ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1214-8371
Current Organisations
University of the West of England
,
James Cook University
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-04-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2009
Abstract: Whereas `distance learning' has often been seen as the poor relation of face-to- face educational encounters, this article suggests that paradoxically, this mode of delivery can offer significant advantages to those aiming to develop highly situated practices, such as leadership capability. In particular, the `distance' from the delivering educational establishment becomes `proximity' or an affordance in terms of where the learning is actually applied, and the constraints of the programme's structure enable greater freedom on the part of participants as they choose which aspects of theory they focus on. The argument presented here is based on research conducted to gain insight into participants' experience of a two-year Masters in Leadership Studies delivered primarily through on-line, web-based technology. We conclude that despite appearing to be a `transmission'-based learning intervention, the on-line mechanism fosters an experience similar to action learning in its engagement with participants' contexts, and also enables a more `constructivist' approach to learning about the practice, as well as the theory, of leadership.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 10-04-2007
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2009
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2008
Publisher: Resilience Alliance, Inc.
Date: 2015
Publisher: American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
Date: 08-07-2015
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-04-2015
Abstract: Leadership is heralded as being critical to addressing the “crisis of governance” facing the Earth's natural systems. While political, economic, and corporate discourses of leadership have been widely and critically interrogated, narratives of environmental leadership remain relatively neglected in the academic literature. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, to highlight the centrality and importance of environmental science's construction and mobilization of leadership discourse. Second, to offer a critical analysis of environmental sciences' deployment of leadership theory and constructs. The authors build on a review of leadership research in environmental science that reveals how leadership is conceptualized and analyzed in this field of study. It is argued that environmental leadership research reflects rather narrow framings of leadership. An analytical typology proposed by Keith Grint is employed to demonstrate how any singular framing of environmental leadership as person, position, process, result, or purpose is problematic and needs to be supplanted by a pluralistic view. The paper concludes by highlighting key areas for improvement in environmental leadership research, with emphasis on how a political ecology of environmental crisis narratives contributes to a more critical body of research on leadership in environmental science.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2002
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2002
Abstract: This article attempts a critical reappraisal of the part played by `trust' in management education. Our main contention is that trust is being perceptibly eroded by a range of factors that find their genesis in a wider set of social relations within contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, we set about trying to account for the diminution of trust in social theoretical terms. Having constructed an analytical matrix we then apply our reasoning to specific instances of mistrust in an educational context. Drawing on documented student reflections and other qualitative data we seek to demonstrate how broader social trends are being `holographically' rehearsed and reproduced in the micro-politics of the university classroom. Our `representative anecdotes' give the lie to the increasing regulation and legalization of educational relationships. The concluding section adopts a deliberately polemical tone and we end by asking some searching questions concerning the future of management education in universities.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-03-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 25-09-2017
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 15-06-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-02-2022
DOI: 10.1177/13505076211070359
Abstract: This article explores a conceptually modified notion of liminality in order to make better sense of contemporary ‘flexible’ working life. Previous conceptualizations of liminality rely on the assumed existence of socially sustained boundaries and the possibility of boundary spanning. Under conditions of liquid modernity, however, boundaries or thresholds have been destabilized to the point of collapse. Nonetheless, in iduals still feel the need to establish and maintain intersubjective boundaries to preserve their own sense of well-being. To understand the new predicament faced by employees, we reconceptualise liminality for liquid times – through the notion of liquid liminality – and, simultaneously, problematize dominant conceptions of work-life balance. The implications that liquid liminality carries for the notion of flexible knowledge work are discussed. Our auto-ethnographic visual study of an academic returning from maternity leave uses a socio-material lens to exemplify the struggles of the contemporary flexible knowledge worker. It also demonstrates how the constant transition between workplace and home life is freighted with anxiety and exhaustion. We also outline opportunities for establishing new learning habits that follow from our theoretical framing and empirical analysis.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 06-11-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2003
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-05-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-1999
Abstract: This paper seeks to introduce the oeuvre of the Polish science fiction author, Stanislaw Lem, whose work is argued to carry significance for students of organizational conduct. Singling out his most famous novel, Solaris, for particular attention, a critical interpretation is offered that selectively highlights Lem's epistemological and ontological pre-occupations concerning scientific inquiry and the human condition. These concerns are seen to resonate with contemporary issues in the field of organization studies. In particular, the rhetorical role of mimesis, viewed as a synthesis of rational and non-rational human motives, within Solaris is taken to inform a wide range of human conduct. The paper concludes by calling for a realist mode of organizational discourse that explores the dialectical relationship between what it characterizes as `solar' and `lunar' dimensions of human behaviour. A new challenge to organization studies will be not simply to learn from the substantive concerns of literary genres such as science fiction, but also to aspire after the narrative skills of their leading exponents.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-1995
DOI: 10.1177/135050769502600402
Abstract: This work documents a reflexive study of workplace talk. It attempts to trace the conversational encounters of a management educator whilst engaged in routine academic activities. Concepts drawn from Speech-act theory and Actor-network theory are found useful in interpreting transcribed conversational episodes and pursuing performative and translational features of their evolution. Analytical emphasis falls on the dual characteristic of talk's operation in both accomplishing pragmatic ends and facilitating ritual sociability. In considering the textual representation of workplace talk, it is argued that context-less transcription of talk is boring. Despite the legitimate analytical ambitions of ethnomethodology, the transcription protocol of conversation analysts does little to remedy the anaesthetic effects of drily reproduced exchanges. An inquiry into styles of representation adopted by playwrights and screenplay writers is used to inform an alternative approach to the representation and interpretation of dialogue.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2003
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 07-09-2015
DOI: 10.1108/IJSHE-04-2014-0054
Abstract: – This paper aims to report on findings from the first phase of a longitudinal study of undergraduate business students’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions concerning sustainability issues. – To improve understanding of the potential effects of changes in the curriculum, business students enrolled during the academic year prior to a redesigned, sustainability-informed, curriculum were surveyed. Familiarity with key sustainability terms was tested using a semi-structured questionnaire applied across two c uses of James Cook University, Australia. Quantitative data were complemented by use of open-ended questions that yielded qualitative insight into a range of student knowledge, attitudes, behaviours and normative influences relating to sustainability and climate change. – Findings reflect naïve awareness of the potential impact of in idual contributions to sustainability and environmental challenges. They reveal a tendency to regard major issues as beyond personal control and to view solutions as being the responsibility of others. This is coupled with reluctance to consider major lifestyle changes. – Universities are increasing their focus on sustainability-related issues and the ways in which these can be effectively communicated via curricula. This paper carries implications for this societal agenda, particularly in relation to the need to address disconnections between awareness of issues, personal relevance and effective strategies for addressing sustainability issues. – The findings shed fresh light on the attitudes and behavioural dispositions of undergraduate business students and could help guide the development and delivery of curriculum content.
Publisher: IGI Global
Date: 2008
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-564-1.CH012
Abstract: Management has historically sought to restrict the options for manual workers to rebel by simplifying and limiting their jobs according to Tayloristic principles. The need for their experience and knowledge has been consciously minimized, having been relocated instead to supervisors and middle managers, working routines and machines. In high-tech industries, by contrast, the workers’ fundamental contribution to the enterprise is their very knowledge, offering other possibilities for rebellious activities or, at least, for rebellious plans. This chapter focuses on one of the common denominators in the exchanges among programmers, namely the concept of knowledge: how to get it, who has got it (and who hasn’t), what kinds are important and its role in their conflict with management.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2004
Abstract: The influence of astrology and alchemy on organizational conduct has not hitherto attracted much serious social scientific attention. Retro-organizational theory licenses paying closer attention to topics that are systematically occluded by modern knowledge regimes and is invoked in this article to examine the manner in which premodern cosmologies underpin certain contemporary organizational practices. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator ® (MBTI) is presented as a particularly conspicuous ex le of how the modern may be suffused by the premodern. An astro-genealogical account of the development of the MBTI ® is offered, tracing its Jungian origins and exposing structural debts to Renaissance thinking and earlier forms of symbolism. The article concludes with a consideration of Latour’s claim that ‘we have never been modern’ and suggests ways in which his hybridization critique of modernity connects with astrological and alchemical cosmology.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2012
Publisher: International Association of Management Spirituality & Religion
Date: 03-2012
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 16-03-2016
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2006
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2000
DOI: 10.1080/713655370
Publisher: Resilience Alliance, Inc.
Date: 2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-10-2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2000
Abstract: The authors of this article are actively involved as teachers and administrators on a taught `Master's' degree in `International Management' at Oxford Brookes University. In this article, we offer a series of critical reflections on the educational process that has resulted from our close engagement with students on the Brookes MSc. In addition to careful personal introspection, with students' permission we draw on data collected from assignments and observation of tutor-led exercises. The outcome of our observation and reflection is twofold: (1) we find much of the existing international management literature to be considerably lacking, complacent and potentially harmful in a number of respects (2) we report on the critical insights we have gleaned into the motives of students and tutors on this kind of programme. In response to these criticisms, we suggest educators might fruitfully seek to `repoliticize' their approach. Such re-politicization would entail two strategies: one reflexively intellectual and one directly participative. The educator might strive, for instance, to pay due reflexive deference to the historical, social and geographical context of the knowledge and skills he or she brings to the learning arena. The second strategy necessitates close encounters in the classroom: a meeting of and between tutors and students in an attempt to explore constructively and perhaps even transcend difference.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-2006
Abstract: This article reports on an empirical study of a computer programmer community, focusing on online exchanges in which participants discuss the aesthetics of coding. Naturalistic data were collected during a 12-month period of non-participant observation of the software community in question. The authors estimate that approximately 200 participants are represented in the main dataset. Narrative data are presented under two interpretative rubrics: ‘programmer performatives’ and ‘commercial performativity’. We seek to demonstrate that there is the online equivalent of a great deal of intricate ‘face work’ that programmers do in their narrative exchanges. In expressing and conforming to a ‘hacker ethic’, programmer narratives simultaneously evince technical, ethical and aesthetic motives. There is frequent articulation of resistance and subversive intent expressed toward representatives of employers and employing organizations. Software engineers are acutely aware of the facets of organizational control and demands for performativity that they feel compromise their artistic endeavours. Programmers make sense of their condition ideologically both through their practical pursuit of coding ideals and by espousing a hacker ethic that legitimates their passionate engagement with coding tasks.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-03-2020
Abstract: This article contributes to the growing body of literature developed within the leadership-as-practice perspective, focusing on issues of learning and power. It draws on a co-constructed (auto)ethnographic account of an in idual’s longitudinal experience of leadership in the context of an international development project in Laos. This person’s circumstances as a non-Lao-speaking foreigner provided him with a unique opportunity to learn about and participate in the embodied, sociomaterial unfolding of leadership practice in an unfamiliar setting. The analysis examines (1) what ‘leadership learning’ involves when viewed through an ‘entative soft’ leadership-as-practice lens and (2) how in idual attempts at exercising power and influence can be understood and represented in leadership-as-practice terms. The study highlights that participants are not given equal scope to exercise power within the emerging, hybrid agency orienting the flow of leadership, and that one task of leadership learning at an in idual level is to develop reflexive knowledge about one’s own and others’ contribution to the unfolding of leadership process. Such knowledge draws increased attention to the responsibilities commensurate with attempts to exercise influence within leadership practice.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 20-01-2015
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 03-07-2020
DOI: 10.3390/SU12135403
Abstract: Traditional lifestyles of lowland rice farmers of the southern provinces of Lao People’s Democratic Republic are rapidly changing, due to two important trends. Firstly, there is a push towards modernization and commercialization of farming. Secondly, though farmers still focus on rice farming as a key activity, there is an increasing move towards ersification of livelihoods. The changes have seen the uptake of non-rice crops, livestock husbandry and forest and river utilization as well as non-farming activities. This has influenced gender relations, impacting household agricultural production decisions and lified transitional trends. To explore the processes, we analyzed data from a study of innovation adoption amongst rice farmers in southern Lao PDR. The study revealed nuances of gender-based differences in the priorities and attitudes towards farming and off-farm activities, as well as differences in behaviour related to the adoption of new practices. Women were more focused on non-farming practices and considered engaging in the modern, non-traditional, economy more so than men. Women also reported experiencing greater challenges when engaging and trading in the agricultural marketplace. The study supports the importance of taking a gendered approach to understanding the inherent complexities within agrarian change.
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 14-08-2020
DOI: 10.3390/SU12166594
Abstract: What influences farmers’ decisions to adopt agricultural technologies is an important question for international agricultural research projects. There are often interpersonal differences between women and men that influence the adoption of decisions and behaviours, but few studies in the literature focus on these factors. We describe a game-based approach to explore decision-making processes underpinning the adoption of new farming technologies and practices in Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Sowing a different rice variety is the tailored technology. The game explored adoption behaviours influencing decisions on transitioning from growing glutinous rice, a traditional variety preferred for consumption, to “white” rice for commercial export to international markets. We conducted separate game-workshops with 36 women and 36 men in 4 villages of southern Laos that were transitioning from subsistence to commercial smallholder production. The gaming exposed various possible behaviours and decisions that women and men considered. Access to resources, both assets and information, was equal for all players, yet women were found to adopt new rice varieties more readily than men and to engage in cooperative behaviours in the game situation. The study highlighted the need for further gender-sensitive research into cooperation among women in the agricultural context—an understanding beneficial for countries and regions undergoing agricultural transition.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2012
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 20-05-2020
DOI: 10.1186/S12936-020-03255-Z
Abstract: Focus for improved malaria programme performance is often placed on the technical challenges, while operational issues are neglected. Many of the operational challenges that inhibit malaria programme effectiveness can be addressed by improving communication and coordination, increasing accountability, maintaining motivation, providing adequate training and supervision, and removing bureaucratic silos. A programme of work was piloted in Zimbabwe with one malaria eliminating province, Matabeleland South in 2016–2017, and scaled up to include two other provinces, Matabeleland North and Midlands, in 2017–2018. The intervention included participatory, organization development and quality improvement methods. Workshop participants in Matabeleland South reported an improvement in data management. In Matabeleland North, motivation among nurses improved as they gained confidence in case management from training, and overall staff morale improved. There was also an improvement in data quality and data sharing. In Midlands, the poorly performing district was motivated to improve, and both participating districts became more goal-oriented. They also became more focused on monitoring their data regularly. Participants from all provinces reported having gained skills in listening, communicating, facilitating discussions, and making presentations. Participation in the intervention changed the mindset of malaria programme staff, increasing ownership and accountability, and empowering them to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and act within their sphere of influence, elevating challenges when appropriate. This pilot demonstrates that a participatory, organization development and quality improvement approach has broad ranging effects, including improving local delivery of interventions, tailoring strategies to target specific populations, finding efficiencies in the system that could not be found using the traditional top-down approach, and improving motivation and communication between different cadres of health workers. Scale-up of this simple model can be achieved and benefits sustained over time if the process is imbedded into the programme with the training of health staff who can serve as management improvement coaches. Methods to improve operational performance that are scalable at the district level are urgently needed: this approach is a possible tactic that can significantly contribute to the achievement of global malaria eradication goals.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 14-03-2023
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 20-06-2011
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 26-01-2016
Abstract: Inspiration, aspirations, attitudes, and perception of threats play a pivotal role in the way that in iduals associate themselves with natural environments. These sentiments affect how people connect to natural places, including their behaviours, perceived responsibility, and the management interventions they support. World Heritage Areas hold an important place in the lives of people who visit, aspire to visit, or derive a sense of security and well-being from their existence. Yet, the connection between people and special places is rarely quantified and policymakers find it difficult to incorporate these human dimensions into decision-making processes. Here we describe the personal concern and connection that Australians have with the Great Barrier Reef and discuss how the results may help with its management. We utilize a statistically representative s le of Australian residents ( n = 2,002) and show empirically that climate change is perceived to be the biggest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and that the Great Barrier Reef inspires Australians, promotes pride, and instills a sense of in idual identity and collective responsibility to protect it. An increased understanding of the high levels of personal connection to iconic natural resources may help managers to enhance public support for protecting climate-sensitive systems within Australia and around the world.
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Date: 29-06-2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2013
Abstract: The article considers the role of dreams as social, rather than in idual, phenomena and suggests that as such they may serve as resources for ‘future imaginings’ with respect to potentially devastating consequences of climate change (and other transgressions of planetary boundaries). Adopting a socio-analytical perspective, it contemplates the possibility of a societal level ‘cosmology episode’ caused by catastrophic climate change a critical point of rupture in the meaning-making process which leaves local rationalities in ruin. Drawing on a ‘representative anecdote’, the article finds allegorical parallels between the cultural collapse of a traditional indigenous culture and the impending threat of ecocrisis currently facing humanity. The possibilities of seeing and imagining offered by collective forms of dreaming are explored alongside development of a non-anthropocentric ethics. Our focus is on ways of sensing, thinking and talking about climate change that are less dependent on a rational conscious subject. The article thus enquires into what cultural means or resources might be available to (post)modern Western societies that, like the shamanic dream-vision of certain traditional cultures, might enable them to draw on non-anthropocentric sensibilities and organize responses to an impending cultural crisis. We conclude by offering Gordon Lawrence’s social dreaming matrix as one possible medium through which to imagine and see beyond climate change catastrophe.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 02-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2007
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 11-03-2017
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-07-2016
Abstract: This paper responds to recent calls in the leadership studies literature for anthropologically informed empirical research on leadership phenomena in non-Western and non-Anglophone settings. The authors have worked extensively on rural development projects in Laos and draw on ethnographic ‘observant-participation’ and interview data to explore how leadership is construed in a contested terrain where traditional concepts intersect with those of official government and international development agencies. A theoretical discussion of linguistic relativity and the socially constitutive nature of language in general is offered as background justification for studying the language of leadership in context. The anthropological distinction between etic and emic operations is also introduced to differentiate between various interpretative positions that can be taken in relation to the fieldwork and data discussed in this paper. The study shows how difficult it can be for native Lao speakers to find words to describe leadership or give designations to ‘leaders’ outside of officially sanctioned semantic and social fields. A key finding of the study is that, viewed from the perspective of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, authority and leadership are coextensive. This social fact is reflected in the linguistic restrictions on what can and cannot be described as leadership in Laos.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2018
Publisher: International Association of Management Spirituality & Religion
Date: 12-2010
DOI: 10.1080/14766086.2010.524727
Abstract: This article offers a theoretical contribution to the current debate on workplace spirituality by: (a) providing a selective critical review of scholarship, research and corporate practices which treat workplace spirituality in performative terms, that is, as a resource or means to be manipulated instrumentally and appropriated for economic ends (b) extending Etzioni’s analysis of complex organizations and proposing a new category, the “spiritual organization”, and (c) positing three alternative positions with respect to workplace spirituality that follow from the preceding critique. The spiritual organization can be taken to represent the development of a trajectory of social technologies that have sought, incrementally, to control the bodies, minds, emotions and souls of employees. Alternatively, it might be employed to conceptualize the way in which employees use the workplace as a site for pursuing their own spiritualities (a reverse instrumentalism). Finally, we consider the possible incommensurability of “work organization” and “spirituality” discourses.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2006
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-1999
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2012
Abstract: This article explores the transition of the theological and philosophical concept of theoria—contemplation—to the modern notion of theory. Theory derives linguistically from theoria and retains a connection with knowledge. However, it has lost and, moreover, typically excludes theoria’s focus upon the direct experiential knowledge of the ine. In keeping with the thrust of this special issue, we focus on how the secularization of the theological concept of theoria defines in a profound manner the limits and possibilities of thinking and theorizing work and organization. We examine the nature of theoria and the transitions that have led to its metamorphosis. It is suggested that dominant forms of theorizing work and organization are typically performative (Lyotard, 1984). This is illustrated, somewhat ironically, through a review of Spiritual Leadership Theory, which appears to promote spiritual leadership without contemplation.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Start Date: 2020
End Date: 2022
Funder: University of California, San Francisco
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2018
End Date: 2020
Funder: University of California, San Francisco
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2015
End Date: 2016
Funder: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2013
End Date: 2016
Funder: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2012
End Date: 2012
Funder: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2015
End Date: 2020
Funder: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2017
End Date: 2018
Funder: University of California, San Francisco
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2016
End Date: 2017
Funder: University of California, San Francisco
View Funded Activity