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11 – 20 of over 1000While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional…
Abstract
Purpose
While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.
Methodology/Approach
Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.
Findings
Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.
Originality/Value
This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.
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Jill Clark, Charlotte Haines Lyon, Tim Jay and Karen Laing
Ethics work in research is often conceived of as a process of research governance. The case study chapters, however, provide evidence of a much more sophisticated engagement with…
Abstract
Ethics work in research is often conceived of as a process of research governance. The case study chapters, however, provide evidence of a much more sophisticated engagement with ethical dilemmas arising in research and an enactment of ‘everyday ethics’, in other words, a concern with our relationships with, and responsibilities to, other people (Banks, 2016). This emphasis on relationality can often lead to what Cook (2009) describes as ‘mess’ in research, which needs to be made sense of. This is in contrast to the notion of ‘well-ordered’ research, which underpins many of the ethical frameworks, principles and guidelines that are produced for research. The chapters also indicate the opening up of new spaces for research that raise new challenges in respect of ethical practice, including, for example, digital spaces (Case Study 4 – Minecraft Club). Case Study 8 – Democratic Engagement also demonstrates that both researchers and participants in the research process find ways in which to challenge conformity and research norms in order to access knowledge, and this is not always a harmonious process. The following sections try to make sense of the implications of these issues for the ethical practice of research. This chapter pulls together three key themes emerging from the case studies of research governance, ethical relationality and ethical spaces, presenting an analytical overview of all three areas using the concept of ‘willful subjects’.
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Using oceanographer Rachel Carson's study The Edge of the Sea (1955) to contextualise tidal spaces, this chapter discusses how constantly shifting and eroding coastlines act as a…
Abstract
Using oceanographer Rachel Carson's study The Edge of the Sea (1955) to contextualise tidal spaces, this chapter discusses how constantly shifting and eroding coastlines act as a site for writing, re-writing and performing acts of cultural and personal memory. It also considers the ecological impact of human activity on tidal spaces and their more-than-human inhabitants.
14-18 NOW's Pages of the Sea, directed by Danny Boyle, invited communities around the United Kingdom to meet on their local beach to commemorate those who were lost in World War I by marking portraits in the tidal sands. Choreographer Chloë Smith's Tidal, performed in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 2015, was commissioned as a commemorative work but became an act of personal memorialising when Smith's brother drowned prior to the event. Performance company Curious's Out of Water (2012–2014), invites participants on a dawn-walk to the shoreline exploring memory, time, genealogy and water through song and movement. My own collaborative site-responsive work, Tide Times (2018), created with electroacoustic composer Tim Cooper for the tidal island of Cramond, explores the multiple identities of place over time. Tide Times encouraged audiences to create their own tidal poems and artworks through a series of invitations in treasure chests hidden around the island.
In explicating these aforementioned artworks, which explore ideas of remembrance using tidal spaces, this chapter will also acknowledge the forgetting that is implicit in performing these actions. What can the legacy of commemorations traced in such a transient and precarious space as a tidal zone be? This chapter argues that while shorelines provide sites for large and small scale acts of public remembering, they are simultaneously acts of forgetting as the twice daily tides cause inevitable erasure.
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Abbey MacDonald and Timothy Moss
The purpose of this paper is to offer a picture of the relationship the researchers perceive between the art and research practices, unravelling the ways the authors shape and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer a picture of the relationship the researchers perceive between the art and research practices, unravelling the ways the authors shape and inform enactment of a purposeful nexus between art making and research.
Design/methodology/approach
A hybridised methodology is adopted, where methods integral to narrative inquiry and a/r/tography are drawn together to generate a series of “pictures” of the interplay between research and artistry. Through exploration of critical events, creative prose and artefacts, the paper unfolds the parallels perceived and tensions encountered between the approaches to making art and conducting research.
Findings
Borders can create a sense of calm and safety in allowing us to organise and contain information or matter, but they are also provocative in their potential to be crossed. Through this work, the authors chart the borders of the art making and research, and how, why and when these borders might be traversed to augment the integrity of both practices. In unfolding and examining the experiences and the perceptions thereof, the authors articulate ways in which the authors find arts practice to enrich and inhibit the research, and vice versa.
Originality/value
Of particular value in this paper is the way in which the authors not only tell of the experiences as artists and researchers, but also show these experiences through a/r/tographic methods. As such this paper presents an approach to research that is generative, suggesting rather than concluding and challenging rather than resolving, and ultimately offering multiple avenues for artistic and analytic insight.
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Alexandros Skandalis, John Byrom and Emma Banister
The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on netnographic and interview data from the Greek football manager (FM) online gaming community. FM is a simulation strategy game in which players act as “real-life” managers from the screen of their computer.
Findings
A central paradox and a set of four supporting paradoxes are identified. These paradoxes give rise to a transitional mode of experience, which lies on the borders of reality and fantasy, and is realised both at the individual and the tribal levels.
Originality/value
This study makes a threefold contribution. First, it advances the understanding of the paradoxical aspects of consumption experiences in light of post-postmodern consumer culture. Second, it shows how these paradoxes are negotiated by consumers between individual and tribal levels. Third, it extends the understanding of the nature of consumption experiences through the development of the concept of the transitional consumption experience.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the form of young male socialisation referred to as birzha, in its relation to public space in Georgia. Birzha defines a group of young…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the form of young male socialisation referred to as birzha, in its relation to public space in Georgia. Birzha defines a group of young men who meet regularly in urban open spaces in Tbilisi’s neighbourhoods. Partly considered as the initial step of a criminal career, belonging to birzha is a mark of identification with one’s local group. The contested nature of public space is illustrated by the conflicting relation between birzha’s bottom-up use of public space and top-down projects of urban renovation sought by Saakashvili’s government.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing upon literary and media sources, and analysing fieldwork data collected in 2008-2009 and 2014, this study explores how the announced (re)construction of public space under Saakashvili resulted in institutional interventions from above which curtailed public space’s accessibility.
Findings
The present analysis points out contradictions in Saakashvili’s government’s political narrative on public space. In the institutional focus on a future of order, transparency, and democracy, birzha is an insistent reminder of an informal and corrupted past. Banned from futuristic projections of the public space, in the present birzha is annihilated by state repression, enforced in opaque zones out of public sight.
Originality/value
Focusing on a largely overlooked phenomenon in social science research, the paper highlights the ways in which conflicting approaches to public space affect the relation between political institutions and citizens. Delving into ambivalent public/private divides in post-socialist societies, the study of Georgian birzha offers an original angle for investigating the contestation of urban public space in relation to political legitimacy and transparency.
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On September 16, 2022, Mahsa a 22-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in Tehran by so-called morality police due to wearing her hijab improperly. After that, thousands of Iranians…
Abstract
On September 16, 2022, Mahsa a 22-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in Tehran by so-called morality police due to wearing her hijab improperly. After that, thousands of Iranians, led mainly by Gen Z women, poured into the streets protesting the Islamic Republic’s police actions. Named after the protesters’ main rally cry, the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement swept across Iran very soon and covered other aspects of Iranians’ frustration with the government. The rallies have been confronted with a violent crackdown by the regime, which denied all the accusations and blamed Western countries for sponsoring the protesters. In the lack of dialogic space, Iranians have created their own spaces of autonomy. Calling these spaces the third spaces of engagement, the authors shed light on the protesters’ disruptive daily activities on social media as well as physical spaces as leadership activities through the lens of leadership-as-practice theory. This chapter reframes the issue of hijab as an issue of authority which WLF as a youth-led movement is challenging. Observing protesters’ practices via video clips, news, photos, and social media posts, the authors give an analysis of the movement’s practices based on Harro’s cycle of liberation. The authors argue that while the movement made a huge breakthrough in building a public community around its main slogan, it is suffering from a lack of unity and inclusive collaborative dialogue. Finally, the authors offer suggestions for the movement’s future actions.
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Daniela Mueser and Peter Vlachos
The live streaming of theatrical performances to cinemas has become increasingly common in recent years. The practice offers potentially positive returns for audience reach…
Abstract
Purpose
The live streaming of theatrical performances to cinemas has become increasingly common in recent years. The practice offers potentially positive returns for audience reach, audience development, revenue streams and global cultural exchange (Cochrane and Bonner, 2014; Nesta, 2011; King, 2016). However, the conceptualisation of live performance transmissions remains under-explored. The purpose of this paper is to review critically selected literature on event experience and apply it to the growing practice of live-streaming theatre (LST). In doing so, the paper develops a new conceptual model that can be used to guide future research on audience expectations, motivations and experience of LST.
Design/methodology/approach
A comparative historic case study approach combines a structured review of relevant academic literature and industry sources. Theories of live cultural experience and authenticity are critically reviewed. The opportunities and threats of LST to performing arts companies are summarised. The approach considers cognitive, affective and behavioural factors in probing themes of audience awareness, perceptions, expectations and experience of LST. The paper uses these factors to develop an original conceptual model for LST.
Findings
The research finds that the practice of cinematic live transmission of performing arts challenges existing conceptual categories and marketing strategies. Fundamental events studies factors such as “attendance”, “authenticity” and “experience” are re-evaluated. The model suggests that despite improvements in digital technology traditional theatre and broadcasted theatre are two different experiences, not substitutes.
Research limitations/implications
As a conceptual paper, the results are subject to being tested in the field. The findings reveal implications for the evolving future of hybrid and mixed event experiences. The potential for LST screenings to attract new audiences requires further study.
Practical implications
The implications of the research reflect the changing business models and supply side dynamics of theatre production and touring. The results suggest that live streaming is of limited effectiveness in addressing the capacity limits of Baumol and Bowen’s (1966) “cost disease” in live arts performance. LST allows major brands to penetrate regional markets thereby potentially squeezing out smaller touring companies and restricting innovation.
Social implications
The findings reveal implications for the evolving future of hybrid and mixed event experiences.
Originality/value
The influence of digital technology on live arts experience is currently under-explored and under-theorised. This paper develops a new conceptual model that captures in greater detail than previously the various factors that may determine audience engagement with, and experience of, LST. The paper contributes to knowledge by expanding the discourse on the gaps between the competing aims of access and authenticity. The analysis expands the academic understanding of hybrid and virtual event experiences.
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This paper applies Bhabha’s concept of the third space to frame an understanding of Prem Sikka’s use of digital media to bridge the academic–activist binary. In doing this, the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper applies Bhabha’s concept of the third space to frame an understanding of Prem Sikka’s use of digital media to bridge the academic–activist binary. In doing this, the paper makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises Sikka’s engagement, and second, through the lens of the third space, it analyses it to establish whether, in the era of the neoliberal corporatised university, public intervention has the potential to generate new perspectives and new knowledge.
Design/methodology/approach
Sikka’s articles and blogs for the period 20 February 2002 to 15 April 2020 were analysed using Leximancer, a textual analysis software programme that displays the output visually. A discriminant analysis was used to identify where each year of the study is situated in the overall semantic analysis. Netnography, the examination of archived published texts, was then used to analyse the responses by members of the public, academics, accountants and auditors, tax experts, policy makers and regulators to Sikka’s digital media engagement.
Findings
As a third space practitioner, Sikka has overcome some of the shortcomings associated with academic research to challenge the activities of professional accounting firms, regulatory bodies and multinational corporations. Through extending the boundaries of accounting and accountability, he has facilitated new radical alliances aiming to create a just and equitable society. The paper also finds that by opening up a third space of engagement, academic activists’ work can play an essential part in social transformation and emancipatory change framed in terms of social justice and equity.
Originality/value
This is one of the few papers to provide an in-depth examination of the activities of an accounting activist over twenty years.
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