Tracing Context as Relational, Discursive Accomplishment

Abstract

This chapter problematizes traditional approaches to understanding context as an analytical category, and, instead, it suggests engaging it differently, as members’ concern continually made present through particular kinds of attention and action. The authors elaborate on this via illustrative empirical exemplars from shadowing-based study of chief executives in the UK’s National Health Service. These examples demonstrate the ways in which context was actively made to matter by CEOs making connections and giving particular meaning in district work situations. Building on these examples, it offers a number of analytical and methodological contributions, as well as outlines implications, including those for the literature on managerial work, power, and relational prospective sensemaking.