1,721,020 research outputs found
Discourses of Planning
No full textThis book addresses the widespread and long established phenomenon of progressive ‘managerialization’ in the public services sector. But it does so with a particular focus, a particular angle and a particular lens: the focus is the intensification of planning (along with control) practices in the changing public sector; the angle is professional work, i.e. how this is lived among professionals in their daily work routine; the lens is discourse analysis, as a way to capture and make sense of the multiple rationalities that may be interacting when a change in practices is in place. Empirically, the book draws on an ethnographic piece of research conducted in a public hospital that has been setting particular emphasis on the introduction of a planning system and on the engagement of clinical professionals in it
Traiettorie e prospettive di cambiamento della professione di commercialista: uno studio esplorativo
No full textQuesto volume raccoglie i risultati di una ricerca sulla Professione di Commercialista, sulle direttrici dei cambiamenti in corso che ne stanno rimodellando l’essenza e i confini. L’obiettivo è esplorare i cambiamenti intervenuti negli anni, lo stato dell’arte e le possibili prospettive per la Professione, così come sono vissuti e percepiti dai protagonisti di questo scenario, ovvero i Professionisti stessi. Una prima parte del volume sarà è dedicata ad una ricostruzione “macro” del “Discorso ufficiale”, ovvero una rassegna dei temi e dei numeri della Professione ad oggi, così come sono riflessi nel dibattito esistente, sia nazionale che internazionale, riguardante i tratti principali del processo di cambiamento della Professione.
Nella seconda parte saranno invece presentati i risultati della ricerca sul piano “micro”, ovvero i “discorsi dal campo”, un’esplorazione di come gli attori stessi concepiscono la Professione oggi, le sfide rispetto al passato e le potenzialità future, a partire da una serie di interviste in profondità condotte con una selezione di Studi nel territorio bolognese.
In conclusione, verranno ripresi tutti i risultati e discussi nel loro insieme, nella speranza che questo studio possa animare ulteriori domande e sostanziare alcune riflessioni sullo stato dell’arte della Professione, per chi la vive o ci si affaccia
Industrial Heritage in Action: Beyond Museification and Regeneration
No full textThis paper proposes a reflection on the contemporary phenomenon of industrial heritage
re-uses. It will do so by coupling a review of the extant debate on industrial heritage with a comparative
appreciation of several micro-cases of industrial heritage re-use located in Italy. This will allow
for a reconstruction of the main discourses and practices in and around industrial heritage sites,
and it will be conducive to a reflection on which specific notions of ‘culture’ are mobilized in these
discourses and concrete experiences. In particular, the paper will show the link between industrial
heritage preservation discourses and museification practices and between strategic discourses and
regeneration practices. On top of this, it will illustrate a case of site-specific artistic practice that activates
a dialogue with industrial heritage, beyond museification or local regeneration intents. The
paper will then discuss the meaning of culture in these discourses and practices, the implications
of the dominant discourses and practices, together with the need to consider the manifold ways in
which culture can relate to industrial heritage
Formal planning and the reshaping of public sector professional work
Full text linkThis paper deals with the ‘managerialization’ of public sector professional work. Specifically,
it will focus on the role of formal planning practices (as expressed in strategic planning,
project management and budgeting practices) in changing public sector professional work.
Planning and accounting are at the heart of public sector reforms, responding to a logic of
having public service professionals transparent on what they do, on how they pursue their
goals, and accountable on the use of resources and on results. Thus planning and accounting
practices have been transferred from private sector management models to public,
professional organizations. Yet public sector professional organizations can be conceived as a
pluralistic setting characterized by diffuse power, fragmented objectives and knowledgebased
and are deeply embedded in public administration regulatory logics: how can
management models deriving from private, hierarchical firms be applied to the specificities
and complexities of public, pluralistic settings? What is the specific meaning of formal
planning practices in such complex contexts?
Based on a qualitative, single case study design, this paper will show how the planning
system (in its manifestation of strategic planning, project management and budgeting) applied
in a public hospital apparently ‘fails’ when its deliberate role of serving as a tool for decisions
is considered. Yet it is widely in use and widely accepted by professionals as well.
Conclusions on the value of formal planning when other emergent roles are taken into account
will be discussed
Professionals as strategists? Channelling and organizing distributed strategizing
No full textMany contemporary organizations claim to be moving towards forms of increased inclusion
and transparency in the strategy formulation and communication processes. This paper
explores how organizations can enable wide participation in strategy making while keeping a
coherent strategic direction. In particular, it investigates how strategizing takes place in
professional, pluralistic contexts, supposedly characterized by open participation in strategymaking.
Drawing on a strategy-as-practice perspective and on a case study of an Italian public
hospital that introduced a new participatory planning system, it focuses on how professionals
participated in strategy work and the tools they drew on to do so. The study shows how
professionals’ empowerment is likely to be subject to managerial endorsement and how the
simultaneous opening up and holding together of strategy may be accomplished through the
boundary spanning activities of planning officers and the channelling and organizing roles of
formal planning tools. These findings contribute to an understanding of how distributed
strategizing occurs in professional settings and how ‘open strategy’ may play out in
organizations more generally
Professionals as Strategists?
No full textMany contemporary organizations claim to be moving towards forms of increased inclusion and transparency in the strategy formulation and communication processes. In particular, openness of strategy-making is a characteristic typically associated with pluralistic settings and public and non-profit organizations. This openness raises however the question of how organizations can enable wide participation while keeping a coherent strategic direction. This paper aims then to shed light on how strategizing takes place in professional, pluralistic contexts, supposedly characterized by open participation in strategy-making. Drawing on a case study of an Italian public hospital that introduced a new participatory planning system, it focuses in particular on how professionals participated in strategy work and the tools they drew on to do so. It explores how professionals strategizing was depicted by the organizational discourse, what professionals actually did, how the adoption of a participatory planning system was taken up and what it enabled in terms of strategy work. The study shows how professionals empowerment is likely to be subject to managerial endorsement. Because of this partial nature, we can consider professionals to be quasi-strategists. It also shows that the simultaneous opening up and holding together of strategy may be accomplished through the boundary spanning activities of planning officers and the channelling and organizing roles of formal planning tools. These findings may increase our understanding of how distributed strategizing occurs in professional settings, offering in turn insight into the processes and the conditions whereby open strategy may play out in organizations more generally
What editors talk about when they talk about editors: Resisting institutional change through discourse in Italian literary field
No full textHow do resisters and losers of a process of institutional change use discourse to define their identity and position themselves in the new institutional arrangements? After a process of institutional change, received literature suggests that losers tend to re-define themselves in relation to the new institutional arrangement: in this case we see their discourse colonized by a new dominant one. We analyse Italian literary field, that experienced a transformation toward a market oriented institutional logic, that is already finished. Here editors, that are professional that select new manuscripts to be published and edit texts before publishing, far from incorporating market discourse, leverage their symbolic role to protect their niche. We find that their discourse highlights their literary peculiarities: we suggest that they maintain an idiosyncratic discourse, focused on aesthetic and literary topics, in order to define their identity and role and protect their position. Publishers' dimensions accounts for different discourses, with editors of medium sized publishers more prone to refer to aesthetic issues, editors working for big ones that refer to personal expertise, whereas small publishers’ editors are the only ones explicitly referring to market
Public Discourse and Category Formation: A Topic Modelling Exploration of ‘Historical Shops’ on Italian Media
Full text linkThis paper addresses the role of public discourse in processes of category formation. Tracing the emergence and diffusion of a category on the media, and exploring the discourses generated on the media within and around the emerging category, the paper reflects on how these discourses concur in performing the very category they portray. The focus is set on the Historical Shops category, as part of broader processes of urban categorisations for local development and regeneration. By means of a Topic Modelling of a corpus of 3262 press articles collected from Italian news sources between 2009 and 2019, the paper finds that public discourse plays three main roles: echoing category creation processes by policymakers, grounding the rising category in wider discourses of retail crisis, urban degradation, regeneration and overtourism, and narrating it by explaining what Historical Shops are, where they are located, which issues they face and which responses they receive at different institutional levels. Overall, in this paper, the semi-automated techniques afforded by Topic Modelling offer a way to enter the meaning construction processes and elicit the agential role of public discourse in the formation of a category
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