity for inclusion and creating the right conditions under which inclusion and equity can grow and thrive and crafting policies and practices whose end result is to create a culture of inclusion.

In this chapter, we propose a blended methodological approach (critical) educational ethnography, to address problems of education. The chapter includes a brief overview of critical and educational ethnography, which inform the methodology, followed by a discussion of the essential elements and pedagogical objectives that undergird and operationalize the methodology. The essential elements include articulating a critical context, defining and understanding culture, establishing relationships and embeddedness, and multiple ways of knowing. Rather than articulate a curriculum and content for teaching (critical) educational ethnography, pedagogical objectives are provided to support the development of novice researchers (i.e., doctoral students, researchers-in-training).

This study aims to identify the street-level approaches of professional workers in complex public social service organisations when attending to social assistance claimants.

The study employed a multifaceted approach comprising documentary analysis, semi-structured individual interviews (17) and focus group discussions (8) with qualified frontline social workers from primary care social services in Tarragona.

Social workers embodied three specific sets of cognitive, normative and emotional dispositions when attending to people with low incomes. First, the compassionate approach conceives clients as defensive regarding social services and emotionally vulnerable because of deprivation. Second, the instructional approach frames clients as being baffled by a new, precarious, institutional and economic context. They also lack information, abilities and the proper mindset to conceive of and attain available welfare and occupational resources. Third, the enforcement approach tends to define clients as suspicious, trying to obtain an excessive and unfair advantage of the welfare system that would eventually hamper their social opportunities.

Research thus far has tended to define public social assistance programmes in Southern welfare state contexts as mostly inefficient and hardly relevant residual social policies. The street-level approach shows that social workers try to resist the mere administrative processing of benefits, which is a professionally troubling and organisationally unsustainable way to proceed. They attempt to help clients by providing inclusive content in order to implement their benefits.

The paper investigates the role of information asymmetries and sensegiving processes of citizens claiming for social services. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relevance of applicants’ agency, since it has been generally neglected in the analysis of social services provision. On the contrary, the paper proposes an alternative view, considering applicants as actors who are able to develop dialectic strategies for claiming specific forms of social assistance.

The paper is based on a qualitative research, conducted following an inductive approach. The data have been collected in three different Italian municipalities, where the researcher has been the opportunity to perform a period of observation of the interviews between the social workers of the local social services department and the citizens applying for social assistance.

The findings of the research point out that informational asymmetries play an ambivalent role in the definition of applicant’s strategies, since they represent an ambivalent and dynamic factor, rather than a mere source of disadvantage for the user. From this viewpoint, the citizens’ possibilities to access to social assistance are shaped by both institutional and dialectic factors: on the one hand, access to social assistance relies on specific criteria of eligibility (institutionally defined), but on the other hand the access is the outcome of situated sensegiving processes, performed by both the applicants and the gatekeepers of social services during their encounters.

The research is based on the analysis of a small number of cases, within a context that is characterized by a high level of organizational and professional discretion in the regulation of the provision of social assistance.

The findings of the research urge policy maker to re-consider applicants as strategic actors and opens the space for the development of new options of regulation of the delivery of social services.

The paper suggests to consider the applicants for social services as people who, although in a condition of need, are capable to identify specific forms of assistance. From this point of view, informational asymmetries are not be considered as a stigmatic issue, but as a space which calls for further and less superficial investigation.

The paper challenges some of the most taken-for-granted theoretical assumptions in the analysis of the regulation of the access to social assistance. First, it proposes a dynamic interpretation of the notion of informational asymmetries, considering them as a space for action, rather than a binding factor; second, it emphasizes the relevance of user’s agency in the access to welfare services, that is generally neglected since most analyses focus on professional discretion disregarding the hypothesis of the user as a strategic actor.

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a new direction in ethnographic research in education through the emergence of critical presence ethnography (CPE). Through a review of the evolution of the field of ethnography as well as the positionality of the self as ethnographer, this chapter illuminates the ways in which critical ethnographic commitments and critical reflexivity can support a critical presence perspective that captures the ways in which the researcher impacts the internal epistemology and ontology of the research environment. This chapter is a conceptual chapter and does not include a specific research design, methods, or approaches. As a conceptual piece, there are no clear-cut findings, however a review of the extant literature concerning the field of ethnography is presented as well as the roles, opportunities, and tensions that ethnographers experience in the field. Based on the authors’ ethnographic work in the field, they employ a CPE to capture the ripples of self in the research context.

The limitations of this work are that it is only presented in its conceptual form and has not been implemented nor tested in the field. As such, the implications of this work are that it be further developed and operationalized in the field of ethnography. Upon implementation and in depth testing, CPE may have the potential to positively impact the way in which education ethnographers manage researcher identity, conceptions of the self, and researcher bias within a given context. This chapter builds upon a strong body of literature concerning ethnography and critical ethnography in education. Using these processes of ethnography and the ways in which the positionality of the ethnographic researcher have been conceptualized and operationalized in the extant ethnographic literature, our work seeks to provide a way in which the ethnographer can measure his or her impact on the given context. Although infant in our conceptualization, we aspire to contribute to the conversation about ethnography, researcher positionality, and context.