Overseeing organizations: configuring action and its environment

Despite the widespread deployment of CCTV through most major cities and towns in great Britain, and the importance of surveillance to contemporary debates within the social sciences, there remains relatively little detailed research concerned with the practical use of these technologies in the workplace. In this paper, we examine how personnel in the operation rooms in London Underground use CCTV and related equipment to identify problems and events and to develop a co-ordinated response. In particular, we consider how personnel configure scenes to make sense of and interpret the conduct of the travelling public in organizationally relevant ways, and how they shape the ways in which both passengers and staff see and respond to each others' actions. In addressing how personnel constitute the sense and significance of CCTV images, we reflect on the development of information processing systems which are designed to automatically detect conduct and events.     

Configuring Action in Objects: From Mutual Space to Media Space

It has long been recognized that the material environment is an essential feature of the organization of social action and interaction. It is only recently, however, that we have witnessed a burgeoning body of empirical studies, from within both the social and cognitive sciences, that has begun to delineate the ways in which objects are socially constructed and feature in social relations and activities. Despite this growing interest in the object in social life, there remains a paucity of research concerned with how objects are reflexively constituted in and through social interaction. In this article, we consider how aspects of the material environment are rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction and the ways in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others. We examine interaction in both conventional working environments and new experimental spaces created through advanced telecommunication and communication technologies to reveal the ways in which the sense and significance of social actions and activities are embedded in, and inseparable from, the local ecology.     

Journalists’ and Educators’ Perspectives on News Media Reporting of Islam and Muslim Communities in Australia and New Zealand

We know much about how the news media report on the topic of Muslims and Islam, but we know very little about the journalistic practices and processes that contribute to the way these issues are framed and reported. Whereas research has until now largely focused on the ways in which Islam and Muslims are represented in various news media, there is relatively little research that explores the issue from the perspective of key people working in the news media. In order to address what we perceive as a significant gap in the research, we draw on data from interviews with 29 journalists, editors, media trainers, and journalism educators located in Australia and New Zealand to explore their understandings of the ways stories about Islam and Muslims are reported and why. The article also investigates the interviewees’ perceptions of the effects of news media coverage of Muslims and Islam. Our findings present a starting point to improving practice for those reporting on Islam and Muslim and inform the development of training modules in the reporting of Islam for journalists and journalism students.     

Downloading New Identities: Ethnicity,Technology, and Media in the Global Greek Village

This article addresses the ways in which new media and technology contest how Greek ethnic communities in Canada are organized and structured. New technologies allow Greeks to go beyond their physical community and interface, via computer, television, or periodicals with Greeks on a global scale. I argue that current uses in media and technology signal the creation of new dimensions to Greek diasporic identity and imply stronger ties with the homeland and other diasporic communities, thus contesting traditional assimilation paradigms indicating that European ethnic groups are in the twilight of their existence. These findings suggest an increase in the application of new technologies among the first and second generations with interesting implications for our understanding of ethnic identity. I propose that the advent of high-tech forms of media in the last fifteen years has created new outlets for expressing ethnicity among those who already have some Greek ethnic consciousness. The means of acquiring social and cultural capital within diasporic communities is expanded to include these new forms of media, with implications for habitus and daily practices.     

FRAMING THE ABORTION DEBARTE: Organizational Resources, Media Strategies, and Movement-Countermovement Dynamics

This study examines how ideologically opposed social movement organizations, the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Concerned Women for America (CWA), get media coverage during critical moments of the abortion debate. I analyze how organizational structure and identitate or constrain a social movement organization's ability to get mainstream media coverage. Specifically, I use the social movement framing literature to analyze how the organizations strategically construct media frames and packages in response to opposition, the tactics they use to get media coverage, and the relative success of each organization's efforts in mass media outlets. The analysis suggests that an organization's media strategy matters, but that organizational structure and organizational identity color these strategies.
One of the best ways to develop press relations is to know how a particular newspaper or broadcast station operates. Make friends with reporters or newscasters who are sympathetic to the issues. They can be strong allies. Remember, publicity means "information with news value" issued as a means of gaining public attention. recognition, understanding or support for a person, an organization, an institution or a cause.
National Organization for Women Records (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University)
Conservative groups did not understand media or its importance then [ten years ago] as much as they do now. [Now they understand that] media is the name of the game and whoever frames the issue wins the argument. Communications Director for Concerned Women for America     

Ordering competition: the interactional accomplishment of the sale of art and antiques at auction

Auctions provide an institutional solution to a social problem; they enable the legitimate pricing and exchange of goods where those goods are of uncertain value. In turn, auctions raise a number of social and organizational issues that are resolved within the interaction that arise in sales by auction. In this paper, we examine sales of fine art, antiques and objets d'art and explore the ways in which auctioneers mediate competition between buyers and establish a value for goods. In particular, we explore how bids are elicited, co-ordinated and revealed so as to rapidly escalate the price of goods in a transparent manner that enables the legitimate valuation and exchange of goods. In directing attention towards the significance of the social interaction, including talk, visual and material conduct, the paper contributes to the growing corpus of ethnographic studies of markets. It suggests that to understand the operation of markets and their outcomes, and to unpack issues of agency, trust and practice, we need to place the 'interaction order' at the heart of analytic agenda.     

Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere

Recent discussions of the Internet have touted "virtual community" and a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present essay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) suggests that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology may do more to foster "categorical identities" than they do dense, multiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to be complemented by more direct attention to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people across lines of basic difference in collective identities. Previous protest movements have shown that communications media have an ambiguous mix of effects. They do facilitate popular mobilization, but they also make it easy for relatively ephemeral protest activity to outstrip organizational roots. They also encourage governments to avoid concentrating their power in specific spatial locations and thus make revolution in some ways more difficult.     

The mediatization of leadership: grassroots digital facilitators as organic intellectuals,sociometric stars and caretakers*

ABSTRACT

Scholars of both resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory recognize leadership as integral to traditional social movements. Following global protest movements of 2011, some now characterize movements relying on social media as horizontal and leaderless. Whether due to an organizational shift to networks over bureaucracies or due to a change in values, many social movements in the present protest cycle do not designate visible leadership. Does leadership in social media activism indeed disappear or does it take on new forms? This paper undertakes an in-depth analysis of data obtained through interviews, event observations and analysis of media content related to three Canadian cases of civic mobilization of different scale, all of which strategically employed social media. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding the role of these mobilizations’ organizers as organic intellectuals, sociometric stars and caretakers. By looking closely at the three cases through the lenses offered by these concepts, we identify the specific styles that characterize digitally mediatized civic leadership.     

"WE DON'T PAY FOR BUS TICKETS, BUT WE CAN HELP YOU FIND WORK":

Guided by the concept of social problems work and the micropolitics of trouble perspective, we examine the discursive strategies used by social workers to conduct intake interviews with homeless clients. Trouble was a pervasive feature of these encounters: clients often requested services that diverged from the service preferences expressed by social workers. Social workers used elicitation strategies to solicit information about clients' biographies and their service needs and seminarrative raps to construct service plans with clients. Conceptualized as rhetorical devices, these strategies appear to have managed trouble in ways that articulated closely with material and nonmaterial aspects of the organizational context. We illustrate how these strategies articulated with an agency preference for consensus-style service planning and a focus on clients' recent biographies and immediate problems. Further, we show how these strategies managed the provision of scarce resources in ways that focused on remedies that could be tied to long-term client stability. We conclude by offering the outlines of a general model of the micropolitics of trouble in human service encounters.     

Organizing Gender? Looking at Metaphors as Frames of Meaning in Gender/Organizational Texts

This article examines the ways in which the writing of gender and organizational theory has made use of metaphors to frame understanding about gender and gender relations. Key examples of different theoretical approaches to explaining gender difference within organizations are analysed as texts, to explore the ways in which rhetorical devices play a crucial role in constructing knowledges about women, men, and organizational life. In particular, three metaphors are uncovered: those of space, time and the sexual body. These have important connections with metaphors embedded in ‘mainstream’ (masculinist) organizational theory and are thus shown to construct our understanding of gender in particular, and somewhat limited, ways. However, in the second half of the article, alternative significations of these metaphors are explored. These suggest other readings which may open up the ways in which women, men and gender relations are framed within gender/organizational theoretical texts.     

少年儿童新媒体使用情况解析

“网络新生代”的少年儿童在新媒体使用中呈现出对新媒体适应性、依赖性强，使用新媒体仍以娱乐为主要目的，以及在虚拟世界参与积极性较高等特点。针对不断变化的新媒体对少年儿童的影响，建议家庭、学校、社会各方需理性面对新媒体利弊，积极探索引导儿童健康使用网络的方法，进一步反思新媒体的不利因素；全面警惕儿童上网安全，整合各方力量保护儿童身心健康；关注新媒体环境下“知识沟”现象，思考信息公平对于儿童成长的影响。     

Navigating the Tavern: Digitally Mediated Connections and Relationship Persistence in Bar Settings

The widespread adoption of digital communications technologies has provided new avenues for social interaction to occur. We build on the sociological literature of fleeting encounters in bar settings to show how patrons' use of these technologies augments the bar experience and shapes the social networks that may develop through interaction. Using seven gay, lesbian, and heterosexual bars located in Southern California as research sites, we describe how patrons invoke digital technologies as props to aid the impression management strategies used to facilitate new connections. Second, we demonstrate how these encounters are subject to greater relationship persistence as a result of the way these technologies are used to quickly create a shared history. We conclude by arguing that fleeting encounters are no longer connections that either persist or completely fade away after face‐to‐face interaction. Rather, they often persist through technology‐mediated communications in ways that result in, at minimum, the development of weak ties. This greater relationship persistence can permit more opportunity to get to know a potential partner in digitally mediated settings like Facebook or via texting, but it could also require new strategies to evade interested others given this new lack of ephemerality and the influx of weak ties.     

WHEN 'VIRTUAL' MEETS VALUES: INSIGHTS FROM THE VOLUNTARY SECTOR

Electronic networking can support strategic re-positioning within organizations seeking to respond effectively to deep shifts in the social, economic and political regimes in which they operate today. Evidence, though, from our large-scale survey of core UK voluntary organizations suggests that voluntary organizations do not always seek to exploit this capability. Instead, our survey indicates that voluntary organizations are exploiting information and communication technologies (ICTs) in conventional ways to enhance administrative and operational efficiency and effectiveness. There is little evidence of more strategic applications supporting reconfiguration of the organization internally, redefinition of relationships across organizational networks or the extension of business scope. Further research based upon in-depth case studies demonstrated that social conditions are active in shaping the uptake and application of information and communication technologies within voluntary organizations. Within volunteer-intensive settings in particular,founding philosophies and the deeply rooted values that accompany these can have a profound effect. Ultimately,the technologically supported transformations, which occur within the organizations that we examine here, emerge from the inter-play between historically institutionalized values, strategic objectives and technological capability.     

Towards a theory of organizational storytelling for public relations: An engagement perspective

In this paper, organizational storytelling is defined as planned communication by. organizations that deliberately uses specific forms of content and delivery behavior to. engage audiences (both internal to the organization and outside it) cognitively and. affectively primarily for the achievement of organizational goals and objectives. But. there is little in the literature to show how organizational storytelling fits into the. theoretical lexicon of public relations; or to guide practitioners in how to adapt. storytelling to suit organizational purposes. There is even less discussion from either. perspective on how public relations can contribute to organizational storytelling. Stories are often described as being engaging, but little has been written to explain. why this is. Extant research tends to focus on the significance of engaging of. audiences with stories, rather than understanding how stories engage. This paper. adopts an engagement perspective on storytelling in general to identify the cognitive,. affective, and behavioral aspects of its elements (characters, plots etc.). The same lens. is then applied to organizational stories and shows how they use the elements of. engagement to convey organizational key messages. The paper also highlights. differences between storytelling and organizational storytelling. These findings are. incorporated into a checklist for practitioners to help them identify, create, critique, and. improve organizational storytelling in their work. In addition, the paper suggests ways. in which public relations can bring its uniquely relational perspective to contribute to. organizational storytelling by empowering stakeholder storytelling to organizations and. listening by organizations.     

NEW MEDIA'S POTENTIAL FOR PERSONALIZATION

Despite the growing maturity of new, interactive media, rhetoric about its possibilities and potentialities that abounded in its earliest days still endures. The growth of detailed and empirical work, which has sought to populate the digital landscape with grounded research calling into question this rhetoric, has not stopped new media debate from continuing to be shaped, in part, by the language of the potential. This paper is concerned with one aspect of new media's potential, personalization. It focuses on new media's proclaimed capacity to be adapted to meet the needs and desires of individual users. This is a trope that runs through much humanities and social sciences literature on new media and ICTs, yet despite recognition of the possibility of personalization offered by networked media technologies, there is very little grounded, empirical work on this subject in these fields. In order to address this absence, this paper compares an attempt to personalize new media web content on a two-year research endeavour entitled Project @pple with the rhetoric about the potentiality for personalization that new technologies offers. It aims to contribute to understandings of personalization by detailing the issues that arise when attempting to implement it. The argument of the paper is that the difficulties encountered on Project @pple suggest that, in real-life situations, characterized as they are by constraints and complexities, it is not always a straightforward process for personalization to cease to be potential and to become actual.     

Operating the production calculus: ordering a production system in the print industry

The topic of shop-floor work has been extensively examined within sociology. However, the organizational structures within which this work takes place have, in the most part, been taken as unexamined givens. Yet, their operation is also the shop-floor work of some people. This paper examines the way in which the stable organizational structures within which shop-floor work takes place are achieved. It is based upon a fieldwork investigation of a large commercial printer and focuses upon the collaborative work of those who are involved in scheduling the production of a job and their use of 'the production calculus' in planning the work of the site. The print industry is undergoing considerable technological change and scheduling technologies have been developed to automate this work. However, there has been little take up of these technologies and the paper also considers how the characteristics of operating the production calculus in practice may account for this.     

The Social‐psychological Aspects of Team Formation: New Avenues for Research

The ubiquity of teams in the modern workplace cannot be denied, as Curseu, Kenis, and Raab (2009, p. 30) note, “team formation is a challenge in modern organizations as most of them use teams to perform a variety of organizational tasks.” How teams form is, therefore, a question of much practical interest. Research illustrates that stratified social systems influence the choice and decision‐making behaviors that shape group and team formation (Hechter, 1978). From a structural social psychological perspective (Sell & Kuipers, 2009; Lawler, Ridgeway, and Markovsky, 1993), teams are like microcosmic societies. They represent a process of social cohesion through interaction. Additionally, they can be organic, mechanical, homogeneous, and heterogeneous. In other words, teams are structural and cultural artifacts of societies. Members of society through interaction create these “social artifacts,” which may consist of hierarchically organizing sets of individuals into a group, or multiple groups, relative to power and status dimensions. In this paper, we aim to show how contributions from social psychology have informed research on team formation. Thus, two research questions guide this paper: What are the mechanisms of team formation via partner selection for self‐organizing teams? In what ways, can these studies advance scholarship focusing on the social psychology of inequality? To establish a foundation for understanding the various studies on team formation, we begin with a general overview on how team and team formation has been conceptualized. Next, we examine the social psychological research on team formation via partner selection. In doing so, we note the importance given to the 4 major mechanisms of team formation emerging from the literature: competence, homophily, familiarity, and affect. Lastly, we conclude the paper with a discussion addressing the research questions guiding this paper and suggest opportunities for social psychologists to consider for future team formation studies.     

Sexualized labour in digital culture: Instagram influencers,porn chic and the monetization of attention

The rise of digital technologies and social media platforms has been linked to changing forms of work, as well as the mainstreaming of pornography and a ‘porn chic' aesthetic. This article examines some of the ways in which these themes coalesce, and interrogates the conceptual boundaries of sexualized labour, extending beyond traditional organizational settings and into Web 2.0. The study explores performances of sexualized labour on social media by analysing visual and textual content from 172 female influencers on Instagram. This article contributes to the literature on sexualized labour in three ways. First, by demonstrating how sexualized labour is enacted across various forms of influencer labour, and how this relates to the attention economy and monetization. Second, by developing the extant conceptualization of sexualized labour and introducing connective labour as a required element to mobilize sexualized labour. Third, by opening up a critical analysis of what is meant by ‘sexualized' labour within a cultural context of pornographication.     

The myth of the “data‐driven” society: Exploring the interactions of data interfaces,circulations, and abstractions

The prominence of data and data technologies in society, such as algorithms, social media, mobile technology, and artificial intelligence, have heralded numerous claims of the revolutionary potential of these systems. From public policy, to business management, to scientific research, a “data‐driven” society is apparently imminent—or currently happening—where “objective” and asocial data systems are believed to be comprehensively improving human life. Through a review of existing sociological literature, in this article, we critically examine the relationship between data and society and propose a new model for understanding these dynamics. “Using the concept of the informatic,” we argue the relationship between data and society can be understood as representing the interaction of several different social trends around data; that of data interfaces (that connect individuals to digital contexts), data circulation (trends in the movement and storage of data), and data abstraction (data manipulation practices). Data and data technologies are founded to be entwined and embedded in numerous social relationships, and while not all are fair and equitable relationships, there is ample evidence of the deeply social nature of data across many streams of social life. Our three‐part informatic framework allows these complex relationships to be understood in the social dynamic through which they are witnessed and experienced.     

‘Only Connect’: Unifying the social in social work and social media

‘Only Connect…live in fragments no longer’

(E.M. Forster, Howards End).

This paper utilises ‘Only Connect’, the epigraph from Forster’s novel ‘Howards End’ as the starting point for exploring the challenges and opportunities of integrating social networking with relationship based social work practice. The paper discusses the more deleterious implications of social networking, whilst assuming a deliberately optimistic stance to uncover ways in which the opportunities afforded by online space can be utilised effectively within social work education and practice. Whilst recognising that social networking platforms are transforming constantly, the paper adopts Kaplan’s definition of social media as a ‘group of internet based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0’. Whilst much of the discussion within the paper relates to Twitter and Facebook, two of the most endemic international social networking platforms, it is also applicable to myriad forms of social networking. The paper begins with a discussion of UK professional conduct cases and explores these both within Klein’s concept of splitting and historical attitudes to new technologies. Drawing from emerging research data and other examples, the positive relational practices educed by social media within social work education and practice are emphasised and discussed. The paper concludes by highlighting Forster’s plea for connection and recommending that social work embraces the renewed opportunities provided by online networking.