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Background: The World Health Organization Astana Declaration of 2018 sees primary healthcare as key to universal health coverage and gives further support to the goal of building sustainable models of community palliative care. Yet evaluating the benefits of such models continues to pose methodological and conceptual challenges. Objective: To explore evaluation issues associated with a community-based palliative care approach in Kerala, India. Design: An illuminative case study using a rapid evaluation methodology. Methodology: Qualitative interviews, documentary analysis and observations of home care and community organising. Results: We appraise a community palliative care programme in Kerala, India, using three linked 'canvases' of enquiry: (1) 'complex' multi-factorial community-based interventions and implications for evaluation; (2) 'axiological' orientations that foreground values in any evaluation process and (3) the status of evaluative evidence in postcolonial contexts. Three values underpinning the care process were significant: heterogeneity, voice and decentralisation. We identify 'objects of interest' related to first-, second- and third-order outcomes: (1) individuals and organisations; (2) unintended targets outside the core domain and (3) indirect, distal effects within and outside the domain. Conclusion: We show how evaluation of palliative care in complex community circumstances can be successfully accomplished when attending to the significance of community care values. Plain language summary: Where are the values in evaluating palliative care? Learning from community-based palliative care provision The evaluation of any intervention or service will inevitably involve a series of decisions on what we measure, what criteria we use to judge whether the intervention has been successful (or not), what type of data we actually collect and what methods we use to do this. When evaluating a range of palliative care interventions, we suggest that these decisions have often been taken in a concealed way and tend to favour relatively narrow quantitative measures linked to end outcomes. Our paper reports on the evaluation of a community-based palliative care intervention on Kerala, India. In it, we suggest that such complex work requires a broader approach to evaluation that: makes the values being used to assess success explicit; draws on a range of data types; is interested in delivery processes; and places the voices of participants at the heart of the assessment. The paper concludes with some broader observations on how these principles might be applied more widely within palliative care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the temporalities that shape and alleviate serious health-related suffering among those with chronic and terminal conditions in Kerala, India. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2019, we examine the entanglements between waiting for care within dominant institutions and the community organizing that palliates this waiting. Specifically, people navigate multiple medical institutions, experience loneliness and abandonment, loss of autonomy, and delays and denials of recognition as they wait for care. Community palliative care organizations offering free, routine, home-based care provide samadhanam (peace of mind) and swatantrayam (self-determination) in lifeworlds mired with chronic waiting. We document how community care sustains an alternative politics of shared time, untethered from marketized notions of efficiency and productivity toward profits. In so doing, we cast in high relief community healthcare imaginaries that alleviate serious health-related suffering and reconfigure Global North-centric perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how heterogeneous actors produce solidarities to address institutionalized infrastructural inequalities. We trace fifteen years over which diverse actors constructed community palliative care infrastructure in Kerala, India. We analyse how actors engaged in solidarity processes of recognizing interdependences, reconfiguring spaces and re-imagining accountability to challenge exclusionary institutions and construct inclusive infrastructure at different scales. We foreground solidarity-making as an indispensable yet under-theorized aspect of institutional research on inequalities. We inform solidarity studies by illustrating how solidarity-making pulsates infrastructures with diverse webs of relations and spatial configurations. Overall, we advance a generative engagement with heterogeneity in institutional analyses and discuss the implications of solidarity-making to address infrastructural inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Parker recently auto-critiqued his book Against Management. Parker reflected on the book's circulation, responded to some criticisms, and proposed a manifesto for a School of Organizing that must emphasize alternative organizational forms. I highlight the Eurocentric frame that permeates the book and the auto-critique. This Eurocentrism manifests as settled geographies, histories, and epistemic practices. Such knowledge practices truncate the possibilities of radically imagining alternatives to the contemporary crises of capitalism. I borrow Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's metaphor of foraging to briefly consider how subterranean struggles and solidaristic transgressions offer possibilities for alternative world-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon feminist scholarship, this study offers insights into how respectable consumption exacerbates precarity and contributes to normalisation of sexual violence in Delhi, India. It helps to uncover androcentricity of respect that has been under-examined in marketing theory. This research identifies androcentric discourse of izzat or respect as a key discursive apparatus that enframes sexual violence against women. In this discourse, women are carriers of family traditions and respect or honour. Moreover, norms of consumption get situated within discourse of izzat and alterity is created from women who do not follow these norms. Such women, labelled as unrespectable, live under conditions of heightened precarity and are blamed for the sexual violence they face. Therefore, this work offers insights into normalisation of sexual violence that have not been understood in marketing theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the conflicts and unintended consequences that arise from the diverse social conventions constituting a transformative service. We draw on convention theory and an ethnographic study to interpret a community-based palliative care initiative in Kerala (India) as a transformative service system. We contribute to transformative service research by developing a dialectical transformative service system framework that is a synthesis of the calculative conflict-ridden regime of justice and the noncalculative regime of agape based on love. In this framework, the calculative regime of justice has civic conventions at its core and industrial, inspired, market, domestic, and fame conventions as ancillaries. While the regime of justice is associated with the undesired, unintended consequence of conflicts, the regime of agape constitutes a desirable unintended consequence. Our framework provides a microlevel understanding of disputes and their reconciliation, advances a diffused understanding of worth that ruptures the binary of legitimate or illegitimate actions, and delineates the significance of morality. Our study also contributes by explaining agape's role in transformative service, particularly in health and caregiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-based palliative care services and their integration with public health systems are of considerable contemporary interest. However, the conflicts that emerge in such a complex organizational field comprising multiple stakeholders with diverse interests remain under-examined. Our analysis of community-based palliative care in Kerala identifies four 'logic conflicts' that indicate competing frames of reference in an organizational field. These conflicts shape decision-making and coordination and manifest as: 1) professional versus community logics, 2) centralized versus decentralized governance logics, 3) generalist versus specialist care logics, 4) charity versus rights-based logics. We also identify two mechanisms – forming coalitions and fostering plurality – by which actors manage these conflicting logics. We discuss contributions to public health palliative care conversations and implications for nurturing and sustaining care communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we surface the problems of representation mainstream organizational theory encounters in documenting and telling accounts of subaltern actors and social transformation. We explore how writing practices that draw on feminist postcolonial literary traditions can transform organizational studies of social change. Drawing on three literary texts—Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi, Urmila Pawar's The Weave of My Life, and Arundhati Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness—we reflect on how we may represent the lives of others. Inspired by these three writers, we suggest solidaristic transgression, unsettled habitation, and counter‐discursive memory work as three modes of engagement that challenge us as academics writing for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and where do social innovations emerge? We address this question using comparative and historical analyses of organizing for palliative care in India. Although palliative care made in-roads into different parts of India in the 1980s, it evolved as a vibrant sector only in the state of Kerala, through a novel community-based approach. By examining historical and social conditions, we reveal how poisedness, and particularly political poisedness, of time and place manifests in the genesis and propagation of a social innovation. We contribute to the literature on macro-foundations of social innovations by illustrating how an array of organizations and individuals create the very conditions of poisedness that are thereafter leveraged by institutional actors for the construction of novelty and propagation. Moreover, we specify the conditions of poisedness that are conducive to propagation, thereby contributing to conversations on distinct phases of emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon the work of Judith Butler to explain how violence is deployed against vulnerable consumers. It examines a site in which a commercial complex including a shopping mall is to be constructed in Ejipura, Bangalore (India), by displacing the poor from their slums. It offers insights into the mechanisms of violent dispossession that inhere liberal modes of governance of consumers. Moreover, this study attends to derealization that desubjectifies vulnerable consumers. It further helps to comprehend why violence remains in the zone of ellipsis without any popular revulsion against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the emergence and evolution of collective action frames in the palliative care movement in Kerala, India. We do so by leveraging secondary data published over seventeen years as well as interviews with thirty movement actors. Our findings suggest two key themes: First, frames that emerge at the grass-roots level, and in many occasions from bystanders, can become dominant frames of a movement. Second, frame alignment processes may be directed by non-elites towards the elites. These findings diverge from prior literature which emphasizes roles of movement leaders and key actors in framing issues and strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background : The community form of palliative care first constructed in Kerala, India has gained recognition worldwide. Although it is the subject of important claims about its replicability elsewhere, little effort has gone into studying how this might occur. Drawing on translation studies, we attend to under-examined aspects of the transfer of a community palliative care intervention into a new geographic and institutional context. Methods : Over a period of 29 months, we conducted an in-depth case study of Sanjeevani, a community-based palliative care organization in Nadia district, West Bengal (India), that is modelled on the Kerala approach. We draw upon primary (semi-structured interviews and field notes) and secondary data sources. Results: We identify the translator's symbolic power and how it counteracts the organizational challenges relating to socio-economic conditions and weak histories of civil society organizing. We find that unlike the Kerala form, which is typified by horizontal linkages and consensus-oriented decision-making, the translated organizational form in Nadia is a hybrid of horizontal and vertical solidarities. We show how translation is an ongoing, dynamic process, where community participation is infused with values of occupational prestige and camaraderie and shaped by emergent vertical solidarities among members. Conclusions : Our findings have implications for how we understand the relationship between locations, institutional histories, and healthcare interventions. We contribute to translation studies in healthcare, and particularly to conversations about the transfer or 'roll out' of palliative care interventions from one geography to another., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed.