Cultivating compliance: governance of North Indian organic basmati smallholders in a global value chain

Focusing on a global value chain (GVC) for organic basmati rice, we study how farmers’ practices are governed through product and process standards, organic certification protocols, and contracts with buyer firms. We analyze how farmers’ entry into the GVC reconfigures their agencements (defined as heterogeneous arrangements of human and nonhuman agencies which are associated with each other). These reconfigurations entail the severance of some associations among procedural and material elements of the agencements and the formation of new associations, in order to produce cultivation practices that are accurately described by the GVC’s standards and protocols. Based on ethnography of two farmers in Uttarakhand, North India, we find that the same standards were enacted differently on the two farmers’ fields, producing variable degrees of (selective) compliance with the ‘official’ GVC standards. We argue that the disjuncture between the ‘official’ scripts of the standards and actual cultivation practices must be nurtured to allow farmers’ agencements to align their practices with local sociotechnical relations and farm ecology. Furthermore, we find that compliance and disjuncture were facilitated by many practices and associations that were officially ungoverned by the GVC

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

Challenging Social Cognition Models of Adherence:Cycles of Discourse, Historical Bodies, and Interactional Order

Attempts to model individual beliefs as a means of predicting how people follow clinical advice have dominated adherence research, but with limited success. In this article, we challenge assumptions underlying this individualistic philosophy and propose an alternative formulation of context and its relationship with individual actions related to illness. Borrowing from Scollon and Scollon’s three elements of social action – “historical body,” “interaction order,” and “discourses in place” – we construct an alternative set of research methods and demonstrate their application with an example of a person talking about asthma management. We argue that talk- or illness-related behavior, both viewed as forms of social action, manifest themselves as an intersection of cycles of discourse, shifting as individuals move through these cycles across time and space. We finish by discussing how these dynamics of social action can be studied and how clinicians might use this understanding when negotiating treatment with patients

STRATEGY AS DISCURSIVE PRACTICE IN A BRAZILIAN PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: A LOOK UNDER THE PERSPECTIVE OF CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The aim this article a critical discursive analysis of the “management plan” genre of a public institution of higher education, from 2012 to 2015, located in southeast Brazil. The aforementioned plan is inserted in the discursive practice of strategic management, specifically the institutional, bureaucratic management, and is used as an instrument for decision-making. The goal of this analysis will be to discuss the first step of the “management plan”, named “organizational policies”. We can see that, while elaborating declarative sentences, there is an evaluation of the statements regarding what is to be considered relevant to the institutions by means of the ideological discourse on neoliberal ideals and market behavior. The adoption of market-oriented managerial tools has been a constant in public administration. The public administration looks for bases of organizational practices in the private sphere. This mimicry is still present in the field, and the search for new managerial practices still crosses the imaginaries of the public managers. However, the increasing incorporation of a market-oriented, neoliberal logic, mainly in the adoption of strategic planning, can still be verified. The conclusion presented in this paper serves to foment the debate on the strategies formulated for the Brazilian public service and the methodological applicability of the critical discourse analysis. This meets the emerging need to systematize and integrate distinct theoretical and methodological approaches in the field of organizational studies when strategy is studied as a social and discursive practice

Debunking the Myth of the Efficacy of “Push-down Academics”: How Rigid, Teacher-Centered, Academic Early Learning Environments Dis-Empower Young Children

The increased emphasis on higher academic standards in Early Childhood Education has changed the instructional landscape and developed myths of quality learning. In recent decades, pre and primary schools have begun to focus more on assessments and testing as a determinant of quality learning; this emphasis has led to a shift to “push down academics”, which refers to an increase of academic standards at a younger age (Bassok, Latham, and Rorem, 2016). The concept of “push-down academics” is contrast to the foundational components of early childhood education, which equally values socio-emotional development, academic core concepts, and natural growth (Burman, 2016; Alford, Rollins, Padron & Waxman, 2016). This paper discusses the shift in ECE educational settings from foundational components of learning to “push down academics” and reveals the commonly associated myths of the implications of “push down” academics. We also review how the implementation of “push down academics” in early childhood privileges academic concepts over other forms of learning and consequentially minimizes the importance of skills outside of the academic core (Piker & Jewkes, 2014)

Standardizing and destandardizing practices at a Flemish secondary school : a sociolinguistic ethnographic perspective on Flemish pupils’ speech practices

For a couple of decades now, in Flanders, the functional elaboration of what is generally called tussentaal, i.e. mesolectal language use situated in between (‘tussen’) acrolectal Standard Dutch and basilectal Flemish dialects, has caused increasing concern about the position of Standard Dutch relative to other recognized ways of speaking. This has provoked intense debate about the proper characterization of this evolution. This paper focuses on the daily language practices and overt attitudes of six girls at a Flemish secondary school to illustrate that it is relatively easy to find evidence that suggests this evolution is properly characterized as a type of destandardization. Yet by zooming in on the covert SLI-influenced language attitudes of the girls, I will argue that a close ethnographic study of daily language use is able to go beyond the surface appearances of larger-scale ideologies and can demonstrate the continuing influence of standardization. Sociolinguistic ethnography may therefore have a vital role to play in the ongoing debate about language variation in Flanders