Counter-rhetoric and sources of enduring conflict in contested organizational fields: A case study of mental health professionals

As a means by which actors justify beliefs and practices, rhetoric has a key institutional role. In contested settings, where multiple groups and the logics associated with them interact, research has highlighted rhetorical strategies that exploit rival systems. The account we develop expands on these ideas and suggests they embrace forms of counter-rhetoric, or arguments that delegitimize a rival’s logic and refine and reframe others’ values. We use these categories to explore the case of a local mental health service, an area of health policy known for problematic diagnosis and treatment. Here groups of medical and social-care providers were required to work together in a system of intensive inter-professional relations and clashing logics. Our analysis focuses on this interaction, exploring the language-based nature of logics and sources of conflict between logics that are asserted in counter-rhetorical forms

Dynamics of convectively driven banded jets in the laboratory

The banded organization of clouds and zonal winds in the atmospheres of the outer planets has long fascinated observers. Several recent studies in the theory and idealized modeling of geostrophic turbulence have suggested possible explanations for the emergence of such organized patterns, typically involving highly anisotropic exchanges of kinetic energy and vorticity within the dissipationless inertial ranges of turbulent flows dominated (at least at large scales) by ensembles of propagating Rossby waves. The results from an attempt to reproduce such conditions in the laboratory are presented here. Achievement of a distinct inertial range turns out to require an experiment on the largest feasible scale. Deep, rotating convection on small horizontal scales was induced by gently and continuously spraying dense, salty water onto the free surface of the 13-m-diameter cylindrical tank on the Coriolis platform in Grenoble, France. A “planetary vorticity gradient” or “β effect” was obtained by use of a conically sloping bottom and the whole tank rotated at angular speeds up to 0.15 rad s−1. Over a period of several hours, a highly barotropic, zonally banded large-scale flow pattern was seen to emerge with up to 5–6 narrow, alternating, zonally aligned jets across the tank, indicating the development of an anisotropic field of geostrophic turbulence. Using particle image velocimetry (PIV) techniques, zonal jets are shown to have arisen from nonlinear interactions between barotropic eddies on a scale comparable to either a Rhines or “frictional” wavelength, which scales roughly as (β/Urms)−1/2. This resulted in an anisotropic kinetic energy spectrum with a significantly steeper slope with wavenumber k for the zonal flow than for the nonzonal eddies, which largely follows the classical Kolmogorov k−5/3 inertial range. Potential vorticity fields show evidence of Rossby wave breaking and the presence of a “hyperstaircase” with radius, indicating instantaneous flows that are supercritical with respect to the Rayleigh–Kuo instability criterion and in a state of “barotropic adjustment.” The implications of these results are discussed in light of zonal jets observed in planetary atmospheres and, most recently, in the terrestrial oceans

The Sociology of a Market Analysis Tool: How Industry Analysts Sort Vendors and Organize Markets

The information technology (IT) marketplace appears to be shaped by new kinds of specialist industry analysts that link technology supply and use through offering a commodified form of knowledge and advice. We focus on the work of one such organisation, the Gartner Group, and with how it produces a market analysis tool called the ‘Magic Quadrant’. Widely circulated amongst the IT community, the device compares and sorts vendors according to a number of more or less intangible properties (such as vendor ‘competence’ and ‘vision’). Given that potential adopters of IT systems are drawn to assess the reputation and likely behaviour of vendors, these tools play an important role in mediating choice during procurement. Our interest is in understanding how such objects are constructed as well as how they wield influence. We draw on the recent ‘performativity’ debate in Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Finance to show how Magic Quadrants are not simply describing but reshaping aspects of the IT arena. Importantly, in sketching this sociology of a market analysis tool, we also attend to the contested nature of the Magic Quadrant. Whilst Gartner attempt to establish this device as an ‘impartial’ and ‘legitimate’ arbiter of vendor performance, it is often viewed sceptically on the grounds that industry analysts are not always independent of the vendors they are assessing. Paradoxically these devices remain influential despite these sceptical assessments

Technology choice and its performance: Towards a sociology of software package procurement

Technology Acquisition is an important but neglected issue within the social science analysis of technology. The limited number of studies undertaken reproduce a schism between rationalist (e.g., economic) forms of analysis, where the assumption is that choice is the outcome of formal assessment, and cultural sociological approaches which see choice as driven by the micro-politics of the organisational setting, interests, prevalent rhetorics, fads, etc. While sympathetic to the latter critical view, we are dissatisfied with the relativist portrayal of technology selection: that decisions, beset with uncertainties and tensions, are divorced from formal decision making criteria. Influenced by Michel Callon’s writing on the ‘performativity’ of economic concepts and tools, we argue that formal assessment has a stronger relationship to technology decisions than suggested by cultural sociologists. We focus on a procurement which is characterised by high levels of organisational tension and where there is deep uncertainty about each of the solutions on offer. We show how the procurement team are able to arrive at a decision through laboriously constructing a ‘comparison’. That is, they attempt to drag the choice from the informal domain onto a more formal, accountable plane through the mobilisation and performance of a number of ‘comparative measures’ and criteria. These measures constituted a stabilised form of accountability, which we describe through the metaphor of a ‘scaffolding’, erected in the course of the procurement. Our argument is threefold: first, we argue that comparisons are possible but that they require much effort; second, that it is not the properties of the technology which determines choice but the way these properties were given form through the various comparative measures put in place; and finally whilst comparative measures might be imposed by one group upon others in a procurement team, these measures remain relatively malleable

Thinking critically about intellectual capital accounting

The measurement and reporting of intellectual capital has recently attracted a growing interest from accounting researchers, promoting a lively and far-reaching debate. Two related issues have informed this debate. It is possible to identify these issues as exemplifying financial reporting and management accounting perspectives on the emergence of intellectual capital. Provides a commentary on the progress of the debate to date, while also attempting to contextualise some of the issues it entails in both earlier and wider debates. In an effort to progress the project of accounting for intellectual capital, suggests the adoption of a critical accounting perspective. This would entail exploring the possibilities of intellectual capital providing its own accounts, rather than remaining imprisoned within accounts devised by others.