State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). We argue that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. In doing so, we tackle long-standing stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for. We highlight how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. We demonstrate the potential pay-off with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies, we argue, suggest a reorientation of how we understand the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. We conclude by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection,and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment

Successful programs wanted: exploring the impact of alignment.

Alignment between formulation and implementation of business strategy can be important for achieving successful programmes. The authors have explored developing a programme management alignment theory. Statistical testing suggests that interaction between the study model variables was found to be multidimensional, complex and subtle in influence. They conclude that programmes have both deliberate and emergent strategies requiring design and management to be organised as complex adaptive systems. Programme lifecycle phases of design and transition were often illustrated by an unclear and confusing strategic picture at the outset which makes it difficult to control. Learning was established as an underlying challenge. The study model demonstrated continuous alignment as an essential attribute contributing towards successful delivery. This requires programme design and structure to adopt an adaptive posture