UiS Open Journals (Univ. of Stavanger)
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Upcycling – a new perspective on waste in social innovation
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to introduce ‘upcycling’ – a well-known term within design practice – to the field of social innovation. A mix between ‘upgrading’ (adding value) and ‘recycling’ (reusing) creates the word upcycling, which, in its simplest terms, is the practice of reassessing waste and transforming it into something valuable. In this paper, we ask: How does an upcycle mind-set and practice contribute to situated social innovation?
This conceptual paper seeks to combine insights from the fields of social innovation and co-design with the ideas inherent in upcycling. To ground the theorizing of what we term ‘social upcycling’, four cases are used to illustrate what upcycling practices look like. The cases illustrate the diversity of actors, activities and materiality involved in social upcycling processes. Concluding, the paper outlines a new promising area of social innovation and some practical implications
‘Teach, reduce and discharge’: Community nurses’ textual production of ‘independence’ and the coordination of discharge from home care services
Get PDFOver the past three decades, the Canadian healthcare system has undergone significant reform and restructuring. As a result, healthcare and healthcare costs are relocated from hospitals to the community (McGregor, 2001). Text-based technology is increasingly used to standardize care and contain healthcare spending. This paper examines an example of a text-based technology used in the School Health Support Services programme for students with diabetes in Ontario, Canada. Using institutional ethnography, the inquiry starts with parents’ concerns regarding the premature termination of nursing care for their children with diabetes at school. The exploration shows how these parents’ concerns are hooked into the institutional work of assessment for service discharge conducted by the Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) care coordinators. The analysis shows how the institutional category of ‘independence’ coordinates the service discharge work of the CCAC care coordinators with that of the nursing work of community nurses at school. The activation of the category of ‘independence’ by the nurses mediates their work, orienting their focus away from providing direct nursing care, and towards transferring primary care to children with diabetes. Children doing diabetes self-care work at school is then written up in nursing texts to stand in for children’s ability to manage diabetes ‘independently’. The textual production of ‘independence’ enables the next institutional course of action, that is, the discharge of children from nursing services at school. In this process, children with diabetes are drawn into doing the discharge work that ultimately serves the cost-containment interests of the institution. This institutional process also functions to obscure important actualities: It obscures how children’s ‘independence’ is co-created on a daily basis with their parents and relies on their parents’ work, and it discounts the significance of children with diabetes coming to their own embodied and emotional readiness for diabetes self-care
Understanding implementation in complex public organizations – implication for practice
Get PDFThe effective implementation of politically initiated public service innovations to the front-lines of the public service organization, where the innovation is to be applied, is a challenge that both practitioners and researchers struggle to solve. We highlight the importance of analysing contextual factors at several levels of the implementation system, as well as the importance of considering how the practical everyday work situations of the front-line workers influence their application of the innovation in question. We illustrate this by exploring the implementation process of a specific work inclusion measure, looking at its wider context and some of its implementation outcomes at a specific public agency. The intention is to illustrate the significance of considering the contextual complexity influencing implementation work as a reminder for practitioners to take this into account in their planning and practices
Intentional fire management in the Holocene with emphasis on hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic in South Norway
Get PDFThe geographical and altitudinal distribution of the data from 68 palynological sites has allowed the synthesis of a relationship between the microscopic charcoal curves and people over time. Most of the selected sites were of archaeological interest. Quantitative methods, qualitative methods and topics about the relation between fire, charcoal, nature and people in a forested landscape were used. Palynological sites are better suited to revealing fire management activities in the Mesolithic than archaeological sites because intentional burning of vegetation was carried out in areas related to lakes and mires. Climate is ruled out as the cause of the charcoal occurrence because there are no correlations between inferred regional climatic changes and the charcoal. This suggests that an anthropogenic explanation for the charcoal occurrence is the most plausible.There are many indications that hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic used fire management and that fire was an important part of cultural practice associated with settlement, population density and resource needs. Fire management was a common and regular work task integrated with other activities. The traditional lifestyle of foragers may have included customary controlled burning practices as a part of manipulating the ecological succession and the modification of vegetation communities. Burning may have been central to hunting and gathering practices and the key to many social and cultural activities. The timing of burns may have been related to weather conditions, time of year and annual cultural events.The different pattern of temporal changes in charcoal abundance suggests that no widespread burning (i.e. on a regional or landscape-scale) had taken place. The anthropogenic burning was different from natural fires. The fires set by people were smaller and less intense. Selected areas of vegetation were burnt on a recurrent basis. They were predictable, almost immediately productive, creating mosaics in a complex pattern of vegetation of burnt and unburnt patches. Because they reduced available fuel, they provided protection against the disruptions of natural fires. The occurrence of natural fires is irregular, often with long intervals in between; they are uncontrolled, unpredictable, destructive to the vegetation and potentially dangerous for people. In order for the recorded charcoal occurrences to be considered the result of natural fires, sites close to each other should have had similar charcoal occurrences, but this is not the case. An often low and continuous charcoal presence in a more or less dense forest in the Mesolithic indicates a continuous production of charcoal, which is better interpreted as people’s use of fire than continuous natural fires. The data confirm that anthropogenic fires were much more frequent than natural fires in the Mesolithic. Foragers did not simply adjust to their environment, but had an active, dynamic relationship with nature, using intentional burning both to modify and to maintain the environment. Intentional burning of vegetation during the Mesolithic is suggested to have been enacted by foragers who controlled fire for many purposes and widened its application to preserve their basis of existence, for instance to improve the outcome of hunting and for communication. Two periods with a high frequency of maximum values of charcoal in the pollen diagrams are recorded in the early (9800–6000 cal yr BP) and the late part of the Holocene (younger than 2400 cal yr BP), respectively, and not at the transition to the Neolithic. This shows that early farmers did not produce as much charcoal—measured in maxima—as the huntergatherers did before the transition to the Neolithic, and confirms foragers’ intentional burning as part of Mesolithic land-use in South Norway. The first occurrences and high frequency of maximum values of charcoal pre-date the transition to the Neolithic and thus it can be ruled out that they were correlated with agrarian cultures in South Norway. It is possible that the selective burning carried out by foragers in vegetation paved the way for pioneer farmers to convert land for agricultural purposes. In that sense, the neolithisation was not very revolutionary, as the knowledge of using fire to manipulate and open the forest had a long pre-agrarian history. As the path of the charcoal curve following the transition to the Neolithic is often interpreted as the result of forest clearance by farmers, a fire-related woodland change interpretation for the Mesolithic might also be used. After the transition to the Neolithic, the density of the forest in many areas decreased and allowed more charcoal deposition. The density of the forest affected the charcoal curve resulting in low values before the transition to theNeolithic compared to the values after the transition. This is a strong indication that the charcoal curve during the Mesolithic mainly originated as an effect of human activities. That the density of the forest in the Mesolithic changed more than the traditionally accepted view is probably the result of intentional fire management. 
Om kyrkjebygging og kristning i Rogaland i tidleg mellomalder
Get PDFThis article researches six church sites founded in Rogaland during the early stages of Christianisation in Norway in the High Middle Ages. The areas selected for investigation are the coastal skipreider (administrative units) Time and Klepp incentral Jæren, and Jelsa and Suldal in non-coastal Ryfylke. The sites have been assessed in relation to their surroundings, to shed light on the issues of actor, time and choice of location. The investigation revealed two types of church site: siteswith proprietary churches erected by a local magnate or middle-ranking landowner, and churches built by the villagers as a collaborative enterprise, in accordance with provisions in the section on church law in Gulatingslova (the Gulating Law) –called Kristenretten (Christian Law). The location of church sites relative to older pagan cult sites was assessed, to ascertain to what extent the location of a particular church represented continuity or change. The issue of monumentality appears to have been central in determining the location of proprietary churches, while accessibility seems to have been a consideration that influenced the location of churches built collaboratively by members of the community.It is suggested that Kristenretten was instrumental in spreading Christianity in Norway, in that the provisions on church building and related regulations encouraged the building of churches by a class of middle-ranking landowners. 
Social work and families in child welfare in Malawi: Social workers considerations when placing a child outside the home
Get PDFThis article discusses professional discretion in relation to placing a child outside the family, as understood by Malawian social workers. The article is a product of an exploratory study covering different aspects of social work practice with children and families in Malawi. It is based on focus group discussions with practicing social workers that were conducted using a vignette. This article describes how social workers handle child protection cases, in which a child has to be placed outside the home or family. The article points out different solutions and the reasoning behind certain decisions on placing children outside their home. The study explores issues of patriarchy, intervention methods into families and the cooperation between social workers, community members and other professionals when helping families. The study found that a number of different factors affect the decision of placing a child outside the home. Social workers in this study put an emphasis on the importance of helping children within the immediate- and extended family to help cope with the lack of financial resources that would provide alternative options
Narratives from parents in England and Norway: Power and emotions in child protection assessments
Get PDFThe framework for assessment in child protection, as well as the context of the welfare state, differs between England and Norway. Assessments in England are structured in terms of a set model (the triangle) and procedures to be followed, whereas in Norway there are few national guidelines and not a set model for assessments. This underpins professional judgement as the most important component in Norway. This is a study of parents` experiences from assessment in these two contexts, and patterns and themes of assessment experiences have been identified in the two countries through a narrative analysis of in-depth interviews with parents. When asked about their opinions of the current assessment framework, parents in both countries talk more about feelings than about framework and procedures, as their experiences of assessment are similar in both countries. First and foremost, they experience strong emotions in a stressful situation, including anxiety, frustration and powerlessness, but also relief. These cross-national emotions might provide information about how assessment is a stressful situation for the parents involved. However, we find some differences in the way social work is acted out according to the national assessment framework and policy context. In England, the framework and procedures seem to provide clarity with regard to process and power within the system. In Norway, the assessment is characterized by a professional judgement accompanied by more resources, which we find enables helpful decisions from a family perspective. However, this heavy reliance on relationships using professional judgement might also be viewed as a source of informal power. These findings are discussed in relation to theories of emotions and the concept of power. Regarding implications for practice, we would recommend a more explicit awareness of help and control in assessment among social workers involved, together with a clear communication on the topic of emotions and power in assessment
Steinalderliv på Helganes: Arkeologiske undersøkelser av en mellomneolittisk boplass i skjæringspunktet mellom nord og sør. Helganesprosjektet 2011–2013, Karmøy kommune, Rogaland
Get PDFIn 2011, archaeological excavations were conducted at a middle Neolithic site on the outmost headland at Haugesund Airport on the island of Karmøy in Rogaland, Southwestern Norway. The excavations revealed three dwelling structures, a midden and a string of stones constructed to prevent the sea from flooding the living areas. The dwelling structures, defined as huts, consisted of several cultural layers with a depth up to 40 cm. Several fireplaces inside and outside the living areas were also uncovered. A total of 133 484 artefacts were recovered, including 515 shards of pottery, of which 122 shards were ornamented with corded stamps, pit imprints, bone imprints, zigzag ornamentation and knot winds. Of tools, there are fragments of ground flint adzes, and adzes and chisels of greenstone and other types of rock. Additional finds included many different forms of slate arrows, projectile points of type A, B and C, plate knifes of slate, greenstone and sandstone, and so on. The finds from the Helganes site have many parallels to other middle Neolithic sites in southern Norway. This publication gives an introduction to all the well-known dwellings from middle Neolithic A and B and compares them in terms of find inventory, 14C-dates and structures. This study concludes that there are many similarities between the sites which indicates social interaction along the coast of southern Norway and exchange of material culture, ideology and knowledge. 
