{"title":"Texts and the institutions of municipal government: The power of texts in the public process of land development","authors":"S. Turner","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523562","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the textual practices organizing participation in municipal planning and its public discourse. The process in which the assessment and public approval of private land development takes place is a complex sphere of actions involving local government professional staff, clerks, lawyers, private developers and consultants, provincial government staff in several ministries, publicly elected officials and, often, local residents. It is part of the institutions of municipal government. What takes place publicly co-ordinates and characterizes individual actions as part of the institution of local government and its ‘politics'.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127883796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Talks on tracks - debating urban infrastructure projects","authors":"Hervé Corvellec","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523551","url":null,"abstract":"This paper retraces and analyzes the debate around a major infrastructure project in central Stockholm, the construction of a third railroad track over the islet of Riddarholm. Using the analytical framework of the New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958), it shows that the debate is not only a matter of diverging views about the necessity or the impact of the project but, as well, a matter of epistemology. Whereas both sides tend to refer to similar values and make use of matching rhetorical devices, they differ quite radically as to which knowledge they regard as valid and as to how they have organized their approach to the debate. Demonstration faces argumentation, the New Rhetoric suggests, as its contribution to our understanding of the genesis of urban projects.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123201135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Safety for battered women in a textually mediated legal system","authors":"E. Pence","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523558","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a shift in legal advocacy approaches employed by activists in the US battered women's movement that would take into account how the work of criminal justice professionals (police officers, probation officers, judges, and prosecutors) is organized. While judicial procedures may be more successful in bringing domestic abusers to justice than in the past, they are less successful in producing safety for the victims of abusers. Using institution ethnography as a research strategy, I explore aspects of how the work of practitioners in the police and court system is organized in ways that are not observable to activists working with the victims of abuse. An important aspect of the institutional process are its texts. Texts, as they are produced and processed in people's work settings, coordinate and regulate the different phases of practitioners’ work. In these work processes, organized and limited by formalized texts, women's experience of violence and intimidation is erased and issues of their safety disappear. In conclusion, I propose a method of engaging criminal justice professionals and community advocates in an investigation of local criminal justice settings with the intent of making changes in practices which fail to attend to the safety needs of women who are battered.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128312499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Troubled hearts, care pathways and hospital restructuring: Exploring health services research as active knowledge","authors":"E. Mykhalovskiy","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523561","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the socially active character of contemporary forms of expertise through an institutional ethnographic analysis of health services research. The paper draws primarily on interview research to investigate how health services research helps shape text-mediated relations linking government health-care policy with local reform initiatives. In the paper, I focus on the use of a particular research report by managers, physicians, and others at a community hospital in Toronto, Canada as part of their efforts to standardize and reduce the duration of care provided to heart attack patients. I discuss how, through its intertextual presence, health services research helps to co-ordinate medical and managerial practices and rationalities into medico-administrative relations. I offer two examples of this process. The first focuses on the relations co-ordinated through the textual observance of inefficiency. The second addresses how the report helped resolve the problem of physicians’ resistance to reforming cardiac care. My analysis contributes to current perspectives on the relationship between discourse and action.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130365276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowledge management and the missing tradition - on the role of tradition, knowledge and competencies in industrial production","authors":"L. Henriksen","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523553","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523553","url":null,"abstract":"The ideas of knowledge management, competence strategy and learning organisation have been dominating debates on organisational behaviour and management recently. This article argues that most contributions to this debate are based on a quite naïve conception of knowledge and competencies. One important problem is the neglect of tradition. Through an analysis of the conventional views of knowledge and competencies and through a rehabilitation of tradition the article shows how tradition can provide us with another conception of knowledge management and related ideas. Two case studies from small Danish manufacturing companies are presented in order to show how tradition functions even in the most modem organisations.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133025599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Textual accounts, ruling action: the intersection of knowledge and power in the routine conduct of community nursing work","authors":"M. Campbell","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523559","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reflects critically on nursing knowledge-based action, its increasingly scientific and text-based manifestations, and the relevance of these practices for power and powerlessness in nursing. Smith's concept of text-mediated relations of ruling (1990. 1999) provides the analytic frame to investigate how nursing case managers articulate public health services and home support for people with disabilities to specific policies, including fiscal policy. An institutional ethnography shows how a nurse's routine text-mediated assessment and exercise of professional judgement establishes a ruling relation with a client (against her intention), as he is “written up” in organizational texts. The analysis of assessment texts spells out how a local perspective is subdued to the ruling discourse. A general argument is made on the basis of this analysis: nurses participate in ruling through the textualization of their knowledge and in the process it dominates their knowing and acting. An ideological construction of nursing knowledge results. The paper suggests what this means for the profession, nurses themselves, and their clients.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"191 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115056432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Texts in action: how nurses are doing the fiscal work of health care reform","authors":"J. Rankin","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523560","url":null,"abstract":"Canada's publicly insured system of socialized health care is coming under intense scrutiny by governments firmly focused on the politics of national indebtedness and public spending. Contemporary health care reforms aimed at cutting costs and increasing productivity place new emphasis on “official knowledge” constituted through particular textual practices. Since 1994 the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) has become a powerful regulator of patient care. It has entered business-like accountability and rationing practices based on competitive, market-like comparisons into Canadian hospitals in order to “assist leaders in the health sector make informed decisions” (CIHI 2000). Using Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's (1987) Institutional Ethnography, with a specific focus explicating a Smithian textual analysis (1990a, 1990b, 1999), this paper explores, in depth, one feature of how a business genre is being inserted into the everyday practices of nurses and doctors who work with the frail elderly in a small community hospital in British Columbia.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"608 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116465121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Organizing creation: The role of musical text","authors":"L. D. Warren","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523563","url":null,"abstract":"This study considers how the work of an amateur orchestra creating a concert performance of a Haydn's concerto is organized by the musical score. The method of inquiry which places the text in the centre of the analysis explores how the surrounding social relations and discourses are carried into an actual work-in-progress; in this process, the score is a link between the macro level of musical discourse embodied in other texts, the related macro level of performance history, and the micro level of individual performance, finally connecting the individual work of actual composers to the exposition of that work. The study furthers existing ethnomethodological and phenomenological examinations of orchestral performance by exposing some of the relations underlying the taken-for-granted ‘common ground’ of the score.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123704701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The sense of violence and the absence of consolation","authors":"Warren Smith, V. Fournier","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523555","url":null,"abstract":"The paper is an attempt to engage with our contemplations of violence and the failure of familiar explanations to capture these contemplations. We begin our explorations of these familiar accounts by examining contemporary debates on media violence but find these problematic. By reducing media violence to mere spectacle or, on the contrary, by seeing such violence as desensitising and destructive, the various positions in the debates deprive violence of meaning and fail to address our fascination with violence. Other explanations that seek to attach meaning or utility to violence, be it economic, symbolic or moral, equally fail to convince. There is always an excess that transcends these explanations, an excess that is ill-captured by the notion of ‘gratuitous violence’ often deployed to condemn violence that does not make sense. Furthermore, the various accounts of violence we review tend to consider violence only in terms of its victims and perpetrators rather than the (fortunately) more common position of the observer. In the remaining of the paper, we try to say something about the sense of violence without investing it with deterministic or moralistic implications. This leads us to re-interpret the notion of desensitisation; for the observer, desensitisation indexes a lack of sensation of violence. This lack of sensation, our inability as observers to sense and make sense of violence, we argue, brings about moral questioning and acuity rather than moral indifference.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124929034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"(Un)willing to resist? the discursive production of local workplace opposition","authors":"Anshuman Prasad, P. Prasad","doi":"10.1080/10245280108523554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10245280108523554","url":null,"abstract":"Workplace resistance is conventionally regarded as the product of worker consciousness and intentionality. More recent studies of resistance have questioned this notion, seeing workplace resistance as emerging out of more spontaneous and non-calculative types of action. This paper examines the discursive production of routine resistance in an organization, showing how notions of employee intentionality and non-intentionality were categories through which resistance itself was produced. We look at an alleged case of sabotage, the enactment of “careful carelessness” and “dumb resistance” as complex discursive productions of both resistance and intentionality. We conclude with a brief discussion of implications for managerial control.","PeriodicalId":303569,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Cultures, Organizations and Societies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114564752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}