Constructing nation: national narratives of history teachers in Ukraine

This paper scrutinizes history narratives as a practice of a specific kind of nation-building and analyzes the role of history teachers in this process. Based on 60 semi-structural interviews with history teachers in Ukraine, this paper analyzes three major national narratives used by history teachers to produce specific meaning of social identity among school pupils. This paper shows how history teachers reproduce national identity in their classrooms by altering the teaching program and textbook narratives and by promoting their vision of a nation, rights of specific groups to participate in nation-building process and defining enemies and allies.     

Those Who Pay the Piper Calls the Tune: Meta-Organisation and Capacities of the Third Sector in Migration Policies

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In this paper, we examine the changing landscape of migration policy work conducted by civil society organisations (CSOs)...     

Out of mind,out of sight? Leading distributed workers to ensure health and safety

ABSTRACT

Current frameworks of leadership are based on face-to-face interaction. A growing number of workers work away from their main location of work; this makes it challenging for leaders to ensure the health and safety of distributed workers. In the present study, we explore the relationship between line managers’ health and safety leadership and distributed workers’ health and safety behaviours. We also explore the organisational procedures and practices that may enhance the impact of health and safety leadership. We included a broad range of distributed workers (in analyses, minimum N?=?626) from 11 organisations. We found that health-and-safety-specific leadership was positively related to distributed workers’ self-rated health, safety compliance and safety proactivity. These relationships were augmented by distributed workers’ sense of being included in the workplace. Knowledge sharing among colleagues was associated with safety compliance when health-and-safety-specific leadership was low. Our results indicate that one way of addressing the challenges of distributed working may be through line managers putting health and safety on the agenda.     

Organizational interventions: A research-based framework for the evaluation of both process and effects

Abstract

Organizational interventions are often recommended when organizations want to improve employee psychological health and well-being. Research, however, has revealed inconsistent results and reviewers have called for research on why interventions either bring about desired change or fail to do so. Answering the “how” and “why” of intervention outcomes requires a close examination of the elements that hinder or facilitate desired outcomes, thus moving beyond evaluation of only the overall effects. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework based on recent intervention research and process-oriented organization theory. The framework offers suggestions for which elements to include when evaluating organizational interventions. Within the framework, elements crucial to intervention evaluation are grouped into four overarching categories that we argue are crucial to evaluation over the five phases of an intervention programme. These categories are: the organizational “actors”; the mental models of those actors; the context of the intervention; and intervention design and process. Evaluation during the process as well as of the overall effects, as recommended by this framework, should throw light on what works for whom, why, how and under which circumstances.