Suchergebnisse

In the educational field, evaluations based on standardised indicators play a major role in the determination of evidence-based regulations. To have an effect within a policy field, evaluations based on standardised indicators have to become institutionalised. Nevertheless, very little is known about the strategies that actors apply to institutionalise their procedure and whether these strategies are successful. This paper explores the strategies that German school inspectorates use to maintain external evaluations based on standardised indicators as an institution. The paper draws on educational governance research and institutional work. By conducting expert interviews with staff members of school inspectorates, I show which strategies are used to increase the acceptance by school representatives. Two strategies can be identified: school inspectors try to make less judgements and focus on descriptions of what they have observed (strategy I), and school inspectors give school representatives a greater say when formulating expectations for schools (strategy II). From a governance perspective, these strategies mean that school representatives are perceived as equal partners. They also imply that school representatives do not have to give up any of their autonomy, which is also a necessary condition for the institutionalisation of school inspections.

This study reveals the institutional work required to maintain taken-for-granted beliefs about roles in the face of everyday breaches of role expectations. Through a comparative qualitative study of hospital-employed patient advocates in teaching and Veterans Health Administration hospitals, I demonstrate that patient advocates repair breaches in the taken-for-granted beliefs about the patient, family, and staff roles in hospitals. My research shows that patient advocates skillfully used rules—or formal policies and procedures—to restore, clarify, or initiate organizational changes in rules, all to maintain institutionalized role expectations. This analysis expands our understanding of the work of maintaining institutions by specifying how constellations of roles are maintained in the face of breaches of role expectations and across different institutional contexts. It highlights the roles of pressure specialists and furthers theorizing on individual agency by specifying how rules can be source of individual agency.

In this essay I call attention to segregation within the workplace, specifically the divide between maintenance worker (ABM staff), student, and the SAIC institution at whole. Through using a personal project as a case study to ground my critical interest, I delve into labor politics part of a capital system that leave us feeling underpowered, under appreciated, and with little to no say in how we choose to have relationships with those who we share space with. Through breaking down terms and policies like "liability" and "fraternization," I strive to disclose the realities they bare on our true human connection. I aim to understand how something so critical to society and our daily lives, that of labor, has become commoditized through a system which values profit and fears connection, rather than promoting well-being of all. In doing so, we as workers and individuals of communities become alienated from each other, our place of work and most importantly lose the ability to have empathy for one another. Through the power of storytelling and opening ourselves up to be aware of these systems, my hope is that it can allow for all individual's contributing to spaces beyond themselves to reconsider these spaces as shared, and truly act on that notion. More specifically, I want to reconsider the work place as a collective space. In such a collective space, individuals can be cognitive of each other's' service through communication, dialogue, every day interaction, empathy, solidarity and experience. I believe these collective spaces to render as "possible futures," ones which can challenge our current modes of recognition and gratitude for each other, therefore creating built realities where shared space inhabits common ground.

AbstractThis article examines the work of professional service firms (PSFs) in their relationships with public corporations; work that is designed to ensure that investors and potential investors have information that will enable them to participate in the capital markets. Using an institutional theory lens, we view these efforts by PSFs as institutional maintenance work and specifically analyze their work related to policing (i.e., rating), enabling (i.e., tutoring), and embedding and routinizing (i.e., collaborating) that helps to support the capital market as a core institution in society. We illustrate how there is a "dark" side to each of these forms of institutional work that exists because of ongoing conflicts of interest within and between their work practices. This dark side has the unintended consequence of producing often biased information or information unavailable to many. When a crisis brings this bias to light, some repair is introduced but often not enough to alleviate the distortion. Our contribution is, therefore, to shed light on the dark side of institutional maintenance work and to explore why repair is increasingly necessary, but often only partially effective.