Participation in Transition(s):Reconceiving Public Engagements in Energy Transitions as Co-Produced, Emergent and Diverse

This paper brings the transitions literature into conversation with constructivist Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspectives on participation for the first time. In doing so we put forward a conception of public and civil society engagement in sustainability transitions as co-produced, relational, and emergent. Through paying close attention to the ways in which the subjects, objects, and procedural formats of public engagement are constructed through the performance of participatory collectives, our approach offers a framework to open up to and symmetrically compare diverse and interconnected forms of participation that make up wider socio-technical systems. We apply this framework in a comparative analysis of four diverse cases of civil society involvement in UK low carbon energy transitions. This highlights similarities and differences in how these distinct participatory collectives are orchestrated, mediated, and subject to exclusions, as well as their effects in producing particular visions of the issue at stake and implicit models of participation and ‘the public’. In conclusion we reflect on the value of this approach for opening up the politics of societal engagement in transitions, building systemic perspectives of interconnected ‘ecologies of participation’, and better accounting for the emergence, inherent uncertainties, and indeterminacies of all forms of participation in transitions

Political geographies of the object

This paper examines the role of objects in the constitution and exercise of state power, drawing on a close reading of the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire, an unconventional crime drama set and shot in Baltimore, Maryland. While political geography increasingly recognizes the prosaic and intimate practices of stateness, we argue that objects themselves are central to the production, organization, and performance of state power. Specifically, we analyze how three prominent objects on The Wire—wiretaps, cameras, and standardized tests—arrange and produce the conditions we understand as ‘stateness’. Drawing on object-oriented philosophy, we offer a methodology of power that suggests it is generalized force relations rather than specifically social relations that police a population—without, of course, ever being able to fully capture it. We conclude by suggesting The Wire itself is an object of force, and explore the implications of an object-oriented approach for understanding the nature of power, and for political geography more broadly

The Ideal and the Real: Southern Plantation Women of the Civil War

Southern plantation women experienced a shift in identity over the course of the Civil War. Through the diaries of Catherine Edmondston and Eliza Fain, historians note the discrepancy between the ideal and real roles women had while the men were off fighting. Unique perspectives and hidden voices in their writings offer valuable insight into the life of plantation women and the hybrid identity they gained despite the Confederate loss

The Nature of the Spectacle

Today crisis appears to be the normal order of things. We seem to be turning in widening gyres of economic failure, species extinction, resource scarcity, war, and climate change. These crises are interconnected ecologically, economically, and politically. Just as importantly, they are connected—and disconnected—in our imaginations. Public imaginations are possibly the most important stage on which crises are played out, for these views determine how the problems are perceived and what solutions are offered. In The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe embarks on multifaceted explorations of how we imagine nature and how nature shapes our imaginations. The book traces spectacular productions of imagined nature across time and space—from African nature tourism to transnational policy events to green consumer appeals in which the push of a virtual button appears to initiate a chain of events resulting in the protection of polar bears in the Arctic or jaguars in the Amazon rainforest. These explorations illuminate the often surprising intersections of consumerism, entertainment, and environmental policy. They show how these intersections figure in a strengthening and problematic policy consensus in which economic growth and ecosystem health are cast as mutually necessitating conditions. They also take seriously the potential of these intersections and how they may facilitate other alignments and imaginings that may become the basis of alternatives to our current socioecological predicaments

How do we know who we are when the dust settles? The experience of organisational identity formation post-merger

Poorly planned and executed merger integrations may result in destroying intrinsic value associated with a highly identified workforce, due to an inability to foster post-merger identification during the integration phase (Riketta, 2005; Dukerich, Goldenm, and Shortell, 2002). This, together with the notion that the way in which employees interpret and enact the merger ultimately shapes and realise the intended merger (Guitte and Vandenbempt, 2013; Balogun and Johnson, 2005; 2004; Balogun, 2006), reinforces the call for leaders to pro-actively consider both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements of a merger integration (Giessner, Ullrich and van Dick, 2011; Mc Donald, Coulthard, and de Lang, 2005). This research set out to understand and explore how a merger integration experience affects the way members of a legacy client services organisation, identify and engage with the new post-merger organisation, in order to enhance the merger integration process. I positioned this study as a longitudinal internal action research project that adopts a three-stage conceptual research process model, which allows for the meditation of theory and practice components, in order to deliver theory-practice linkages (Tenkasi and Hay, 2004) over a 3.5-year period. The project execution phase embraces an interpretative phenomenology approach (Van Manen, 1990), whilst also involving employees in the co-construction of the research by incorporating co-operative inquiry group meetings and collaborative management research practices (Canterino, Shani, Coghlan and Brunelli, 2016). Quantitative data stemming from three annual Employee Engagement Survey responses further augment the qualitative data gathered. The outcome of the first action research cycle, i.e. a conceptual process model that illustrates the cyclical journey employees experienced during the merger, as well as nine phenomenological themes emerging from the qualitative data analysis, which provides a rich description of the essence of the shared experience, informed the collaborative approach in the second action research cycle. The latter resulted in more subtle influencing activities, as the research steered the organisation towards a collaborative organisational development approach, and highlights my own journey as a self-perceived marginalised employee-researcher, towards an empowered peripheral insider-researcher. I contribute to actionable knowledge by proposing two conceptual models aimed at assisting leaders to better plan and execute merger integrations. The first model suggests the need for leaders to view a merger integration as a system of three inter-related cycles, with each cycle representing a specific state of sensemaking, and emotions, associated with the fluid process of identification, and, as such, each requiring specific actions to enhance the merger experience through facilitated identification and engagement. The second constitutes a four-level merger integration model for leaders, suggesting specific leadership attributes behaviours and actions needed to support successful and sustainable merger integrations. Furthermore, the study also supports and builds on the extant literature, in the areas of organisational identity, merger and acquisition and sensemaking

Understanding “Understanding” in Public Understanding of Science

This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published in Public Understanding of Science from 2010–2015 are systematically analyzed to identify instances in which epistemic states are empirically measured. The results indicate that epistemic success terms are inconsistently defined, and that measurement of understanding, in particular, is rarely achieved in public understanding of science studies. We suggest that more diligent attention to measuring understanding, as opposed to mere knowledge, will increase efficacy of scientific outreach and communication efforts

Missing the point of the practice-based view

In this article, we address Jarzabkowski et al.’s strategy-as-practice criticism of Bromiley and Rau’s practice-based view as ignoring the “who” and “how” of practice implementation. Bromiley and Rau explicitly note that any statistical model under the practice-based view should consider mediating and moderating variables that depend on the specific practice and context but that the article would not attempt to identify such variables. Strategy-as-practice’s focus on the “who” and “how” of a practice are two of many such potential mediating or moderating variables. More fundamentally, strategy-as-practice scholars’ discomfort with the practice-based view may arise both from their different definitions of practice and their different approaches to strategy research. Without diminishing the strategy-as-practice’s contribution to strategy research, we argue for the additional value in the practice-based view’s call for systematic, large-scale, quantitative studies that establish the performance impact of specific practices across populations of organizations

Team and Project Work in Engineering Practices

In this article, we investigate teamwork amongst professionals in engineering consultancy companies in order to discern how teamwork affects the collaboration and work practices of the professionals. The article investigates how professional engineering practices are enacted in two engineering consultancy companies in Denmark where teamwork has been or is an ideal for organizing work. Through a practice-based lens, the article sets out to investigate, firstly, how discourses about team and project work affect engineering work practices; secondly, how technologymediated management is reconciled in teamwork practices; and thirdly, how team and project work affect engineering professionalism and collaborative work practices. A practice theoretical framework informs the analysis. Teamwork is investigated as a phenomenon enacted through the sayings, doings and relatings of practitioners in landscapes of practices and the interconnectedness of the practices is traced through the setup of specific ecologies in the sites