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This article examines employers' practices and employees' experiences of incentive programmes that aim to encourage and reward safe behavior in high-risk industries, focusing particularly on the oil and gas sector. Little qualitative research has been carried out that explores how employees would like to be recogniz ed and rewarded within such programs in the oil and gas sector and why, and what their understandings of safety and rewarding are.Drawing on 41 semi-structured interviews and observation research across eight sites in three countries, we examine safety incentivization practices, preferences, and understandings. The use of Hazard Identification cards is also being discussed.One of our findings is that, contrary to the assumptions of managers and supervisors that material awards are particularly motivational, many employees preferred symbolic recognition, care by the company, the provision of training and professional development, and investment into improving their wellbeing. We also identify a preference for collective recognition over individual rewards and discuss the values of certificates.We conclude that rewarding practices of large multinational companies should become more responsive to the individual wishes of employees and their specific socio-economic contexts and highlight the importance of employee involvement in reward programs.

This article examines transitional justice in Kenya, drawing on interviews and focus groups with survivors of the post-election violence of 2007–2008. Focusing particularly on the experiences of women and internally displaced persons (IDPs), it explores how survivors understood and negotiated waiting for reparations and analyses the effects of temporal uncertainty (around timing and scope) and of inequality (in relation to waiting times). Uncertainty and inequality contributed to survivors’ senses of passivity and exacerbated their feelings of marginalisation. To delay reparations for an uncertain time contributes to senses of continuity with the past, which transitional justice precisely seeks to disrupt. However, the study also demonstrates that waiting is not only endured, but at times actively resisted or rejected, which might be understood as a claim to ownership of local peace and exercise of peacebuilding agency but also as resistance against the dominant temporality of transitional justice. By framing survivors’ experiences with the scholarship on time and power and the “politics of waiting”, the research contributes to the literature on local experiences and understandings of transitional justice and to recent debates around its temporalities.

Empowerment is an often used concept and the work of Paulo Freire has helped to define the application and outcomes of approaches. The researchers visited Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, during periods of political activity which had previously resulted in violence. Community members identified strategies employed in an attempt to curtail heightened risk. These factors were analysed to evaluate whether empowerment, as espoused by Freire, was still relevant in community development work. Empowerment strategies were multi-faceted and highlighted that they had created new issues for the community to address, suggesting strategy and outcomes need to be strong considerations in future work.

This article explores why landscape is a crucial element in researching the relationship between environment and well-being. The main point we make is that human social agents are embedded in particular landscapes, and it is in landscapes that environmental changes are experienced, which can have implications for well-being. We draw from a variety of perspectives on landscape that understands a fundamental creative relation between humans and landscape and recent developments in neo-materialism theorising. Landscape is understood here as an assemblage of different forms of matter, animate and inanimate objects, as well as symbolic and cultural processes. A case study is also presented to indicate how landscape can be studied in relation to environment and change. Using the conceptual ideas laid out in the first section of the article, we analyse landscape, environment and well-being in Xuan Thuy National Park in North Vietnam. The area is part of a precarious coastal region where extreme weather events have impacted on the well-being of both humans and other matter. This article concludes with suggestions on the use of this landscape approach in researching environment and well-being.

This paper explores the maintenance of livelihoods under climate, environmental, and economic development pressures, through the case of Thang Binh District in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam. Within widespread recognition of the need to link sustainable livelihoods approaches with climate change adaptation, there is growing awareness of the importance of people-centered approaches which keep the diverse experience, capabilities, and knowledges of the most vulnerable at the heart of sustainable livelihoods thinking. In response, this paper explores the conditions for changes in modes of livelihoods in a case study area where top-down strategies for sustainable livelihoods are met with residents’ diverse experiences of vulnerability, and where climate and environmental changes shape residents’ relations with the landscape. The research is undertaken via interviews with residents, farmers/fishers, and local government officials. Our study finds that whilst government-led initiatives for sustainable livelihoods are welcomed in the locality, inflexible policies can make it challenging for the most vulnerable people to access support. Moreover, residents see the capacity to live with and respond to extreme weather events as a critical component of maintaining a sustainable livelihood. Our findings reinforce international literature, showing that ‘the poor’ are not a homogenous category, and illustrate the importance of attention to the smallest levels of government who are tasked with putting sustainable livelihoods initiatives into practice in relation to people’s daily lives.

While previous literature has examined time discourses in social work and demonstrated that social work is predicated on linear understandings of time, one area that has received little theoretical...

This chapter examines the role of intermediary NGOs in community development in post-apartheid South Africa, specifically exploring how these organisations have been shaped by changing funding modalities. It first summarises the socio-historical developments that have enabled NGOs to become significant actors in community development. It then examines partnerships as a specific neoliberal mode of funding that has shaped the role of NGOs in community development. It is argued that partnerships provide a context within which shared values, practices, and techniques appropriate to particular, often neoliberal, forms of community development can be developed in NGOs. Partnerships link intermediary NGOs with corporations, the state, and communities, and enable claims of legitimacy, build consensus through homogenisation, and necessitate particular auditing techniques and capabilities.

This study ethnographically explores how collaboration is enacted within two differently structured sub-sea engineering organisations local to the oil & gas industry in Aberdeen, Scotland. Literature suggests organisational collaboration practices are largely dependent on trust, historical cooperation, establishing interpersonal relations and information sharing networks. Such notions are suggested as readily enacted in Aberdeen. However, following changes in industry landscape, we uncover a variety of additional factors pertaining to macro-level local industry climate, and meso-level organisational cultures that shape different perceptions, understandings, and enactments of collaboration. To grow current scholarly thinking, we define how such diverse understandings actively prevent organisational collaboration in the restrictively competitive climate of Aberdeen’s oil & gas industry. Implications for expanding understandings of collaboration in employment sectors facing substantial industry destabilisation and reformation are discussed.

The idea for this book drew from Mueller-Hirth's (2017) article on temporalities of victimhood and was developed thanks to the generous response by the contributors to the volume. The backbone of the collection is our belief that by exploring how time is experienced, constructed and used by people and institutions, some central problems in post-conflict societies can be revealed and analysed in a unique way. The volume aims, empirically, to develop a deeper understanding of the role time plays in overcoming violent pasts and, theoretically, to contribute time-sensitive perspectives to the fields of transitional justice and peacebuilding.

This chapter gives voice to our sample of South African victims and explains the South African sample of victims. The chapter begins with a history of South Africa and the development of policies of racial segregation under the British and apartheid under Afrikaner nationalism. It then proceeds to develop the same themes that South Africa’s victims gave voice to, such that the chapter discusses South African victims’ notions of competitive victimhood, their emotional landscape, exploring the meaning of forgiveness, hope and the future in a South African context. Victims’ attitudes towards Whites are addressed as a legacy of apartheid, and the impact of this legacy is shown in the ambivalence victims have toward hope and the future. The structural inequalities faced by most first generation victims of apartheid are highlighted as they impact on victims’ hopes for the future.

This chapter examines one of the mediators of compromise, the capacity for forgiveness. Three dominant understandings of forgiveness emerged from the narratives of South African victims of human rights violations interviewed for this research: religious forgiveness, secular forgiveness, and forgiveness as coping. While there were relatively high levels of forgiveness among the victims interviewed for this study, personal or interpersonal forgiveness is not a necessary condition for the practice of compromise, whereas third-party forgiveness is. What is more, the chapter demonstrates that forgiveness is contingent on senses of reciprocity, the fairness of the peace process, and contemporary experiences of social justice, and can wane or be withdrawn even years after the formal end of violence. Contrary to a supposed linear temporality of peace processes within which healing takes place progressively such that forgiveness and trust increase with the passage of time, contemporary victimisation experiences can bring back negative emotions about the past that can shape individuals’ capacity for forgiveness. The conditions that sustain forgiveness therefore need to be continually supported.

The silencing of victims in peace processes is contrasted with the need to mainstream or centre them in peacebuilding. This mainstreaming is done via the idea of everyday life peacebuilding by victims. This chapter introduces the idea of everyday life. It explores how conflict brutalizes everyday life and looks at how this brutalization is manifested in Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and South Africa. Sociological approaches to everyday life are outlined and the chapter explores how sociological understandings broaden the understanding and range of everyday life peacebuilding. A sociological lens is used to help us understand the victim category and how victimhood is socially constructed. The social construction of victims as a ‘problem’ in peace processes, although of different sorts, is contrasted with their role as moral beacons, which requires victims and victim issues to be mainstreamed rather than side lined in peace processes.

The victims’ voices captured in the previous three chapters are used in this chapter to develop the conceptual argument about the nature, limits and strengths of everyday life peacebuilding. A review and critique is given of the concept of everyday life peacebuilding as it has developed in International Relations Studies. The chapter argues that sociology’s special understanding of the nature of everyday life adds to discussions in International Relations Studies and elaborates the process in positive ways. Examples are given from the empirical data to show how sociologically, everyday life is not only a space where certain forms of peacebuilding are done, but a mode of reasoning, in which ‘getting along’ with one another after conflict as a way of thinking is made normal, routine and everyday.

This chapter gives voice to the sample of Sri Lankan victims. It addresses how the sample was obtained and studied before giving a historical account of Sri Lanka’s conflict and the ambivalence of its ‘victor’s peace’. The impact of the victor’s peace on the double victimhood of Tamils is the central motif for understanding the victimhood experience of Tamils. The victimhood experiences of Sinhalese victims are not ignored but they are contrasted with the double victimhood of Tamils. The chapter addresses the standard themes for capturing the voice of victims, including topics like competitive victimhood, attitudes towards the erstwhile enemy, their emotional landscape, such as feelings of anger, hope forgiveness and compromise, and grief and loss. The structural inequalities faced in particular by Tamils are addressed for their impact on the victimhood experience.

This chapter gives voice to our sample of Northern Irish victims. After a historical survey of the Northern Irish conflict and ‘the Troubles’, this chapter introduces the Northern Irish sample of victims and focuses on the central themes that they gave voice to. These include their understanding of the victim category and whether or not they understood this competitively to be inclusive or restricted, how they coped with stress and difficult memories, their emotional landscape, such as the meanings they attributed to compromise, hope, forgiveness, and the future, as well as their attitudes toward erstwhile enemies and ‘the other’, the reciprocity of the peace agreement and the fairness of the peace settlement, and their attitudes towards the past.

Leverhulme Trust in funding the research on which this paper is based under grant number F/00 152/AK.

Private sector activities have often been linked to the fuelling of conflict and violence. At the same time, there has been growing interest in the contributions that the business sector can potentially make to peace, both from within academia (for example the ‘peace through commerce’ literature) and in the global institutional realm (for example the Business for Peace agenda). Proponents of such approaches claim that businesses have roles to play not only in contributing to growth and socio-economic development, but also in resolving or preventing conflict.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are increasingly challenged to demonstrate accountability and relevance, with reporting, monitoring and evaluation arguably having become development activities in their own right. Drawing on interviews and observation research, this article examines the impact of intensified monitoring and evaluation (M&E) requirements on a number of South African NGOs. M&E - and the types of expertise, vocabularies and practices it gives rise to - is an important area that is usually neglected in the study of NGOs but that significantly impacts on NGOs' logic of operation. By focusing on three areas - data that are considered appropriate to conduct M&E, staffing and organizational cultures, and NGOs' reformist relationships with other civil society organizations (CSOs) - M&E is revealed as a central discursive element in the constitution of NGOs appropriate to neoliberal development. By engaging a neo-Foucauldian framework of governmentality, M&E practices are thus understood as technologies through which governing is accomplished in the trans-scalar post-apartheid development domain.

This chapter will discuss historical contexts and contemporary issues in Corporate Social Responsibility in South Africa. Here, the private sector has been forced to adopt socially responsible policies that are more advanced than those in many of the richer economies; spending in Corporate Social Investment (CSI) far exceeds that of wealthier countries. This is due to the adoption of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) legislation, the set of affirmative action policies adopted by the post-apartheid government to give historically disadvantaged groups economic opportunity. Relationships between business and society in South Africa are thus significantly shaped by the country’s divided history of colonialism and apartheid, as well as by its present developmental challenges. Indeed, given that big business was one of the main beneficiaries of the Apartheid regime, it was ironically apartheid and the social unrest that it brought about that first stimulated corporate social responsibility practices in the country. Today, any South African company’s performance is rated on a number of BEE scorecards, with companies collecting points for Corporate Social Responsibility. Although corporate involvement in development is usually portrayed as diametrically opposed to the state’s involvement, the South Africa government has a very active role in defining and motivating CSR. At the same time, CSR funding is becoming ever more vital for the non-profit sector, with NGOs receiving an average of 20 % of their income from corporations. Moreover, CSI spending in 2012 by the top 200 South African companies alone amounted to a total of R7 billion, of which over a third was channelled through non-profit organisations. These complex intersectoral relationships under the banner of CSR have led to a maturing and professionalisation of companies’ CSR strategies and practices in recent years, which this chapter will outline with reference to recent scholarship and to original research by the author.

This article examines the widespread notion that post‐apartheid democracy can be deepened and civil society strengthened by NGO activities in the sphere of public debate and participation. I focus on a number of interrelated processes which I argue may compromise NGOs' ability to expand the public sphere: first, donors' overwhelming focus on NGOs as the sole representative of civil society may contribute to a homogenous and institutionalised public sphere; second, the tendency for NGOs to be drawn into partnerships with government bodies and corporate sponsors casts doubt on their ability to open up spaces for critical public debate. By directing attention to popular movements as potentially offering a site for the production of critique, NGOs' relationships to such movements are examined. It is argued that attention must be paid to the processes of NGO‐isation and reformism by which NGOs themselves come to define what civil society should be and may consequently contain counterpublic spheres.

Despite the attention to gender and conflict in empirical positivist peace research, and the interest in local agency in recent peacebuilding literature, women’s understandings and lived experience...