Age-Friendly Organisations: The Role of Organisational Culture and the Participation of Older Workers

Population ageing is a global phenomenon that has become prominent in international discourse over the past few decades. This discussion is often coupled with the economic implications of population ageing through reduced workforce participation of the older age group, increased government spending on health and pensions and reduced government income from taxes. A means of mitigating the economic costs of ageing is to lift the proportion of older individuals in the workforce and prolong working lives. This brings to the forefront an important point regarding the need for organisations to undertake changes so as to better enable the employment of older individuals and to cater for an ageing workforce. This article critically reflects on age-friendly organisational practices that can have an impact on the recruitment and retention of older individuals. It further contends that there is a need to develop a deeper understanding of factors that constitute an organisational culture geared towards the older demographic, in order for strategies and practices directed at older workers to be effective. Through this argument, the authors consolidate the literature on age-friendly organisational practices and propose a conceptual model of an age-friendly organisational culture, drawing from both functionalist and interpretivist paradigms.     

The Flipside of Sixpence: Aboriginal Stories of Hope and Reconciliation

This is Colleen Brown's last interview before her untimely death in 2002. The interview continues and extends Colleen's project to educate family therapists about Aboriginal experience and culture. In presenting Cecily's life narrative and painting, Colleen surprises us with a creative message of hope and reconciliation about the stolen generation, because Cecily expresses gratitude to the white family who brought her up. In her own words, Cecily ‘did that painting for me like the others so I could show family therapists what the other side of the coin is, the flipside’. This three‐way conversation between Colleen, Cecily and Glenn provides a contribution to the reconciliation process.     

Young Adult Moral Exemplars: The Making of Self Through Stories

The purpose of our research was to explore the differences between young adult moral exemplars and comparison individuals by studying their life stories. Moral exemplars were nominated for their extraordinary moral commitment to the social organizations where they volunteered or worked. Forty moral exemplars, along with 40 matched comparison individuals (total N=80), participated in a life narrative interview. These interviews were coded for specific narrative features such as narrative tone, awareness of others' suffering, helpers and enemies, agency and communion themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, personal ideology, and future goals. Moral exemplars differed from comparison individuals on agency themes, redemptive experiences, contamination scenes, awareness of others' suffering, enemies, ideological depth, and future goals. These findings are discussed within a narrative identity development framework.     

The Critical Shapes of Body Image: The Role of Culture and Family in the Production of Eating Disorders

Although research has pointed to the influence of culture and family in the etiology of eating disorders, few studies have examined how these influences conjoin in this process. This research explores how the family mediates cultural ideas about thinness and how the family conveys these messages to family members. Using a grounded theory approach, open‐ended interviews were conducted with 32 White, middle‐class women (with and without eating disorders) on the topic of body image and eating problems. In conjunction with this method, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) was also performed to identify family characteristics, and their specific combinations, that were associated with eating disorders. The findings indicate that a critical family environment, coercive parental control, and a dominating discourse on weight in the household are salient conditions, and their specific configurations are discussed in relationship to current theoretical conceptualizations regarding the influences of culture and family in the production of eating disorders.     

The Sociology of the Future: Tracing Stories of Technology and Time

The sociology of the future is an emerging field of inquiry that works to understand future consciousness drawing from a mix of Science & Technology Studies and the practice of foresight. Through an exploration of the theories, methodologies, and quagmires of anticipation employed in the study of nanotechnology, this piece introduces the sociology of the future and suggests some ways the field is taking definition. Exploring the future tense provides a means of taking responsibility for what is to come; yet, the movement of the social sciences into the tricky terrain of the future presents tensions. Understanding plausibility, how different communities use anticipatory knowledge, and the performative role of expectations in innovation remain areas of research rich with dilemmas and delights. As social scientists begin to weave their own accounts of futures, they should pay attention to the politics of such rendering.     

Misplaced Loyalties: The Role of Military Culture in the Breakdown of Discipline in Peace Operations*

Cet article a comme objet les manquements a la discipline au cours des opérations de paix de l'armée canadienne en Somalie et dans l'ex-Yougoslavie. L'auteure montre d'abord comment la cohésion et la loyauté - deux aspects importants de l'efficacité au combat - sont renforcées par la culture militaire canadienne, plus particulière-ment par le systeme régimentaire de l'armée canadienne. Puis elle décrit la façon dont les liens affectifs puissants propres aux normes du combat créent des unités trés cohésives qui peuvent nuire au fonctionnement d'ensemble de l'organisation. This paper examines the breakdown of discipline in two Canadian peace operations in Somalia and in the former Yugoslavia. The author shows how cohesion and loyalty, which are considered important components of combat effectiveness, are reinforced by Canadian military culture—particularly the Regimental system of the Canadian Army. The author then goes on to describe how strong affective ties, which are encouraged by combat norms, create highly cohesive units that can actually impede the good functioning of the overall organization.     

Seducing Leadership: Stories of Leadership Development

This article argues that leadership development is a process of seduction. Drawing on some stories of leadership development from my experience as participant, observer and teacher I show the ways in which certain sorts of highly valued leadership teaching contain seductive elements, including sweeping audiences off their feet and, in some contexts, forestalling critique about the content that is offered. The article also considers the extent to which seduction is a gendered performance. I conclude that, while gender and power are defining elements and constraints in how seductive pedagogical relations are constructed, there are opportunities for experimentation and display that potentially subvert gendered stereotypes. Seeing the seduction in leadership can help us understand leadership and leadership teaching better, and can open the way to doing it differently — to experimentation and innovation.     

团购也需擦亮眼

A foreign company in East China＇s Shanghai Municipality employs Andrew Magee, a young French man, and his younger brother, Michael Magee. In their spare time, the Magees attend a Chineselanguage course.     

Love Stories

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绿色经济:发展中国家成功的故事(下)

印度农村生态基础设施印度 2005年颁发的<国家农村就业保障法>是一个有保障的工资就业方案,以加强农村地区被边缘化家庭的生活保障.<保障法>由农村发展部实施,直接牵动着穷人的生活,有助于促进包容性增长,也有助于恢复和维护生态基础设施.     

绿色经济:发展中国家成功的故事(上)

绿色经济是指既能促进人类福祉和社会平等,同时又能显著降低环境风险和生态牺牲的经济.绿色经济的特点是通过经济部门的大量投资加强地球的自然资本或者减少生态牺牲和环境风险,并且经济部门是以这些条件为基础的.     

Contending Stories: Narrative in Social Movements

Study of stories and storytelling in social movements can contribute to our understanding of recruitment that takes place outside formal movement organizations; social movement organizations' ability to withstand strategic setbacks; and movements' impacts on mainstream politics. This paper draws on several cases to illuminate the yields of such study and to provide alternatives to the overbroad, uncritical, and astructural understandings of narrative evident in some recent writings. It also urges attention to the role of literary devices in sociological analyses of collective action.     

Reconceptualizing Social Movement Abeyance: The Role of Internal Processes and Culture in Cycles of Movement Abeyance and Resurgence

Abstract

Questions of social movement emergence and decline have long been of interest to social movement analysts, but discussions related to social movement endurance are relatively new to the field. In this work, we explicitly adapt Verta Taylor's concept of abeyance to a local grassroots social movement organization (SMO), Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians (SICK), that has endured for 18 years and achieved success in multiple campaign issues. Arguing that an unfavorable external political climate is not the only reason for an SMO to decline in mass membership and mass-based challenges, we use the concept of abeyance to explain the SMO's continuity as a product of internal SMO processes and organizational culture. Our findings indicate that the grassroots organization emerged, won considerable victories, and then continued to survive rather than disbanding. The SMO subsequently underwent two cycles of abeyance-and-resurgence, which we assess using Taylor's set of five characteristics of movement abeyance structures. We conclude that some of the abeyance structures are applicable to a grassroots movement while others are not.     

Trauma,Gender, and the Stories of Jewish Women: The Other Within

This paper explores how trauma (individual, cultural, and historical) experiences and gender stories of women behaving more like men become intermingled. Drawing upon stories of women in Jewish literature (Beruriah and Yentl), psychoanalytic theories of gender, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, the author unpacks how women carry vulnerability and helplessness whereas men are seen as stronger and agentic. The author believes that gender performance and passing highlight how gender becomes enlisted as a mode of traumatic transmission and possibly 1 type of internal psychic reparative resolution to complex traumatic experiences.