1,720,992 research outputs found
Doing organisational space: practices of voluntary welfare in the city
No full textIn this paper I consider the doing of organisational space. Within a sociopolitical context that presents opportunities and constraints, my interest is in how a particular set of organisational spaces -- those of a voluntary welfare agency -- are brought into being within the city and in how we might best apprehend their experiential texture. Drawing on research undertaken in a community drop-in centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, I explore the utility of two bodies of thought which emphasise social practices for this task. The first of these is actor-network theory. This frames organisation as a relational achievement, rooted in the successful translation of various actors, resources, and other material entities into a network through which an agency is constituted over time. Although an actor-network perspective affords insights into organisational formation and subsequent durability, I argue that it functions less well when one is seeking to apprehend the intersubjective spaces of affect that constitute so much of the daily goings-on of organisational life. As a way of approaching these matters, I turn to a second and related body of work that foregrounds notions of embodied practice. This, I suggest, enables us to attend more fully to the sometimes fleeting immaterial and affective dimensions of organisational space. It helps us, as Thrift (1997) has written, to touch the invisible in the visible
Expressions of charity and action towards justice: faith-based welfare in urban New Zealand
No full textChristian churches have long been involved in responding to social need in New Zealand cities. Since the formation of city missions in the late 19th century, their engagements have variously encompassed emergency relief, social housing, orphanages and residential aged care. In recent years, the churches and their affiliated social service operations have also sought to intervene in the political and social processes that contribute to disadvantage in New Zealand. The article analyses this movement towards a more explicit concern for social justice, with specific reference to developments among a set of Christian social service organisations in the city of Christchurch between 1999 and 2006. Alongside transformations in local services, national lobbying to highlight the situation of disadvantaged social groups has been an important element of this transition. The analysis offers insights into the place of faith-based welfare organisations within socio-political settings that might be characterised as ‘third way’ or ‘after neo-liberalism’
New cultural economies of marginality: revisiting the West Coast, South Island, New Zealand
No full textMarginal regions have been the subject of political concern and remedial action in western states for several decades now. The West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand is an interesting case study in this regard, for recent economic growth has confounded earlier expectations of post-restructuring decline,
while also contradicting several of the nostrums of new regionalism. In an effort to understand this trajectory, this paper draws on documents from public and private sector organisations, newspaper articles and field visits to examine developments in four key sectors of the West Coast’s economy: mining, dairy farming, forestry and tourism. Economic growth is found to be closely linked to the cultivation of new markets for primary products, but efforts to rework the cultural dimensions of marginality have also been important. Value has been added to specific products through the insertion of references to the
region’s alpine and forested landscapes. Isolation and peripherality have been recast in more positive terms, echoing the broader reframing of New Zealand as a scenic, unspoiled destination. In adopting a cultural economic perspective on marginal regions, the paper illustrates the significance of symbolic forms of value, the potentially flexible nature of marginality as a discursive category, and the importance of the networks which connect regions to national and international flows of capital and tourists
The affective possibilities of London: Antipodean transnationals and the overseas experience
No full textThis paper contributes to research on the lived dimensions of transnational mobility through an engagement with recent work on affect. Drawing on interviews with New Zealand skilled migrants, we argue that the attractions and experience of relocation to London are significantly connected to the affective possibilities it offers. As a diverse and enlivening set of ecologies of place, London appears to facilitate a certain feeling of being in the heart of things, an embodied state that is both valued and closely linked to New Zealand's former status as a British colony. We argue that considering the affective possibilities of cities - and the diverse ways in which transnational migrants perceive and appropriate these possibilities - offers valuable insights into the dynamics of subjectivity in a mobile world
Emotional geographies and work
No full textThis chapter explores the emotional geographies of work through the different binaries underpinning how work shapes scales and spatialities. We explore how emotions blur and smudge the boundaries between care and wage work, femininities and masculinities, and the public/private nexus. We examine how these relations yield complex emotional geographies that bridge many spaces and places – from the home, to offices and shops, to institutions and remote working forms. Drawing on examples from women in academia, (migrant) precarious labour, and formal/informal forms of home labour, we argue for the necessity of centring emotions as part of the jagged edges of care-wage and work-home communities. We show how emotions are used as forms of control, as well as how they offer avenues for resistance. We conclude by exploring future directions for the emotional geographies of work, calling for more attention to the collective experience, building on connectivity between places and how emotions facilitate flows between different spatialities, as well as calling for further exploration of the use of emotions in dominant power structures
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