Suchergebnisse

AbstractBased on 3 years of research with Nepali Bhutanese refugees in the Dallas–Fort Worth region of the southern US, this article asks how house ownership affects the meaning of home in third-country resettlement. While research participants initially depicted the owned house as a recovery of the pre-exile home, their narratives shifted when many started considering moves to the northern states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. In follow-up interviews based on future plans, an alternative image of home emerged based on the ability to relocate and seek better futures. In this spatially mobile and temporally open reconceptualization, home did not mean an end to displacement, but rather a continuous negotiation with conditions of alienation experienced as migrants in Bhutan and refugees in Nepal and the US. This shift suggests conceiving of refugee resettlement less as a romance of overcoming the liminality of exile, and more as a tragedy of enduring displacement.

Compared to the uniform brick architecture and contiguous courtyard structure of houses in the urban core of Kathmandu Valley cities, the houses of the growing urban periphery appear fragmented, disorganized, and unplanned. While critics attribute this haphazard growth to a site-then-services (house first, then infrastructure) approach of rural migrants, in this paper I consider it a result of an alternative formulation of planning generated by three-plus decades of economic and governmental liberalization. The practices of new homeowners in the periphery must be understood within the greater context of peri-urbanism controlled by a complex negotiation of brokers, contractors, housing companies, and neighborhood associations. I draw from the multiple expressions of what 'ghar' (house/ home) means to make sense of everyday life in a new neighborhood on the western edge of Kathmandu Valley. While ghar references the singular focus on building a prestigious house, it also indexes aspirations of neighborly cooperation and collective action to develop neighborhoods. Based on an ethnographic account of one family's struggles to build a ghar, I track how such aspirations can unravel into debt, shame, and alienation, which ultimately produce a provisional sense of place in the city.

The diffusion of scientific knowledge is critical for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Yet scientists face a fundamental dilemma when it comes to sharing such knowledge: sharing can simultaneously advance and challenge both academic and commercial interests. Although several studies explore the different reasons that scientists may or may not share, along with their overall propensity to do so, we have much less insight into how researchers who confront sharing/secrecy tensions attempt to manage them. In turn, our understanding of the ways in which scientists enable cumulative innovation through sharing, even as they attend to their private interests, remains limited. Based on qualitative analysis of 46 interviews and 58 oral histories with researchers in biotechnology and digital audio, I identify 4 tactics that researchers use to manage sharing/secrecy tensions—leveraging trust, strategic withholding, delaying, and patenting—and I analyze how the use of these tactics is tied to particular sharing practices, organizational environments (e.g., universities versus firms), and scientific fields. I then theorize how these tactics address different dimensions of sharing/secrecy tensions, working together as part of an integrated repertoire. Finally, I tie my findings to broader considerations around sharing, including managerial and policy initiatives aimed at promoting cumulative innovation.

A large literature addresses the practices and challenges surrounding knowledge reuse within organizations. Yet organizations frequently attempt to reuse knowledge from outside their boundaries, which may be even more challenging. The practice is so prevalent that an entire industry—the consulting industry—has developed to support it. Unfortunately, we understand little about how knowledge embedded in one organization is used to intervene in another and about what challenges follow from the attempt to do so. In this paper, we aim to address these questions. On the basis of an analysis of four months of ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival data surrounding an engagement between a leading consulting firm and a multihospital healthcare system, we find that partners and senior executives created generalizations based on their experience and encouraged junior consultants and hospital employees to apply these generalizations and reuse old solutions. Yet junior consultants, who had different backgrounds and were embedded in particular contexts, struggled to reuse solutions, and they instead developed novel insights through the engagement. We argue, moreover, that the ultimate success of consulting engagements lies in this division of labor within and across firms. Our work contributes to the literatures on knowledge reuse, organizational learning, and consulting by illuminating how knowledge is (or is not) reused and how differences between junior and senior consultants, and between consultants and clients, shape both the reuse of existing solutions and the development of new ones.