Seselelãme: Aŋlɔ-Eʋe Refractions of an African Somaesthetics

Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong. Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. 256 pp. Kathryn Linn Geurts. Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 293 pp. Sandra Greene. Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana. Indiana University Press, 2002. 280 pp. We must have water, we are made of water, our bodies would perish without water. This rich testimony from one of Kathryn Linn Geurts' informants demonstrates the life-giving force of water, the theme that binds three new works on the Anlo-Ewes of southeastern Ghana, in West Africa. From Sandra Greene comes an exploration of the role of sacred sites within the Anlo littoral, many of which are ponds, pools and impermanent lakes. From Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong's research based in the abandoned port city of Keta emerges a new environmental history of the lacustrine region immediately south of the world's largest man-made dam. And from Geurts, an extrapolation of culture and sensory perception grows from the observation of young girls practicing balancing and carrying water on their heads in a small village on the banks of the Volta River. Water was the very reason the settlements in the first place - water shortages are a common theme in the displacement, resettlement, and difficulties encountered by Ewe communities throughout Eweland. Water-fetching is cultural performance and well-digging and restoration is emblematic of the march of modernity. Greene's book on the Anlo region, her second, is about the management of sacred sites of power, and the shift in the structuration of traditional and non-traditional power in Anlo spanning the colonial period and the recent historical present. It builds on her earlier work on gender and ethnicity in the pre-colonial Anlo polity (1996), but broadens the analysis to incorporate cultural shifts that she loosely describes as indicative of modernity. Sacred sites are numerous and diverse in Anlo. They include lagoons and ponds, forests, groves, and cemeteries. This shift, rudely from interactions between people to inter-actions between bodies and space, is explained partly as a response to scholarly failure to account for the range of cultural responses that emerged as a result of these encounters, a range that included minimalist appropriations of surface characteristics and more profound responses that involved the abandonment of whole ways of thinking about self and the world. (5) Greene's chapters are thematic and a richly woven tapestry of oral narratives and colonial archival material sensitive to change over time which engage criticisms of her earlier work. Individually, they explore the myth, history, water, the body, and health. Collectively, they emphasize the notion that changing meanings associated with landscape features, especially in the context of the colonial cultural encounter, reflects both micro and macro episternological development in the way people come to understand themselves and their environment. On a more profound level, Greene's approach should appeal to the generalist as a critique of a very politicized Africanist project, the interrogation of resistance, ingenuity, agency, and creativity, focusing instead on the particular historical circumstances that foster the development of tolerance the diverse cultural forms and beliefs operating within the same society, and the intra-communal tensions that often arise from this diversity. For the specialist it reads well as an historical compliment to Blier's (1995) work on contemporary Ewe-Fon art and spirituality and Rosenthal's (1998) exploration of performance and ritual among gorovodou adepts. The ancient Ewe homeland of Notsie, Notse, or Nuatja (modern day Togo) and its relationship to colonial and post-colonial chiefly authority is the subject of Chapter One. …

More than 40 years after the end of Portuguese colonialism, those who migrated from the former colonies in Africa to Portugal remain silenced and forgotten as if they were not part of a colonial project that forged an imperial nation overseas. At least a third of these subjects were actually descendants of white Portuguese people as well as of populations of different faiths, skin colours and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who were migrating for the first time to an unfamiliar country. Among them were Muslims of both Indian and Mozambican origin who have, since colonial times, been portrayed as the Muslim, racialized and ethnic Other, and whose senses of belonging have not been voiced, heard nor properly understood. As such research is required, within the framework of the Lusophone postcolonial critique. This thesis aims to contribute to this critical approach by providing a ethnography of the postcolonial material, affective, sensory and bodily ways through which these postcolonial subjects, and their descendants already born in Postcolonial Portugal, have been reproducing and negotiating collective memories of belonging. It departs from the assumption that one cannot understand people’s belonging without going beyond the simplistic identity categories often used to label them. Therefore it adopts a phenomenology of material culture and experience in order to understand how these subjects have been re-appropriating and reconstructing general ideas of Indian-ness, Muslim-ness, Mozambican-ness and Portuguese-ness across generations, particularly when engaging with a multiplicity of objects that integrate into their everyday life, namely objects of home decor, food and media. This thesis results from fieldwork conducted over a period of 12 months in these subjects’ current public and private contexts of conviviality, such as the Lisbon Central Mosque and their family homes. Biographical interviews and visual methods were also applied to two generations (parent and child) from the 11 family-household units collaborating in this research.

Filling an important gap in design history, Another Modernism examines how domestic space was conceived by the US home economics movement in the first half of the 20th century. In doing so, it tells the story of how home economists—mainly women—developed design that challenged the traditional architecture of American farm communities and countered the approach of modernist architects. Uncovering unacknowledged contributions of women to domestic architecture and design history, it reveals early instances of participation, sustainability, and accommodating the disabled body in domestic design. In contrast to the canonical modernist model of space, which is primarily visual, home economists centered on a user who interacts with the interior in a tactile, bodily way. Although both strove for efficiency, they understood it differently: whereas for many of the mainstream modernists the term ‘efficiency’ meant functionalist aesthetics, for home economists it signified design solutions intended to ease the labor of an average American homemaker. The book argues that the home economists’ focus on tactility, the user’s corporeality, movement, access, preferences, and her engagement in the design process, constituted an alternative model of modern architecture – a popular and largely rural modernism centered on the specificity of the female user and her personal experience of the domestic interior. Based on little-known archival material, and with an emphasis on mostly female researchers, designers, and users/occupants, Another Modernism will appeal to architects, design historians, and anyone interested in gender, women's and disability studies, as well as non-visual approaches to design.

Project Overview This project contains the data that underlies the behavioral study done as a part of Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE), a funded project thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. IASGE addresses the need to investigate how academics are using Git hosting platforms, how they can be adapted to academic needs, and how the scholarship hosted on them can be archived. The results of this project aim to inform the that scholarship on Git hosting platforms move from a phase where they are highly active and collaborative, to a state where they are stable, permanently citable, and under active, professional preservation. This half of the IASGE project, the behavioral study, is a three-part, mixed methods empirical approach to understand the scholarly users of Git and Git hosting platforms (GHP) whose use patterns vary from beginner to advanced. Methods employed include focus group sessions, a survey, and interviews. The data used include, but are not limited to, user profiles, frequency of feature use, and common practices, all which inform how librarians can support scholars in sustainable and long-term research. Through focus groups, a survey, and interviews, the study considers two groups of scholars: those who actively use Git to conduct their research within the academy, and those who are aware of Git but have not fully adopted it into their workflow in a standardized way. While each scholar may have varying reasons and degrees to which they include Git throughout their workflows, they all belong to the community of scholars who have the potential to utilize the power of Git to optimize their research and scholarship output.

Tyrėjo subjektyvaus patyrimo episteminė reikšmė lauko tyrimuose

The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has shaped me as a scientist by providing a collaborative environment and the opportunity to take a long-term, large-scale perspective in my research. I share this perspective with students by incorporating the principles, questions, and data from such research into my teaching. Working at an LTER site, and one that is based in Puerto Rico, has allowed me to increase the diversity of my laboratory and our graduate program by facilitating the recruitment of women and minority students. Personal experiences with science and data management in the LTER program, particularly the bad experiences, have helped me to improve as a communicator in the broadest sense. Although being a scientist in the LTER program has contributed to my career in many positive ways, it has also presented challenges to my work–life balance. To maintain its leadership role, the LTER program needs to remain an open network welcoming new scientists, new ideas, and thus new potential for discovery. I grew up, professionally speaking, in the LTER program. In 1989 as a new PhD student, I was strongly encouraged (i.e., told in no uncertain terms!) to explore research opportunities in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico. My mentors had developed a graduate field course in Puerto Rico that I participated in and later helped teach. Puerto Rico was their first venture into the tropics, one that was made easier by the fact that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and provides almost all of the conveniences of home. As one of my professors, Tom Siccama, liked to remark, Puerto Rico was “just like Connecticut, only different!” Puerto Rico was not, however, my first venture into the tropics. I had traveled, studied, and worked in Central and South America and the Pacific since my sophomore year of college and considered myself to be a tropical veteran. I felt at home in tropical rain forests, and had envisioned my PhD research taking place at some remote field site, in a foreign country, far from civilization: just me, my tent, the jungle, and the animals.

In an unguarded moment at the Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum, I expressed the view that to create an hypothesis in order to justify an experimental approach to long-term research is unlikely to further the long-term objective. The proposition was based on personal experience, casual observation, and some acquaintance with the Rothamsted long-term or as they are better known “The Classical Experiments.” Lawes, a contemporary of Darwin, created the Rothamsted experiments. He was not given to explaining himself; nor was Gilbert who became his partner in operating these oldest and possibly best known of all long- term agricultural field “experiments.” Living and working alongside these experiments for almost 40 years, I had come to accept that their successful continuation was not a necessary product of their experimental aspect but something more dependent on Lawes and Gilbert’s personalities. Also, I was aware of the eventual loss of some of the original experiments through time, and the reduction of others by later activity on the field plots that was the product of different minds committed to their own immediate experiments, and were sometimes antithetical to the long-term view of ecology or agriculture.

Peak music experiences are those experiences involving music that stand out as especially affecting, meaningful and memorable for the individuals involved. They are a common topic in discussions of popular music, including in journalism, biography and fan culture, where they are often credited as pivotal in people’s relationships with music and their lives more generally. Examples of peak music experiences are apparent in some previous scholarly studies of popular music cultures, however, this is the first dedicated investigation of the phenomenon. By analysing this way of thinking and talking about music, this thesis contributes to understandings of how music’s meaning and effects are constructed, the role of musical experience in identity and sociality, and the discursive structuring of individual and collective experience in music scenes. The thesis draws on ethnographic research conducted in 2015 in the local music scene of Brisbane, Australia, including participant observation in activities of music consumption and production, reviews of secondary data sources including popular music media, and in-depth interviews. Interviews were conducted with 44 women and men between the ages of 23 and 58 who participated in Brisbane’s dance, hip hop, indie and rock ‘n’ roll music scenes. This research provides the basis for a grounded exploration of peak music experiences, as well as a contemporary ethnographic study of these scenes, demonstrating the methodological value of peak music experiences for music scene research. The findings are broadly divided into themes of identity and belonging. In the first part, peak music experiences are shown to be epiphanies through which self-narratives are constructed. This involves common tropes including first encounters, gateway experiences and conversion experiences, which offer discursive shape for the construction of identity through popular music and highlight common and divergent priorities between popular music cultures. In particular, these narratives enable and encourage people to present their relationship to music as personal, authentic, and aligned with specific cultural values. It is common for music scene participants to credit peak music experiences with inspiration and influence on their musical activities as well as other aspects of their lives. Analysing these claims highlights the crucial importance of affect in people’s responses to music and therefore its social agency. This analysis also responds to the important but under-explored question of why some people grant music a central status in their lives, as musicians, fans and in other roles, investing considerable resources and organising their social lives around it. Peak music experiences provide motivation to sustain social commitments and activities, as embodied experiences, memories and sought-after ideals. The second part considers the role of peak music experiences in belonging and collective identity. At the micro-social level, peak music experiences can both reflect and inform relationships between family, friends and romantic partners. At a larger scale, the music scene participants interviewed attributed peak music experiences most often to live and collective music events, reflecting the status accorded to these in both popular culture and scholarly research. These specifically celebrated instances of live music reveal what people value most in that context and how this differs between groups. Most notably, live music enables the exploration and celebration of individual and collective identity, including uncommon expressions of the self, resulting in especially affecting, memorable and meaningful musical experiences. Thus peak music experiences help to account for the special status of live music. Finally, the role of peak music experiences in music scenes is considered. Individuals’ peak music experiences contribute to and are shaped by collective memory in the Brisbane dance, hip hop, indie and rock ‘n’ roll music scenes. This informs ongoing practices in the scenes, which are defined partly by the shared priorities and ideals that are apparent in and reproduced by the peak music experiences of participants.

The study was informed by an interest in the relational aspects of children’s participation and how children’s participation can practically be shifted from being a transactional experience to a transformational, participatory experience. It highlights the complexity of the issues involved in children’s participation and how it actually works in practice in a residential child care context. It provides deeper insights into the social, cultural and political issues that influence how children participate and relates these to the larger discourse of development ethics, children’s citizenship and agency. Ethnographic research was conducted in two major children’s homes in Trinidad and Tobago for a period of two years where children’s participation in decision making processes was the key focus of attention. Data analysis using a combination of the scientific qualitative software, Atlas.ti7, and the constant comparative method, revealed five essential themes related to the participation experiences of children in residential care. These themes are: the complexity of caring relationships between adults and children; participation, paternalism, resistance and resilience; Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as a new site of conflict for children’s participation; how adults and looked after children negotiated meaning at the broader policy level and positive aspects of residential child care. A combination of ideas from development ethics, critical social work theory, children’s agency and care ethics has been applied to the analysis of children’s participation, which includes four key areas: (1) the meaning of increasing children’s agency in residential care; (2) the interdependence of adults and looked after children; (3) children’s participation as an indigenous experience and (4) children’s experiences as collective decision makers. This research therefore presents useful insights into children’s participation in post-colonial Trinidad and Tobago and presents findings which challenge traditional assumptions held about children by adults as being incompetent and dependent. It also provides an alternative approach to understanding children’s participation which incorporates adult-child relations as opposed to only taking a rights-based approach. Although the findings cannot be generalised to all children’s experiences regarding participation, knowledge about how to identify children’s participation and its relational issues might be transferable. There are lessons from the adults’ and children’s experiences which will be useful to policy makers, researchers, children themselves and practitioners in the field of child welfare and children’s rights.

Research into social work and child protection has begun to observe practice to find out what social workers actually do, however, no such ethnographic research has been done into long-term practice. This article outlines and analyses the methods used in a study of long-term social work and child protection practice. Researchers spent fifteen months embedded in two social work departments observing organisational practices, culture and staff supervision. We also regularly observed social worker’s encounters with children and families in a sample of thirty cases for up to a year, doing up to twenty-one observations of practice in the same cases. Family members were also interviewed up to 3 times during that time. This article argues that a methodology that gets as close as possible to practitioners and managers as they are doing the work and that takes a longitudinal approach can provide deep insights into what social work practice is, how helpful relationships with service users are established and sustained over time, or not, and the influence of organisations. The challenges and ethical dilemmas involved in doing long-term research that gets so close to social work teams, casework and service users for up to a year are considered.

Disruptions, and indeed spectacular disruptions, are understood and experienced by people in many different ways. They serve to both highlight and embed deep-rooted inequalities, changing experiences of the everyday and even challenging the very right to have an everyday. In this joint article we critically engage with conceptualisations of the mundane, exploring how people negotiate everyday life in contexts of unprecedented change. We take up Georges Perec’s call to take account of the everyday, focusing on examples from two ethnographically informed projects, both of which engage with creative practice. The first is long-term research in forced migration settings in North-Western Finland, which explores how people negotiate and re-negotiate linguistic citizenship and everyday life, in a policy context which restricts and limits. The second is a community arts and wellbeing project in the North of England, which investigated creative approaches to re-emergence from the Covid19 pandemic among people who had been particularly affected by isolation, including new mothers. In both projects, our data are drawn from fieldnotes from observations, reflections from our own participation, interviews and creative artefacts made by participants. In our analysis and discussion, we foreground ephemeral everyday moments and how individuals aim to hold up the mundane in the middle of major, internal and international crises. We consider how the ‘right to an everyday’ is central to understandings of being human, and draw on these experiences to show how ethnographic research, with particular emphasis on language(s) and creative practice, can shed light on lived experiences of the mundane and unequal experiences of and rights to the everyday.

Written from a practice-as-research perspective, this thesis focuses on the use of testimony in creating material for the stage. Designed as a reflexive performance ethnography and action research study, the work is concerned with developing a new performative strategy to address the memory of pain in the aftermath of conflict and to contribute to rebuilding communities dispersed by social and political unrest. Informed by methodologies and performance practices involved with the curation of testimonial content and conceptually inspired by the work of theatre director Augusto Boal, anthropologist Victor Turner and psychiatrist Dori Laub, Memodrome, as I named my technique, resides within the field of Applied Drama. It is intended to facilitate the direct interaction between a testifier and an empathic witness while generating simultaneous narratives based on the memories of the participants and their synergetic experiences. By using testimonial performance to explore aspects of the exilic and diasporic experience of Romanians in the UK and by making reference to the political and social tensions in the aftermath of the 1989 anti-communist revolution, this research aims at contributing to the understanding of how the experience of pain can reshape the cultural behaviour of a community and address feelings of belonging. Memodrome: Incubator, Memodrome: Roots and Memodrome: Home, the three performances I have created for the purpose of this PhD research, are experimental laboratories based on the particular and various experiences of life impacted by coercive and oppressive political governance. Memodrome: Incubator presents the testimony of a Romanian refugee artist who escaped a 30 years sentence in a communist prison by fleeing to the UK. Memodrome: Home explores testimonies of four Romanian migrants in the UK while Memodrome: Roots, constructed as a counter performance, captures the testimonies of six Romanians who are still based in their native country but reportedly feel that life under communism affected their feelings of belonging. The three case studies mentioned above constitute the foundation for developing a new performative strategy aimed at supporting communities affected by conflict to claim their past, commemorate painful experiences and celebrate survival. Examining the role of collective memory in the formation of public narratives, my proposal offers an alternative space where tensions can be negotiated through democratic means of spectatorship and collective authorship. This project demonstrates how capturing and performing personal testimonies can bring members of the community together and bridge differences. This work is structured in three main parts, each organised with several chapters and subchapters. In the first part of this thesis, I will provide a brief historical context and discuss how Romanian cultural behaviour has been reshaped in the shadows of the communist oppression. I will explore issues of identity in the aftermath of the anti-communist revolution in 1989 and argue that Romanians formed a new nation, one of people who lost their sense of place and belonging. I will also present my methodological approach articulating my affiliation with the practice of Applied Drama and explain how my academic and cultural background allowed me to engage with this work from a performative ethnographic perspective. In addition, in the first part of the written work, I will reflect on theoretical aspects with reference to memory, trauma, identity and nationhood and show how testimony can provide a powerful and restorative device in negotiating the tensions within communities affected by pain and oppression. In the second part of the research I will illustrate the conceptual framework of how I developed this new performative strategy to address the life of communities affected by painful pasts and to promote routines of reconciliation between its members by using testimony and performance. I will be reflecting on performativity, performance and the making of the self from an experiential perspective. Moreover, I will provide a theoretical framework to locate my practice alongside existing practices including Augusto Boals’s Forum Theatre technique and his concept of simultaneous dramaturgy that has influenced my thinking and technical approach. I will be articulating performative aspects which inform my strategy and establishing in particular how participative performance, as an art of experience, can provide a valuable platform for democratic spectatorship and collaborative authorship. The present study is carried in the form of a practice-as-research PhD and therefore I will describe the process of creating three performances – Memodrome: Incubator, Memodrome: Home and Memodrome: Roots – and using them as investigation tools to design a new performative strategy I have called Memodrome. The third part of this work is concerned with the illustration of the practice and demonstrating how performance art, especially Applied Drama, is defined by the process rather than result. The three case studies that I will be presenting emphasise how performing testimony and the staging of oral histories can respond to questions of belonging and social interaction while driving the negotiation of identities in the public sphere. For example, Memodrome: Incubator – where I staged the story of Mariana Gordan, a Romanian exile living in Britain for the past thirty years and Memodrome: Home – where I staged the testimonies of four Romanian migrants living in London – can both be read as counter narratives to the story of Romanian migration in the UK. They all articulate frames of selfhood that have been only very rarely, if never, represented in the British mainstream public space with connection to the Romanian diaspora: the role of the artist, gender diversity, women activism, otherness versus togetherness. Likewise, Memodrome: Roots, produced in Romania, provides an insightful picture of the struggles concerning the identity of the Romanian self and the contrastive narratives of its cultural embodiment. I will conclude each case study with the learnings and reflections extracted from each performance and describe my decision making based on those findings. A relatively new way of engaging with both research and arts or producing new knowledge1, the practice-as-research model can yet pose some challenges and tensions within different academic frames. As a practitioner at core, my writing will be aiming at capturing the essence of the practice in the making, the process and the experience.

<table><tr>\n <td><p>This\n dissertation puts forward a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to\n study the effects of low control determinants and peer-to-peer interactions\n on customer experience. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is the exchange between\n participants of equal power and authority to perform common tasks in a\n service context. It was made popular by file sharing system like Napster.\n Some firms have successfully harnessed P2P interactions to advance their\n competitive position. As an example, online communities for open source\n software provide collaborative platforms for users to share information, as\n well as exchange and look for social support. These platforms are often\n sponsored and hosted by firms who in turn benefit from the insights generated\n that can be used for product and service development (Libai et al. 2010). The\n structure of consumption comprises consumer actions that directly engage\n objects and often involve interactions with other people including P2P\n interactions. Holt (1995) refers to the latter as consuming as play and\n consuming as integration. Despite these developments, there are limited\n examples of firms using P2P interactions as a lever to improve customer\n experience, drive satisfaction and loyalty (Zomerdijk & Voss 2010). The\n literature is filled with strategies to manage customer experience (Bitner\n 1992; Berry & Carbone 2002; Rust & Chung 2006; Bitner, Ostrom &\n Morgan 2008; Schmitt 2010; Rosenbaum & Massiah 2011; Achrol & Kotler\n 2012; Pine & Gilmore 1998, 2014) using firm controllable factors.\n However, there is a dearth of research on how firms can exert influence over\n firm uncontrollable factors or low control determinant. Consequently, this\n dissertation proposes the concept of low control determinants to bridge the\n vital research gap. The author defines low control determinants as factors\n that affect customer experience, but firms have little influence over. With\n archival data of an island resort, the quantitative analysis proposed a\n proof-ofconcept for low control determinants as a situation moderator in\n customer experience (Verhoef et al. 2009) based on extant literature on\n customer experience management. Specifically, the climate factor was\n hypothesized as the situation moderator between functional, mechanic and\n humanic clues respectively, on customer experience. From the findings of the\n quantitative study, the moderating effects of climate factors were\n inconclusive, although the direct effect of climate factors on customer\n experience was significant. The findings might be due to a selection bias and\n perhaps a coarse measurement of the independent variable – the daily average\n temperature was used to represent climate data instead of, say, the hourly\n breakdown. Nonetheless, the significant direct effects of a low control\n determinant suggested that firms need to identify low control determinants in\n addition to high control determinants and have strategies to exert influence\n over them. A second study used a qualitative case study method to investigate\n how firms could exert their influence over low control determinants. The\n second study used ethnographic research techniques and interviews to gather\n insights into how a local healthcare organization exerted influence over P2P\n interactions. Empirical research in brand experience, customer decision\n journey, sense of community and normative community pressure for firms,\n formed the basis for developing the conceptual model for the qualitative\n research framework. In-depth interviews with 39 administrators and customers\n or patients uncovered experiential dimensions of respondents and allowed\n respondents who were regular members of the wellness centers managed by the\n focal healthcare organization, to describe their feelings and experiences in\n their languages. The wellness centers were extensions of the healthcare\n organization into the residential estate; they were assimilated into the\n residential community without the infrastructure complexities of a hospital.\n The healthcare organization conceived of the wellness centers as a first step\n to promoting supported self-management of community-dwelling seniors. Besides\n explicating the governing mechanism of P2P interactions in building a sense\n of community, the qualitative study assessed the resulting outcomes on\n customer experience and effects on customer well-being. The study found a\n role transformation in the firm as it expanded its reach from that of a\n provider in institutional settings to that of a facilitator or catalyst in\n the community that was closer to community-dwelling seniors or patient. As a\n catalyst, the firm evolved its operating framework, and the researcher\n distilled the findings into a managerial implementation framework for firms\n interested to harness P2P interactions to improve customer experience.\n Customers in P2P interactions are not mere recipients, but active\n contributors or co-producers to the community. Instead of firm-sponsored\n support functions, firms could harness P2P interactions as a cost-efficient\n strategy that could deliver transformative customer experience. Firms could\n harness P2P interactions by facilitating customer helping behaviors which\n could be more effective than firm sponsored resources in achieving desired\n outcomes. P2P interactions offer a promising strategy for firms interested to\n deliver superior outcomes at lower or not impact on their cost structure.\n This research offered prescriptive value for managers to expand firm\n capabilities and capacities without the corresponding increase in costs. The\n insights that were generated informed and provided managers with an\n implementation framework to exert control over P2P interactions. In\n conclusion, the findings contributed to the literature in customer experience\n management and transformative service research through an advanced\n understanding of how a firm can deliver a transformative experience of\n lasting customer benefits.</p></td></tr></table>

Good Autoethnography

This dissertation presents, discusses, and advances findings and contributions from an investigation into how professional orchestral musicians learn as they engage in their work together. Understanding the processes, demands, and consequences of orchestral work is important for informing the practices of professional and aspiring orchestral musicians, orchestral organisations, and educational institutions. Musicians’ well-being and the longevity of their working lives are of particular concern for this community. Learning and development are identified as important factors in understanding individuals’ vocational practices and how they work together. It follows that the conceptual framework of this investigation focuses on microgenetic learning and ontogenetic development to elaborate how intersubjectivity arises as musicians engage together in and learn through orchestral practices. Intersubjectivity refers here to the shared understandings of self and activity that arise from interaction with others, changing and developing with continued participation. From a sociocultural perspective, learning refers to microgenetic changes in individuals’ understanding and practice, while development lies within ontogenetic changes in their knowledge and abilities. As individuals engage together in activities, their learning and developmental processes contribute to a gradually emerging intersubjectivity, that is, shared understandings of what they know, can do, and value. To address the concerns raised regarding musicians’ ongoing practices, this investigation aims to describe and explain what intersubjectivity and engagement look like in orchestral performance. It also aims to comprehend how learning and development occur within this engagement. To investigate learning and development in orchestral performance, an ethnographic inquiry was conducted to generate an account of how a small sample population of orchestral musicians engaged with and experienced their working environment. The study involved observations and interactions with 6 members of an Australian professional symphony orchestra over a 12-month period. The participants’ selection targeted a range of ages, gender, instrument type, and level of seniority in the orchestra. Within the findings, five processes of engagement were identified through which intersubjectivity was constituted. These comprise (a) awareness, (b) communication, (c) evaluation of performance, (d) acting like a professional orchestral musician, and (e) the formation of playing intentions. These processes are advanced to contribute to a metaprocess of rehearsal, that is, the personal and interpersonal process of progressively reconstituting musical performance towards a shared ideal. New descriptions and evidence of how the musicians in this study engaged in orchestral performance are contributed, including descriptions and explanations of how trust and humour facilitated communication about performance. Through these processes of engagement, the participants’ daily interactions in orchestral performance became sites of microgenetic learning processes in three distinct ways. First, the temporal conditions of rehearsals and performances imposed a nonlinear but directional pattern on how performance knowledge changed. Second, spatial awareness was a highly important organising factor in the musicians’ knowledge of performance within the orchestra. It is proposed here that the sensory ethnography term “emplacement” might be useful for describing the connections between musicians’ activity, perceptions, and environments. Third, these temporal and spatial aspects of the musicians’ knowledge combined as they co-created a performance environment together, within which they progressively advanced their performance practices. Patterns and possibilities in the musicians’ ontogenetic development were identified through how they presented and construed their personal histories relating to performance. They selected past instances of microgenetic learning to illuminate and explain their current abilities, attitudes, and approaches to orchestral performance. The musicians were also capable of presenting positive or negative narratives of their development, frequently corresponding with their level of satisfaction with current environments or appraisals of performance. Positive developmental narratives used experiences of injury, difficulties in gaining membership in the orchestra, and the stresses associated with surveillance and critique to explain a growing ability to cope with challenges and to perform effectively with colleagues. Conversely, negative developmental narratives explained these experiences as being injurious to their ability to meet challenges or to perform at their best. It is advanced that how musicians engage with positive and negative developmental narratives may impact on their perception of their ability to sustain their working practices into the future.