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Amidst a worldwide concern with teacher quality, recent teacher reforms often focus on how to certify teachers, how to evaluate teachers, how to recruit the best and brightest people to be teachers, and how to fire bad teachers. The political discourse of these policy reforms oftentimes depicts teachers as largely inactive transmitters of knowledge and does not recognize the agency they have in affecting standards. Yet, such a narrow framework may suppress teacher pedagogy, practices, and also teacher beliefs. In this chapter, we seek to understand the extent that two types of math teacher beliefs – traditional and constructivist orientations – are related to national cultural factors. In doing so, we test both “culturist” and “neo-institutional” hypotheses by observing how those beliefs vary across different nations.

This chapter shifts contemporary debates on Eurocentrism from its focus on European social theory to an analysis of its moorings in non-Atlantic sociological traditions and especially those within ex-colonial countries. It discusses the sociological/anthropological visions of two first generation sociologists/anthropologists from India, G. S. Ghurye (1893–1983) and D. P. Mukerji (1894–1961), within Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and explores how these are reinvented in the work of contemporary sociologist T. N. Madan (1933–). It suggests that colonial processes and its institutions together with “derivative” nationalist ideas have played and continue to play important mediatory role in organizing these Orientalist-Eurocentric visions.

The chapter presents three sets of arguments. First it suggests that in order to understand postcolonialism it is imperative to lay out the organic links between Orientalism and Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism and its mirror Orientalism mediated to frame social science language in terms of the binaries of universal (the West) and particular (the East). The particular was represented in India through the discipline of anthropology. The latter studied “traditions” through the themes of religion, caste, and family and kinship. When sociology emerged as a discipline in India in the early twentieth century, it continued to use the language organized by anthropology to analyze the particular cultural traditions of the country. Second, I suggest that these binaries also framed nationalist thought and the latter mediated in framing the sociological ideas of G. S. Ghurye and D. P. Mukerji which were embedded in Eurocentric-Orientalist principles. Third, I analyze the ideas of the contemporary social theorist T. N. Madan to indicate how his perspective continues to derive its positions from Orientalist-Eurocentric positions and ignores an engagement with critics who have questioned Orientalist Eurocentrism. Disregarding these arguments implies the legitimation of the latter perspective derived from the disciplines of sociology/anthropology.

The chapter contends that a decolonized critique of colonial social science has existed in other regions of the world including India, and that this perspective needs to be retrieved by social theorists to reformulate the sociological discourse as a study of modern India. It also suggests that contemporary analysis of Eurocentrism needs to move out from within the circuits of knowledge defined by received colonial geopolitical enclaves in order to assess the way production, distribution, and consumption of Orientalist-Eurocentric perspectives have organized sociological traditions across the world including the Global South.

Sociocultural learning theories, usually premised on participation in some community, explain workplace learning well up to a certain extent. The paper aims to extend beyond these and to account for learning in repetitive and mundane work environments from a dialectical perspective.

Based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of one salmon hatchery in Canada and the fish culturists that work there, theory (dialectics) is blended with empirical fieldwork (interview data, participant observation data, field notes). Codes that emerged were classified into categories that formed the basis for the tentative hypotheses.

Two assertions are proposed concerning learning from a dialectical perspective: the dialectic of doing (actions might seem repetitive but are in fact always different and productive in nature) and the dialectic of understanding and explaining (practical understanding develops dialectically with conceptual understanding when the latter is subjected to scrutiny). These can account for learning in places that at first sight are not conducive to change and transformation.

Using the proposed framework, researchers/management can no longer get at individual learning independent of collective learning, which simultaneously is the effect and cause of individual learning. That is, individual and collective are inseparable ontologically.

The study suggests a need to rethink the nature and possibilities of learning in mundane work environments that are believed to be widespread.

Approaches workplace learning from a dialectical, hermeneutical perspective that is not widely appreciated. Affirms the dignity of workers.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some methodological problems concerning the neglect of participants' voices by workplace ethnographers and neglect of the highly interactional and co‐constructive nature of research interviewing. The study aims to use discourse analysis, to show the phenomena of workplace learning and expertise to be constituted in participants' talk.

From excerpts of natural talk and research interviews by fish culturists speaking about their learning in a salmon hatchery, discourse analysis is used to analyze how workplace learning and expertise are rhetorically performed.

The paper finds that fish culturists drew on two discursive repertoires/resources – school‐ and workplace‐based learning – to account for their learning and expertise. The main participant affirmed the primacy of interest and practical workplace experience in his job just as he presupposed a weak correlation between school‐based (theoretical) and workplace (practical) knowing. However, both kinds of learning were deemed important though articulating this view depended on the social contexts of its production.

Discourse analysis does not establish immutable truths about workplace learning and expertise but rather it is used to understand how these are made accountable through talk in real‐time, that is, how the phenomenon is “done” by participants.

There is increased sensitivity when using ethnographic and interview methods. No method can avoid being theory‐laden in its conduct and reporting but discourse analysis perhaps does it better than its alternatives.

While some contributors to this journal have also approached workplace learning from a discursive perspective, this paper attempts to understand the phenomenon solely from participants' categories and interpretations.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to answer two interrelated questions: “Who learns and how in the learning organization?”. By implication, many theories of the learning organization are adressed that are based on a static and erroneous separation of individual and collective. Design/methodology/approach – Four episodes from a larger case study exemplify the theoretical arguments. These were based on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a salmon hatchery and the public‐sector organization to which the former was accountable. Conceptual framework is strongly dialectical: in their actions individuals concretely reproduce the organization and, when actions vary, realize it in novel forms; organizations therefore presuppose individuals that concretely produce them. However, without an organization, there would be no aim or orientation to individual actions to speak of in the first instance. Findings – The paper finds that individuals learn, through the production of socio‐material resources, notions of organizations which are not abstract. These resources increase action possibilities for the collective, whether realized concretely or not. Expansive learning in individuals is co‐constitutive of learning in organizations and decreasing interest in individual learning constitutes decreased levels of action possibilities for the collective. Research limitations/implications – The paper shows that using this framework, it becomes problematic to separate individual and collective learning. Originality/value – The paper shows that access to participation by all members is a key component as are affordances given by the organization for the development of individuals.

This paper aims to utilise cultural theory of risk to provide a broad analytic framework for examining how risk is constructed within the dominant discourses around patient safety within the domain of psychiatry. It also seeks to examine notions of blame and to consider the possibility of the creation of a no‐blame culture.

The empirical element of the paper draws on qualitative interviews with a sample of psychiatrists to explore how culture may give rise to different perceptions and responses in respect of “risky behaviour” and “safe practice”.

The paper discusses how psychiatry may be differentiated from other branches of medicine and concludes that the cultural grouping that appears to be most apposite in respect of psychiatrists is the egalitarian culture. However, changes in the NHS are resulting in the imposition of an individualistic culture on the community of psychiatrists with the effect that behaviours are being adopted as measures to avoid potential blame.

The paper finds that if the NHS is to improve patient safety then it must recognise that it is not possible to create a no‐blame culture and, therefore, it is more important to consider which type of culture will impact most positively on patient safety. It appears that psychiatrists are being compelled to adopt an individualistic culture when an egalitarian culture would be more advantageous for patient safety.

In contrast with the methodological individualism of the current safety orthodoxy which interprets risk as an objective and measurable phenomenon, the paper draws on cultural theory of risk to develop a critical perspective on current safety policy and to explore how “risky” and “safe” practices are socially constructed in the context of psychiatry.

I dedicate half of the book to establishing the theoretical basis of a Southern green criminology as a science that contests ecological discrimination. My political premise for such a theoretical design is that a Southern green criminology must seek to scientifically uncover the harmful practices that make the South victim to ecological discrimination. I use another five chapters to analyse the culturist and speciesist practices that create ecological discrimination against the diverse components of the earth system. In this concluding chapter, inspired by the interactions I have had with members of more than 20 Colombian Indigenous communities and my students, I formulate an everyday Southern green criminology practice for countering ecological discrimination – a critical pedagogy through Southern green criminology seedbeds.

Humans are a key component of the earth system. Through our interactions with nature, we have irreversibly altered and damaged all components of the system, ourselves included. Usually, fields other than green criminology focus on human exploitation and trafficking; but, in this chapter, I show how environmental discourses and practices are used to justify the exploitation and monopolisation of humans. I examine the dynamics by which Southern communities are monopolised by Northern corporations. I also explore Southern forms of resistance to ecological discrimination such as land grabs, biopiracy and animal abuse. I finish the chapter with an analysis of the threat posed by culturism to Southern resistance.