Mundane Work Research Articles

Relational materialism in passive house designs – mundane work and tinkering in Vallastaden’s low energy buildings

Sweden’s new showcase mixed-use neighbourhood of Vallastaden has been designed for social and environmental sustainability, with a specific focus on citizens’ active involvement in the early phases of the planning process, and the built environment has been designed to encourage social interaction between residents. One aspect of the Vallastaden concept is low energy buildings and passive house designs. All buildings are designed to be 25% more energy efficient than the requirements of the Swedish Building Code, and 12 residential buildings have been designed as passive houses. This research project focuses on the planning, construction and management processes, and on the everyday lives of the passive houses’ residents. The paper reports on the initial research conducted with a qualitative approach, including interviews with residents and stakeholders and diaries maintained by residents. Relational materialism is our theoretical approach for analysing empirical material and guiding our understanding of the sociomaterial as being intertwined in assemblages and how different elements and entities are enacted in everyday life for low energy thermal comfort in passive houses. Our conclusion is that building design and energy system design varies between the different buildings. There are many different passive houses in Vallastaden, which come in different shapes and with multiple relationships between the social and the material. Both residents and professional groups need to work to achieve the desired levels of thermal comfort, and this work includes what seems to be endless tinkering with the different parts of the energy system and buildings. Eventually, different practices become established for mundane management of thermal comfort.

Repair in Translation

In this article, the author juxtaposes writing and conversation about care for, with, and in spite of technology in Cambodia. The scene is medical care, and the actors are radiologists, engineers, cadres, and X-ray machines. A radiologist is forced to repair an X-ray machine for doctors of the revolution; the pressure and constraints are almost unreal, yet his skill in repair affirms his humanity and the specialized knowledge and creativity required for problem solving. An engineer teaches repair as he fixes an old X-ray machine. He finds words and necessary tools are missing in Phnom Penh, a familiar story of lack, yet repair is material practice that enables improvisation in spite of linguistic and epistemic challenges. A radiologist, the same one from before, in the twilight of his life, questions the dominance of technologies within medical care and the deskilling of doctors. Juxtaposing these stories bolsters attention for the mundane and creative work of keeping things going in a “broken world,” in line with the ways that care and repair are mobilized in STS. It also shows how the radical potential of “broken world thinking” is circumscribed when a broken world is the one from which people are struggling to distance themselves. What we are left with are multiple, overlapping, fraught stories of modernity in which need, choice, and pleasure of repair all have a place.

A participatory journal/dialogue approach to narrative research illustrated using a study of informal caregiving

ABSTRACT In this paper, we describe a participatory approach to data collection and analysis, illustrated by using a study of informal caregiving. Participants chose their own method of journaling their experiences of caregiving: they used written journals, photographs, or a combination of these methods to record their experiences. Participants reflected on and discussed the journal entries during regular telephone interviews with the researcher. Four participants completed up to six interviews each based on their journal entries. The interview transcripts were analysed using narrative analysis. This participatory journal/dialogue method provided rich, reflective and insightful information. This approach was particularly useful for exploring dynamic experience; participants had the opportunity to recollect, reshape, and narrate the importance of the transitory experiences of caregiving described in their journals. The narrative analysis revealed caregiving identities grounded in the daily mundane work of informal care.

Toxic sights: The spectacle of hazardous waste removal

This paper examines the geographies of hazardous waste removal. Over the past decade, studies of disposal have demonstrated the myriad ways in which things can never disappear – they can only be transformed, transmuted, combusted, combined or any other manner of material change. This paper aims to develop understandings of the material politics of disposal by considering the matter of representation. It does this ethnographically, by following a chemical stockpile though the process of removal from its storage site in Tanzania. In examining everyday disposal practices, this paper highlights the materialities of hazardous waste in ways that have been epistemologically side-lined. Locating the analysis at the intersection of matter and representation, the paper illustrates the centrality of paper-work, diagrams, photographs and standard operating procedures in performing removal. It argues that removal is achieved through a bureaucratic spectacle; a process which obscures lingering residues and compounds their toxic effects. By attending to chemicals through the mundane work of removal, this paper opens up different lines of inquiry for studies of waste, and enriches understandings of materiality by considering how visual representations make a difference.

The decentered translation of management ideas: Attending to the conditioning flow of everyday work practices

Based on a study of Lean management practices at the Swedish Migration Board, we develop a novel theoretical understanding of the translation of management ideas. We show how translation, rather than being reduced to a network of human intentions and actions governing the transformation of organizational practices, can instead be understood as a historically contingent, situated flow of mundane everyday work practices through which social and material translators simultaneously become translated, conditioned to be and act in certain ways. We show how prior actor-centric accounts of translation of management ideas can be understood as performative consequences of a conceptual vocabulary inherited from Callon and Latour. Contrasting this, the non-actor-centric vocabulary of social anthropologist Tim Ingold allows us to background the intentional human actor and foreground the flow of mundane, situated practices. In adopting this vocabulary, we capture how the flow of practices conditions subjects and objects to become enacted as well as act, and develop an understanding of translation as occurring within, rather than distinct from, these practices. In essence, our novel view of translation emphasizes how management ideas are radically unstable, and subject to alteration through the flow of practices rather than as a result of deliberate implementation efforts.

Chinook Resilience: Heritage and Cultural Revitalization on the Lower Columbia River by Jon D. DaehnkeTony A. Johnson

93 Reviews REVIEWS CHINOOK RESILIENCE: HERITAGE AND CULTURAL REVITALIZATION ON THE LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER by Jon D. Daehnke foreword by Tony A. Johnson University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2017. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 256 pages. $30.00 paper. Too often, writings about contemporary Indigenous peoples still trade on tragedy. The Chinook in particular offer a ready temptation in this regard as a non-recognized people physically located at the end point of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, one of European America’s most treasured national narratives. Once situated as key regional brokers of trade, culture, and power, the Chinook lost much of this position with European arrival and United States colonization and occupation of the continent. Chinook Resilience, as the title suggests, does not rest in those moments of loss and pain. Jon Daehnke tells the story of the Chinook, their efforts at continuing as a people, and their ongoing battle for official and legal recognition by the United States government. At the same time, this book mostly centers on the role of heritage in Indigenous cultural survival and the complexities of that survival under the stresses and forces of settlercolonialism.Thus,Daehnkereliesonthree themes: the ongoing impacts of colonialism in regards of heritage-based projects and practices; Indigenous forms of and purposes for sustaining heritage; and the need to pay attention to tensions over different notions of place and space. The Chinook offer a uniquely compelling case becausetheirnon-recognitionstatusoftenmakes heritage efforts complicated and constrained. While resting on a solid base of archaeology, the text Daehnke presents is rooted in handson experience and full engagement with the Chinook people. He appropriately identifies his approach as both “heritage ethnography” and “collaborative ethnography,” both of which signal the broad realms of culture he must navigate as well as the need to work intensively with and for the Chinook. The author’s compelling recounting of meetings and disagreements over policy and practice, and tensions over cultural legacies in multi-tribal areas, cuts to the heart of what many Indigenous communities navigate on a daily basis. Daehnke offers skilled accounts that are clearly based on experience with these proceedings but also provides important illustrations of the larger context of settler colonialism that generates so many of those tensions. As he shows, today’s tribal leaders often prove the most deft of contortionists in working with local, regional, organizational, and federal agencies in order to push forward even the most modest projects. By necessity, the Chinook (like many) have become experts at working to build effective relationships with key non-Native partners, which facilitate rather than obstruct cultural practices and protocols. Daehnke shows how the Chinook’s mundane but crucial work to create a viable present and future when working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for example, still continues to combat Eurocentric maps, anthropological methods, and ongoing land claims of settler colonialism. My favorite are the final two chapters, which highlight the efforts toward the construction of the plankhouse at Cathlapotle, and the emergence and growth of tribal canoe journeys. These sections prove to be the heart of the book, as they represent multifaceted and relatively successful heritage or cultural revitalization endeavors. Those examples, both outlined in wonderful detail and care, are precise illustrations of forward-looking acts of sovereignty negotiated within the constraints of a settler colonial nation-state. The canoe journeys, in particular, are inter-tribally determined modes of asserting Indigenous geographies and sovereignties . And, as the author points out, they also serve as a springboard for other forms of cultural revitalization in the Pacific Northwest, from plankhouse construction to language to wood carving to weaving. If there is room for mild criticism, I would say that Daehnke’s academic fluency with the concepts of space and place remains under- 94 OHQ vol. 121, no. 1 developed. Cultural and human geographers (including Indigenous geographers) would have much to add to the conversation, as a great deal of literature and debate exists over topics as seemingly simple as the meanings of space and place. Yet, the overall project is still clearly well-informed by Indigenous spatial practices. Despite the potential for this book to fall into a fully academic...

Billing/coding tips from the pros: How important is this stuff, and what does the future hold?

Familiarity with the complicated rules of coding and billing is a skill not required to provide excellent care to patients, and thus is not covered in most residency training programs. Mastering the cognitive and technical skills of surgical care is far more important for the professional development of the surgeon-in-training. The mundane clerical work of coding holds little interest for most aspiring surgeons, who may feel that such tasks would best be left to others. However, it is critical to success as a practicing surgeon. As the provider of the service, no one is in a better position to understand exactly what was done and to describe it correctly. Incorrect coding may lead to an audit of claims which can result in significant financial penalties levied by payers against the surgeon and/or their employer, not to mention it may alter the ability to accurately characterize procedures that are used in research and other databases. This manuscript explores the basics of coding and billing.

The role of mundane and subtle institutional work in market dynamics: A case of fashion clothing market

Research on market dynamics shows that markets (trans)form through the institutional work of a wide range of actors. This literature, however, focuses on resourceful and/or powerful actors who can freely and openly shape the market. Via an inductive analysis of the Iranian female fashion clothing market, we examine the institutional work undertaken by actors who have limited resources and are subject to power structures that constrain their institutional work. We find that consumers, designers, retailers, and social activists engage in ambidextrous practices, secure networks, and stealthy defiance to navigate or moderate their institutional restrictions. Such work contributes to the relaxation of some state regulations and the coexistence of parallel taste structures. The study draws attention to mundane, subtle, and less visible and organized institutional work and extends knowledge on marketplace resistance by showing that everyday acts of resistance can function as unintentional institutional work that contributes to market dynamics.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Muddling through the Swedish Police Reform: Observations from a Neo-Classical Standpoint on Bureaucracy

AbstractThis article discusses current police reform in Sweden, analysing recent events in light of tensions between rationalistic reform culture and more mundane work practices in policing. The analytical tool-kit consists of practice theory and the neo-classical theory of bureaucracy. The empirical material originates in ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews from different regions in the new police organization in Sweden. Three themes are outlined: structural sanctification, job crafting, and resilience in work practices. At the end of the article, some reflections on shared leadership are presented, focusing on discretionary powers in police work.

The mundane work of recognition: Directions and modes of recognition among human resource managers

The workplace is as a domain of life in which recognition plays a fundamental role. However, we still know little about the characteristics of recognition in the context of organized work. Building...

Devising the consumer of the competitive electricity market: the mundane meter, the unbundling doctrine, and the re-bundling of choice

ABSTRACTThis paper follows the sinuous trajectory of the joint design of an electricity meter and the technical architecture of the smart home in France. The analysis points to the articulation between the mundane work of material and market design and the profound, pervasive, and political issue of ‘agencing’ consumption. Three figures of the consumer appeared along with the evolving design of the smart home and meter: a behavioural energy saver; a market offer chooser, and an attached consumer. The ‘unbundling’ doctrine, which states that competition must be sorted out from monopoly in order for the electricity market to function, was often invoked to justify changes in the smart meter and smart home designs. The role of the doctrine was, however, ambiguous. As a rather abstract perspective on the working of markets, unbundling seems to be exceeded by concrete and mundane marketing attempts at re-bundling choice. And yet consumer figures doctrinally compatible with classical/neoliberal economics, which considers the consumer to be an autonomous self, leave open the ground for an attached consumer to emerge, suggesting that the consumer is in fact always ‘attached’ rather than detached.

The Mundane and Strategic Work in Collaborative Design

We address the design issue of mundane and strategic work in collaborative design. We do so through an examination of a series of participatory design activities in building a flagship library of the future. Both strategic and mundane work are found to permeate the processes, results, and further uptake of collaborative design outcomes as internal issues of user involvement, and not just as external context or excludable routine execution, which has been the prevailing view to them in design research to date.

Articulations of mundane transition work among consulting engineers

This paper analyses sustainability transition agency among consulting engineers, who exercise considerable influence in a wide spectrum of environmental decision-making through advice, calculations and design. They work in an ambiguous space of governmental requirements, environmental politics, cost considerations, and professional standards. Nevertheless, many consulting engineers engage with sustainability transitions in a mundane and modest way. To a varying degree, they combine four kinds of transition work: (1) sustainable technological problem solving, (2) persuasion work, (3) mediation work, and (4) institutional work. On this basis, we propose a model of sustainability transition agency where sustainable technological problem solving is the core activity as a precondition of necessary sociotechnical change. The three latter kinds of transition work may facilitate and support the core activity. The study also shows that environmental regulations, rules and standards are important to sustainability transition work among consulting engineers, guiding but also providing more space for such efforts.

Development geography II

Financialization is now a key area of research within Geography. Development geographers have made significant (although arguably under-recognized) contributions, notably in relation to household and ‘everyday’ financialization, as well as recent work on the financialization of nature, land, infrastructure, health and energy in the Global South. In this progress report, I argue that donors are currently seeking to accelerate and deepen financialization in the name of ‘development’. Foreign aid is being used to de-risk investment, ‘escort’ capital to ‘frontier’ markets, and carry out the mundane work of transforming objects into assets available to speculative capital flows. Financialization both permeates and goes beyond the more commonly referenced private sector-led development. Donors are pursuing these strategies and programmes with little or no reference to the threats posed by greater financialization.

Garfinkel on strategy: Using ethnomethodology to make sense of “rubbish strategy”

This paper has three aims. First, it presents what the term ethnomethodology means and explains some of its central concepts and tenets. Second, the paper illustrates an ethnomethodological approach to studying strategy by drawing on a fieldwork study of the development of a waste management strategy in a UK Local Authority, conducted by the first author. Third, the distinctive approach that ethnomethodology takes to the study of social organization is presented in order to outline what it could offer to the understanding of strategic organization in particular. The paper concludes by discussing the insights that ethnomethodology can offer in the strategic management field, including existing applications and potential future lines of enquiry, particularly in the field known as Strategy-as-Practice. The conclusion advocates a move away from rational analytic models, proclamations and prescriptive treatments of strategy towards studying the more mundane work that enables strategic action to take place, notably the production of accounts of various kinds. It is argued that through accounts, members produce the social facts that generate ‘strategies’ of various kinds. This necessitates studying fact production ‘in flight’. Strategic organization is thereby conceptualised as an ongoing achievement of member’s ethno- methods for producing it.

Book Review: Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse

Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse. By William Woolfitt. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2016. xii + 77 pp. $20.00 (paper).In the prelude to her magisterial nineteenth-century novel Middle-march, George Eliot describes the life of the Carmelite nun and reformer, St. Theresa of Avila. Eliot writes in the Prelude that Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life, but she also concedes that many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action. It required a special confluence of circumstances to produce St. Theresa. Dorothea Brooke, Eliot's protagonist and Theresas foil, yearned . . . after some lofty conception of the world. . . . She was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects (Book I, chap. 1). Unfortunately, her rashness-coupled with other events beyond Dorotheas control-leads to a poorly chosen marriage and unfulfilled dreams. Dorothea never becomes the great philanthropist that she hoped to be, and her life must be fulfilled by more mundane work. This problem is one of the central concerns of the novel: how is one to live a grace-filled life under graceless circumstances?Somewhere between St. Theresa and Dorothea falls the nineteenthcentury French saint Charles de Foucauld. William Woolfitts new collection, Charles of the Desert: A Life in Verse, is an exploration of a holy life that is both remarkable and unremarkable in turn. Ecstatic dreams are juxtaposed with eremitic drudgery, eucharistie awe with pedantic scribbling. It is in this way that Woolfitt portrays a life in which the relationship between the mundane and the numinous is left unresolved.As an attempt to imagine the inner life of a Christian exemplar, Woolfitts collection evokes the biographical poetry of Thom Satterlee (Burning Wyclif) or perhaps even T. S. Eliots classic play, Murder in the Cathedral. Woolfitt selects as his subject matter specific moments from de Foucauld's life: his relationship with his grandfather, the experience of the eucharist that drew de Foucauld back to the church, an apocalyptic vision. Each poem is dated, to allow the reader to locate the specific poem within de Foucauld s life. This makes Woolfitt s project something of an imaginary biography. The persona that Woolfitt-as-poet inhabits likely has more in common with Woolfitt himself than de Foucauld, and yet the timeline Woolfitt describes anchors his character in a very real story. The creative liberties that Woolfitt is able to take, then, are not Woolfitt overstepping himself, but rather Woolfitt being a good iconographer. …

The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics

Adam Ewing's The Age of Garvey joins a recent wave of scholarship on the black uplift movement led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey and carried across the African diaspora through his Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Like others, Ewing focuses less on Garvey's biography or the successes and failures of UNIA enterprises than on the appeal of the largest black movement in history. By understanding Garveyism “not as an ideology but as a method of organic mass politics,” he traces the “age of Garvey” past the UNIA's rise and decline in the early 1920s into a “second period” of interwar organizing, asking how the movement could be alternatively radical and cautious (pp. 6, 108). Ewing argues that Garveyism provided black men and women with a discursive framework of racial unity and interconnectedness that imbued “the mundane work of organizing and consciousness raising with world-historical significance” while also providing latitude for a range of responses to the political strictures of the era (p. 133).

Commentary to “The American Academy of Pediatrics Workforce Survey for the Section on Urology 2015”

The use of surveys to assess medical-workforce needs are of benefit in giving us a ‘snapshot’ regarding physicians opinions relating to the state of practice; however, the foundations of their viewpoints, in most cases, lack supporting data. Indeed, information obtained from surveys may at times be incongruent; for example, 75% of respondents reported no change in clinical volume and operative case complexity, however, 50% reported an increase in minor cases, and 40% reported a decrease in the number of open cases. In essence, workforce surveys supply us with an opinion on how practicing pediatric urologists see the field, but fail to allow us the ability the data necessary to truly see our workforce needs. That said, surveys such as this do enable us to see some key insights into how individuals who practice pediatric urology have changed their views or practice over the past decade. Specifically, we see a continued shift in the type of practice from the academic to the private setting, a decrease from 60% to 50%, respectively, with 50% of pediatric urologists now practicing in multiple office locations. Interestingly, despite the change in practice location and need for clinical outreach, involvement in resident education and research remains high, with two thirds of pediatric urologists involved in resident education and two thirds having at least some dedicated clinical time (≥10%) related to research. During the past 10 years there has also been a significant increase in the use of physician extenders: there are now 89% of responders with extenders, which is an approximately 50% increase in their use. The impact of how the use of physician extenders has affected our need for additional pediatric urologists is, however, unknown. Has it just relieved us from mundane clinical work and increased our ability to see new patients and increase operative volume, or has it altered our need for more partners?

Digital technologies and a changing profession

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate what role particular new management devices play in the development of the news profession in an organizational setting shifting to new technologies.Design/methodology/approachThis is studied through of observations of work practices in the newsroom and through documentary research and qualitative interviews with managers, editors, and other professionals.FindingsIt is shown that management devices such as the news table and the news concept are central to the reorganization of news work, as they realize managers’ strategies, just like they produce new practices and power relationships. It is shown that the devices produce increased collaboration among journalists and interaction between managers and output journalists, that mundane work and power is delegated to technological devices and that news products are increasingly standardized.Practical implicationsThe wider implications of these findings seem to be a change in the journalistic profession: TV news journalism is becoming less individualistic and more collective and professionalism becomes a matter of understanding and realizing the news organization’s strategy, rather than following a more individual agenda.Originality/valueThe paper’s originality lies in showing that profession and management are not opposed to each other, but can be seen as a continuum on which journalistic and managerial tasks become intertwined. This is in contrast to previous research on news work. Furthermore, the paper’s focus on devices opens up for conceptualizing power in the newsroom as distributed across a network of people and things, rather executed by managers alone.