The concept of ‘place’ can play a powerful role in understanding how leadership is socially constructed. This article explores the geographic, symbolic and mythic uses of place in the cultivation of ...a distinct leadership style around the Presidency of John F. Kennedy. It focuses on the history of a social and learning event that today might be called a leadership development programme: the ‘Hickory Hill Seminars’ of 1961-4, named after and mostly held at the specific location of Robert F. Kennedy’s home. These seminars – only lightly touched on in Kennedy-era history and leadership literatures – were semi-formal occasions organized by the historian Arthur Schlesinger that brought eminent public intellectuals of the day to present their work to the assembled group of insiders. The seminars functioned as a network in action, both cultivating and projecting certain cultural formations of leadership. Bounded by the geographic places inhabited by Washington elites, the seminars formed part of the broader construction of the symbolic place of the ‘New Frontier’ and the mythic place of ‘Camelot’. The Hickory Hill seminars were one part of a broad metaphysical canvas upon which a distinct presidential leadership style and ‘legacy’ was created. Building on critical and social constructivist perspectives, we argue that geographic, symbolic and mythic notions of place can be central to the social construction of particular leadership styles and legacies, but that these creations can be deceptive, and remain always vulnerable to critique, co-optation and distortion by opponents and rivals.
HRM literature often fails to adequately consider the political‐economic context that can strongly influence HR practices and outcomes. This problem is particularly visible as regards international ...careers. Notions such as “boundaryless careers” privilege HR and employee agency and neglect the complexity, variety, and importance of social structure in influencing careers and constraining agency. Informed by Bourdieu's theory of practice, this paper explores Japanese HRM through the careers of repatriate managers. Through in‐depth and prolonged narrative inquiry, it documents the powerful “forms of capital” that structure the “salaryman” career field. Although tensions and conflicts existed—notably in relation to gender—traditional “lifetime employment” careers remain powerful, highlighting the continued centrality of capital and habitus in reproducing the Japanese white‐collar career field. We conclude by suggesting alternative ways of conceptualizing, researching, and portraying white‐collar careers within varied employment environments that are always shaped by specific and situated contexts.
The label ‘extreme’ has traditionally been used to describe out-of-the-ordinary and quasi-deviant leisure subcultures which aim at an escape from commercialized and over-rationalized modernity or for ...occupations involving high risk, exposure to ‘dirty work’ and a threat to life (such as military, healthcare or policing). In recent years, however, the notion of ‘extreme’ is starting to define more ‘normal’ and mainstream realms of work and organization. Even in occupations not known for intense, dirty or risky work tasks, there is a growing sense in which ‘normal’ workplaces are becoming ‘extreme’, especially in relation to work intensity, long-hours cultures and the normalizing of extreme work behaviours and cultures. This article explores extreme work via a broader discussion of related notions of ‘edgework’ and ‘extreme jobs’ and suggests two main reasons why extremity is moving into everyday organizational domains; the first relates to the acceleration and intensification of work conditions and the second to the hypermediation of, and increased appetite for, extreme storytelling. Definitions of extreme and normal remain socially constructed and widely contested, but as social and organizational realities take on ever more extreme features, we argue that theoretical and scholarly engagement with the extreme is both relevant and timely.
This article identifies two, nation-wide, forms of governance or organizing
capital,`shareholder' capitalism and `managerial' capitalism, epitomized by the USA
and Japan respectively. Furthermore, it ...identifies the implications for managers in
these systems. The article argues that both varieties of capitalism have been forced
to modify, due to pressures from globalization. Shareholder capitalism in the USA has
been intensified with an even greater emphasis on `shareholder value'. In Japan,
meanwhile, poor national economic performance has led to pressures upon managerial
capitalism to take on features more akin to the shareholder variety. Such pressures
have been transmitted to managers with a more intensified work regime. However, many
of the HRM features of the Japanese model remain, despite these pressures.
Foucault's medical gaze has only been minimally applied to palliative care through the analysis of key policy documents. This paper develops the conceptualisation of Foucault's medical gaze using ...empirical data gathered from a group ethnography of a hospice daycare centre. Using Foucault's medical gaze as a theoretical aporia we conceptualise the “hospice gaze”. We argue the hospice gaze is the antithesis of the Foucauldian medical gaze, suggesting it operates reflexively so that professionals adapt to patients, rather than patients to professionals; that it is directed towards enabling patients and their loved ones to narrate severe illness and death in ways that develop more patient-centred narratives; and, structures the processes of care in direct resistance to the neoliberalisation of healthcare by engaging in slow practices of care with patient's bodies and minds. Finally, key to all of this is how the hospice gaze manages the spaces of care to ensure that it always and already appears slow to the patients. Therefore, the hospice gaze ensures a (re)distribution of power and knowledge that minimises the corrosive qualities of busyness and maximises the ethical potentials of slowness. We conclude by arguing that the operation of the hospice gaze should be examined in other settings where palliative care is practiced such as in-patient and home care services.
•Ethnographic research develops Foucault's medical gaze in contemporary settings.•A Foucauldian inspired hospice gaze provides ethical approaches to palliative care.•The hospice gaze offers patients more agency than the medical gaze.•The hospice gaze slows care, and adapts the environment to patients.•The hospice gaze attunes staff to patients and helps expression of patient needs.
University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities ...feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial power or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.
This paper explores the professionalization project of paramedics, based on an ethnographic study of UK National Health Service (NHS) ambulance personnel. Drawing on concepts derived from ...institutional theory and the sociology of professions, we argue that the project is enacted at two levels, namely a formal, structural and senior level reflecting changing legitimation demands made on NHS practitioners and pursued through institutional entrepreneurship, and an informal, agentic, ‘street level’ enacted by the practitioners themselves via ‘institutional work’. Focusing on this latter, front‐line level, our ethnographic data demonstrate that the overall impact of the senior level professionalization project on the working lives of paramedics has been somewhat muted, mostly because it has had limited power over the organizations that employ paramedics. Given the slow progress of the senior level professionalization project, paramedics at street level continue to enact subtle forms of institutional work which serve to maintain ‘blue‐collar professionalism’ – a form originally identified in Donald Metz's ethnography of ambulance work. Our analysis draws attention to the complex and contested nature of professionalization projects, in that their enactment at senior and street levels can be somewhat misaligned and possibly contradictory.
The occupation of policing is in crisis. Criticism of police failings has created intense pressure for the traditional ‘occupational closure’ model of policing as a craft to be replaced by new ...‘professional’ models associated with ‘evidence-based policing’, harm reduction, risk management and vulnerability. Various change initiatives have amounted to the ‘re-professionalisation’ of policing, whereby previous models of police professionalism based on craft, discretion and judgement have been abandoned and replaced by new protocols, guidelines and enhanced external scrutiny. This article explores how these changes are interpreted by operational police officers, using qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to explore officers’ application and understanding of the new requirements. Whereas some literature argues that ‘police culture’ remains largely unchanged, our data illustrate how officers’ daily routines are in a state of enforced flux. While there was some limited support for the rationale for change, officers were highly critical of the practical implementation of policing vulnerability, were sceptical of the new doctrine of ‘professionalism’, and resentful of new managerial controls and priorities. This does not amount to the stubborn persistence of a ‘reform-proof’ police culture. Rather, officers described substantial change to the everyday culture and practice of policing, in ways they regard as confused, self-defeating and unworkable. We argue that professionalisation imposed ‘from above’ via dogmatic managerial logic can have detrimental implications for occupations and the public they serve.
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