Emotional citizenry: everyday geographies of befriending, belonging and intercultural encounter

This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as exceeding a fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere, rather as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions, produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super-diversity

Remote, Mobile, and Blue-Collar: ICT-Enabled Job Crafting to Elevate Occupational Well-Being

Blue-collar remote and mobile workers (BC-RMWs) such as repair/installation engineers, delivery drivers, and construction workers, constitute a significant share of the workforce. They work away from a home or office work base at customer and remote work sites and are highly dependent on ICT for completing their work tasks. Low occupational well-being is a key concern regarding BC-RMWs. The objective of this research is to understand how BC-RMWs can use information and communication technology (ICT) to elevate their occupational well-being. Drawing from the job demands-job resources theoretical framework in occupational psychology, we theorize that the distinctive work characteristics faced by BC-RMWs can be viewed in the conceptual framing of job demands. We conceptualize BC-RMWs’ practices of ICT use as possible ways to gather resources to tackle these demands. We conducted a study of 28 BC-RMWs employed in two private sector firms (telecom service provision and construction industries) in the UK across 14 remote work sites. Based on our findings, we developed the concept of ICT-enabled job crafting and theorized how ICT-enabled job crafting by BC-RMWs can help them increase their job resources to tackle their job demands and consequently increase their occupational well-being. The empirical context of the paper, i.e., the study of BC-RMWs, provides further novelty because these kinds of workers and their distinctive and interesting work conditions have not received much attention in the literature

To pave or not to pave: A social landscape analysis of land use decision-making in the Lamprey River watershed

Seacoast New Hampshire\u27s population has quadrupled in four decades resulting in sprawl and increased impervious surfaces which threaten the ecological health of Great Bay. Calls for watershed-based strategies addressing growth and land use planning abound. This study addresses these challenges by examining the question of whether there is a potential for watershed base land use decision-making. Using constructivist grounded theory, this study explores the social landscape of land use decision-making in a case study of the towns of the Lamprey River watershed. The qualitative methods include semi-structured interviews with GIS based maps and content analysis in NVivo software. Results include a proposed theoretical framework which characterizes the social landscape of land use decision-making concerning community, conflict and temporo-spatial scaling. Challenges and opportunities are also identified in moving towards watershed based land use decision-making. Conclusions represent a mix of optimistic and pessimistic themes regarding current land use decision-making and suggested recommendations necessary to move towards watershed-scaled land use planning

Managing an Epidemic: Zika Interventions and Community Responses in Belize

Implementing effective health interventions in recent epidemics has been difficult due to the potentially global nature of their spread and sociocultural dynamics, raising questions concerning how to develop culturally-appropriate preventive measures, and how these health threats are understood locally. In Belize, health policy makers have only been marginally effective in managing infections and mosquito vectors, and Zika has been declared endemic in multiple regions of the country, particularly on the island of Caye Caulker. With one locally confirmed case of microcephaly on this small island already, this disease has the potential to severely impact the health and wellness of pregnant women and future generations. Based on ethnographic and Geographic Information Systems research conducted primarily in 2017, I examine how perspectives of Zika-related health risk are shaped, and how state interventions to manage Zika are understood. I argue that despite its declared endemic status, Zika is not perceived as a true health concern for community members due to numerous neoliberal structural challenges. Moreover, the state\u27s restrictive form of reproductive governance which limits family planning services is forcing individuals to weigh conflicting conceptions of health consequences. This also contributes to an ambiguous healthcare environment for health practitioners, giving them an unclear picture of the scope of Zika as a public health concern and limiting their ability to treat patients. This thesis also considers how critical medical anthropology and feminist analytical approaches are useful in exploring these questions and contributing to understandings of the health impacts of Zika

Organizational Intelligence in Digital Innovation: Evidence from Georgia State University

The fourth industrial revolution challenges organizations to cope with dynamic business landscapes as they seek to improve their competitive position through rapid and pervasive digitalization of products, services, processes, and business models. As organizations sense and respond to new opportunities and threats, digital innovations are not only meeting new requirements, unarticulated needs, and market demands, they also lead to disruptive transformation of sociotechnical structures. Despite the practical relevance and theoretical significance of digital innovations, we still have limited knowledge on how digital innovation initiatives are rationalized, realized, and managed to improve organizational performance. Drawing on a longitudinal study of digital innovations to improve student success at Georgia State University, we develop a theory of organizational intelligence to help understand how organizations’ digital innovation initiatives are organized and managed to improve their performance over time in the broader context of organizational transformation. We posit that organizational intelligence enables an organization to gather, process, and manipulate information and to communicate, share, and make sense of the knowledge it creates, so it can increase its adaptive potential in the dynamic environment in which it operates. Moreover, we elaborate how organizational intelligence is constituted as human and material agency come together in analytical and relational intelligence to help organizations effectively manage digital innovations, and how organizational intelligence both shapes and is shaped by an organization’s digital innovation initiatives. Hence, while current research on organizational intelligence predominantly emphasizes analytic capabilities, this research puts equal emphasis on relational capabilities. Similarly, while current research on organizational intelligence focuses only on human agency, this research focuses equally on material agency. Our proposed theory of organizational intelligence responds to recent calls to position IS theories along the sociotechnical axis of cohesion and has pronounced implications for both theory and practice

Sidestepping secularism: performance and imagination in Buddhist temple-scapes in contemporary China

Why, in the second decade of the 21st century, do Chinese temple-goers visit Buddhist temples even if they are religiously unaffiliated, folk religionists, or even self-proclaimed secularists? How can we develop new conceptual tools to better understand religious involvement in contemporary China? The thesis investigates the significances of temple-based activities under late socialist state secularism, which defines religion in a specific way. It suggests that temple participation allows diverse Chinese citizens to flexibly negotiate modernity, sidestep institutional constraints, and introduce ritual-religious momentums to their temple-going lives in a mainstream society. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork, the study identifies and documents three stylistic forms of temple participation that are widely accessible and require no prior religious commitments: making wish-vows, drawing efficacious lots, and providing residential temple services. It refines a method of ritual analysis for studying how these non-institutional activities affect temple-goers’ self-understandings and their worldly stances. Theoretically, the dissertation discusses the social conditions for creative actions and the relationship between religious participation and state secularism. It shows that “temples” as spatial entities can be a place for many-sided meaningful activities and an incubator for complex visions of life, outside the conventional typecast of sacred spaces based on institutional religious differences. In late socialist China, Buddhist temples exist as semi-public sites because of an inclusive Mahayana Buddhist ideal of bodhisattva practices and, paradoxically, because of a state secularist policy that endorses “Religious Activities Venues” as spatial and even residential units. Overall, the dissertation treats Chinese temple-goers as our interlocutors sharing the global modernist predicament of state secularism. We theorize a sidestepping, non-confrontational mode of religious activism, move beyond a dichotomous view of religiosity and secularity, and consider the existing creative transformative processes of a hegemonic linear-developmental view of history. Temples as places of self-transformation are historically constituted sites within the sovereign state spaces. When Chinese temple-goers reconfigure their historical selves by actively visiting temple spaces, they also open the possibility of different futures for the late socialist regime. This brings us to an anthropology of religion effectively considering the making of humanity in contemporary China in a shared modern world

Organization development as instrument to build and maintain organizational effectiveness in remote mode: a qualitative inductive research

The public-health driven COVID-19 lockdowns unpredictably forced organization development (OD) consultants to work from home in no time. As original interventions, driven by behavioral and social science knowledge were predominantly designed for face-to-face encounters, adaptation to virtual OD services was inevitable. The purpose of this study was to investigate how organization development consultants adjusted their labor activity from a predominantly face-to-face to a solely technology-mediated setting. We adopted a bottom-up, research approach to inductive concept development, following Gioia and colleagues’ methodology (2013) to study the adaptation process of 10 both external and internal OD consultants. The emergent framework suggests that adjusting to a virtual setting was a complex process that occurs in more or less sequential stages: (1) we go into action, (2) acknowledging limits, (3) an ongoing need and evolvement of a tech & tool literacy, and finally (4) the acceptance of change, resulting in an evolved state of the occupational field. The findings indicate a parallel to Lewin’s famous Three-Phase Model of Change (1951). We suggest that our emergent framework can be well applied by other occupational fields (e.g., education sector, therapy, consultancies) in a transition process to a virtual setting. To facilitate the transition in other occupational fields we outline a roadmap as guidance.Os confinamentos do COVID-19, impulsionados pela saúde pública, forçaram imprevisivelmente os consultores de desenvolvimento de organização (DO) a trabalharem a partir de casa em pouco tempo. Como as intervenções originais, impulsionadas por conhecimentos comportamentais e de ciências sociais foram predominantemente concebidas para encontros presenciais, a adaptação a serviços virtuais de DO era inevitável. O objetivo deste estudo era investigar como os consultores de desenvolvimento organizacional ajustaram a sua atividade laboral de um ambiente predominantemente presencial para um ambiente exclusivamente mediado pela tecnologia. Adoptámos uma abordagem "bottom-up", de investigação para o desenvolvimento de conceitos indutivos, seguindo a metodologia de Gioia e colegas (2013) para estudar o processo de adaptação de 10 consultores externos e internos de DO. O quadro emergente sugere que a adaptação a um cenário virtual foi um processo complexo que ocorreu em fases mais ou menos sequenciais: (1) entramos em acção, (2) reconhecimento de limites, (3) uma necessidade contínua e evolução de uma alfabetização tecnológica e de ferramentas, e finalmente (4) a aceitação da mudança, resultando num estado evoluído do campo ocupacional. Os resultados indicam um paralelo com o famoso modelo de mudança de três estágios de Lewin (1951). Sugerimos que o nosso quadro emergente seja aplicado por outros campos profissionais (por exemplo, sector da educação, terapia, consultorias) num processo de transição para um cenário virtual. Para facilitar a transição noutros campos profissionais, delineamos um roteiro como orientação

Chat and instant messaging : the risks of secondary orality

The synchronous nature of chat and instant messaging (IM) make them unique among computer-enabled communications technologies in that their real-time exchange of data allows for rich media experiences, even though users can only use text symbols to trade messages. Chat and IM are also important in that they enable secondary orality, or the merger of the most beneficial aspects of orally-based cultures with the well-documented benefits of print and text. Where print in the modem day has fostered contemplative behavior and inward thought among human beings, chat and IM breathe vitality into print and, in a sense, allow print to be spoken. Chat and IM have provided well-documented benefits for business, academia and everyday human socialization. However, when the tools are used beyond these narrow contexts they not only lose their effectiveness; they also pose credible threats to society. Because chat and IM provide anonymity to their participants, the virtual communities they support are typically loosely governed, driven by stereotype, and replete with social deviance. Further, the more attractive online environments become, the less time and energy people will invest in the physical world, thereby threatening that the habitats of humans will ultimately wither and decay. Finally, as humans become less able to extricate themselves from their computer-enabled habitats, they will increasingly rely on the computer as a social prosthetic--if not evolve to the point where human beings and computers become indistinguishable

"It's hard being a young parent, it's even harder being a young Māori parent" : young Māori parents' experiences of raising a family : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Public Health at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Young Māori parents play a significant part in growing the indigenous population of Aotearoa New Zealand and helping to raise the country’s future. Despite Māori only being about 15 percent of New Zealand’s total population, about half of all young parents in this country are Māori. While parents at any age may require support, being young and Māori while also needing support may present additional challenges. The disproportionate representation of young parents and of Māori in socioeconomic disadvantage has dual implications. These disparities fuel a deficit understanding of early parenting, indigeneity, and requiring assistance. The ongoing impacts of colonisation and racism further exacerbate these disparities and marginalise Māori. This research examines the historical, cultural, political and social contexts that influence early parenting for Māori. Key principles of Māori research, oral traditions and narrative inquiry were employed to explore the distinct experiences of young Māori parents. Māori principles were implemented throughout all of the research process; in the design, methodology and organisation of the research. A Māori narrative approach was developed to gather, present and analyse the perspectives of 19 young Māori parents from the Manawatū, New Zealand about support during pregnancy, birth and parenting. Their stories were examined using a Māori analytical framework. This approach identified interrelated layers of kōrero (story) that revealed how young Māori parents construct their own changing identity and contextualise their stories within significant relationships, a Māori worldview, and society. A cross-examination of their kōrero revealed that their experiences were also shaped by what it means to be a young person, a young parent, Māori and from disadvantage. This Māori narrative approach revealed a more complex and nuanced understanding of the interrelatedness and influence of societal expectations, indigeneity, Māori culture and whānau, on personal experience. The findings of the research demonstrate that support for young Māori parents in Aotearoa New Zealand is constrained by prevailing and intersecting ideas about being young, early childbearing, Māori identity and receiving welfare. For example, young Māori women are framed as more likely to become pregnant at a young age, have their education disrupted, require welfare assistance, and pass on socioeconomic disadvantage to their children. This deficit perception of their parenting potential is perpetuated in many different ways in society. This stigma and stereotyping has real consequences for the way young Māori parents construe their experience of parenting and how they are supported. This thesis discusses the consequences of deficit-based research, government rationalities for welfare provision, and the potential role of whānau. The kōrero from the young Māori parents resisted the assumptions that having a child at a young age and being Māori contribute to negative outcomes. As Māori they could draw on counter narratives about early parenting that may not be available to non-Māori. Māori understandings of reproduction, raising children and whānau celebrate a new baby as an extension of whakapapa (genealogy) and do not necessarily frame the age of the parents as an issue. However, young Māori parents also felt that taking up a Māori identity meant that their parenting was subject to increased scrutiny and there was added pressure to prove themselves as competent parents. Young Māori parents continuously navigate the tension between Māori beliefs and societal expectations in their own accounts of raising children. Whilst dominant narratives constrain whether they are treated as a suitable parent, Te Ao Māori beliefs help them to feel valued in their role as whakapapa nurturers and contributing whānau members. Support for young Māori parents would be helped by the authentic promotion of Māori knowledge, practices, language, identity and experiences associated with pregnancy, birth and parenting guaranteed in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Privileging the lived experiences of young Māori parents, such as those included in this thesis helps to critically deconstruct the negative assumptions about young parents and Māori, particularly those who are overrepresented in requiring assistance. The findings of this research are relevant to all people responsible for the outcomes of young Māori parents and will help to inform better research, policy and practice. Government, community, health and supporting professionals, iwi, and whānau all have important roles in supporting young Māori parents to develop positive identities, to reach full potential and to raise their children