Search

Drawing on a qualitative case study consisting of interviews with Danish police trainees, patrol officers, and police detectives, this article explores police endorsement of myths surrounding male-perpetrated intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) and its influence on police response to IPVAW incidents. The findings show that police officers begin to believe in the myths to cope with negative emotions arising from repeated exposure to IPVAW victims, who do not behave according to expected norms of being cooperative, responsible, and innocent. This makes police officers meet victims with skepticism, low spirit, and hopelessness, making them refrain from initiating further criminal investigations, opening criminal cases, and pursuing arrests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many have suggested that performance grading may be a factor in the increasing number of students reporting having mental health issues, including feelings of stress. Gradeless learning has been shown to ease the pressure on students because it encourages a focus on learning rather than performance. Indeed, gradeless learning has been documented to benefit well-being, stress reduction, motivation, and learning approach, but its influence on academic performance requires more investigation. Drawing on a quantitative analysis, we empirically examine the effect of gradeless learning on a broad set of outcomes including well-being and stress, but focus specifically on students' later academic performance as measured by grades. Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students' later academic achievements. The study concludes that gradeless learning can provide a relevant alternative to grades if carefully designed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative impacts of grades on students' approach to learning and well-being have renewed the interest in gradeless learning in higher education, with the current literature focusing on the positive outcomes for students, including the advancement of student learning, reduced stress, increased motivation, and enhanced performance. While the idea of freeing students from the weight of grades sounds promising, grades are so integral to the educational system that the effects of learning without grades may not provide the relief intended. In this article, we present a qualitative case study of how business and management students experienced having gradeless learning in their first year of an undergraduate program. Our data show that students felt true ambivalence about learning without grades. Although gradeless learning was associated with less pressure, higher motivation, and a more collaborative approach to learning, it also engendered feelings of identity loss and uncertainty among students about their own performance and future opportunities. Our study contributes to previous studies on the impact of grades by revealing the ambivalence experienced by students when learning without the well-known metric of grades in a performance culture. Moreover, it provides new empirical insights into how business and management students experience gradeless learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note addresses how ignoring may be investigated as an interactional phenomenon. Ignoring-related practices can be stated to produce absences in the data rather than presences. Thus, their scrutiny poses challenges for analysts. We argue that inspiration can be found in Billig's work, which leverages a relational understanding of unconscious processes combined with the close attention to interactional details associated with the conversation analytical approach. We conceptualize the practices of ignoring through the psychodynamic concept of blindness to demonstrate the combined approach in an exemplary analysis of data obtained from an emergency call center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear of contamination is central to our thinking about 'dirty work', that is, tasks and occupations that carry a stigma owing to being perceived as having degrading, disgusting, or immoral qualities. However, most existing literature focuses on the symbolic dimension of taint – particularly, dirty workers' cognitive, ideological tactics to counter taint. Although contamination has more material consequences, the processes through which it is experienced and contained in dirty work have not yet been well explicated. Drawing on an ethnographic study of work in two Danish prisons, this article offers an opportunity to see behind the walls and gain insight into the extreme emotional dirty work of prison officers as they face burdensome emotional encounters with manipulative and intimidating inmates. As society's agent in the containment of inmates' emotional dirt, officers, as emotional labourers, risk contamination if they give in to inmates' pressure and manipulation and do them illicit favours. I use embodied phenomenology as an original and fertile approach to deepen the understanding of how contamination occurs in emotional dirty work and the bodily responses that workers engage in to resist it. Drawing on these findings, I extend our understanding of emotional dirty work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important but understudied issue in the study of organisational sensemaking concerns how power and politics influence sensemaking processes, specifically the political struggles immanent in collective processes of meaning construction and organising. When people are located at different areas and levels in the organisational hierarchy and they draw on different experiences and areas of knowledge, they often develop conflicting interpretations, which may compete for legitimacy. To capture the dimension of power in sensemaking, we combine the sensemaking perspective with a poststructuralist feminist conception of power, as this allows us to explore the mechanisms through which some sensemaking becomes legitimate whereas others remain marginalised. We specifically explore the ideological resources that shape the terrain within which a diverse workforce interpret, enact and emotionally experience diversity management in a local branch of a global retail chain store. The study used in-depth interviews and participant observations to provide insight into the complex mechanisms that are employed to control the definition of a specific situation, mapping out a hierarchical system of dominant, hidden and forbidden sensemaking of diversity management. The article concludes that the political processes of sensemaking deeply implicate emotions as a central force that facilitates the ongoing reproduction of social order. Our study, therefore, highlights the need to conceive of sensemaking, power and emotions as a complex nexus of the micro-political practices in which certain terrains of action unfold, allowing collective organising to occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse and often unacknowledged assumptions underlie organizational conflict research. In this essay, we identify distinct ways of conceptualizing conflict in the theoretical domain of organizational conflict with the aim of setting a new critical agenda for reflexivity in conflict research. In doing so, we first apply a genealogical approach to study conceptions of conflict, and we find that three distinct and essentially contested conceptions frame studies of conflict at work. Second, we employ two empirical examples of conflict to illustrate how organizational conflict research can benefit from a more reflexive approach and advance our understanding of conflict. In this essay, we emphasize how philosophical and political assumptions about conflict frame knowledge production within the field and we encourage future theory development to build on different notions of conflict to become better at coping with the complex and dynamic nature of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study illustrates how staff and management’s sensemaking in conflict in a clerical unit in a Scandinavian nonprofit organization is shaped by institutionalized meanings. Staff and management draw on three institutionalized frameworks when making sense of conflict: The defective personality framework, the diversity framework, and the status inequality framework. Similarly to the organization’s practice of framing “conflicts” as “frictions,” the diversity framework is guided by organizational ideology of egalitarianism and similar to the defective personality framework it emphasises nonconfrontation as a main strategy in processes of conflict management. Despite the organization’s strong commitment to egalitarianism, the clerical workers view status inequality as the origin of many conflicts and they thereby draw from the same institutionalized meanings of political economy of distributional conflicts that the organization was founded to change. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to display and critically reflect upon how field experiences in the research process interacted with the author's subjectivity and shaped her construction of knowledge about organisational conflict. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Weick's theoretical framework of sensemaking and the notion of reflexivity as a resource for dealing with research experiences, the paper presents empirical narratives that explore how research experiences of negotiating access to information and emic categories of conflict in the field, analysing events and morally deciding which stories from the field are conflict stories, and dealing with ethical dilemmas in the process of doing research about conflict constitute common factors that influenced the author's construction of knowledge about organisational conflict. Findings – The paper shows that the way we organise and make sense of research experiences shapes our process of theorising and the actual production of knowledge in a research field. Research limitations/implications – We should document and display the process of theorising in our research and thoroughly pursue what we experienced in the field, because this will create thoroughness to our research and add to, not devalue, the knowledge we produce. Originality/value – This paper highlights the process of theorising in organisational research. The empirical narratives presented in the paper contribute to the narrow display within the field of how we, as organisational researchers, mobilise our theorising and construct knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Some mental health service users need support from both hospital-based and community-based services. Treatment requires well-functioning collaboration practices between different mental health organizations and professions. However, serious cross-sector problems of collaboration have existed in Danish psychiatry since the 1980s when mental health service provisions were split into two psychiatric systems., Material and Methods: We report from two qualitative studies: STUDY#1 (n = 24) consisted of twenty-four individual, qualitative interviews with the staff and management of a psychiatric emergency unit, a closed psychiatric ward, and a community-based residential facility, respectively. STUDY#2 (n = 22) consisted of four individual interviews with service users and mental health staff, and three focus group interviews each including six staff members from both hospital- and community-based services., Results: Staff and management experiencing cross-sector problems of collaboration point to ineffective coordination of services between systems and lack of mutual understanding of how systems other than the staffs' own systems work. Solutions include specific procedural changes during service users' admission to and discharge from hospital and during hospitalization and measures to increase cross-sector knowledge about each system's practices and methods., Conclusion: Improvement of cross-sector collaboration in psychiatry should take the form of a multi-faceted approach embracing measures to improve coordination of service users' treatment and care and to increase interaction, understanding and respect between the two systems., Funding: not relevant., Trial Registration: not relevant.