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1 – 10 of over 41000What happens when we limit our understanding of reason to a calculating competence? In this chapter, I will approach the contemporary introduction of New Public Management (NPM…
Abstract
What happens when we limit our understanding of reason to a calculating competence? In this chapter, I will approach the contemporary introduction of New Public Management (NPM) in the Swedish public sector from the point of view of the fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa and his critical analysis of reason and not-knowing. Cusa emphasises not-knowing as something which we cannot and should not avoid. As such it is central to every creation of knowledge. Reason, as the process to gaining knowledge also includes the capacity to relate to not-knowing. In modernity, the understanding of not-knowing has decreased and accordingly changed our understanding of reason. Reason became a calculating capacity, what Cusa calls ratio, rather than a reflecting capacity, what Cusa calls intellectus. The introduction of NPM in the Swedish public sector can, from this point of view, be seen as a kind of ratio-organisation, and I will point out three characteristics of this ratiofication: First, it includes a ‘concept imperialism’, as concepts from outside of the public service-activities displaces concepts that come from within. In this displacement, easily measurable concepts and concepts that frame a measurement-culture displace concepts that belong to the intellect. Second, we can see an ‘empaperment’ when every act has to be documented in order to be counted as complete, and where the empapered world of ratio becomes more central than the lived world with its constant presence of not-knowing. Third, this also results in a ‘remote controlling’ of activities when the acts of the staff are governed from the outside, and the competence to listen to the not-knowing of each situation is not valued.
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Peter Simpson and Hugh Burnard
The senior manager’s role is to constantly identify and clarify what to focus on and then to direct energy into that focus. This involves learning to gain clarity of purpose…
Abstract
The senior manager’s role is to constantly identify and clarify what to focus on and then to direct energy into that focus. This involves learning to gain clarity of purpose within a context of uncertainty and disagreement: the place of not knowing. Learning to work in this way involves discovering how to act as though one knows whilst still not knowing. This requires a working awareness of the fact that certainty is socially constructed knowing rather than discovered truth. In this way, leaders can lead others to know what to do. The authors present a case study of their work together (as an academic and a chief executive) which describes one approach to supporting organizational leaders in this task.
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Liangzhi Yu, Wenbo Zhou and Junli Wang
This study aims to build an integrative framework for explaining society's information access disparity, which takes both structure and agency as well as their interactions into…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to build an integrative framework for explaining society's information access disparity, which takes both structure and agency as well as their interactions into consideration.
Design/methodology/approach
It adopts a qualitative survey design. It collects data on the development of 65 individuals' information access through interviews, and analyzes the data following grounded theory principles.
Findings
A theoretical framework is established based on seven constructs and their relationships, all emerging from the empirical data. It rediscovers practice as the primary structural force shaping individuals' information access, hence society's information access disparity; it shows, meanwhile, that the effect of practice is mediated and/or interrupted by four agentic factors: affective responses to a practice, strategic move between practices, experiential returns of information, and quadrant state of mind.
Research limitations/implications
It urges LIS researchers to go beyond the embedded information activities to examine both the embedded and embedding, beyond actions to examine both actions and experiences.
Practical implications
It calls for information professionals to take a critical stance toward the practices they serve and partake in their reforms from an LIS perspective.
Originality/value
The framework provides an integrative and novel explanation for information access disparity; it adds a number of LIS-relevant concepts to the general practice theories, highlighting the significance of embedded information activities in any practice and their reverberations; it also appears able to connect a range of human-related LIS theories and pinpoint their gaps.
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– The purpose of this paper is to examine the idea of getting lost during field studies as a point of departure for reframing the initial research question.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the idea of getting lost during field studies as a point of departure for reframing the initial research question.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents field notes and reflections to illustrate the process of tracing innovation in the field by means of a theoretical concept – “knot-working” as proposed by Engeström (2008). By paying attention to seemingly irrelevant empirical data and experiences of being lost, the author infuses another theoretical concept – “not-knowing” as proposed by Lather (2007).
Findings
By questioning research questions, it becomes possible to challenge conventional assumptions in the field under study as well as assumptions underlying existing theory. It is argued that good research questions evolve iteratively throughout a study and might be even more valuable than answers (Alvesson and Sandberg, 2013). The paper illustrates how not-knowing can serve as a methodological perspective from where ordinary held assumptions can be reconsidered, thus paving the way for novel research questions that can enhance established theory.
Originality/value
The paper questions the initial research question: “How is the elderly care sector affected by innovation imperatives,” and ends up posing the reverse question: How are innovation imperatives affected – or how could they be affected – by the notion of care.
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This paper seeks to advance research into entrepreneurial uncertainty. Few researchers have attended to the endogenous means by which entrepreneurial teams account for uncertainty…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to advance research into entrepreneurial uncertainty. Few researchers have attended to the endogenous means by which entrepreneurial teams account for uncertainty in context. This article begins to unpack the concept of uncertainty as an entrepreneurs’ phenomenon by investigating entrepreneurial teams’ situated ways of verbally attending to and accounting for uncertainty in their routine work.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on the ethnomethodological traditions of Conversation Analysis and interaction order to analyze naturally occurring interactions that have been recorded by entrepreneurial teams in context. It considers entrepreneurial uncertainty as a matter that teammates draw upon and orient to in the process of their naturally occurring workplace interactions.
Findings
First, it suggests that the endogenous means by which entrepreneurs recognize, account for, and respond to uncertainties is identifiable in a team’s naturally occurring conversations. It transforms entrepreneurial uncertainty as a matter of cognition into a matter of practice that is observable in the structure and order of authentic interaction. Second, it reveals the “epistemic engine” that entrepreneurial teams use to demonstrate greater or lesser levels of knowing and to move to closure that is not marked by the full elimination of uncertainties but by the establishment of a shared sense of not knowing.
Practical implications
By adhering to the detailed interactional focus of Conversation Analysis, this article emphasizes the value that the structure and order of entrepreneurial conversations can offer to research on entrepreneurship as practice. It points to future research on matters of effectuation and expertise that will be relevant to scholars and educators of entrepreneurship. It also helps to bridge the gap between scholarly research and entrepreneurial work as experienced by practitioners.
Originality/value
This article shows the mundane verbal means by which entrepreneurs account for uncertainties in their everyday work. It reframes entrepreneurial uncertainty, transforming it from a matter of cognition to an accomplishment of practice. It suggests that entrepreneurial uncertainty is a practical matter that is recognized by and accounted for in the conversations of entrepreneurial teams in context.
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Shelley Green and Douglas Flemons
Shelley:I suppose we should explain the title.Douglas:“From Lingua Franca to Scriptio Animi”: Sounds so scholarly, eh? So learned.S:In an uptight, un-Carolyn kind of way.D:We…
Abstract
Shelley:I suppose we should explain the title.Douglas:“From Lingua Franca to Scriptio Animi”: Sounds so scholarly, eh? So learned.S:In an uptight, un-Carolyn kind of way.D:We first heard about her in that profile in Lingua Franca.S:I was teaching a qualitative research class. The idea of reflexive ethnography jumped off the page. She sounded so fascinating and courageous.D:And so close by! Living just across the swamp from us in Tampa. Was it then that you went out and bought Final Negotiations?S:Yes, and found myself drawn into her life and her writing in an intense way.D:How did reading her work change your approach to the research class?S:I became more and more interested in personal experience methods, and ultimately created a class devoted almost exclusively to autoethnography. I guess you could say Carolyn was a ghost member of our curriculum committee.D:Oh, I love the image of her hovering around us.S:She actually sort of entered my blood stream, and I’d never even met her yet, though I certainly wanted to.D:And during that same time, I happened to email this guy named Art Bochner to thank him for his amazing “Forming Warm Ideas” chapter in Rigor and Imagination (Bochner, 1981). He and I started corresponding back and forth, developing an online friendship, and all the while I didn’t have a clue that he and Carolyn were together.S:One day you came home and said, “You know Art, the guy I told you I’ve been chatting with via email? You’re never going to believe who his partner is!”D:The coincidence was wonderful! I was clueless!S:The Latin formality of the title is doubly ironic then. “Scriptio Animi.” Brother!D:How so?S:Well, for one thing, Latin is not the first language that jumps to mind for capturing the intimate, speaking-in-vernacular nature of Carolyn's scholarship.D:Right. Despite the fact that the term lingua franca has to do with speaking a common language and scriptio animi translates as “writing of the heart-and-mind-and-soul.”S:That's the first irony – using a dead language of disembodied scholarship to refer to Carolyn's lively and embodied first-person voice.D:And the second irony?S:The use of Latin makes us sound like we’re these all-knowing academics. But neither of us knows anything about Latin. In you’re words, we’re clueless.D:Absolutely. I was trying (and failing) to cobble together a meaningful phrase by working backwards in the O.E.D. Our friend John brought his expertise in classical languages to bear on my first few attempts and very sensitively suggested I torch them. Without him, we’d never have come up with “Scriptio Animi” (John Leeds, personal communication, March 9, 2003). A Liberal Arts colleague at the university, however, kindly normalized my ignorance: “Native Latin speakers,” he assured me, “are either dead for over a thousand years (in Rome) or in prison for child molestation” (Mark Cavanaugh, personal communication, March 7, 2003).S:Irony and our cluelessness aside, the title does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of Carolyn's work. After all, she values “narrative soul” (Ellis, 2000, p. 274) – pretty close to the “writing of the soul” of “scriptio animi.”D:But irony and cluelessness shouldn’t be put to the side – they belong at the center. Carolyn's whole enterprise is grounded in the irony of knowing and the importance of maintaining a not-knowing stance.S:Okay, so the Latin stays. Besides, I like the reflexive paradox of the title, and Carolyn is nothing if not reflexive.D:Little did Lacan know that social science would go through its own “mirror stage,” using an ethnographic looking glass to encounter and transform the self-in-context.S:Right. Carolyn says reflexive stories should have “therapeutic value” – that they should change the reader in some significant way. Her stories, and her students’ stories, transformed me as a researcher and as a teacher. I invited personal experience into class discussions in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. After hearing her perform her story of her brother's death, I found that her voice was often with me in the classroom; it was very powerful.D:Therapeutic not only for the reader, but also for the writer. Last fall when I was traveling back and forth to Calgary while my mom was dying, I started writing an autoethnographic account of what I was going through. Carolyn and Art were in my head and my heart a lot as I storied my experience.S:Yes, I remember. And Carolyn's stories about her mother's illness and her many trips to West Virginia to be with her became entwined with your stories.D:Yeah. And something odd happened – something that unsettled me at the time and that cries out for a Carolyn consultation. It was like I couldn’t put down my pen. At some of the most tender, most difficult, most intimate times, I was composing sentences in my head, wondering how I could best grab the color and texture of what I was living. But in doing so, I felt removed from it. There I was, in the moment, crafting sentences rather than breathing life, forming descriptions rather than facing death.S:Carolyn talks about how writing autoethnographic texts has intensified her living (Ellis, 1996, p. 243).D:Maybe she isn’t plagued like me. Maybe she can have the experience without being interrupted by the anticipation of setting it down.S:She certainly recognizes that “written reality is a second-order reality that reshapes the events it depicts” (Bochner & Ellis, 1996, p. 26).D:Sure, but I’m troubled by the reshaping that was going on in the moment. It wasn’t a forced thing; it happened automatically. I was (and am) still struck by, and stuck on, the irony of it all.S:Still more irony? What do you mean?D:Let's say when I complete my narrative, I give it to Carolyn, and it manages to engage, evoke and provoke (Ellis, 2000, p. 274) her. Her reading will allow her to immerse in an experience that I, because I couldn’t turn off my goddamn autoethnographic eye-and-ear, felt distant from. So what's with that? She – or any reader – ends up being able to drink in my experience more than me? That's a hell of a price to pay. Rather than being with the fear in my mother's eyes, rather than being with the words and short phrases coming out of her mouth, expressions I hadn’t heard in forty years and so were transporting me back to my childhood, rather than being with the dry thin skin on her hands, rather than being with her sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night, scared to death, rather than being with her, I was a step ahead of both of us, getting it all down in my head so I could later transpose it to paper so some reader I don’t even know could get a handle on what it was like. But how the hell could I write what it was like if I was so damn busy writing what it was like, I wasn’t quite there? A curse! I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.S:The curse of rendering experience.D:Exactly! Rendering in both senses of the word. When you render something personal [writes in the air], you render it [rips the air apart].S:Carolyn points out that “the world as we ‘know’ it cannot be separated from the language we use to explain, understand, or describe it” (Bochner & Ellis, 1996, p. 20).D:Maybe the “known” world can’t, but how about the felt world, the sensed world?S:Which is where “not knowing” comes in.D:Another link to our way of approaching therapy. It's about engaging in discovery, not about imposing what you think you already understand.S:We’ve brought autoethnography to our therapy students as a way of enhancing their ability to understand their own and their clients’ experiences – a mirror inversion of Carolyn's bringing “therapeutic sensitivity” to her autoethnography students.D:Right. She tells her students that one of the goals of writing about their lives “is that they should become their own therapist…. Writing can help them have insights about themselves, help them work through problems themselves” (Flemons & Green, 2002, p. 116).S:Carolyn is right about stories having “therapeutic value,” but I think Carolyn herself – the in-person-Carolyn – does, too. Her way of being embodies her work. Because she is so intrigued by personal experience, she brings a unique intensity to her relationships. Her curiosity and genuine not-knowing stance allow her to know others deeply.D:And care about them. For someone who has done so much self-reflection, she's the least self-absorbed person I know.S:Autoethnography as a method has been criticized as a form of narcissistic self-indulgence (Sparkes, 2002), but that is the antithesis of what Carolyn does as a person and a scholar.D:She reaches in, but also out.S:Both personally and professionally, she touches us.
– The purpose of this paper was to understand the experience of those living with the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper was to understand the experience of those living with the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence.
Design/methodology/approach
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to analyse seven interviews with Young Offenders aged 18-21 who were serving an IPP sentence. Two participants were past their tariff expiry date, two had less than a year until their tariff date and three had more than a year until their tariff date.
Findings
Several themes were found, each with their own subthemes: Injustice of the Justice System, Not Knowing, Coping, Change and Walking on Eggshells. Participants still detailed negative aspects of the sentence but within this was one, important, positive aspect, namely the inspiration the sentence gave for them to change their offending behaviour. However, this has come at a cost with participants feeling as though they have been treated unfairly, finding it difficult to cope, feeling victimised and finding it difficult to see a future.
Practical implications
Lapses in motivation do not necessarily reflect the risk of the person but the difficulty of the sentence. Motivation can be fostered and developed through motivational interviewing, praise and peer support IPPs should be given more credit for the way they manage themselves daily and more understanding when they struggle. IPPs could be victimised by determinate prisoners or by staff. Establishments should be aware of this and help IPPs resolve situations without feeling like they are a victim. Consideration should be given to converting IPP sentences to determinate sentences.
Originality/value
Previous research focused on the negative aspects of the sentence, the purpose was therefore to approach the situation with an open mind and by using a method that allows those with an IPP sentence to share their experience of the sentence. IPA allowed for exploration of the effects of the sentence on those serving it and therefore gains a further understanding of the impact of the sentence.
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Disparities in access to health services continue to exist among adults age 65 and older in the United States despite near-universal insurance coverage provided through Medicare…
Abstract
Disparities in access to health services continue to exist among adults age 65 and older in the United States despite near-universal insurance coverage provided through Medicare. One potential barrier to health service utilization is knowledge of health insurance coverage. Medicare has been drastically restructured in the recent past, and as the program becomes increasingly privatized, Medicare enrollees are left with more choices, but also a more complicated system through which to navigate. This study examines the relationship between Medicare enrollee knowledge of their Medicare health insurance and sociodemographic factors, health status, and the use of health services. Data was analyzed from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a nationally representative study of the U.S. civilian, non-institutionalized, household population. Included in this study were Black, Hispanic, and White respondents aged 65 and older who participated in the NHIS from 2004 to 2009 (N=30,002). The prevalence of a lack of Medicare knowledge appears to be low among Medicare enrollees, with 13% reporting they did not know the answer to one or more questions about their coverage. Age and chronic illness status were found to be related to Medicare plan knowledge, with older adults and those who were not chronically ill more likely to report they did not know some aspect about their Medicare plan. Respondents who reported not knowing at least one question about their Medicare plan reported significantly fewer medical office visits and more time since they last interacted with a doctor, were less likely to have talked with a medical specialist, and have had surgery over the past year. The findings from this study suggest that knowledge of health insurance coverage is an important correlate of health service utilization, which may be shaped by disparities in access to health insurance across the life course.
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Angela Uyen-Cateriano, Fabriccio J. Visconti-Lopez, Cielo Cabanillas-Ramirez, Milene Morocho-Pinedo, Vicente A. Benites-Zapata, Daniel Raa-Ortiz and Percy Herrera-Añazco
This study aims to evaluate the association between ethnic minority membership and their knowledge about their human health rights in Peru.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to evaluate the association between ethnic minority membership and their knowledge about their human health rights in Peru.
Design/methodology/approach
A secondary analysis of the National Health User Satisfaction Survey 2015–2016 was conducted using an analytical cross-sectional design. Participants who spoke Quechua, Aymara, Awajun, Bora or a language other than Spanish aged 15 year were considered as a racial minority. The question “Do you know that by law you have health rights?” was applied to incorporate knowledge on health rights. Generalized linear models of the Poisson distribution were used to calculate crude prevalence ratio and adjusted prevalence ratio. A total of 3,721 responses were included in the analysis.
Findings
The average age was 38.3 year, and 26.6% were males. The prevalence of belonging to an ethnic minority was 7.7%, and 27.6% of the participants did not know about their health rights. An association was found in the adjusted regression analysis between belonging to an ethnic minority and a greater probability of not knowing human health rights.
Originality/value
The value of the works lies in one in four participants who did not know he had health rights by law. Belonging to an ethnic minority was associated with not knowing about having human health rights.
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This paper seeks to examine learning groups as complex systems and to address three issues about learning in organizations: learning from change; factors affecting learning; and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to examine learning groups as complex systems and to address three issues about learning in organizations: learning from change; factors affecting learning; and learning leading to growth and renewal.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study was conducted at a Singapore Engineering firm to explore its two‐year change intervention experiences. Data were gathered at two stages: laddering, non‐directive interviewing with 45 employees; and focus group discussions with 20 leaders.
Findings
Learning from a state of not‐knowing gives rise to a new problem‐solving dimension, enabling individuals to thrive and survive in complexity. Understanding constraints that seemingly truncate change is ironically a generative device that frees people from being trapped by Murphy's Law.
Research limitations/implications
Change provides the stimulus for learning in complex contexts and paradigms where reciprocal relationships are sought to stabilize feedback loops and revitalize decision making. Mediating the variety of learning dynamics is an integration of two metacommunicative activities: dialogue and reflection.
Practical implications
Leaders are the connecting tissues to facilitating a learning that is highly interpretive and socially constructed. Process leadership is characterized by leaders assuming appropriate stewardship and walking the talk. A shared vision is necessary for contextualizing change and stabilizing learning conditions.
Originality/value
Combining Murphy's Law with the complexity of organizational dynamics gives rise to a new understanding of learning in unpredictable contexts. It is a learning that creates a projection of language which transcends time and space, a learning that presents itself as an intertwined activity celebrated by complex systems and processes.
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