Exploring linkages between organisational culture and gender equality work—An ethnography of a multinational engineering company

This article explores linkages between organisation-specific cultural narratives and gender-equality programme planning through the lens of the ‘historicity’ concept. The article argues that to fully understand problem definitions, programme design and organisational change processes related to gender equality, scholars and practitioners cannot focus one-sidedly on expected outcomes and effects; we must also factor in cultural narratives, because gender equality actors never arrive at their work as ‘tabulae rasae’. A community of actors always draws on shared dispositions that give sense, direction and shape to their anticipations of the future hereby guiding their actions in the present. Based on an ethnography of a multinational engineering company, the article shows how cultural narratives may serve in different ways as support factors for gender equality programme planning and implementation, if they are actively but mindfully engaged. This mindfulness is important as positive cultural narratives may entail problematic gender dimensions. On the other hand, negative cultural narratives may entail important learning outcomes that may benefit future gender equality initiatives. The analysis further points to the centrality of strategic communication, leadership commitment and comprehensive evaluation in order to mobilise the potential of cultural narratives as support factors to gender equality work. Finally, this article offers a rich example to scholars and practitioners of how to employ cultural analysis in relation to gender equality activities, and demonstrates the value of the insights produced by this analysis for the case company and its gender equality programme.     

Becoming,Being and Having Been: Practitioner Perspectives on Temporal Stances and Participation across Children’s Services

This article is based on a study of the changing meanings and experiences of citizenship and participation for young people in transition from primary to secondary school. One of the primary concerns of the study is to better understand how different professional practices impact upon young people’s uptake of participation and adoption of civic identity. To gain some insight into this area the article first looks at the contexts in which participation work is developing and the interrelationships between these developments across children’s services. How different practitioner’s conceptualise participation is tied into different assessments of young people’s or children’s capacity. Recasting questions of capacity as dialogues across differing temporal stances can offer practitioners new ways to reflect upon the power negotiations within their relations with young people. The key role temporality plays in configuring power relationships and transactions is explored as it arises within practitioner life history interviews. The shifts between temporal stances that young people experience as they interact with different practitioners are illustrated through fieldwork data.     

Cultural Barriers and Familial Resources for Negotiation of Engineering Careers Among Young Women: Relational Dialectics Theory in an Asian Perspective

The study takes a critical approach to understanding how girls/women discursively navigate engineering career discourses with their families by using the lens of relational dialectics theory 2.0. In particular, the study examines 28 interviews of Asian women engineers to explore the ways in which cultural meanings of engineering careers influence families’ messages towards girls in choosing their future careers. Contrapuntal analysis shows that competing culturally circulating discourses intersect with familial material/discursive resources through which girls make sense of the support and barriers they experience from parents and other family members regarding their engineering careers. Findings have considerable implications for the role of culture in familial understanding of engineering careers and how families contribute towards sustaining young women in engineering from an Asian perspective.     

Music to Remember Me By: Technologies of Memory in Home Recording

This article presents ethnographic data on home music recording to advance the concept of technologies of memory as way for interactionists to understand memory work as a practice of self. John Dewey's classic ruminations on memory as process are combined with Tia DeNora's contemporary articulation of music as a technology of the self to explain data on home recording as individually and socially meaningful mnemonic work. This specific case study demonstrates how home recordists use material technologies (technics) and technological practices (techniques) to form and reform the self in everyday life. More generally, this article demonstrates the efficacy of interpretive studies of memory, creativity, technology, and the self in everyday life.     

Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora

Abstract In this article I examine the role of education in the family strategies of recent East Asian migrants, contributing to intellectual debates around transnationalism and the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Empirically, the article provides an insight into the experiences and objectives of an often‐neglected group within studies of Chinese migration – students. I also attempt to understand the particular role that children play within a wider family project of capital accumulation. Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, I emphasize the significance of different forms of capital in underpinning the spatial strategies of East Asian families. The research for this article was conducted in Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, involving in‐depth interviews with university students, recent graduates and their families. In conclusion, in the article I maintain that a geographically informed theory of ‘cultural capital’ and its relationship to the family unit can help elucidate recent patterns of trans‐Pacific, transnational mobility, moving beyond more common ‘political’ and ‘economic’ interpretations of this contemporary migration.     

Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity: The creation of ‘silence’ in an elite sports academy

Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Building upon two existing literatures concerning the institutional dynamics of footballing traineeship, and the concept of organizational ‘silence’, the article explains how characteristics associated with surveillance mechanisms and the perpetuation of institutional norms lead to the configuration of a climate of silence. Utilizing the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, the article addresses the call for an understanding of the interplay between social actors and the confines of their structural context as an example of restrictive practice and for providing insight into the ‘how’ of silencing.     

School counsellors and cultural diversity management in Spanish secondary schools: the role of relations with other educators and intervention models used in care of immigrant students

During the last 20 years, the influx of immigrant pupils in Spanish schools has taken up much of school counsellors’ agendas. This leads us to reflect upon the status and role of educational guidance in terms of cultural diversity management, particularly focusing on two elements that may potentially help understand the situation: relations with other educational agents and the intervention model applied. The field work for this study was carried out during an academic semester in four secondary schools in Huelva. In addition to the analysis of official school documentation, remarks and field notes, semi-structured interviews were carried out and a discussion group was held with the four counsellors. Counsellors are trying to overcome an intervention model that is mainly therapeutic in nature and make space in their schedules for a way of working that is more focused on prevention and advisory services, incorporating the participation of other educational actors. But this is not an easy task. The possibility of generating changes would encourage better integration of cultural diversity in the life of schools, rather than treating it as a negative/deficit view, as an occasional issue, individual and isolated from the sum of school activities and other members of the education community.     

Personal meaning in the public sphere: The standardisation and rationalisation of biodiversity data in the UK and the Netherlands

The demand for biodiversity data is increasing. Governments require standardised, objective data to underpin planning and conservation decisions. These data are produced by large numbers of (volunteer) natural historians and non-governmental organisations. This article analyses the interface between the state and the volunteer naturalists to understand the emerging patterns of information flow between them. Our results are based on research in the UK and the Netherlands. These two countries have a long history in volunteer biodiversity recording and are facing similar issues in relation to the increasing demand for standardised data. Our findings demonstrate that citizens who become involved in recording do so because they value nature and biodiversity. Recording is for them a way to enact their relationship with nature and contribute to its protection. Our findings also show that they are concerned about the increasing rationalisation in the process of data flow and about the way in which the government treats them and ‘their’ data. Our paper concludes by discussing this tension and the challenges and opportunities for biodiversity recording.     

OWING THE SEED: THE DISCURSIVE ECONOMY OF SEX MIGRATION AMONG TURKISH-SPEAKING MINORITY URBANITES IN THE POSTSOCIALIST BALKAN PERIPHERY

This article explores postsocialist change in a non-postsocialist context. It is concerned with discourses on sex and cultural change as articulated by members of the Turkish minority group living in the northern Greek town of Komotini, in an area of northern Greece where, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, immigration from eastern Europe has risen noticeably. The impact of this migration is explored with reference to çapk?nl?k and k?l?b?kl?k, two concepts guiding notions of masculine failure. By analyzing the relations of these to other concepts used to articulate social change (e.g., ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’), the article exemplifies how the effects of political change on the global level can be subsumed under localized power structures. The article argues that the inconsistencies between informants' physical encounters with eastern European immigrants and their discourses on ‘Russian women’ show that it is their marginal location within local Greek society that is central to their identity conceptualizations. This, in turn, leads to the argument that such discourses can shed considerable light on our understanding of internal and external relations with reference to particular politicized groups, primarily because they offer an understanding of power relations, that foregrounds not one domain of difference over another, but the interplay of gender, ethnic, and economic differentiations.     

Empire,emotion, exchange: (dis)orienting encounters of/with post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy

ABSTRACT

This article disentangles how empire, emotion and exchange intersect and work to orient and disorient processes of identity formation within post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy. Focusing on everyday cultural exchange practices, it challenges the particular cosmopolitanism embedded in these programmes that hinges upon the affective and the colonial. It reflects on how this entanglement of empire, emotion and exchange operates through modes of governmentality that produce energized, more governable subjects and masks such operations of power. Analysing one particular exchange – YES – this article disorients colonial logics of subjectification by exploring affective exchange encounters that are always already (dis)orienting. It then serves as a disorienting encounter with cultural diplomacy through four provocations, illustrating how empire is (always) (dis)orientating, can (dis)orient, can be disoriented, and must undergo disorientation. First, post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy and its logic of cosmopolitanism suggest empire is always (dis)orientating via its manifestation in ‘unusual’ sites; while exchange programmes’ onus on celebrating difference appears to conflict with ‘where’ empire ‘normally’ orients itself, as post/decolonial scholarship reveals, it is in the seemingly benign/unquestionable where empire does its work most profoundly. Second, the entanglement of emotion, empire and exchange can (dis)orient exchange subjects through how they are governed to perform and oscillate between ever-shifting ‘ideal’ subjectivities (familiar national/cosmopolitan global/enterprising neoliberal). Third, tracing colonial echoes and spectres in these exchanges reveals empire as disoriented, as that which is analytically ‘less conventional’. An arguably ‘conventional’ analysis oriented around a neo-colonial logic and an imperialistic ‘America’ while seductive in its simplicity obscures the governmental and performative complexities operating within these programmes. Finally, disorientation enables empire to be challenged and disrupted, opening up possibilities for post-9/11 US cultural diplomacy, and the self-Other relations comprising it, to be reimagined. In short, this paper’s analytical disorientation can lead to a reorientation of cultural diplomacy.     

Gendered Meanings of Commitment from High Technology Engineering Managers in the United Kingdom and Sweden

This article considers why women managers are often perceived to be ‘less committed’ at work than men, through an exploration of male and female managers' meanings of ‘commitment’, to see whether their meanings are shared. Despite a large body of literature on the concept of commitment, managers' own meanings of commitment have not been reported. In general, engineers reported that they used the term ‘committed’ without defining what it meant. Their meanings were a broad composite of organizational and career commitment, focused on very strong affective commitment with almost no emphasis on continuance commitment, in contrast to the traditional (1979) definitions of commitment (Mowday et al. 1979). Results from this interview study of engineering managers and senior technologists (20 males, 17 females, 17 British, and 20 Swedish graduate engineers, from vice‐president to senior technologist) show that there are differences in male and female engineers' unprompted meanings of commitment at work, as well as differences in meaning between the three levels of management sampled. Females responded more often with less visible ‘commitment’ meanings such as involvement, being people‐concerned, and availability. More males (and top managers) used the term commitment to mean task delivery, being proactive, being innovative, adding value, and being ready for challenge. The gender differences identified in reported meanings could impact on the assessment of women's commitment, when evaluated for promotion, career development and professional chartered status by the mostly male engineering managers.     

The “Turkish Model” of Sociology: East–West Science, State Formation, and the Post-Secular

The field of sociology in Turkey has a history that is perhaps unique to Europe (and the “West”) in its co-founding with a modern nation-state, and yet its story is more central to the discipline’s general development than that of a marginal “outlier.” Positioned at an East–west crossroads, Turkey, and its sociological tradition, have been in an ongoing conversation between the two cultural poles. Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article traces the discipline’s history through the lens of an East–west gaze. Touching on the lived public social questions that this story invokes, regarding ethnic relations, gender, migration, democracy-building, religion, and international relations, this article surveys the growth and present state of the discipline, including methodological trends and current issues.     

Flawed Policy,Failed Politics? Challenging the Sexual Politics of Managing Diversity in Engineering Organizations

In Australia, as in most other developed countries, women constitute less than 10 per cent of engineers and they are leaving the profession faster than men. Engineering organizations have taken up managing diversity as a key policy to improve the recruitment and retention rates of women engineers. This article contributes to the developing literature of critical approaches to diversity by drawing on data from three large engineering companies to argue that this policy fails to challenge the prevailing sexual politics in engineering. We propose the concept of ‘sexual politics’ in order to stress that gender is relational, contested and always political. In failing to engage with the sexual politics in engineering organizations, managing diversity obscures the systematic nature of women's disadvantage and men's advantage in the workplace. Only when these politics are recognized, confronted and transformed will engineering careers be more equitable.     

The magic of mundane objects: culture,identity and power in a country vets' practice

This article explores and extends the idea that material objects lie at the heart of many of our social, and specifically workplace, interactions. The site of exploration is an ethnography of a British farm animal veterinary surgery. Drawing upon traditional cultural studies approaches alongside contemporary sociological understandings about the place of materials in social life, the article analyses how objects function to track and structure the ways that people of different professional status experience work at a veterinary surgery. It is argued that the power of the veterinary elite in this setting is best understood by paying close attention to ‘mundane’ artefacts. The article argues that such objects, having almost no meaning on their own, can become potent cultural symbols if actors have the necessary social capital to ‘transform’ them. Here, Latimer's concept of ‘strong moves’ (2004) is extended to consider how the reinterpretation of objects might constitute a form of ‘cultural magic’. This article seeks to uncover some of the practical scenarios in which such ‘magical’ transformations play out and describes, through a series of tales from the field (Van Maanen, 1985), the ways in which vets control and regulate their interactions with those outside the professional elite.     

Metabolism and colonization. Modes of production and the physical exchange between societies and nature

Written by a sociologist and a biologist, this paper attempts an interdisciplinary approach to describing the basic exchange relations between human societies and their natural environments. One type of exchange relation is termed ‘metabolism’ and related to the biological metabolism member organisms of societies require. A historical overview (part 1) demonstrates this exchange relation in terms of mass throughput per inhabitant to have grown in the course of human cultural evolution—without necessarily increasing the quality of life of those concerned—to the twentyfold it now amounts to in industrial societies (as is demonstrated empirically for Austria in part 3). A strategy of ‘contraction of physical metabolism’ (reduction of physical growth irrespective of ‘economic’ growth) of industrial societies is proposed as a strategic means of survival and possible ways to this goal are discussed quantitatively. The other exchange relation termed ‘colonization’ refers to treatments of natural environments that purposively change some components to render better exploitability (for the purpose of social metabolism), while still relying upon their basic self‐regenerating qualities. It is sketched how colonization strategies developed historically, and it is demonstrated empirically that industrial societies now use about 50% of the available plant biomass (the energetic basis of all animal life) upon their territories for human purposes (part 4). Part 5 classifies different ‘paradigms’ for judging the ‘harmfulness’ of social interventions into the environment and outlines the logic of an information system that would enable society to generate an awareness of its own interventions into nature. On the whole the paper presents a theoretical as well as an empirical attempt to view societies as physical systems (among other physical systems on this planet) and confront sociology with the paradigmatic task to analyze the social regulation of these physical processes.     

THE AMBIGUITIES OF EXTERNAL MINORITY PROTECTION

This article focuses on the special and prominent place that the “Jewish question” occupied in the general discussion about Russian modernisation in the pre‐1914 period, both in American society and in the arena of US–Russian relations. It analyses the role that anti‐Jewish violence in Russia had in effecting a dramatic shift in the way Americans viewed the Russian Empire, which was being depicted by the American Jews and the leaders of the crusade for a “Free Russia” as a barbarous oppressor of political dissent and a savage persecutor of religious, national, and ethnic minorities. American society’s reaction to anti‐Jewish violence in the Russian Empire at the turn of the twentieth century helped, on the one hand, to shape the idea of the American belief that the United States bore special responsibility for carrying out reforms in Russia, and, on the other hand, to place relations between the two countries within such binary oppositions as “light and darkness,” “civilization and barbarity,” “modernity and medievalism,” “democracy and authoritarianism,” “freedom and slavery,” “the West and the Orient.” The article uses a broad range of verbal and graphic sources from the American press and new sources from archival collections. These sources help to illustrate one of the author’s principal tenets which holds that the United States’ view of the foreign policy of the Russian Empire was a result of the Americans’ projection of their own vision of the nature of the US foreign policy. In their official and public discourses, Americans considered Russia’s foreign policy an extension of Russia’s political regime. This study examines US foreign policy as a vital sphere in which national identity is redefined and reaffirmed and gives an opportunity to draw attention to the cultural and ideological dimensions of Russian–American relations, to understand the origins of dualistic American myths about Russia that have proven so enduring, and to demonstrate how a demonised Russia serves to revitalise American nationalism and how the Russian “Other” was used, in part, to construct the American “Self.”     

‘Birds of a feather stick together’? Negotiating community,family and intimate relationships between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ Caribbean migrants in Britain

This article explores the ‘invisible’ boundary separating and informing social relations among ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ Caribbean migrant communities in Britain. To briefly note, ‘established’ migrants are characterised in the analysis as those Caribbean migrants who settled in Britain from the 1940s, their offspring and subsequent generations. In contrast, the ‘newcomer’ represents a new influx of Caribbean that arrived and settled in Britain from the late 1990s onwards, either with a legal or illegal resident status. The common assumption is that ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ groups are bonded together through shared cultural and ethnic background. Therefore any differences that exist between the two groups tend to be ignored because it is assumed that the newcomers are automatically absorbed into existing Caribbean communities. However, this empirical study of Caribbean families suggests that inherent differences exist between these two groups. To discuss issues of intra-ethnic diversity the analysis is guided by a social capital approach. It also draws on the views and perspectives of Caribbean people to highlight the social hierarchies and cultural stereotypes that exist between ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants. Concentrating on the ‘invisible’ and intra-ethnic boundaries between the ‘established’ and ‘newcomer’ migrants, the discussion explores issues of change and continuity, and also problems and opportunities that emerge within Caribbean family networks and their intimate relationships.     

THEORYCRAFTING

This article investigates theorycrafting, a cultural practice of gaming communities, to analyse the differences in participation, knowledge production and dissemination and to show the effect that this has on the community itself. Theorycrafting describes a process of reverse engineering, a process of extracting design ‘blue prints’ to understand a technology better, whose design is not accessible. The ‘design’ not accessible in this case is the game algorithm. The concept of scientification of gameplay is used to highlight the scientific approach of theorycrafters to their gameplay. Their ‘scientific’ approach is described by using Aristotle's concepts episteme, techne and phronesis. His concepts have been chosen as they help us to analyse the different layers of the meaning of ‘theory’ in theorycrafting. This article investigates which understanding of theory and science is central in the practice of theorycrafting. How is a specific concept of science part of mechanisms of participatory surveillance? Theorycrafting can be understood as the desire of players to gain control over the game and share this knowledge with other players. The production of knowledge for the community leads to formulas that are used to improve playing skills, but through the spread of add-ons and forms of social control, it can also be described as a tool for surveillance.     

Geometries of ‘global’ evangelicalism

In this article, I explore the power dynamics at play in religious place‐making. I critically discuss the uneven co‐configurations of imaginaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ within global evangelicalism. Specifically, I analyse the recent recording of a live album by the famous charismatic Australian band Hillsong United (of Hillsong Church) at various locations in Israel‐Palestine, which was followed by a concert tour in Israel. Palestinian evangelical Christians were critical of this endeavour, for they felt that it marginalized and excluded them from their global evangelical faith family. The frictions between the Palestinian evangelical community and Hillsong United illustrate how dominant evangelical actors create an imagination of the ‘local’, which enters the imaginary of global evangelicalism (and bears material consequences). In the article, I thus argue that privileged financial and cultural resources and travel regimes lead to specific notions of geometries of power in global evangelicalism.