Process Of Bricolage Research Articles

Problematising environmental governance and the politics of natural resource sovereignty in Brazil

ABSTRACT Locating the analysis in the context of the various shifts in Brazil’s development trajectory since 2003, this article problematises the dynamics underpinning processes of environmental governance. Adopting a critical institutionalist approach, the article analyses how evolving claims of sovereignty over natural resources are used to legitimise contested policy agendas for environmental governance of the Amazon region within Brazil’s coalition politics, and how bricolage processes (innovation, adaptation, and legitimisation) shape these agendas and their outcomes. In a context of territorial fragmentation and ideological differences between an expanding network of actors (federal, state, municipal and non-state) involved in the institutional bricolage of environmental policy-making, the analysis demonstrates that the coalition dynamics of each administration determines the extent to which environmental policies are implemented within Brazil as well as the social-environmental outcomes.

‘Harsh’ SoMa vs ‘Beige’ Castro: The cross-modal construction of contrasting femininities in queer San Francisco

The study of gender in sociolinguistic variation has long concerned the ways linguistic variables pattern with binary gender identities like male and female, with the implicit assumption that masculine individuals will use variants that index masculinity, and feminine individuals will use variants that index femininity. The emerging field of trans linguistics has built upon insights from queer linguistics and challenged the idea that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic variants and gender identities. Studies of transgender speakers have illuminated that indexing gender is a process of bricolage, where multiple variables collaborate, and only one needs to index gender in a particular way for the speaker's overall semiotic construction to carry that gendered meaning. Here, I investigate cross-modal bricolage, by exploring how visual gender presentation and three different linguistic variables come together to construct contrasting feminine styles among San Francisco drag queens. Linguistic patterns and aesthetic choices illuminate that bricolage involves a semiotic division of labor, in which only some signs (or modalities) need to index gender to give the overall style that gendered meaning. Concurrently, other signs can contribute qualia to a style's overall qualic cloud, that distinguish the style from others in the semiotic landscape. This exploration illuminates the role of the body in conditioning the indexical potential of linguistic signs, destabilizes monolithic essentializations of trans linguistic practice, and acknowledges the varied ways that gender non-normative identity can manifest across communities.

Developmental change, bricolage, and how a lot of things develop: Mechanisms and changes in attachment across the lifespan.

Under the leadership of its founding editor, Dante Cicchetti, Development and Psychopathology has been recognized for decades as the foremost journal integrating developmental theory and clinical research programs. Contributors have often highlighted the implications of attachment theory and research for understanding developmental processes and pathways, and as a testing ground for intervention strategies. In this paper we reflect on the strengths and limitations of the traditional developmental perspective. We suggest that behavioral, cognitive, and emotional development are better understood as a process of bricolage (construction within constraints). This perspective is illustrated in an analysis of change mechanisms, and behavioral and representational changes, in attachment development from pre-locomotor infancy to later adulthood. Special emphasis is placed on ordinary learning and cognitive processes, rather than those specific to attachment, and on the roles that socialization pressures and changing circumstances play in shaping the course of attachment development.

Towards a livelihood-interdependence approach to framing adaptation in research and practice: evidence from farmers’ and herders’ relations in Northern Ghana

ABSTRACT Changing farmer–herder relations (FHR) are central to the social dynamics of climate change adaptation in African drylands, involving conflict and cooperation. While substantial literature has built a case for increased conflict of various kinds in West African drylands due to climate change stressors, this literature does not yet fully reflect the growing importance of more cooperative and interdependent elements of FHR. This study addresses this research gap through a case study of Gushiegu and Karaga Districts in Northern Ghana. Our analysis found growing cooperation between farmers and herders driven by livelihood diversification, sociocultural conditions such as increasing intermarriage, religious affiliation and the emergence of hybrid conflict resolution mechanisms that reflect a process of institutional bricolage. This deepening interdependence manifests in multiple ways, including knowledge exchange, management of common property resources and the strengthening of “bridging” forms of social capital. Our findings suggest a need to reframe adaptation in research, policy and practice to emphasize these beneficial forms of interdependence in FHR.

Entrepreneurs’ network bricolage: Reconfiguring social ties for resource creation

The entrepreneurship literature demonstrates the positive impact of network bricolage on resource-seeking. We extend this work by examining why and how entrepreneurs reconfigure ties within the social architecture of their networks. Building on the network bricolage literature and an in-depth analysis of 55 dyadic relationships embedded in four networks, we provide evidence of network bricolage behavior indicating that entrepreneur bricoleurs are, in fact, resource-creators as well as resource-seekers. Our data cover a series of preliminary and in-depth interviews, member checks, site visits, direct observations, and archival sources. We find support for our theoretical arguments that more resources and re-deployment opportunities for developing new products, new markets, and operation efficiencies emerge during bricolage processes when bricoleurs use their networks in ways that differ from their originally intended utility. While the strength of network ties is important in its own right, our findings further suggest that heterogeneity of relationship type is a key factor in pursuing network bricolage. A mix of relationship roles provides opportunities to repurpose network resources to achieve new valued outcomes.

Independent Celebrant-Led Wedding Ceremonies: Translating, Tweaking, and Innovating Traditions

This article explores ceremonial design of independent celebrant-led wedding ceremonies in England and Wales. It draws on a qualitative study which involved focus groups with celebrants and interviews with individuals who have had an independent celebrant-led wedding ceremony. Six factors are described which influenced how couples translated and tweaked traditions or innovated ceremonial elements: faith, heritage, values, kin, informality, and temporality. In line with a bricolage process, it is suggested that the keeping of and minor adaption of traditions through the personalisation offered by independent celebrant-led wedding ceremonies may support inclusion of relationship practices such as interfaith couplings and blended families. Examples of kinship display-work and self-display-work were found throughout participant accounts of their wedding ceremonies. It is proposed that both may act as an important means by which the needs of individuals for whom a religious or belief framework is not prioritised over other contexts of identification can be met in a wedding ceremony. Further research is needed to explore the transferability of these findings to larger samples, as well as specific sub-populations.

When constellations align: What early childhood pre‐service teachers need from online learning to become confident and competent teachers of the arts

AbstractPre‐service teachers need to experience authentic arts activities to confidently impart the quality arts engagement that young learners deserve. Most importantly, these experiences should contribute to shaping emerging teacher identities. We sought to understand the student experience of online early childhood pre‐service in their arts courses, and what they need to become competent and confident teachers of the arts. Using data from 51 responses to a 24‐question qualitative survey distributed across three Australian universities, we engaged in the methodological process of qualitative bricolage to present a story constellation offering important insights for online teacher‐educators in the arts.

Mixed-sex civil partnerships: developing a morality of love

Civil partnerships were extended to mixed-sex couples in England and Wales at the end of 2019, shortly followed by Northern Ireland (2020) and Scotland (2021). Since then, thousands of mixed-sex couples have entered a civil partnership. While civil partnerships were favoured by politicians as an alternative to legal rights for cohabitants, we know little about why mixed-sex couples would choose a civil partnership. In 2020–21 we interviewed individuals and couples who had entered or were planning a mixed-sex civil partnership (MSCP) to explore this further. We find that MSCPs are constructed in opposition to the ‘traditional’ image of marriage/weddings and yet symbolic elements including dress, form and structure are necessarily relied on in constructing something new, via a process of bricolage. Moreover, through civil partnership motivation talk, mixed-sex couples are constructing an individual morality that is centred on resisting cultural norms, advocating equality and justice, and pragmatic love.

Together Strong or Falling Apart? Coping with COVID-19 in Smallholder Irrigated Agriculture

Coping, surviving and living with different kinds of crisis is a recurrent challenge to those governing groundwater as a common resource. In this paper, we mobilise ideas about the functioning of the state and of processes of bricolage to explain the functioning of institutions governing groundwater during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on empirical material from one irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe we argue that such institutions show signs both of transformation and degeneration over the course of the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis shows the emergence of temporary and innovative ways of collectively organising around groundwater which ensure improved access to water during the pandemic. Such new ways of doing things draw on different sources of authority and legitimacy in shaping governance arrangements. However, as the pandemic situation becomes the ‘new normal’, collective arrangements degenerate into a pre-Covid-19 state, or worse, further restricting access and representation for some people.

Preparing for medical school selection: Exploring the complexity of disadvantage through applicant narratives.

Despite a growing drive to improve diversity in medical schools, those from state schools and less-advantaged sociodemographic backgrounds remain underrepresented. We explore applicants' approaches to preparing for medical school selection, considering the complexity of sociodemographic disadvantage in this highly competitive process. Narrative interviews were undertaken with applicants to a United Kingdom medical school, exploring experiences of preparation for selection (n = 23). Participants were purposively sampled based on involvement in widening participation schemes, school background, gender, and ethnicity. Transcribed data were analyzed using Labov and Waletzky's analytic framework. Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus provided a lens to constraints faced and variable experiences. This informed a consideration of the ways applicants approached and navigated their preparation, in the face of various constraints. Constraints to resources and support were often apparent for those from state nonselective (SNS) schools. These applicants and those beginning their preparation later (12-18 months before application) appeared particularly vulnerable to myths and misunderstandings about the application process and appeared less confident and less discerning in their navigation of preparation. Some of the applicants, particularly those from independent and state selective schools, appeared confident and competent in navigating the complexities of the application process, while others (often from SNS schools) were more frequently lost or stressed by the process. Those who lack particular preparatory tools or resources (materially, culturally, or perceptually) must "make do" as they prepare for medical school selection, In doing so, they may risk a haphazard, ill-informed or ill-equipped approach. Constraints to opportunities, more typically experienced by those from SNS schools, appeared to motivate the process of bricolage for a number of the applicants. Perversely, medical schools have introduced nonacademic requirements to level the playing field of disadvantage, yet applicants in this group appear to experience challenges as they prepare for selection.

‘Our humanism cannot be captured in the bylaws’: How moral ecological rationalities and care shape a smallholder irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe

In this article, we bring concepts of institutional bricolage, moral ecological rationalities and care into engagement, to explain the everyday management of an irrigation scheme in Zimbabwe. In doing this we: (a) emphasise the constant processes of bricolage through which irrigators adapt to changing circumstances and dynamically enact irrigation management; (b) illustrate some of the key features of the contemporary, hybridised moral-ecological rationalities that shape these processes of bricolage; (c) show how motivations to care (for people, the environment and infrastructure) as well as to control shape the bricolaged management arrangements. Through this approach, we aim to contribute to expanding ways of thinking about rationalities, including those that express the aspiration to live well together with human and non-human others, including water and infrastructure. The focus on moral-ecological rationalities is central to our contribution to critical water studies. This sheds light on actual practices of governing water and relationships between society-water/people and the environment. In so doing it helps us to understand the possibilities of caring for natural resources.

Knowledge Brokering Repertoires: Academic Practices at Science-Policy Interfaces as an Epistemological Bricolage

With the rise of research impact as a ‘third’ space (next to research and teaching) within the universities in the United Kingdom and beyond, academics are increasingly expected to not only produce research but also engage in brokering knowledge beyond academia. And yet little is known about the ways in which academics shape their practices in order to respond to these new forms of institutionalised expectations and make sense of knowledge brokering as a form of academic practice. Drawing on 51 qualitative interviews with researchers and research users involved in two large knowledge brokering initiatives in the UK, this study identifies four repertoires of co-production practices: (i) Challenge to the existing policy framework, (ii) Deliberation between diverse stakeholders, (iii) Evidence intervention producing of actionable knowledge, and (iv) Advocacy for specific evidence-based options. By exploring knowledge brokering as navigation of different knowledge production regimes – traditionally academic and policy-oriented – the paper contributes to the existing debates by providing insights into the nature of navigating science-policy interactions as a process of epistemological bricolage, requiring an assemblage of different meanings, values and practices into new repertoires of practice. Importantly, the choice of a repertoire is not limited to the individual choice of a researcher but rather, it is shaped by the broader institutional context of higher education, risking instrumental bias in which practices oriented towards practical solutions are incentivised over critical or participatory forms of engagement.

Piracy as counter-hegemony

Despite several attempts by the Antipiracy Foundation in South Africa, piracy and counterfeitingof movies on DVD is still widespread. This paper explores piracy in Hanover Park, a Cape Flatstownship, as an expression of a politics of resistance to racism and racial disadvantage, but morespecifically as a routine social practice deeply embedded within the lived reality of communitymembers. The research questions were guided by a desire to explore qualitatively the processesby which consumers in this low-income neighbourhood practise and understand their purchaseand consumption of pirated goods, particularly films on DVD. The study found that the consumers of Hanover Park engage in a complicated process of bricolage, often recontextualising what they view to communicate new meanings, appropriatingAfrican-American and gang films as a form of political cultural resistance. Because of group andfamilial viewing practices, social networks are solidified and piracy often becomes a form of politicalbricolage against a perception of racial and class marginalisation. We find that both the ‘reworking’of community and expression of resistance unfortunately seem to occur primarily in the arena ofleisure, where the practice of piracy is routinised as an integral part of the lived experiences ofcommunity members. ‘Globality’ is experienced through a preference for Hollywood and Bollywoodblockbusters; and a media-saturated globalised national context meets the unequal purchasingpower and economic constraints of the local context, while resulting in little moral concern over thepractice of piracy, which lends a political dimension to everyday practice.

Literacy and literary learning on BookTube through the lenses of Latina BookTubers

AbstractIn this study, we examine various aspects of BookTubers' literacy practices, regarding the personal and social factors that lead readers to devote themselves to the BookTube community, the elements that BookTubers consider as they create and publish video book reviews and the sort of literary learning this digital literacy practice entails. For this purpose, narrative interviews were conducted with six BookTubers, five of them from Latin America and one from Spain. Their answers offer insights into the motivations and unique types of learning that come together in this literary practice. A qualitative analysis of the interviews shows that affective engagement with books is a singular feature of BookTubers' understanding of reading culture and that literary video reviews are created in a complex bricolage process where resources, skills and knowledge are mobilised and develop, both aspects also being associated with the development of an online social reading identity. In addition, an ecological approach to analysing literacy and literary learning in the BookTuber culture points to the importance of framing video book reviews as a didactic resource with considerable potential to bring new learning practices to in‐school literary education.

Feeling disabled: Vowel quality and assistive hearing devices in embodying affect

AbstractPrevious research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, in this case, speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest that /i/ backing is invoked to signal negative affect. This study also demonstrates how assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants can be considered semiotic resources. For deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, assistive hearing devices enter into a process of bricolage with linguistic and other symbolic resources, generating new potentials for the embodiment of affect. (Affect, iconicity, Taiwan Mandarin, embodied sociolinguistics, deafness)*

Unpacking the Role of Idiosyncrasy in Collective Bricolage

This paper aims to advance the understanding of idiosyncrasy in entrepreneurship theory, defined as the particular way of how entrepreneurs do things. To do this we investigate idiosyncrasy’s role in entrepreneurial collective bricolage process. A multiple-case study of the venturing process of FARC ex-guerrillas in Colombia—a highly idiosyncratic group—uncovers the multiple roles played by idiosyncrasy as a shaper, motivator, inhibitor, enabler, and deterrent of the collective bricolage process. Our conceptual and empirical analysis makes two main contributions. First, we show how idiosyncrasy operates as a powerful determinant for collective entrepreneurship. Second, we identify how idiosyncrasy shapes the process of entrepreneurial bricolage and its outcomes. Our findings offer implications for the promotion of entrepreneurship in highly idiosyncratic groups, as well as policies around the collective entrepreneurship process.

I’m Not Racist, They’re Just Facebook Jokes: How Organizations Deal with Viral Racist Incidents

An organizational dilemma for a modern era: racism and social network sites (SNSs). In this international qualitative study of nine cases, we map the stages of how organizations and the public react to incidents of racism gone viral. In the absence of a platform-based consequences, the public negotiates group reactions to offending statements. While organizations have little control over what their staff do outside of work, online spaces enable a context collapse where the traditional work-non-work boundaries are unclear, and when individuals’ racism are tied to their workplace, organizations are called to hold their offending staff members accountable. When organizations go into a stage of damage control their responses are generally considered weak. Our study contributes to critical diversity studies and racism on social media by showing the boundaries of platformed racism, outlining processes of bricolage carried out by the public to show organizational patterns of discrimination, and expand on processes of how organizations perpetuate systemic racism by only targeting ‘bad apples’.

Radcliffe’s Strongest Woman: The Bricolaged Body in One Progressive Era Women’s College Scrapbook

This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

Entrepreneurial bricolage: crowdfunding for female entrepreneurs during COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThe crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented effects around the world and particularly on vulnerable populations, such as female entrepreneurs in developing countries. They are facing a new normal, characterized by high uncertainty and resource constraints. This paper aims to use the experiential learning theory applied to entrepreneurship to propose the entrepreneurial bricolage approach to study how female entrepreneurs can overcome this type of crisis.Design/methodology/approachWithin the research designs of conceptual papers, the study is situated within the model approach because the authors propose novel relationships between constructs to answer the research questions through the development of theoretical propositions.FindingsThe analysis suggests that the entrepreneurial bricolage process represents a type of strategy that allows these women to adapt to this new normal. Based on this approach, the authors suggest that crowdfunding represents a financial resource at hand for both pre-existing female entrepreneurs and new female entrepreneurs.Practical implicationsThe theoretical implications suggest an alternative conceptual framework of the entrepreneurial bricolage process to analyse the female entrepreneurial activity in developing countries and during crisis’ contexts. The managerial implications suggest that crowdfunding is a financial resource at hand for female entrepreneurs that allow them to perform well, innovate or implement growth strategies and have more chances of surviving and growing during the crisis. Finally, the policy implications are oriented to the promotion of this kind of financial alternative and the generation of trust for users, along with the strengthening of a regulatory framework to attract more investors and entrepreneurs.Originality/valueThis study provides useful information on how the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting female entrepreneurs in developing countries. It also expands on the literature on crowdfunding in terms of its advantages as a non-traditional funding source for women.

Re-conceptualising education policy trajectories in a globalised world: lessons from a multi-level comparison of accountability in France and Quebec

ABSTRACT This article aims to show the value of the concept of policy trajectory to compare, from a long-term perspective, the transformations of education policies in the context of globalisation. After discussing the scope and limitations of the analyses of the concept in the literature – descriptive, sequential, metaphorical and building on the works of Stephen Ball –, we propose, our own conceptualisation. This regards policy trajectory as a double shift in time and space and understood as the result of different processes of path dependency, translation and bricolage. The forms of this trajectory depend on the educational orders at work at different levels of school systems, and not only at the global level. To illustrate this approach, we draw on a study which compared performance-based accountability policies in France and Quebec. Despite some challenges, this approach has the merit of proposing a fruitful theoretical framework for studying and comparing policy implementation.