Tag: Organisation studies

Academic Spotlight: Jenna Pandeli

Author ripleywk | Posted on

In this article we speak with Jenna Pandeli, an active member of Bristol Leadership and Change Centre, who has recently been promoted to Associate Professor in Organization Studies at UWE, Bristol

With a notable focus on prison labour and invisible forms of work, she has received the esteemed SAGE prize for Excellence and Innovation in 2020 for her ground-breaking publication, ‘Captives in Cycles of Invisibility’. This recognition underscores her commitment to shedding light on the intricacies of work within prison contexts and highlighting often unnoticed aspects of labour. She talks about her journey as an academic, her current projects and what she sees in her future.

Good Morning Jenna, Thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today. Can you tell us a little about your background, how you got into academic research and how your research interests developed?

I completed my PhD at Cardiff University in 2015. My undergraduate Business Ethics lecturer suggested that I apply for an ESRC scholarship to complete a PhD. When we looked into it, all the scholarships had gone and I assumed that was it, so I started my job as a waitress and started to try and figure out what I might do with my life. My lecturer called me up and told me that someone had dropped out and a space was available, so I quickly came up with a research proposal, submitted it and was successful! It’s like it was meant to be.

My initial proposal was to look at anti-consumer subcultures – exploring people who practice ‘Freeganism’ (people who get their food etc. from supermarket bins in protest to capitalism and over consumption). I researched this for my master’s dissertation, it was a really interesting (and quite scary!) project, but I decided it wasn’t quite for me and looked into other potential research projects to pursue.

I started thinking about people in prison and their job prospects after prison…If I was going to spend several years focusing on something it was going to have to be something that was interesting, something that mattered to me and something I felt was meaningful. And the more I dug into this topic, the more I started to look at prison labour. There were a few fantastic pieces of journalism on the topic, and I thought it was a topic that required greater investigation. And that was it, I was hooked! So, my PhD research was a 10-month ethnographic study exploring prisoners experiences of completing privately contracted prison labour, I referred to them as ‘Orange Collar Workers’ (combining ‘blue collar work’ with the orange jumpsuit synonymous with prisoners). I applied for a job at UWE at the end of my PhD and managed to convince them to give me a job and have been here ever since…going on 8 years now.

You have a particular focus on Organizational Ethnography when conducting research. Why did you choose this method over others?

To be honest, I just can’t imagine researching in any other way. Obviously, I still incorporate other methods too but at its core, I want to know about peoples experiences, I want to see people in action. When I speak to students they often talk about ‘picking’ a method, but really, you don’t have a lot of choice in the methods you choose; I think a lot of it comes down to your outlook and views on the world and society, the questions you want to find the answers too, the things you want to know more about.

..a lot of it comes down to your outlook and views on the world and society, the questions you want to find the answers too, the things you want to know more about. I always find myself asking the How? Why? What?..

I always find myself asking the How? Why? What? Questions and I always want to chat with people. I undertook ethnography for both my master and PhD and even undertook observations for an A level Sociology class before I really even knew much about methods. Even when I’m not doing ethnography, I am still writing about ethnography. I edited a book last year with my wonderful friends Neil Sutherland and Hugo Gaggiotti and contributed chapters that look at conducting dangerous fieldwork and just really unpicking what ethnography is. I am currently writing a paper that reflects on gender in ethnography. My co-author, Rafael Alcadipani, and I explore how completing ethnography in hyper-masculine organizations is influenced by the gender of the researcher – it’s pretty cool. I’ll be presenting it at the EGOS conference next month. It’s wonderful getting to work with amazing people who share these interests.

Tell us more about your research and research projects, what are projects you are working on right now?

At the moment I am focusing on two main projects:

I am working with a charity called Project Remake to deliver enterprise education to previously incarcerated people. I was put in touch with Project Remake last year and we realised that we could help each other. They are an absolutely incredible charity doing really life changing things for people who have been in prison. They provide an 8-week course on starting your own business, working with amazing people from industry and academia and then the participants are given the opportunity to start a paid work placement for 12 weeks, an opportunity to pitch their business idea to experts to gain feedback, and lots of the participants go on to stay at the firm they completed their placement with. I audited the most recent course and knew I needed to be involved. So, we (Lynda Williams and I) applied to the City and Guilds Foundation for funding, and they have been amazing. They loved the collaboration and so they have awarded us funding for year one of the project. This will involve 3 small intakes to join the course, with UWE leading on the 8-week course delivery. The funding also allows me to undertake research on the project and explore its impact on participants self-efficacy, their employment, and its impact on reoffending. We will start the project in September this year, so it’s going to be a very busy summer preparing for the course and the research, and a very busy and exciting year ahead!

The second project I am involved in is called: Maternity Leave During a Global Pandemic: The Black Box of Invisible Work. I am working with two amazing colleagues, Chloe Tarrabain and Mahwish Khan. All three of us gave birth during the covid pandemic to our first babies. We all gave birth in 2020 and I think it’s safe to say, it was incredibly tough. I know bringing a new baby home is tough regardless but doing it in almost total isolation was nearly impossible. I think the trauma that a lot of women experienced during this time is going to stay with them forever. My little boy is almost 3 and I’m still angry at how difficult that first year was; barely seeing anyone, only meeting outdoors (pretty difficult to do in December with a 3-month-old baby!), with the crippling fear of this virus killing lots of people whilst being told that as a pregnant woman, you are vulnerable. We all came back to work after our maternity leave and talked about how we survived maternity leave during covid and felt like we really needed to talk to women who had experienced this too and give them a voice. So, we have now interviewed 13 women. Our interviewees have a lot to say and even now, reading back over the interviews has reduced me to tears. They are really harrowing experiences and very close to home. So yes, I think this is a really important and personal project for me. We received HEIF funding for this project to engage with relevant stakeholders.

..we don’t want to hide this research in academia; we think it’s important to engage with organisations, charities, and women to disseminate this research and try to make it meaningful..

We obviously want to publish about this research in academic journals etc. but we don’t want to hide this research in academia; we think it’s important to engage with organisations, charities, and women to disseminate this research and try to make it meaningful. So, thanks to our HEIF Funding and our wonderful BLCC research centre, we are creating an accessible research report and short animated video so that we can share our findings and recommendations widely.

Do you have any projects you would like to work on in the future? Any collaborations?

For the foreseeable future, I think I am going to have my hands pretty full with both of these projects. I am also working on two research papers from my PhD research with colleagues – the gender paper I mentioned earlier and a paper on neoliberalism and prison labour with Richard Longman from the OU. When it comes to interesting projects and ideas, I tend to get a bit over excited and say yes to everything and I am realising that’s not always the best approach as it’s so tough to do things well when you spread yourself too thin. So, for now, I plan to commit to my current projects and try to avoid taking on too much else until they are completed. BUT…. After that, I’m not quite sure yet… potentially a bigger project on invisible work during maternity leave. Our current project specifically focuses on maternity leave in Covid and is only a small project, so I think we would really like to look at this on a bigger scale.

You can find out more about Jenna, her publications and how to get in touch here.

The Social Imaginary: Rethinking the nature and purpose of social science

Author ripleywk | Posted on

Christoforos’ expertise spans various fields, including philosophy, sociological theory, theories of the self and organization studies. In this blog Christoforos discusses his recently published book “Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse: On the Fundamental Predicament of Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences” written and developed as part of his current project exploring the possibility socio-theoretical anti-realism as an alternative approach to social ontology.

Christoforos Bouzanis, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies

The field of the social sciences is a fragmented terrain of disagreements, often fuelled by mutual ignorance of the tendencies in other fields and disciplines. In this chaotic landscape, with “mountains” of books and papers that scarcely link to other specialties, there is one battle that stands out – let’s call it the mother of all battles in the social sciences – between those researchers who think that we can provide non-biased analyses of clear data, and those researchers who think that we can never eliminate suppositions or assumptions from the choices we make about our topics of enquiry, our methodologies and/or relevant variables to investigate.

The first perspective is characterized by a belief in drawing objective and unbiased conclusions in social scientific reasoning. The second perspective, on the other hand, often draws on theoretical traditions or schools of thought (or research philosophies or “paradigms”) in an effort to reflect on the ontologies (key assumptions about what exists in a domain of reality) and epistemologies (key assumptions about the possibility and status of scientific knowledge that we can achieve in a domain of reality) that influence the rationale of researchers’ steps and “observations” in conducting social research.

This book intends to contribute to this debate by taking the side of the latter perspective. It emphasises the need to reflect on ontological and epistemological assumptions in social research and social philosophy and emphasises the idea of the a priori status of social ontology – the idea that our implicit or explicit core theories about the nature of social reality are centrally placed in the web of our beliefs and thus necessarily inform social research and enquiry. It explains that ontologies are theories of being that theoretically systematise the world-imageries that are more or less shared by the various scientific and philosophical communities. For this reason ontologies are cognitionally (though not necessarily temporally) prior to epistemology, methodology and scientific findings – as the world-views that these ontological schemes systematise set the limits of the existent and the possible.

I argue that this is a generic principle: shared world-imageries – whether philosophical, scientific or lay ones – shape the limits of action for all social agents. This book delves into ongoing discussions in philosophy and the social sciences to explore key ideas such as scientific realism, critical realism, social constructionism, and socio-theoretical pragmatism,  and presents an alternative perspective called “anti-realist social ontology”.

Traditionally, realism asserts that the world exists independently of our minds and theories. This viewpoint extends to the social realm, where social realists argue that social structures and institutions possess their own powers, influencing our actions and thoughts. According to this view, these powerful social forms resist intentional changes, and people are unable to alter them.  The main political message here is that people cannot intentionally change social structures and institutions since these social forms are objective and mind-independent realities that can resist change.

… the anti-realist ontological model I propose offers a comprehensive framework for the discursive transformation of worldviews…

In contrast, the anti-realist ontological model I propose offers a comprehensive framework for the discursive transformation of worldviews. It emphasizes the importance of imaginative agents and their ability to reflect upon and reshape the social imaginary. In this context, the concept of “social imaginary” is redefined to undermine the idea that social forms are independent of our thoughts and theories. Furthermore, it argues for the primacy of imaginative worldviews in shaping our understanding of reality, asserting their significance over material/structural and institutional dimensions.

Ultimately, this book invites social researchers to think at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences. Our social scientific reasoning has persistent, underlying ontological assumptions and in this book I argue that this is also the case for methodological traditions in the natural sciences: there are ontological schemes that systematise world-imageries that are shared by a variety of scientific communities. The surprising element in this analysis – widely overlooked in contemporary philosophy of science – is that in our effort to examine the status of these ontological schemes (in both the natural and the social scientific fields), we necessarily utilise socio-ontological assumptions and concepts (whether implicitly or explicitly). These hidden and unexamined links between philosophy and the social sciences form the labyrinth of contemporary meta-analysis in which we remain entrapped as long as we refuse to reflect on the predicament that results from these overlaps between philosophy and social science. This book is an invitation to scholars in the humanities and social sciences to reflect on this predicament of meta-analysis.

You can acquire a copy of of “Social Imaginary and the Metaphysical Discourse” from the publisher, Routledge. Alternatively, there is a copy at UWE’s Frenchay library.

For more information about the book, Christorfors’s ideas or his research you can contact him via Email – Christoforos.Bouzanis@uwe.ac.uk

Monologue and Organization Studies

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

The following blog includes excerpts taken from a recent journal article written Professor Peter Case recently published an article (co-authored with Michal Izak and Sierk Ybema) entitled ‘Monologue and Organization Studies’, in the reputable journal Organization Studies. The article offers a critique of the dominant dialogical view of organizational communication and argues that instances of one-way communication have been neglected because of existing analytical prejudices. 

Recent decades have witnessed a blossoming of explanatory frameworks for understanding organizations and management. Quite how we arrived at a status quo that privileges dialogue as a dominant perspective for both the descriptive and normative understanding of organization is an interesting question. Our conjecture is that one way of understanding its origins is to view its emergence against the backdrop of post-World War II political dynamics. Cold War politics led to a geopolitical standoff between the democratic principles of what we now think of as liberal democracy and, as positioned by Western powers, the freedom-stifling autocracy of the Soviet Union and Maoist Communism of a newly formed People’s Republic of China. The values of purportedly democratic systems made space for, and normatively privileged dialogue in contrast to single party authoritarianism that actively suppressed any talking back, so to speak. At least this was the Western discourse during this period; a discourse which ultimately ‘prevailed’ with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the establishment of what was hailed in the late 1980s as the Washington Consensus (Williamson, 2004) and geopolitical developments that some celebrated as the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992).

It was within this political climate and context, we contend, that dialogism in the fields of organization studies and organization theory began to emerge and flourish.

In this essay for Organization Studies, we problematize the dominant construal of organization and organizing in dialogic terms and introduce a complementary point of reference: that of monologic organization. Recent work in management and organization studies is typically inclined to understand both organization and the act of organizing as entailing processes that are ‘polyvocal’, ‘polyphonic’ and ‘multi-authored’.  From this vantage point, organization is essentially dialogic in form and profoundly dynamic, propelled by active human sense-makers. As illustrated by research into communication, the notion of a multiplicity of voices, and of a dialogue between them, has become a favoured organizational image within organizational research, as well as a paradigm for recent theorizing. We begin by briefly exploring the underlying assumptions of what we characterize as a dialogic perspective. Specifically, we discuss three dominating features of dialogicity in the context of organization theory: plurality, reciprocity and liquidity. In order to create analytic sensitivity to non-dialogic features of organization, we first draw on the classic work of Mikhail Bakhtin to inform our understanding of the relationship between dialogic and monologic organization. Whereas Bakhtin’s original distinction begets a certain balance between dialogic and monologic forms of communication, we want to make a stand for ‘monologue’ and ‘dialogue’ as different images of organization inspiring different ways of seeing and analysing. This provides the grounds for analysing bodies of work developed predominantly in line with the dialogic view. Having established the limitations of the dialogic perspective, we then propose monologic organization as an alternative image for understanding the (lack of) dynamics in semantically immobile or structurally bureaucratic organizational frameworks. We provide micro, meso and macro level examples – pertaining, respectively, to (1) experience of ostensibly creative work rendered artless, (2) spiritual organization and (3) an authoritarian political regime – in order to discuss the heuristic potential of a monologic view.

Organizational Ethnography: An Experiential & Practical Guide

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

Jenna Pandeli, Hugo Gaggiotti and Neil Sutherland are over the moon to announce that their edited book ‘Organizational Ethnography: An Experiential and Practical Guide‘ will be available from 18th February this year! The book gives a first-hand insight into ‘doing’ ethnography, providing a toolkit that prepares ethnographers for the uncertainties and realities of fieldworking. They include chapters on different types of ethnographies, as well as analysis, all while reflecting on their experiences and practice. 

They wanted to provide a range of voices from people at different stages of their ethnographic journey so the book includes chapters from PhD students just starting out with ethnography where their experiences are raw and new, as well as seasoned ethnographers who are able to draw on a wide range of ethnographic experience. This has been a real labour of love for them all and they are delighted that ethnography is clearly such a hit in the Faculty of Business and Law as two of the chapters are authored by fantastic UWE colleagues, Sarah-Louise Weller and Chloe Tarrabain.

They are really proud of this book and its transparent approach to talking about research methods and they have received some lovely reviews from John Van Maanen, Paul Atkinson and Sudhir Venkatesh.

‘Organizational Ethnography sets a new standard for scholarly reflection and theoretical inquiry. The editors have assembled a smart and engaging set of essays on ethnographic methods in diverse organizational contexts. Readers will find traditional topics assessed with a fresh lens, as well as some issues – exiting the field, studying sensitive issues – that have received far less attention than they deserve. For newcomers to the craft as well as seasoned practitioners, this volume on “hanging out” in organizations is a must read.’
Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia University, USA

‘This is a carefully edited collection of fresh and lively accounts of various phases and stages of ethnographic research in contemporary organizational settings – from planning a study, to carrying it out, to exiting the field, to writing it up. Central to each of the selections are the troubles a particular ethnographic stance presents to the researcher – many unseen at the outset of a study – and the disparate ways researchers have come up with in dealing with these vexing difficulties. These are personalized stories about the practical doing of ethnography – tales that are typically elided from the rather condensed and sanitized renderings of how a given study was accomplished that appear in print. That canonical ethnographic means and ends are necessarily strained and stretched in the flickering, messy, chaotic, emotionally laden and initially unknown surroundings and circumstances that a study seeks to tame is a reoccurring theme in these accounts. This is a work that will appeal to seasoned as well as novice researchers interested how the ethnographers of various backgrounds have dealt with the inherent uncertainties of their trade.’
John Van Maanen, Emeritus Professor, MIT (Work and Organization Studies Group), USA

‘Ethnographic research is flourishing in a wide variety of social settings, and in an equally diverse range of disciplines. With a broad understanding of organisational ethnography, this collection of essays amply displays all that variety. It also captures the remarkable range of approaches – methodological and personal – that characterise contemporary field research. The contributing authors are frank in acknowledging the personal, ethical and intellectual challenges of ethnographic fieldwork, but they also convey the immense satisfaction to be gained from such research. They offer a close look under the bonnet, to see some of the things that lie behind published ethnographic research. Readers will be engaged, informed and confronted by the essays in this collection. It will be an invaluable resource for students and more experienced ethnographers alike.’
Paul Atkinson, Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University, UK

HIV healthcare staff in Zimbabwe begin PG Certificate in Professional Practice in Change Leadership

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

Dr Greyling Viljoen and Dr Prisciplla Matuare (Women’s University in Africa), supported remotely by Professor Peter Case, recently delivered a two-day face-to-face training workshop (18-19 August 2021) for nineteen Zimbabwe healthcare professionals enrolled on the FBL Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Practice in Change Leadership (PPCL). The students are also working as part of a Bill & Melinda Gates funded project co-led by Peter to restructure and improve HIV/AIDS prevention in Zimbabwe. The PPCL module is designed to enable students to combine their studies with experiential workplace learning.  

The PPCL programme forms an integral part of a project entitled ‘Optimizing Stakeholder Operating Models for HIV Prevention in Zimbabwe’ – OPTIMISE, for short. The project, which has been running since June 2020 and is due to conclude in May 2022, addresses health HIV service delivery in Manicaland, Matabeleland North and Matabelend South provinces. The aim is to support and capacitate the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC) in working with stakeholders to develop and implement sustainability plans. This involves reviewing progress on the MoHCC strategy and facilitating the process of establishing goals, priorities and action plans. It also strives to create the necessary leadership coalition to drive change in the health service.

There is a diverse cohort of students on the PPCL module representing different levels with the system: from senior MoHCC directors through to front line staff working in health facilities. Students undertake theoretical studies supported by materials on Blackboard and are trained in the application of the project’s LEAD methodology. There is also a significant ‘supervised practice’ element of the course whereby students are supported in applying their learning.  

Thanks go to Katie Joyce (module leader) and UWE’s Faculty of Business and Law Professional Development Team for their excellent support in delivering the PPCL module.   The main collaborating partners for this work are the Malaria Elimination Initiative (University of California, San Francisco) Population Services International and the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

Home-working during Coronavirus – using the corners of our home for work, rest and play

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

Back in 2017 Dr Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor of Organisation Studies at UWE Bristol Business School, wrote a piece for Work Wise UK about how the commute – be it on a train, a bus or in a car – offers an important space for reflection and escape. She talked about how the commute can be a space ‘in-between’ in which we can momentarily break away from the multitude of identities we seek to maintain in contemporary society, and temporarily find a sense of sanctuary in a working world characterized by change and fluidity. The commute, therefore, offers a ‘liminal space’ in which to momentarily dwell – a liminal space being one that is on the ‘border’, a transitory space somewhere ‘in-between’ where we can suspend social expectations – and just press pause. She also reflected on the liminal spaces of the workplace – like corridors, stairwells, corridors and toilets. Places in which, as her research shows, are usually used to escape the visibility of the office or shared workspace and become important territories for private conversations, quiet reflection, and inspiration and creativity (Shortt, 2015).

In her guest blog post with Work Wise UK last week, she talks about the loss of these spaces and how we can find them again in our current conditions working from home, which for many of us also includes juggling home-schooling with work.

Since the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown, for many workers these spaces have vanished. We aren’t commuting, which is great for the environment and for a whole host of other reasons, but I wonder if there are some of you who are missing the space the commute created between work and home – that liminal space for reflection, decompression or planning. And, of course, many of us are not in the office, so those corridor conversations, those watercooler moments, those snatched minutes in a toilet catching up with a colleague are gone. All these informal micro-interactions at work that are so vital in the everyday life of workers have, for the time being, disappeared.

Instead, many of us are working from home. We have set up workspaces almost overnight and our homes have become workplaces and meeting rooms, classrooms and gyms, places of worship and places to rest. These changes in our domestic environment have taken some adjusting. We have had to negotiate with partners and children about how our home spaces are used, for what purpose and when, we’ve had to compromise our sense of privacy and open up our homes as personal backdrops on Zoom calls, and as the earlier blog from Stefanie Reissner and Michal Izak shows, we have had to think carefully about how we establish, manage, and re-adjust our work/ home boundaries.

All this transposing of work life into the home and sudden, rather dramatic mass shift to working from home has made me think more about the organisation of space at home, and in particular, the liminal spaces of the home. In all my research projects in both public and private sector organisations over the past 15 years, the significance of liminal space has always emerged – whether it be the cupboards in which hairdressers find respite from the visible work they do, the toilets where open-plan office workers go to have private conversations or the stairwells that nurses use to catch up with each other away from the wards. But what are the liminal spaces in our homes, how are they being used in the current crisis, and do they have any value? As a researcher of organisational life, I’ve seen and heard various stories over the past 8 weeks from UK workers adjusting to working at home, and I’ve had my own experiences as a mother and knowledge worker juggling full time work and home schooling a 5-year-old, and the corners of our homes do seem to be significant in a number of ways…

Firstly – liminal spaces for new working practices. I have spent a number of years researching the work of hairdressers working in hair salons and over the past 8 weeks or so I have been struck by how innovative some in this industry have been at adapting to working life at home, using social media (mainly Instagram) to do so. What has been notable are the uses of liminal spaces in their homes, that are now appropriated as new workspaces. For example, one celebrity hair stylist in London is seen in a walk-in wardrobe demonstrating an easy up-do (wife as model). Another hair stylist in Wales is pictured in a hallway by the mirror demonstrating how to cut a little boy’s hair (son as model). And another stylist in London is filmed in a toilet demonstrating a guide to toning your hair at home (self as model). These new workspaces are allowing them to still work, still connect with clients, but perhaps help them avoid exposing parts of their homes to others and somehow this protects their privacy. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, the new Twitter account ‘Room Rater @ratemyskyperoom’ has been set up to comment on and rate the backdrops and private homes of the rich and famous as they Skype and Zoom in the media. As such, the privacy of our homes has been comprised by new working from home practices and so we might reflect on how the liminal spaces in our homes might offer an alternative to putting our more dominant spaces – kitchens, bedrooms and living rooms – on display for all to see.

Secondly – liminal spaces for privacy and rest. The privacy issue is one that we have not really talked about during this crisis. The big focus, naturally, during isolation has been countering the feelings of being alone or separated, and as Reissner and Izak advised in their blog earlier this week, we need to stay connected. But just as I would argue that overly open, collaborative workspaces sometimes forget the need for private, quiet space in their designs, for those of us as home in lockdown with partners or families, we might think about how important it is to find just a few moments alone for rest, reflection and respite. One Bristol-based entrepreneur I am working with on research project text me a photograph of her on the roof of her house and said:

‘This is the only place I can get some rest…some peace and quiet. This is where I can just breath for a minute. It’s a beautiful view and a lovely skyline, all the trees and rooftops. I love being up here, I might do this more often’

Another young mother in Bath, who works in the public sector and is working from home with 2 small children said:

‘I find myself just sitting on the stairs to get five minutes peace. If I’m in the kitchen, the kids want snacks. If I’m in the living room I’m working. I just sit on the steps for a few minutes and get a bit of down time’

So, it could be suggested that liminal spaces are helping us, just as they do in the office, to find private quiet moments of respite from family, technology and being on show. The corners of our homes, or, as above, the rooftops and stairs, are being used in the practice of self-care and wellbeing during Covid-19.

And finally – liminal spaces for play. I have seen how liminal spaces are being appropriated for play during our home-based lockdown. My 5-year-old daughter has been at home with my husband and I, like many other children, for the past 8 weeks, and the den-making has been rife! My daughter has made a den on the stairs, under the stairs, under the table in the dining room, in the hallway, on the landing, on the kitchen step. Dens have been built in every nook of our house over the past few weeks and having spoken to a few ‘working-from-home-mum-friends’, it seems I’m not alone in noticing this. One working mother in Oxford told me:

‘Yes, I’ve noticed my kids have been making dens all the time during lockdown! Behind the sofa, under a tree in the garden, all over the place – but never in the actual playroom that’s specifically designed for them and all their stuff!’

This has made me reflect on children’s needs for privacy and ownership over space. They compromise all the time in relation to space, with their bedrooms perhaps being the only haven they might have in a home, and even then for the most part parents place restrictions on these places – no food, no drink, tidy up, make your bed. It is no wonder that children, whilst in lockdown with their parents who are desperately seeking their own spaces and managing boundaries for work/home-life, are claiming snippets of space. This is perhaps a child’s response to seeking solace, rest and privacy, much like the entrepreneur on the roof or the working mother on the stairs discussed above. And of course, this only serves to highlight how liminal spaces, used for privacy and individual territory, are important to everyone, not just grown-ups in the workplace.  

So, working at home during Covid-19 has shed some light on the liminal spaces of our homes and how they are emerging as unexpectedly useful. As a response to the lockdown, we have seen how the territories on the margins of the dominant spaces in our homes (those we have defined uses for, like living rooms or kitchens), are now in regular use in new ways. Spaces like cupboards, hallways and stairways have always been there, in our peripheral vison, used mainly for transitioning through the home, but they now come into full view and full use – for work, for rest and for play. In our post Covid-19 world we might reflect on the potential for these spaces; how might they be used differently? What value do they have and for whom? And how might they feature when we’re working at home?

These are all reflections and food for thought on home-working during the Coronavirus crisis. I invite you to reflect on how you are using the corners of your home; what have you noticed about where you are working? Have the stairs and landings featured in your working day and if so, how? And what value do they have? As Bachelard (1958/1994, p.136) reflected, corners are symbols ‘of solitude for the imagination’ – what spaces in your home offer moments for imagination when you are home-working?

Dr Jenna Pandeli shortlisted for SAGE Prize for Innovation & Excellence 2020

Author jyotishaw | Posted on

We are delighted to announce that Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Dr Jenna Pandeli, along with co-authors Michael Marinetto and Jean Jenkins, has been nominated for the SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence 2020 for their paper ‘Captives in Cycles of Invisibility? Prisoners’ Work for the Private Sector’.

The SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence is awarded annually to one paper in each of the BSA’s prestigious journals: Cultural Sociology, Sociological Research Online, Sociology and Work, Employment and Society. The prize will be awarded to the paper published in the previous year’s volume judged to represent innovation or excellence in the field.

Dr Pandeli’s article critiques a case of modern prison-labour by exploring prisoners’ attitudes towards the prison-work they undertake while incarcerated. The study is based at a privatised male prison in the UK, assigned the pseudonym ‘Bridgeville’. Bridgeville contracts with private-sector firms in providing market-focused prison-work – so-called real work – for inmates in some of its workshops. In exploring prisoners’ perceptions of this privatised prison-work, it is found that it mainly comprises mundane, low-skilled activities typical of informalised, poor-quality jobs that are socially, legally and economically devalued and categorised as forms of ‘invisible work’. At Bridgeville, such privatised prison-work largely fails in engaging or upskilling inmates, leaving them pessimistic about its value as preparation for employment post-release. Its rehabilitative credentials are therefore questioned. The article contributes to the debate around invisible work more generally by problematising this example of excluded work and the cycle of disadvantage that underpins it.

Read the full paper here

The completion of ‘Captives in Cycles of Invisibility? Prisoners’ Work for the Private Sector’ followed a recent blog post for the American Sociological Association. The blog piece is a condensed article of Dr Pandeli’s paper published in Work Employment and Society. The research discussed in this blog post is based on a study conducted in the UK and is particularly pertinent in helping to understand the reasoning behind one of the largest prison strikes in US history last summer, where prisoners undertook nineteen days of peaceful protest. At the heart of this protest was a demonstration against imposed prison labour and the disturbingly low wages that accompany such work.

This approach to prison work, an approach where profit is becoming more prevalent and private organisations are becoming more and more involved in the prison system, is not isolated to the US. It is no surprise then, that as part of the UK Government’s ‘rehabilitative revolution’, a focus on work inside prison has been embraced. However, the rehabilitative potential of prison labour is dependent on its design. Given that it is situated within an institution that is in a constant state of conflict between punishment, rehabilitation and increasingly profit, its status is contested. The research explores how prisoners experience their prison labour, specifically, that done for private firms inside the prison system.

Read full blog post here

Continuing on this topic, you can also listen to Dr Pandeli in part of a panel discussion on the BBC World Service podcast ‘In The Balance’.

Alongside Nila Bala and Chandra Bozelko, both prison reform advocates from the US, they discuss global prison labour and its exploitative potential as well as offering potential solutions to develop prison labour into something that is rehabilitative and better for society. 

You can listen again to the podcast here

Distinguished Professorial Address – Jackie Ford

Author celim | Posted on

Date: Tuesday 24th March 2020

Time: 17:30 – 19:30

Location: Bristol Business School

Bristol Business School will be hosting Jackie Ford from Durham University Business School on 24th March for a Distinguished Professorial Address.  This will be proceeded by a symposium on Collective Leadership.

Many accounts of leadership studies appear to take too lightly, if they treat of it at all, the insecurity, anxiety and ambiguity in the lives of leaders and led (Ford and Harding, 2004; Ford, 2006). Through ignoring these feelings, they actively create such feelings. Leaders are told they should be confident, secure and very clear about what they are doing, and why they are doing it, in all circumstances. This is an impossible feat in practice – who could live up to such a paragon? By failing to achieve an over-ambitious norm, leaders can feel themselves to be failures. But in equal measure, there is a risk that control of work processes and conversations may still be regulated by power elites qua leaders who manipulate organisational discourses through structural and cultural norms that remain embedded in historical traditions. This can in turn have disastrous consequences on followers in organisations – as Jackie will illuminate during her presentation.

Jackie Ford is Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at Durham University Business School. She has long-standing frustrations with much research on leadership, especially the absent recognition of power and identities, and through her research she seeks to unsettle dominant understandings. Current interests include critical feminist, psychosocial and interdisciplinary approaches that recognise specific gender, wider diversity and ethical dimensions, and ways in which leadership research and practice impact on working lives.

You can register for the address here.

This Address will be proceeded by and afternoon Symposium:

Searching for the Abominable Snowman: Exploring the Elusive Nature of Collective Leadership

Date: Tuesday 24th March 2020
Time: 14:00 – 16:30
Location:  Frenchay Campus

UWE Bristol: Events Diary – BBS Seminar: Searching for the Abominable Snowman: Exploring the Elusive Nature of Collective Leadership

“Leadership is like the Abominable Snowman, whose footprints are everywhere but who is nowhere to be seen.” (Bennis and Nanus, 1985)

It is 35 years since and Meindl et al. (1985) coined the notion of the “Romance of Leadership” to explain the tendency to over-emphasise the importance of ‘leaders’ in shaping organisational life and accomplishing ‘leadership’ outcomes. Despite a huge expansion of leadership theory, research, practice and development in the intervening years, leadership remains “elusive and enigmatic” – heralded as both the cause of and solution to almost all challenges facing groups, organisations and society.

Since the turn of the millennium, despite growing interest in ‘collective’ forms of leadership, which have helped shift the focus from the traits, characteristics and behaviours of ‘leaders’ to the social processes of ‘leadership’ “we have been unable to generate an understanding of leadership that is both intellectually compelling and emotionally satisfying” (Meindl et al., 1985, p. 78) and the myth of the ‘heroic leader’ continues to dominate mainstream perspectives on leadership.

This symposium includes contributions from a number of scholars who have been actively engaged in scholarship on collective leadership over many years, who will reflect on their insights and experiences to speculate on the potential causes of and responses to the “slippery, shape-shifting” (Ospina et al., 2017: 1) nature of collective leadership.

Following the two presentations participants will be invited to share and reflect on their own experiences of researching, teaching and practicing collective leadership and the implications for future scholarship in this field.
There is no fee for attending this event and participants are warmly invited to stay on for the Distinguished Professorial Address by Professor Jackie Ford later in the day.

Social Constructions of Collective Leadership: The performative nature of empty signifiers

Gareth Edwards – Associate Professor in Leadership Development, UWE, Bristol
Richard Bolden – Professor of Leadership and Management, UWE, Bristol

This paper uses reflexive conversations to explore how concepts of ‘collective leadership’ have been socially constructed in leadership research and practice over the past twenty years. Particular attention is given to the processes of social constructive-ness through which ‘collective leadership’ is framed and reframed, and the role of both researchers and practitioners in this process.

The paper contributes to theory, research and practice in three inter-connected ways – firstly by highlighting the performative nature of ‘collective leadership’ through a social constructivist lens; secondly by developing the notion of negative ontology by applying it to empirical evidence in order to uncover and problematize theories of collective leadership; and thirdly, by making the link between negative ontology and critical performativity in order to demonstrate how researchers and theorists can disclose stages of performativity in the development of new theories.

The Transformational Object of Leadership: A critique in two agonies and eight fits

Jackie Ford, Professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies, Durham University Business School
Nancy Harding, Professor of HRM, University of Bath School of Management
Sarah Gilmore, Reader in Organization Studies, Cardiff University Business School

A special journal issue that explored the tricky question of how to research collective leadership was recently announced which described the very term of collective leadership as ‘a slippery, shape-shifting phenomenon’ (Ospina, et al., 2017: 1) that has generated much theory, but is difficult to research empirically.

The same could also be said about much of the work on researching, conceptualising and practising leadership. This paper questions the rationale for searching for appropriate research methods. We argue the necessity for a more sophisticated account of the human subject of leadership approaches before researching leadership in practice. Without such careful preparation there is a risk, firstly, that researchers see what they expect to see. Secondly, we warn that without better understanding of the human subject, leadership could be for ill rather than good, and could contribute to the contemporary forces undermining democracy, liberalism, tolerance and individual freedoms.

These arguments are inspired by Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits, and the insights of psychoanalytical object relations theory. Turning our arguments back on ourselves, we conclude that the times dictate that we, the collective of leadership theorists, turn our efforts to understanding and intervening in trends that threaten to undermine justice, democracy, citizenship, equity, and equality. In Carroll’s terms, we are caught in the fruminous jaws of the Bandersnatch, may be summoning up the dangerous Boojum, and have lost sight of the Snark.

References
Bennis, W. and Nanus, B. (1985) Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge. New York: Harper and Row.
Meindl, J.R., Ehrlich, S.B., & Dukerich, J.M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30, 78-102.
Ospina SM, Foldy EG, Fairhurst GT and Jackson B (2017) Collective dimensions of leadership: The challenges of connecting theory and method. Human Relations, http://www.tavinstitute.org/humanrelations/special_issues/LeadershipCollectiveDimensions.html

You can register for this here.

Dr Jenna Pandeli takes part in BBC world service podcast

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Dr Jenna Pandeli was invited to take part in a panel discussion on the BBC world service podcast ‘In The Balance’.

Alongside Nila Bala and Chandra Bozelko, both prison reform advocates from the US, they discuss global prison labour and its exploitative potential as well as offering potential solutions to develop prison labour into something that is rehabilitative and better for society. 

You can listen again to the podcast here

Cake in the Office – health hazard or edible symbols of collegiality and teamwork?

Author jmenglishby | Posted on

By Dr Harriet Shortt

A longer than average blog post, but it’s about cake, so it’s important…!

I am sure many of us are familiar with cake in the office – cakes to celebrate a colleague’s birthday, cake sales for fundraisers in the office canteen, exotic sweet treats brought back by co-workers returning from holiday, and office bake-offs between competitive teams.

The BBC reported last year that this ‘office cake culture was a danger to health’ and the Royal College of Surgeons argue ‘workplace cake culture’ is impacting the health of workers in the UK, citing obesity and dental problems as key issues caused by such activities. The latest report from the Royal Society for Public Health (published in August 2016) discusses the impact of rush hour commuting on our health and well-being and notes that unhealthy food and drinks that are made available by outlets in train stations during our commute is potentially adding ‘an average of 767 calories’ to our diets each week. And only in January of this year, The Telegraph reported that civil servants had been warned that ‘office cake culture could be a public health hazard’ by a blog post written by a member of the Treasury’s ‘Wellbeing Workstream’.

Whilst I am not disputing the issues raised in these reports – they highlight important timely and relevant concerns around the health of the UK workforce – I would like to raise some further questions and thoughts about what other role cake plays in our offices today. Office cake culture isn’t just about health concerns – my argument here is that food plays a vital social, cultural and political role in office life and organisations should be considerate of the relationships and interactions that are centred around food.

I have been doing some research in a large public sector organisation about the food and drink consumed in their office – or more specifically, their new open-plan office. I am exploring the interconnectedness of food, work, people and space and considering how the ‘foodscape’ (where and how people encounter food in the built environment) of the workplace influences food consumption and social interactions at work. I have been asking: In what ways does space influence where we eat, what we eat and with whom? What is the role of food in our organisational environment and how does it impact everyday spatial practices? How might formal and informal eating practices alter our everyday experiences of space at work?

To help address some of these questions, I asked the staff I worked with to take photographs of their daily interactions with food in the office. They took photographs of food in the canteen, home-made cakes on desks, tins of biscuits on locker tops, and where they made tea and coffee. They talked to me about what meanings these held and why they were important in their everyday lives.

Some of the findings show how formal, designated spaces for eating and drinking, such as the canteen and tea stations, are popular with many workers. Eating lunch in the canteen with groups of friends is a daily ritual and provides opportunities to talk about personal lives, gossip, and a time and space to share hobbies and interests. The tea stations, designed by management and the architects to provide a space in which workers could meet whilst making a hot drink, are identified as ‘nice chatting areas’. However, although the tea stations provide a space to share a few words with colleagues and allow for chance meetings with others, due to their central public location in the open-plan office conversations here are brief and inhibited by the visible and audible nature of the space. Participants noted these drinking spaces were neither suitable for private or work related discussions.

During our discussions, workers reflected on their new open-plan, hot-desking environment and told me they felt this workplace design impacted negatively on teams and working practices: ‘…we just don’t get the banter around the office…not social banter, but I mean sort of asking for advice on what we’re doing…now we’re hot-desking it can be isolating…and there are too many people around’. In amongst these feelings of isolation, what these workers really appeared to value was the informal, ad-hoc sharing of food at desks and on locker tops in walkways and corridors. It is the ability to share food across this new office space that workers identify as key to bringing people back together and reconnecting conversations. Sharing food in this way is an important catalyst in promoting work based discussions and internal networking; ‘…people come and see us when we have food! It gets people talking…’ and ‘…cake, it’s really important…it breaks up the day, gives us a treat…it impacts on morale in a big way’.

It is worth reflecting here that, as a number of researchers have noted, open-plan offices are often designed with collaboration and teamwork in mind, yet here we see the word ‘isolating’ being used to describe how this new open-plan space is experienced by its users. It is somewhat ironic that workers feel isolated with ‘…too many people around’. Nonetheless, it seems it’s the combination of both open-plan space with food that produces a collaborative working environment for these workers. Indeed, one employee describes the placement of food on locker tops as how people ‘…display their wares and encourage people to talk more’ and how this ‘…encourages passers-by to stop, talk a bit of shop, eat and move on’.

Paradoxically, despite all the talk of talk, social interactions and connecting over cake, workers also identify the inability to eat alone as problematic. The very sociality of eating poses privacy issues for some and the open-plan, hot-desking environment presents particular challenges. Some identify the canteen as a space where the ‘pressure to talk’ is unwelcome. The canteen has been designed and is used by many as a social space where bench seating and long tables promote conversation and create a setting where meals are eaten together. Yet, for example, one worker told me ‘…I just want go and sit and eat my lunch and get back to work’ and is frustrated there is no opportunity, or rather no space, in which he might dine alone. The spatial and social expectations in the canteen are such that talking over lunch is a prerequisite. Indeed, a number of workers deliberately choose to eat lunch at alternative times of the day in order to avoid eating with others.

Consequently, alternative spaces for private dining are frequently sought out. Almost half the workers I spoke to took photographs outside the office, at various locations in the nearby city centre that captured where they liked to eat, including cafes, parks, and benches by the river: ‘…I can…sit on the green and have a bit of peace and quiet and eat my sandwich’. Others talked about finding alternative meeting and eating spots in cafes so they could ‘…talk about sensitive materials…’ over lunch or ‘…have a bit of a gossip…’ As we heard, the tea stations offer a nice chatting area, but as one worker said ‘…you’ve got to be careful because obviously now we are open plan, everyone near that area can hear what you’re saying!’ It seems only certain sorts of conversations can be had over food in the office and if privacy is required, alternative eating spots are pursued.

So far, my research has unearthed a complex picture of the foodscape of work – it throws new light on the appropriation of space in the office, re-defined by workers as informal eating locations and spaces for informal munching and chatting, vital for their morale, team communications and internal networking. It has also emphasised that the boundaries of a workplace foodscape are fluid and that we don’t just eat in the office and we don’t always want to eat with others. Sometimes solace is sought and eating a sandwich alone offers workers rare moments of contemplation and reflection in an otherwise impermanent, visible, and public working world.

In this current climate of health and well-being programmes and the drive for a healthy workforce, organisations might wish to take heed of the complex meanings of food across the landscape of work before implementing such programmes or raising alarm bells that cake in the office is a public health hazard. Indeed, other discourses around health and eating at work promote messages that food should only be consumed in designated eating spaces, and not at ones desk. This comes from other health and safety perspectives where workers are encouraged to take ‘proper breaks’ and avoid working through lunch breaks as well as organisations who demand a clean and tidy office, with clear rules ‘not to eat at your desk’.

However, if organisations are serious about understanding the eating habits of their employees, they should understand that food matters at work, but not just in the canteen and not just in relation to health. If organisations wish to remove food from parts of the office, they should be mindful that they are potentially removing the very catalyst that promotes sociality at work and confiscating edible symbols of collegiately.

In addition, organisations must be wary of their disciplinary approach to eating in the office and how, perhaps, this undermines the needs of some workers and marginalises others’ food choices and behaviour. We might reflect on the lack of space in which workers are able to eat privately and consider that eating at ones desk is perhaps less about working through a lunch hour, and actually more about simply creating a personal space in which to eat alone and enjoy a moment of peace and quiet.

I hope that some of the questions I raise here, and in my research, may provide a starting point for other, future research into food, eating and the workplace – we might want to consider; what do the foodscapes of homeworkers look like and how are they experienced? How are foodscapes experienced and constructed by workers on the move or flexible workers without desks or offices? To what extent should we be concerned with ‘office cake culture’ given its social, cultural and political importance for workers? It is with these questions in mind that I end this blog and ponder over the future of food in the workplace, over a sandwich and coffee at my desk.

 

Harriet’s research will be published in a book later this year: Kingma, S., Dale K. & Wasserman, V. (Eds.). Organizational space and beyond: The significance of Henri Lefebvre for organizational studies – an edited collection. London: Routledge. Harriet will be discussing her research at the 12th Organization Studies Summer Workshop ‘Food Organizing Matters: paradoxes, problems and potentialities’ in Crete 18th -20th May 2017. Harriet is also supervising UWE Bristol Business School dissertation student Susannah Robinson, who is exploring the culture of food at work in a multinational organisation in London.

This blog has also been published by the national development organisation Work Wise UK: https://www.workwiseuk.org/blog/2017/3/15/qn3rh8777fnzlmel6y6f90i8b996bd