Liminal Surveillance. An ethnographic control room study during a local event

This article is about the targeted, temporarily intensified use of an already existing, permanently installed surveillance system for the safety and security management during a local event at the campus of the University of Illinois, USA. In particular it is the CCTV system that is analyzed after an ethnographic control room study. It became clear that the law enforcement intensified the use of the CCTV system during the festival. The temporal, intensified use of a surveillance system is in this article labeled as 'liminal surveillance'. Not only could the police intensify the surveillance as a result of the liminal use of the CCTV system, but they also could test the system in extreme circumstances, advocate its use, and raise attention for safety and security issues during the festival. In this article both the intended and unintended consequences of liminal surveillance are discussed

Negotiating the 'trading zone'. Creating a shared information infrastructure in the Dutch public safety sector

Our main concern in this article is whether nation-wide information technology (IT) infrastructures or systems in emergency response and disaster management are the solution to the communication problems the safety sector suffers from. It has been argued that implementing nation-wide IT systems will help to create shared cognition and situational awareness among relief workers. We put this claim to the test by presenting a case study on the introduction of ‘netcentric work’, an IT system-based platform aiming at the creation of situational awareness for professionals in the safety sector in the Netherlands. The outcome of our research is that the negotiation with relevant stakeholders by the Dutch government has lead to the emergence of several fragmented IT systems. It becomes clear that a top-down implementation strategy for a single nation-wide information system will fail because of the fragmentation of the Dutch safety sector it is supposed to be a solution to. As the US safety sector is at least as fragmented as its Dutch counterpart, this may serve as a caveat for the introduction of similar IT systems in the US

'We are growing Belize': modernisation and organisational change in the Mennonite settlement of Spanish Lookout, Belize

This article addresses the entrepreneurial and organisational activities of a specific Mennonite group in Belize called the Kleine Gemeinde community of Spanish Lookout. Building upon Christian beliefs, agricultural skills and a strong working ethos, this group was able to build up a stable, local economic network. The authors suggest that their collective resistance against other social groups and their day-to-day strictness lead to processes of 'selective modernity'. As we make clear in this chapter, the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites identity contains elements of ethnicity and partial exclusion based upon religious motives. The relative successful economic progression of this group is a sign of both their working ethos inspired by their religious background, and their will to progress and expand. Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd

Bringing the state back in to humanitarian crises response:Disaster governance and challenging collaborations in the 2015 Malawi flood response

Malawi is a disaster-prone country with a long history of flooding. Yet disaster response policies have been largely neglected and disaster risk reduction efforts are mostly donor-led. The 2015 floods showed that Malawi's local and national state institutions struggled to respond adequately. To support the Malawi government, the United Nations implemented its cluster system to coordinate the collaborations between the state, humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations in the disaster response. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with relief intervention participants, we argue that a focus on the localization of aid without explicit attention to the affected state's institutions is problematic in contexts characterized by limited state capacity and overall donor dependency

The structuration of organizational learning

Although it is currently common to speak of organizational learning, this notion is still surrounded by conceptual confusion. It is unclear how notions like learning, knowledge and cognitive activities can be applied to organizations. Some authors have tried to unravel the conceptual and ontological problems by giving an account of the role of individuals in organizational learning. However, this has not yet led to an agreed upon analysis. In this article an attempt is made to develop a social account of organizational learning based upon structuration theory. This results in a comprehensive account of the relationship between individual and organizational learning and an analysis of organizational learning. This analysis needs not to be interpreted as a metaphor nor falls prey to the fallacies of reification and antropomorphization

Shaping Societal Impact: between control and cooperation

In our modern society, the impact of large-scale safety and security incidents can be large and diverse. Yet, this societal impact is makeable and controllable to a limited extent. At best, the effect of concrete response actions is that the direct damage is somewhat reduced and that the recovery is accelerated. Proper crisis communication can make the biggest difference with respect to overall societal impact. We argue that crisis communication must strike a balance between a directive approach of chaos, command and control and a more empathic approach of continuity, coordination and cooperation. On the basis of a concrete case we analyze how crisis communication reflects the incident response approach and how societal impact is affected

The structuration of organizational learning

Although it is currently common to speak of organizational learning, this notion is still surrounded by conceptual confusion. It is unclear how notions like learning, knowledge and cognitive activities can be applied to organizations. Some authors have tried to unravel the conceptual and ontological problems by giving an account of the role of individuals in organizational learning. However, this has not yet led to an agreed upon analysis. In this article we use structuration theory to overcome the dualism of individual and organization in organizational learning. We support, illustrate and elaborate our structurationist perspective by an ethnographic and historical study of an industrial research laboratory. We show how organizational learning evolves from distributed social practices, creatively realized by knowledgeable individuals, and illustrate how these practices are enabled and constrained by existing structures