Acting Together Outside Politics: Russian and Ukrainian Volunteers Helping Ukrainian Refugees in Tbilisi

To examine the managerial behaviours adopted by commissioning managers in English primary care trusts (PCTs), and to explore the impact of these behaviours. Qualitative case studies were undertaken in four PCTs, focusing on staff engaged in the commissioning of hospital services. Both formal and informal observation were undertaken (150 hours), and 41 in-depth interviews conducted with managers and general practitioners (GPs). Managers adopted many managerial behaviours familiar from the literature, including sharing information, and networking inside and outside the organization. Multiple organizational layers and unclear decision-making processes hindered this activity. In addition, some managers with responsibility for facilitating practice-based commissioning (PbC) adopted a managerial mode that we have called being an 'animateur'. This approach involved the active management of disparate groups of people over whom the manager had no authority, and appeared to be a factor in determining success. It was facilitated by managerial autonomy and was more prevalent where managers were seen to have legitimacy. Some organizational practices appeared to inhibit its development. From 2012/13 it is planned that GPs will be taking more responsibility for commissioning in the English NHS. This research suggests that managers of the new commissioning organizations will require a deep and contextualized understanding of the NHS and that it is important that organizational processes do not inhibit managerial behaviour. Legitimacy may be an issue in contexts were managers are automatically transferred from their existing appointments.

This book examines the transformative potential of ballroom dance, and especially how it can make anyone become beautiful. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a local community of amateur ballroom dancers from the Regent Ballroom and Banquet Center in Savoy, Illinois, the book explores the intersection of notions of beauty and experience—the act of becoming beautiful through performance. It considers the ethnographic trope of becoming beautiful as an “expression” in the sense suggested by Victor Turner and Edward Bruner in their anthropological work on experience. It demonstrates how the contemporary performance of ballroom dance among amateurs generates feelings of positive personal transformation, of becoming beautiful. The book also discusses the dance hall as a social space where disparate groups come together to move in synchrony, along with the ways in which race, class, and gender converge in ballroom dancing. Finally, it provides detailed ethnographic data on the formation of affinity groups.

Bars have long been recognized as the intersection of a city’s culture and commerce. They provide opportunities for social interaction, contain a multitude of local memories, and serve as sources of identity. The American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Stonewall riots all developed out of local bars. So, what does it mean when the character of bars in a neighborhood begins to change? How do these changes to commercial spaces affect the social fabric of a city? Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, I explore the upscaling of the downtown bar scene in Geneva, New York to unpack what these commercial changes mean for the disparate groups that frequent the downtown space. I argue that instead of simply diversifying the types of businesses available to consumers in Geneva, this development has altered the very character and social fabric of downtown. Rather than creating an integrated and cohesive nightlife scene in which disparate groups come together in shared space and time, this development manifests in the fragmentation of the downtown scene in new ways that increase the segregation of people in social space.

This article looks at two forms of war memorial installed in Sunderland’s Mowbray Park after the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion: captured Russian cannons and a statue of the most famous British commander in India, General Henry Havelock. Although unveiled only four years apart, in 1857 and 1861, the memorials had strikingly different gestations and receptions: the Crimean War ‘memorial’ caused significant contestation within the local political and civic arena, attracting only several thousand spectators to a disorganised unveiling ceremony; conversely, the statue to General Henry Havelock unified Sunderland’s body politic, its unveiling witnessed by up to 100,000 people. This article analyses the organisational processes of the memorials and the narratives they sought to convey—and in the case of the Crimean cannons, why they caused serious controversy—in order to determine why the outcomes were so different. It argues that the memorials were by-products of contemporaneous struggles occurring within civic society and their failure or success depended on uniting the disparate status groups, religious denominations and political wings of the middle-class elite.

Variables which affect female advancement in South African organizations, such as aspects of the organization structure, i.e. the power hierarchy, composition of levels in companies and the reward structures, are discussed. Analyses of organization processes such as selection and promotion of organizational members provide examples of pre-market discrimination and disparate treatment Group structure and processes such as informal networks, the exclusion and inclusion of select members can also create subtle obstacles. Solutions to the slower advancement of women in organizations should be sought in both personal action plans formulated by career-oriented women and creation of enabling conditions in companies.

In this article, I consider how community music-making can help people become more engaged in climate action and responsible consumption. These are two of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how my lived experiences at two Ethno gatherings impacted my engagement with climate action (SDG13) and consumption and production (SDG12). Ethnos are JM International’s annual multi-sited, youth folk-music gatherings. They are active in over forty countries. Their mission is to revive, invigorate and disseminate global traditional musical heritage and to promote ideals such as peace, tolerance and understanding. Following a critique of the concept of sustainability, I explore how two musical gatherings impacted my responsiveness to environmental sustainability. This postdoctoral ethnographic research was conducted in 2019 and 2020 at Ethno England and Ethno New Zealand as part of Ethno Research. I demonstrate how these gatherings addressed environmental concerns through organizational processes, and how the location of the gatherings solidified the relationship between participatory music-making and nature. Finally, I consider the value of the broader social impact of these gatherings in relation to the climate emergency.

In recent decades, organizational scholars have set out to explore the processual character of organizations. They have investigated both the overtly ephemeral and sometimes dramatically unstable aspects of contemporary organizing and the social flux and flow of everyday organizing hiding beneath organizations’ stable surface appearances. These studies manifest a range of different approaches and methods. In this chapter, we evaluate the use and usefulness of one of these – ethnography – for studying organizational processes. As ethnographers draw close enough to observe the precariousness of such processes, stay long enough to see change occurring, and are contextually sensitive enough to understand the twists and turns that are part of organizational life, ethnography is well suited for such study. Ethnographers are commonly aware that ‘… incremental shifts and repositioning are the rule, not the exception, in organizational life’ (Morrill and Fine, 1997: 434). ‘By virtue of its situated, unfolding, and temporal nature’, then, as Jarzabkowski et al. (2014: 282) put it, ethnography ‘is revelatory of processual dynamics’. Ethnography or, to emphasize the processual nature of doing ethnography itself, ethnographying (Tota, 2004; de Jong, Kamsteeg, and Ybema, 2013), typically means three things: (i) doing research (fieldwork), (ii) understanding the world with an orientation towards sensemaking (sensework), and (iii) articulating and presenting those understandings (textwork). The first of these refers to research done through prolonged and intensive engagement with the research setting and its actors, combining different fieldwork methods (observing, with whatever degree of participating; talking to people, including interviewing; and/or the close reading of researchrelevant documents). Second, ethnography embraces a sensibility towards meaning and meaning-making processes, and this shapes the ways its observations and interpretations are carried out. Third, ethnographic analyses are commonly presented through a written text presenting data that give voice to the minutiae of everyday life, in their social, political, and historical contexts, thereby conveying to readers a sense of ‘being there’. This fieldwork, sensework, textwork trio may remind one of other treatments of field research methods (e.g., fieldwork, headwork, and textwork in Van Maanen, 1988; 2011; fieldwork, deskwork, and textwork in Yanow, 2000), which Wilkinson (2014) supplements with preparatory legwork. We replace the middle term with ‘sensework’ to encompass a broader range of analytic activity that is sensitive towards organizational actors’ meaning making, the complexities of the everyday, and the tacitly known and/or concealed dimensions of organizational life. More is involved, in our view, than just the ‘headwork’ of theory-informed interpretation and distanced analysis. Although previous work has typically not made a process focus explicit, the history of organizational studies shows ethnographic research being sensitive to a key feature of organizing processes unfolding over time: the intersubjective processes of ‘social reality’ construction. Ethnography has commonly required a prolonged period of researcher immersion in the research setting in which fieldwork is being carried out. This has inspired many influential organizational studies, both in the discipline’s early days and in more recent years (Fine, Morrill and Surianarain, 2009; Ybema, Yanow, et al., 2009; Yanow, 2013). Earlier studies delved into the dynamics of, for instance, bureaucratic control and resistance (e.g., Selznick, 1949; Blau, 1955; Kaufman, 1960; Roy, 1960; Crozier, 1964; Kunda, 1992), organizational performances and dramatics (Goffman, 1959), and the unofficial workarounds brought into play through processes of power struggles and local meaning making of labour relations (Dalton, 1959). Some of these studies also covered longer-term developments, such as Gouldner’s follow-up account of worker–management relationships in a gypsum mine (Gouldner, 1954). Although these studies show that an ethnographic approach is well equipped for doing process analyses, processes themselves were not often their explicit concern. More recent ethnographic studies, however, have taken a more explicit ‘process turn’, focusing on the instability and dynamics of organizational life on the ground (e.g., Feldman, 2000; Jay, 2013; Lok and de Rond, 2013). We begin this chapter with a sketch of studying organizational processes which provides the conceptual footing to argue for the relevance of ethnographying for this kind of study. To bring the processual qualities of ethnographic work into sharp focus, ethnography can be seen as ‘following’ actors, interactions, and artefacts over time and space. Ethnographers go along with actors, interactions, and artefacts on the move or stay in one place observing things that move around them. Next, we explain in more detail what ethnographic fieldwork, sensework, and textwork entail, and how these relate to process. We discuss two different foci in process analysis – long-term developments and microdynamics – and present two recent examples of ethnographic work which illustrate what ethnography can do for the study of process. We conclude with a few suggestions as to how ethnographers could become more processsensitive in their field-, sense-, and textwork. That is, although ethnography has something to contribute to process studies, ethnographers could themselves learn from taking the issues engaged in this handbook into consideration.

Energy efficiency in industrial organizations – A cultural-institutional framework of decision-making

Recent research has demonstrated that employees can develop novel solutions to work-process-related problems that they experience directly, but in order for organizations to benefit from this form of user innovation (“employee-user innovation”), employee-developed innovations need to diffuse within the innovator's organization. This paper challenges the prevalent assumption in studies of employee-user innovation that employee-users readily reveal and diffuse their innovations. Based on a grounded analysis of 117 innovations developed by rank-and-file workers that we identified during 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two police units and two military units in Denmark, we show that employee-users frequently invest considerable effort in actively hiding their innovations. We (i) identify four distinct hiding practices that employee-user innovators enact, (ii) demonstrate how decisions about whether and how to hide are based on interpretations of a range of material and organizational conditions, and (iii) show how these decisions negatively impact the employee-user innovation process by impeding not just use and diffusion, but also the development of innovations. Our findings carry implications for user innovation research, as well as for how we understand both covert innovation processes in organization and the relationship between bureaucratic organization and innovation.

Rainbow Gatherings are one of the earliest forerunners of transformative events, with a history spanning five decades. These noncommercial, cocreated, and inclusive meetings have a global spread, offering radical alternatives to social organization and political processes. This essay examines the alternative political model of Rainbow Gatherings through the lens of material culture studies. The analysis follows an object biography of the ritual artifact known as the Talking Stick, central to Rainbow’s political practices, and explores the meaning of the object in material, symbolic, and instrumental senses. Drawing on ethnographic field work at fourteen Rainbow Gatherings across Europe, the essay concludes that organizational models contribute to the transformational potential of events.

Patient assessment within the context of healthcare delivery packages: A comparative analysis

Since the 1990s, Chinese parents of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (PWIDD) have been founding rehabilitation service non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to fill the social welfare gaps in disability services in their local areas. More recently, however, a new form of mutual aid organization – the parent organization, which focuses on family empowerment and advocacy – has emerged and diffused trans-locally, along with two national networks’ organizational incubation initiatives. Following an institutional approach to organizational studies and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 to 2023, this study traces the trans-local expansion of this novel organizational form in the emerging field of Chinese NGOs. We argue that parent organizations strategically orchestrate a form of institutional work – network entrepreneurship – characterized by three organizational processes: vertical connections between national networks and local member organizations, horizontal interactions among senior and new parent organizers, and the creative translation and adaptation of local parent organizations. Together, these three processes facilitate the trans-local diffusion of organizational resources, identity, ideas and practices. The findings make theoretical contributions by highlighting the institutional implications of peer organization networks, especially through the emerging subject position of “parent of PWIDD,” in the incubation and diffusion of a novel organizational form trans-locally.

Scholars of religious communication are vitally interested in the impacts of media on religion. At the same time, scholars of organizational communication have intensely studied the impacts of media on organizations. Since much religious communication occurs in organizational settings, the literature on the organization-media interface offers productive frameworks for analyzing the religion-media interface. This article draws from the author's ethnographic fieldwork to narrate four cases of evangelical churches whose radically different uses of PowerPoint for worship and leadership communication are driven by their respective organizational identities and impact congregational dynamics in divergent ways. PowerPoint, though a simple technology, inhabits the churches' sacred space and amplifies their central discourse. The cases are analyzed via frameworks from organization studies to elicit how the churches' PowerPoint usage transforms organizational hierarchies and processes, dynamically interacts with organizational structuration, and indicates degrees to which adoption of a media technology reflects and shapes Habermasian technical reasoning.

Background Mental health policy initiatives in England over the last three decades have led to significant restructuring of statutory service provision. One feature of this has been the reconfiguration of NHS mental health services to align with the requirements of internal and external markets in the context of wider neoliberal organisational transformations. Aims/Objectives This paper examines the effects of neoliberal policy and service reforms on professional practice and „conceptualisations of mental distress within one mainstay of NHS statutory services: the community mental health team (CMHT). Methods The paper is based on findings from twelve months’ ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with practitioners and service users within two CMHTs. Results and conclusions The paper begins with an account of the restructuring of the labour process in mental health services. This utilises the notion of ‘strenuous welfarism’1 to describe an organisational context characterised by escalating performance management, deskilling of professional practice and the intensification of mental health work. The study found that increasingly prominent aspects of managerialism and marketization disrupted attempts by mental health practitioners to sustain supportive and mutual structures with colleagues and engage with service users in therapeutic and relationship-based forms of practice. Moreover organisational processes increasingly recast service users as individual consumers ‘responsibilised’ to manage their own risk, or subject to increasingly coercive measures when perceived to have failed to do so. Consequently biomedical orientations were remobilised in practice in spite of a rhetorical shift in policy discourse towards socially inclusive approaches. The term ‘biomedical residualism’ is coined to describe this phenomenon. However instances of ethical professionalism that reflected resistance to these residualised modes of practice were also visible. Reference Mooney G and Law A. New Labour/hard labour?: restructuring and resistance inside the welfare industry. Policy Press, 2007.

Mental health policy initiatives in England over the last three decades have led to significant restructuring of statutory service provision. One feature of this has been the reconfiguration of NHS mental health services to align with the requirements of internal and external markets. Based on findings from 12 months’ ethnographic fieldwork within one mainstay of NHS statutory provision, the community mental health team, this paper examines the effects of these neoliberal policy and service reforms on professional practice and conceptualizations of mental distress. The paper begins with an account of the restructuring of the labour process in community mental health services. This utilizes the notion of ‘strenuous welfarism’ to describe an organizational context characterized by escalating performance management, deskilling of professional practice and the intensification of mental health work. Increasingly prominent aspects of managerialism and marketization disrupted attempts by mental health practitioners to sustain supportive and mutual structures with colleagues and engage service users in therapeutic and relationship-based forms of practice. Moreover, organizational processes increasingly recast service users as individual consumers ‘responsibilized’ to manage their own risk or subject to increasingly coercive measures when perceived to have failed to do so. Consequently, biomedical orientations were remobilized in practice in spite of a purported shift in policy discourse towards more socially inclusive approaches. The term ‘biomedical residualism’ is coined to describe this phenomenon. However, instances of ethical professionalism that reflected resistance to these residualized modes of practice were also visible.