Process Of Bricolage Research Articles

Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa

ABSTRACTThis article, which forms the introduction to a collection of studies, focuses on processes of state construction and deconstruction in contemporary Africa. Its objective is to better understand how local, national and transnational actors forge and remake the state through processes of negotiation, contestation and bricolage. Following a critique of the predominant state failure literature and its normative and analytical shortcomings, the authors identify four key arguments of the scholarly literature on the state in Africa, which concern the historicity of the state in Africa, the embeddedness of bureaucratic organizations in society, the symbolic and material dimensions of statehood and the importance of legitimacy. A heuristic framework entitled ‘negotiating statehood’ is proposed, referring to the dynamic and partly undetermined processes of state formation and failure by a multitude of social actors who compete over the institutionalization of power relations. The article then operationalizes this framework in three sections that partly conceptualize, partly illustrate who negotiates statehood in contemporary Africa (actors, resources and repertoires); where these negotiation processes occur (negotiation arenas and tables); and what these processes are all about (objects of negotiation). Empirical examples drawn from a variety of political contexts across the African continent illustrate these propositions.

Entrepreneurship in and around institutional voids: A case study from Bangladesh

In many developing countries those living in poverty are unable to participate in markets due to the weakness or complete absence of supportive institutions. This study examines in microcosm such institutional voids and illustrates the activities of an entrepreneurial actor in rural Bangladesh aimed at addressing them. The findings enable us to better understand why institutional voids originate and to unpack institutional processes in a setting characterized by extreme resource constraints and an institutional fabric that is rich but often at odds with market development. We depict the crafting of new institutional arrangements as an ongoing process of bricolage and unveil its political nature as well as its potentially negative consequences.

Bricolage, métissage, hybridity, heterogeneity, diaspora: concepts for thinking science education in the 21st century

The ongoing globalization leads to an increasing scattering of cultural groups into other cultural groups where they the latter continue to be affiliated with one another thereby forming diasporic identities. Diasporic identities emerge from a process of cultural bricolage that leads to cultural metissage and therefore hybridity and heterogeneity. To escape the hegemonies that arise from the ontology of the same—which, as I show, undergirds much of educational thought—I ground the notion of diaspora in the ontology of difference. Difference and heterogeneity are the norm, not something less than sameness and purity. This ontology allows framing bricolage, metissage, hybridity, and heterogeneity as positive concepts for theorizing the experiences of learning science and identity not only as a consequence of cross-national migrations—Mexicans in the US, Asians and Europeans in Canada, Africans in Europe—but also the experience of native speakers who, in science classrooms, find themselves (temporarily) at home away from home. My exemplary analyses show how the very fact of cultural and linguistic differences within themselves gives rise to the possibility of symbolic violence in science classrooms even to those whose ethos is or is closest to the one at the heart of science.

A Bottom-Up Perspective on Innovations

The article focuses on a kind of innovation trajectory, based on the reemployment of assets that belong to the legacy of the past. Thus, it argues for the importance of utilizing know-how and social capital accumulated over the years in organizations' efforts to launch a new course. The concept of bricolage appears especially clarifying in throwing light on innovations emerging through bottom-up processes, utilizing what is at hand or embedded locally. However important breakthrough and pioneering entrepreneurs might be, what really matters in the long run is more incremental processes of problem solving. In elaborating this view on innovation, the article addresses organizational devolution and partnership. According to the article, top-down steering or strategic determination do not suffice to account for the processes underlying the application of these tools. Innovative processes of bricolage based on a bottom-up mobilization appear pivotal for releasing creativity.

Epistemological Bricolage: How Practitioners Make Sense of Learning

How do policy makers come to know what they know? How do they think of learning? And how does that inform what they do? In this qualitative, empirical study, public health officials variously display scientific, institutional, and more socially situated epistemological strategies or rationalities. In turn, the study reveals that a key element of what they do is “piecing together,” assembling and literally making sense of different bits of information and experience, often creating something new from what they have acquired secondhand. It shows how much policy making is knowledge work, and how learning might be thought of as a process of epistemological bricolage.

The Process of Bricolage Between Mythic Societies and Global Modernity: Conversion to the Assembly of God Faith in Burkina Faso

English The case of conversions in Assembly of God churches in Burkina Faso is typical of the identity tinkering which is now going on in West African societies. Through individual conversion experiences, this particular variant of Christianity ends up playing the role of the group that makes one leave one's original group. Conversion thus constitutes a break which allows one to dare to transgress normal boundaries. In the context of a modernity beset by unaccustomed fears and doubts, religious allegiances often prove to be complex acts of identity bricolage,1 which even involve a second level of construction, that of an identity which is specifically constructed to defend me against another who is persecuting me. French Les conversions aux Assemblées de Dieu du Burkina Faso sont emblématiques du bricolage identitaire en train de se faire dans les sociétés d'Afrique de l'Ouest. A travers ces expériences de conversion individuelle, cette forme particuliè re de christianisme joue le rôle de groupe de la sortie du groupe coutumier. La conversion constitue ainsi une rupture permettant d'oser transgresser. En contexte de modernité insécurisée, les appartenances religieuses s'avèrent dès lors des bricolages complexes, révélant en creux un second niveau de bricolage, celui d'une identité fac¸ onnée pour se préserver d'une autre perc¸ ue comme persécutrice.