Poststructuralism and nursing: uncomfortable bedfellows? The benefits and limitations of the application of poststructuralist in nursing research are discussed. The debate concerning the use of poststructuralist theory in feminist research is drawn on to argue a divergence between a deconstructionist poststructuralism and nursing aims. It is argued that there are strong parallels between nursing and social movements such as feminism. The reasons why many feminist and nursing researchers have been attracted to poststructuralist theory are explored, as are the criticisms of (...) poststructuralism as an inadequate, even reactionary theory. It is argued that poststructuralism is useful for examining or deconstructing existing discourse and practice, but incompatible and inadequate for research which aims to develop or change such discourses or practices. (shrink)

This article focuses on the British Broadcasting Corporation's decision to deny a request to air a Disasters Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza in January 2009. The BBC argued that airing the appeal would threaten its impartiality. Despite the centrality of impartiality to the BBC, the concept's meaning is anything but unequivocal. An exploration of a media offensive, which BBC executives launched in response to public outrage over the decision, seeks to reconstruct what definition of impartiality is inferred by the BBC's (...) rationale behind not airing the appeal. The analysis illustrates how the BBC's justification engages dialogically with the critical position of others and, by doing so, draws on diverse understandings of impartiality. We argue that this ‘semantic plasticity’ of impartiality does not point at institutional confusion, but rather at BBC's executives capitalising on the rhetorical potential this plasticity affords. (shrink)

Israeli religious settlers live in contested territory that they claim is promised to them by God. The settlers are at the center of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute and are the recipients of international condemnation for their illegal behavior. Because the territories are neither sovereign nor legally recognized by Israel, their definition is open to construction. Religious settlers make arguments to satisfy three discursive dilemmas that must be solved in order to normalize their lives. They must 1) construct their own authenticity, 2) (...) marginalize the native others, and 3) establish cultural authority. These dilemmas are explicated in this essay. (shrink)

What drives and moves an individual towards certain goals and activities is a familiar question for scholars dealing with motivation in the context of schooling or work practices. However, non-school contexts such as Internet-enabled volunteer-based technical DIY communities are also important to understand since a growing part of everyday social life is spent on the Internet. This article offers the analytical concept of 'motivation path' for understanding changing and dilemmatic motives in innovative pellet DIY development. It also introduces the concept (...) of 'innovative DIY' to show the blurring of the boundaries between profession/hobby and and past work life/retirement of technically competent, innovative people. The findings indicate that Internet-enabled making can be an important medium for continued personal growth, competence development, and reflection. The findings could also help us understand how motivations may be carried over from professional work to private DIY work. (shrink)

The file associated with this record is under embargo while permission to archive is sought from the publisher. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.

Discourse on benefit provision has long been a point of contention within political rhetoric. Although research has demonstrated the damaging impact that welfare cuts have had on people with disabilities, there has been a focus on the material impact of the deprivation such cuts have caused. In the context of welfare, mental health has received little attention in the research literature, often contextualised within the wider remit of disability, with little regard for the nuances of distress. There is a need (...) to consider this in the context of discourse, exploring issues of subjectivity, identity, power relationships and economic concerns. The first empirical study discursively explored how newspapers represent and position mental illness in regard to claiming benefits, neoliberal practices and the capitalist political economy. In ’Shame, Tragedy and the Neoliberal Ideal’. the social and political function of shame as a response to neoliberalism was explored. ‘Class and Classlessness’ explored how discourses of shame were deployed in regard to class and their implications for identity, citizenship and selfhood. The second empirical study discursively explored how mental health service-users who claim benefits negotiate identities and construct accounts of accessing the benefits system. A discourse of malign surveillance in the benefits system was explored, considering issues of deviance and social control. A discourse of ‘Consumerism and Alienation: A Breakdown in Society’ was also explored, where participants positioned themselves as ‘distanced’ and ‘outside’ of ‘human’. The data from both empirical studies were analysed using an innovative discursive method that was developed to engage with the ideas of both Foucault and Marx. The legitimisation of taken-for-granted assumptions regarding those with mental health difficulties who claim benefits was interrogated in a critically geared manner, whilst opening up spaces for empowerment, resistance, and social change. The thesis produces new knowledge regarding the interdiscursive relationship between disability and distress in the context of the welfare system, whilst exploring the potential of innovative and nuanced discursive methods. (shrink)

This empirical study examines how practitioners from the organizational functions of human resources, occupational safety and occupational health services within a Finnish industrial organization view the challenges that production supervisors face in their daily work. The article presents a formative intervention, which focuses on supervisors’ changing work and how these organizational support functions could collaboratively serve supervisors better, especially in their task of promoting well-being at work. The article approaches this collective learning effort from the framework of the Cultural Historical (...) Activity Theory , by examining how crossfunctional collaboration evolves and the transitions through which it develops in an intervention process. The development of collaboration is analysed through a process of collective concept and tool formation by following a cross-meeting trajectory of specific annual clock episodes. An annual clock, a co-ordinating tool used in organizations to assist the yearly planning and management of specific operations, emerged in the intervention as the practitioners’ attempt to synchronize overlapping and inconsistent well-being related practices assigned to supervisors. The article presents a framework that can be applied in this kind of combined empirical analysis of tool development and the evolving collaboration. The analysis shows how the idea of the annual clock grew through multifaceted conceptualizations, in which it first had the status of a conceptual object, then a collaborative tool, and eventually a script for becoming a novel cross-functional practice. Simultaneously, the mode of interaction expanded from a function-based co-ordination to task-oriented co-operation, and finally to communication. (shrink)

I suggest that the transformation of an artifact from an introductory-type instrument into a viable, collectively used tool cannot be understood solely in terms of gradual adaptation of the technology and user environment, but also as a qualitatively broader integration process in which an expansion takes place. The case illustrated a constrained shift of an artifact from its first adopter, an individual pioneer user, to a more collective user in institutional medicine. The artifact, a neuromagnetometer instrument for brain research and (...) diagnostics, brings together physicists, neuroscientists, physicians as well as various practitioners from the medical imaging industry. I applied an activity-theoretical framework for analysing the adoption of the neuromagnetometer from the pioneer phase of implementation into the more established use. The case showed that the anticipated transformation of the artifact constituted a major challenge for the user organization and its practitioners. It is suggested that an expansion of the object into a shared object of implementation among the separate practitioner groups is indispensable.This expansion of the object involves for the practitioners to recognize both the different objects and requirements of the pioneer phase of the implementation and the new phase of introduction into medical practice. It is shown that this recognition does not, however, come as given, spontaneously born in the transition. The emerging new object may remain only partially shared if not made visible by deliberate effort among the practitioners. The expansion requires collective visualization of the work and reflective dialogue on it. Employing analytical tools, such as the activity-theoretical concepts used here, is one possible way of facilitating such an effort. (shrink)