Telling it how it really is? : life in organisations revealed using Heideggerian phenomenology

Heideggerian phenomenology is expounded here as a qualitative methodology of value in researching "how things really are" in organisational life. It is a methodology, and a philosophy, which recognises a priori the value ofthe subjective, lived experience of the informant, and the physical, sociological and psychological phenomena that come together to create their life-world. In this paper, the authors present cases where this methodology successfully revealed the respondents' reality. Stories about working in teams and being downsized are shared to demonstrate the ability of Heideggerian phenomenology to reveal how life really is in organisations.

Bare life in second life : Giorgio Agamben's politics in performance

This paper describes and analyzes the necessary misreadings of Giorgio Agamben’s account of ‘bare life’ in a recent performance in Melbourne, Australia. The ‘Bare Life’ project deals with Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers with reference to Agamben’s work on sovereign power and uses the on-line second life world as both a metaphor for the refugee’s desire for a new life, and a literal site of performance. The development showing explored the interactions between live performance and second life avatars in real time. This paper deals with the philosophical, ethical and practical problems that emerged during the development, and argues that the ‘misreading’ is an inevitable, but useful part of finding ways to embody philosophical and political ideas in performance.

Negotiating life choices : living with motor neurone disease

Motor neurone disease (MND) is an uncommon neurodegenerative disease that is terminal and has an insidious onset. With no known cause or cure, the disease triggers progressive death of motor neurones that causes increasing difficulties with mobility, communication, breathing and nutrition. Most research focuses on the disease process, but little is known of the illness experience from the perspective of those diagnosed with the disease. The aim of this study was to explore what it is like to live with MND and how people with the disease negotiate with others to exercise choice over the way they live. A grounded theory methodology was used to explore the life world of people diagnosed and living with MND. Data were collected via in-depth interviews, their stories and photographs, poems and books participants identified as important and fieldnotes. The textual data were analysed using constant comparative analysis. The majority of participants experienced difficulty with verbal communication. Some invited a third person to interpret their speech and others used assistive technologies such as Lightwriters and computers. Analysis revealed three constructs that, together, told the story of the MND illness experience. First, was the “diagnosis story” that described the devastating process of repeated tests had on the participants, shattering their trust in the competence of the health care system. The second construct revealed the process of living with MND as cyclical and repetitive requiring constant decision-making to adapt to the ongoing changes connected with the disease. The core theme and basic social process of “maintaining personal integrity” evolved as the third construct. This process underpinned and explained participants’ decision-making. Finally a substantive theory was conceptualised as the illness experience: “maintaining personal integrity in the face of ongoing change and adaptation”. This theory illustrates that the basic social process of maintaining personal integrity is central to decision and choice making while living with MND. The findings have implications for people with MND, their carers, health professionals and service providers. Recommendations include improved counselling services for people at the time of diagnosis; the introduction of nurse specialists to support health professionals, people diagnosed with the disease and their families; open, accessible, realistic health and funding policies.

Telling it how it really is?

Heideggerian phenomenology is expounded here as a qualitative methodology of value in researching "how things really are" in organizational life. It is a methodology, and a philosophy, that recognizes a priori the value of the subjective, lived experience of the individual, and the physical, sociological, and psychological phenomena that come together to create a life-world. In this paper, the authors present three cases where this methodology successfully revealed the employee's reality. Stories about working in teams, being downsized, and having an unseen chronic illness at work are shared to demonstrate the ability of Heideggerian phenomenology to reveal how life really is in organizations. The benefit for HR practitioners and managers is an increased understanding of and, hence, ability to address these sensitive and often unspoken aspects of organizational life.

Policy framework for a knowledge society : families and knowledge

My thesis examines the link between families, harm and knowledge in a society where knowledge is increasingly the central organising principle (Bohme 1997: 449-450; Stehr 1994: 6), and represents the capacity for action (Stehr 1994: 8). I observed as a consultant in the 1990s that practitioners in family work were able to articulate what works but often unable to articulate why and therefore unable easily to replicate what works. This time coincided with increasing commentary on complexities of living, capacity of families to cope, identification of the scale of family harm, and use of the term 'the knowledge society'. My aim is to identify why what works, works with families exhibiting harmful behaviours and families acquiring knowledge from learning everyday life skills so as to lead less harmful and more fulfilling lives. And by such explanations inform, replicate and scale up practice to benefit more families exhibiting harm. I conceptualise the outcome as a sequence of family, community and policy work in an ecological framework (Bronfenbrenner 1979) within a knowledge society. My method was a year-long action research project with a family support service in New South Wales. I engaged in reflective practice with workers, and a parallel literature review that supported additional reflective practice. I found growing complexity of life requires growing knowledge. I found a distinction between everyday and abstract life worlds, and with families principally acting in the everyday life world. It is a world from which some families and their members seek to escape, often by means of harmful behaviours of neglect, abuse and violence. I substantiated the link that the family support service of my study sees between relationships, behaviours and affects; and I linked this in turn with its therapeutic engagement of the whole family — adults and children, male and female, victims and perpetrators. This engagement involves a process of learning (Rogers 1967: 280) to acquire fulfilling behaviours. It is a process of adult and experiential learning of relationship skills, drawing on under-used reserves of families. Relationship skills form a basis of acquiring other life skills since most require relationships with others to perform life skills. Combining the sequence of family, community and policy work with workers engaging in reflective practice of their work creates capacity for community institutions to replicate and scale up what works and why. Understanding this sequence may assist community institutions to inform policymakers of benefits common to all policy interests of such replication and scaling up. I conceptualise a policy framework of families and knowledge in a knowledge society and two lower level frameworks of process and content of life skills. Implications of these for practice, policy, and theory include a greater distinction between everyday and abstract knowledge and skills; recognition of a sequential process of information, learning, and knowledge; and inclusiveness and fluidity in learning in diverse adult learning settings and in family support professions.

Images of embodied old age in contemporary Japan

Since the late 1980s, representations of Japanese national identity and Japanese old age have been deconstructed. Images of the resilience of traditional cultural and social institutions are shown to have over-emphasized social and cultural homogeneity, elided social differentiation and inequality and minimized the significance of historical transformation. Key institutions of the postwar modernization project, including the patriarchal seniority system and household structure, are being transformed through globalization and feminization. This thesis focuses on the problem of representing individual and collective ageing in Japan in the context of modernization. Research is focussed on the contradictions, within essentialist representations of Japanese collective and individual identity, between socially constructed policy forms of old age and collective identities. Contemporary trends towards individualization and diversification of identities, and discourses on the ageing/information society, indicate cultural distance between an instrumentally rational administration and the life world of old people. Research explores the concept of embodiment through its significance in debates on postmodernization of the lifecourse in accordance with the structural shifts towards a postindustrial structure. This study examines representations of old age in broader social and cultural processes. Images of the social and cultural trajectory of the lifecourse draw attention to the embodiment of individual identities and ultimately generational cultures in contemporary social and cultural spaces. This research is the result of analyses of old age, which have been informed by postmodern theory. It in turn informs sociological theorizations of cultural representations of old age in contemporary societies.

A semiotic view of Dewey's times and Habermas's lifeworlds

John Dewey (1859-1952) explained how life was ‘corporatised’ at the time of rampant, laissez faire capitalism in early 20th century America. This paper refers Dewey’s observations to Habermas’s notions of the colonisation of the lifeworld. The semiotic and pragmatist approaches of Charles Saunders Peirce are then enlisted to look further into these lifeworld changes. The
paper suggests modifications to Habermas’s schema to bring it more in line with Dewey’s empirical account. It puts together a theoretically and empirically informed picture of the contemporary disruption to ways of living and the accompanying social and political instability. The paper then goes on to suggest how that instability appears to have been quelled by communicative means. These stages of: (1) stability; (2) disruption/instability; and (3) the regaining of stability are compared to Habermas’s notions of: (1) an original lifeworld; (2) colonisation of that lifeworld by the consequences of purposive rational activity; then (3) communicative action which ‘rebuilds’— that is which replaces or modifies or reforms or repairs—the disrupted lifeworld in order to create a new lifeworld. ‘Colonisation’ could be said to have provoked social instability. Notions of building a new ‘lifeworld’—a new cultural and psychic reference—could be said to correspond with attempts to resume social and political stability. The implication is that whatever the degree of purposive rationalism there is always a need for a return to some level of shared values and
understandings which imply communicative rationality. This ‘return’ or ‘counter-colonisation’ can be thought of as operating via a ‘lifeworld negotiation’ which might best be understood with reference to a Peircean based pragmatism-semiotic theory of human subjectivity. This paper
has been criticised for discussing “arguments” which: “would justify those who accommodated themselves to Nazism.” What this paper in fact tries to do is to use the concepts of the above three philosophers to try to account for the ways people think. This paper is not about justifying what philosophies people should hold. It is presumed that most readers are sensible and ethical and can make their own minds up in that respect. Rather it attempts to draw from Dewey, Habermas and Peirce to offer a characterisation of what philosophies might be argued to be held and to offer an explanation about how these modes of thinking might be said to have come into existence.
This paper rejects the notion that ones ‘will’ and thus the way one is able to think, is totally free and beyond the formative influences of the social-cultural context—including the influences of public relations and other persuasive discourse industries.

Sharing community through singing : the Bosnian Behar Choir in Victoria, Australia

In 2008, the Australian Federal Minister for Ageing identified the importance of promoting social engagement amongst older Australians who frequently rely on community arts organizations to enhance quality of life, specifically in health, happiness and community. The arts are identified as a powerful catalyst in building strong communities that have the potential for connection, caring and social development. Greater active engagement in performing arts by older people is positively related to enhanced individual and community well-being. Our research study, Wellbeing and ageing: community, diversity and the arts (begun in 2008), explores cultural diversity and complexity within older Australian society through an examination of engagement with a community choir. In 2009 data were collected via semi-structured interviews that were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis which utilises a phenomenological approach that explores personal experience in the participant’s life-world. Our research study focuses on one community choir, the Bosnian Behar Choir, in Victoria, Australia, as a lens through which to explore active ageing. Three significant issues were identified from this research which will be reported under the themes of well-being, community and cultural diversity. The Bosnian Behar Choir demonstrates how community music making can enhance well-being and positive ageing in contemporary Australia.

Facing off : facebook and higher education

A social and cultural expectation that Information Communication Technologies (ICT) should be ubiquitous within peoples' daily lives is apparent. Connecting generational groups with a specific set of technological attributes also assumes the ways that particular groups of students should be able/do “naturally” use emergent mobile and social technologies. Moreover, the use of social networking technologies is evident in a number of ways within higher education (HE) pedagogies. As part of the suite of possibilities in Web 2.0, Facebook is used in a number of ways to support communications within and between institutions and their students as well as a mechanism for teaching and learning within specific units of study.

The chapter commences with a broad discussion about social sharing software of Web 2.0, specifically Facebook, as a potential teaching and learning tool in HE contexts. We traverse recent exemplars and discourses surrounding the use of social technologies for the purposes of HE. It is clear from the literature that while there is much excitement at the possibilities that such technologies offer, there are increasing anxieties across institutional and individual practitioners, in regard to possible consequences of their use.

Through autoethnographic methodology, this chapter showcases potentials and challenges of Facebook in HE. Through the use of constructed scenarios, the authors describe occurrences that necessitate increasing professional development and vigilance online. Some of the issues highlighted within this chapter include blurring of professional and personal life world boundaries, issues of identity theft and vandalism, cyberstalking and bullying, working in the public domain, and questions of virtual integrity.

Deliberative educational planning : including educators’ deliberations in educational policy making.

The objective of this chapter is to argue a case for the need to include teachers and professional educators in the policy making and implementation processes of the World Bank's Education Sector Strategy 2020. By drawing on evidence from the Consultation Plan, the chapter investigates how communicative practices about teachers are embedded in the discourse of the plan and how these influence the rationalisation of the policy. In doing so, the chapter will examine the relationships between social actions, systems rationalisation and life world rationalisation. Much like commercial and entrepreneurial organisations focus on the voice of the customer (VOC), that is on satisfying the stakeholders and end users in their processes, in this chapter, the voice of the teacher (VOT) is highlighted. The skills and knowledge of key stakeholders need to be leveraged and engaged in order to ensure that the policy achieves its desired aims. In order to frame this argument, notions of Habermas’ communicative action theory is used to show how policy engages in systems steering. Rather than understanding education strategy and reform as a process of engaging only government and policy makers, this chapter suggests that by engaging the practitioners and listening to the practical discourse around reform, teachers can be leaders of reforms rather than obfuscated agents.

Three Australian community choirs : ageing, singing and well-being

The promotion of social engagement amongst older Australians is a national priority. Music is a powerful social mechanism that allows individuals and communities to affirm identity, gain a sense of belonging, and share history and culture. Community choir membership offers older people opportunities to connect with others and share a sense of purpose that can enhance their sense of well-being and potentially reduce their experience of social isolation. This paper explores the understandings of well-being, positive ageing and community music making held by members of three choirs in Victoria; Australia. The choirs selected for this discussion are the Coro Furlan, the Skylarkers and the Bosnian Behar Choir. Data have been collected via semi-structured interview with members of the three choirs and analyzed using interpretative Phenomenological Analysis which employs a phenomenological approach that explores personal experience in the participant's life-world. analysis of the combined data identified two broad common themes: First is the personal impact that choir membership has for the individual which includes the building of friendships and opportunities to learn and share music. The second theme concerns the contribution that the choir can make to others in their local community. Thus older singers are provided with a way to be both engaged, validated and appreciated by their contemporary society. Choir participation is an effective way for individuals to express themselves, engage with each other, improve their quality of life, transmit cultural heritage, and build community.

Security and ethical issues in the virtual world of Second Life

In recent times, Virtual Worlds such as Second Life have generated substantial publicity due to the participation of Fortune 500 companies, and other public and private organisations. As practitioners continue to discuss how organisations could derive business value from Virtual Worlds, new security and ethical issues in Virtual Worlds have emerged to challenge Virtual World users and stakeholders. This paper discusses privacy, intellectual property and a host of other security and ethical issues in Virtual Worlds. It contributes to practice and research by (i) providing insight into emerging security and ethical issues in Virtual Worlds, (ii) analysing the implication of these issues, within and beyond Virtual Worlds, and (iii) raising awareness on security and ethics among Virtual World users and stakeholders.

Evaluating quality of life in hip and knee replacement: psychometric properties of the World Health Organization Quality of Life short version instrument

Objective: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the World Health Organization Quality of Life short version instrument (WHOQOL-BREF), and to determine its responsiveness in assessing early outcome after total hip or knee replacement surgery.

Methods: At baseline (entry to an orthopedic waiting list), 279 participants completed the WHOQOL-BREF instrument, Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), Assessment of Quality of Life (AQOL) instrument, Kessler Psychological Distress (K10) scale, and the modified Health Assessment Questionnaire (MHAQ). A total of 74 patients completed reassessments 3 months after surgery.

Results: The WHOQOL-BREF demonstrated acceptable internal consistency for all domains (Cronbach's = 0.76-0.84) and moderate concurrent validity for the physical and psychological domains (r = 0.67 for physical versus AQOL; r = -0.71 for psychological versus K10). Minimal ceiling or floor effects were identified at baseline or 3 months, except for the social relationships domain. The disease-specific WOMAC subscales were most responsive to change (relative efficiency [RE] 0.66-1.00). Apart from social relationships, all WHOQOL-BREF scores improved significantly after surgery. The physical domain was more responsive than the AQOL (RE 0.50 versus 0.42) and was similar to the MHAQ (RE 0.55 for MHAQ). The responsiveness of the psychological domain was similar to that of the K10 scale (RE 0.11 versus 0.08).

Conclusion: The WHOQOL-BREF has good psychometric properties for use in persons with severe joint disease, and by providing complementary information, it offers clinicians and researchers an additional tool for comprehensively assessing quality of life in this patient group.