Search results

A residential care is home for children who live there and is simultaneously a workplace for employees aiming to safeguard the needs and development of children. Studies have shown that adolescents’ descriptions of life in residential care are connected to feelings of otherness and deviance. The purpose of this study is to explore how adolescents in residential care in Norway relate residential care as a home to their experiences of everyday life in this context and to their relationships with the employees.

This study draws on individual, qualitative interviews with 19 boys and girls (aged 15–18 years) living in residential care homes in Norway. The interviews explored their narratives of everyday life in residential care. The adolescents were encouraged to tell about yesterday and were asked follow-up questions regarding everything that had occurred during encounters with employees. The Norwegian Center for Research Data approved the study.

The analysis shows tensions in the adolescents’ accounts between the institution as an abnormal context and their own subject position as normal. By drawing upon the terms “stigma” and “recognition” in the analysis, the study shows how recognising relationships between the youth and staff decreases the potential to experience stigma.

This study contributes to existing knowledge on social work in residential care. The paper shows how the institutional framework and employees’ practices impact adolescents’ self-understanding and their experiences of residential care as a home.

The purpose of this paper is to learn about professional employees in the early stage of their careers, particularly, their understanding of competence development and career advancement. Law firms have a relatively low rate of turnover of professional staff when compared with employee flow rates that are standard in other organisations and industries. In law firms, the collective stock of embodied knowledge changes gradually influenced by recruitment cohort phases and employee departures. This paper aims to analyse lawyers employed in a reasonably munificent internal labour market context, seeking to understand their accounts of how their competencies can be developed and how their careers may be advanced.

This paper considers the competences and careers of a group of junior professional knowledge workers employed full‐time in a large law firm and conceptualises their competence development and professional career advancement through an existential ontological conceptualisation using a qualitative interpretive research methodology.

The findings from interviews with lawyers in the Planning and Environment area of specialisation are reported concentrating on employees' perspectives. Lawyers' self‐understanding is strongly influenced by career stage and position in the organisation. Their understanding of work in contrast reveals more individual and idiosyncratic clusters of work activities and distinctive ways of acknowledging and developing technical and professional expertise. They express a preference for a focal group of other people at work selecting from primary orientations to either clients or peers or self.

It is concluded that policy makers, practitioners, and academic researchers all have roles to play in assisting people at an early stage in their career to reflect on their existing expertise, assess current work practices, and develop and pursue strategies for competency development and career advancement.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of IT systems on occupational identities of management accountants. The author highlights the pivotal role of the IT system as a central reference point for organisational identity regulation and identity work.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study approach.

The IT system presents the central means of establishing appropriate behaviour in case organisation (“identity regulation”). At the same time, the IT system acts as a sense-giving device (“identity work”) – the central reference point for management accountants to make sense of their work. In addition, the system creates more dirty and unclean work (Morales and Lambert, 2013), producing dissonance between the business partner role and the organisational reality, which is resolved by relating dirty and unclean work through use of the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

The paper suggests to understand IT systems as an important driver of the management accounting work shaping the occupational identity of management accountants.

The author aims to sensitise practitioners and organisations to the potential risks of relying too strongly on IT systems – a behaviour which can limit the professional judgement and business insight of management accountants.

The author contributes to the discussion on how technological disruptions, e.g. ERP implementation, Big Data, business analytics, digitalisation, change management accountants’ identity and management accounting work. The author shows how organisations establish appropriate behaviour and how management accountants make sense upon dissonances between the professional ideals exemplified by business partner role and the organisational realities.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of elements that Intelligence Community (IC) leadership can use as a framework to transition leadership development courses from the current face-to-face format to the virtual environment. IC employees face unique leadership challenges, and broader application of leadership development is needed. Due to the unique ethical and leadership dilemmas faced by the IC workforce, the unique makeup of the current labor force, the limitations of traditional face-to-face leadership development efforts, and the broad group of stakeholders affected, the IC should transition from face-to-face leadership development to a virtual environment. In this phenomeno logical qualitative study, eight primary themes emerged as important to include in a virtual leadership development course.

The purpose of this article is to complement the literature understanding present labour market measures as infused by a so-called neoliberal rationality, fostering self-managerial selves by means of self-inspection. It does so by providing a much-needed illustration of how such “work on the self” is achieved in practice.

The analysis draws on ethnographic fieldwork tracing the “active society” at the local level, depicting practices aimed at activating welfare clients in a local labour market measure organised in a rural Swedish municipality. Here, the author was offered to undergo a method aimed at enhancing participants' employability. As a result, data consists of ethnographic as well as auto-ethnographic accounts from this experience.

This analysis shows how destabilisation of subjectivity was central to the remoulding of individuals into employable and self-reliant selves. Moreover, by dispersing responsibility to the individual, it is shown how the organisation was able to refrain from accountability, hence reducing the levels of uncertainty and ambiguity that is part and parcel of people-processing welfare organisations.

The article concludes with the warning that, in the wake of “local worlds of activation”, municipalities may sometimes draw on questionable assumptions of the human mind and behaviour, as well as the vulnerability of individuals' self-understanding, as a way of managing the “active society” at the local level.

The literature on activation lacks ethnographic accounts depicting concrete practices of turning the socially excluded into active and employable selves. Here, this article offers an illustrating example of such practices in action.

This study attempts to investigate: the effect of meditation experience on employees' self‐directed learning (SDL) readiness and organizational innovative (OI) ability as well as organizational performance (OP); and the relationships among SDL, OI, and OP.

An empirical study of 15 technological companies (n=412) in Taiwan is conducted, utilizing the collected survey data to test the relationships among the three dimensions.

The results show that: the employees' meditation experience significantly and positively influenced employees' SDL readiness, companies' OI capability and OP; and the study found that SDL has a direct and significant impact on OI, and that OI has direct and significant influences on OP.

The generalization of the present study is constrained by: the existence of possible biases of the participants; the variations of length, type, and form of meditation demonstrated by the employees in these high tech companies; and the fact that local data collection in Taiwan may present different cultural characteristics which may be quite different from those in other areas or countries. Managerial implications are presented at the end of the work.

The findings indicate that SDL can only impact organizational innovation through employees openness to a challenge, inquisitive nature, self‐understanding, and acceptance of responsibility for learning. Such finding implies better OI capability under such conditions, thus organizations may encourage employees to take risks or accept new opportunities through various incentives, such as monetary rewards or public recognitions. More specifically, the present study discovers that while administration innovation is the most important element influencing an organization's financial performance, market innovation is the key component in an organization's market performance.

The present study discovers that meditation experience positively affects SDL readiness, and OI ability and performance. The finding implies spiritual practice improves individual capability (i.e. in learning), as well as organizational capability (i.e. in innovativeness), which consequently enhances the outcomes of organizations.

Existing studies prove the benefits of meditation on both spiritual enlightenment and clinical psychology. Existing research documents that meditation practice helps relieve pain, improves physical health, reduces stress, and supports relaxation. No direct evidence shows the effect of meditation on SDL and OI, and only some evidence supporting the influence of meditation on OP. Nevertheless, the finding on the effect of the meditation experience in a work setting adds values to the current literature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key elements of professional identity in service work in order to provide more in-depth theoretical explanations as to why service workers do as they do while co-creating service.

This study takes a multi-perspective on professional identity, i.e. using both an employee and a customer perspective, arguing that the phenomenon mainly consists of what these interactants jointly do during the service interaction and of the meanings that are attributed to it. The authors draw on a detailed empirical study of professionals working at a customer centre. Methodologically, the study is based on practice theory, which helps us to illuminate and analyse both the micro practices and the meaning attributed to the professional identity of service workers.

The key elements of professional identity in service work are outlined within a framework that describes and explains three different facets of the service workers’ professional identity, i.e. as a core (i.e. individual resources, cognitive understanding, interaction), as conditions (i.e. service prerequisites), and as contour (i.e. demeanour and functions).

The findings are based on an empirical data set from a public transport customer centre. As the results are limited to one context, they do not provide statistical generalizability. Although limited to one service industry, the findings may still be of high relevance to a wide range of service organisations.

The study shows the significance of managers not just talking about the importance of being service-minded; more exactly, a wide range of service prerequisites, beyond cognitive understanding, needs to be in place. It is crucial that service workers are given the time to develop their contextual knowledge of their customers, and of other parts of the service organisation.

This study offers original empirical contributions concerning the key elements of professional identity. An alternative conceptualization of professional identity is provided, through which the paper adds to service research, explaining more specifically what kinds of knowledge and skills are in use during the co-creation of services.

Today, low-income people seeking resources from the federal government must often work through non-profit organizations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints that the poor must face today to secure resources through non-profit organizations.

This is a conceptual paper. The authors review cases of non-profit organizations providing federally supported resources to the poor across multiple sectors.

The authors find that to accept government contracts serving the poor, nonprofit organizations must often engage in one or several practices: reject clients normally consistent with their mission, select clients based on likely outcomes, ignore problems in clients’ lives relevant to their predicament, or undermine client progress to manage funding requirements. To secure government-supported resources from nonprofits, the poor must often acquiesce to intrusions into one or more of the following: their privacy (disclosing sensitive information), their self-protection (renouncing legal rights), their identity (avowing a particular self-understanding) or their self-mastery (relinquishing authority over daily routines).

The authors show that the nonprofits’ dual role as brokers, both liaisons transferring resources and representatives of the state, can complicate their relation to their clients and the predicament of the poor themselves; the authors suggest that two larger trends, toward increasing administrative accountability and demonstrating deservingness, are having both intended and unintended consequences for the ability of low-income individuals to gain access to publicly funded resources.

Qualitative research is very often concerned with uncovering the basic structure or essence of whatever is being examined so that conclusions can be drawn and principles developed. Postmodernism with its focus on language and with people interacting with one another in the construction of their worlds provides a strong challenge to this. This has particular implications for a construct such as ‘self’. The post‐modern position is that ideas of the self are formed through social interaction in particular social contexts and are therefore not within the individual but within the space between people. This article explores the concept of ‘self’ as understood by recent writers and examines the implications for our understandings of the self gained through interview based research.

An examination of what management education should be accomplishing in today′s companies to provide executives with the skills necessary to lead their businesses into the future. Categories of executive skills that should be considered in developing management development and education programmes are discussed: anticipatory, visioning, value congruence, empowerment and self‐understanding skills. Other considerations are also examined. An experiential learning environment is suggested for imparting the desired skills. The more frequently used forms are discussed. The importance of assessment and changes to the effectiveness of any programme, is stressed.