Contesting Roles: Rising Powers as “Net Providers of Security”

What is a “net provider of security,” or a “global security provider”? How are such roles adopted by rising powers? We define a net provider of security as a social role, when an actor provides novel, niche, and functionally differentiated security duties, supporting burden-sharing in providing public goods. The nascent literature on these US-vectored roles characterizes role adoption as largely successful. However, rising powers contest the US-designated net provider of security role. Rising powers have stated or latent foreign policy goals to shape international order in their strategic vision, reflecting ideational capacity to reconceptualize their role in global politics, or a material capacity to reposition their rank. Building upon insights from role theory, we illustrate that rising powers exploit temporal and rhetorical ambiguities and leverage their material and ideational resources to execute role differentiation through three micro-processes of role resistance—role acknowledgment, role task rejection, and role task substitution—used to promote an idiosyncratic role, casting the US-vectored role as non-functional, non-representational, and untenable. We examine crucial cases of rising powers, India and China, to develop our theoretical contribution. Our findings speak to the literatures on the logic of identity management, rhetoric in international politics, the taxonomy of contemporary ad hoc security arrangements, and the epistemological project of globalizing international relations.

Communication Adjustment in Engineering Professional and Student Project Meetings

Background: communication is important for project teams. There is a need to better understand how members respond to communication at project meetings, and how this affects the team roles the participants adopt. Methods: observational data were collected from (a) two engineering organisations and (b) five university engineering student teams. A mixed methods approach was used, comprising observations (recorded with the interaction diagram method), questionnaires and interviews. Results: participants adjusted their communication style to the behaviour of other people and to different communication settings. This happened with three different dynamics: micro-level (grounding processes in conversation), mezzo-level (emotional and rational regulation) and macro-level (over a period of time). Originality: a new theory was presented for the process of team behaviour during project meetings; specifically, role adoption and communication behavioural changes. Participants change their team roles within three different dynamics: at the macro-, mezzo- and micro-levels, corresponding to the organisation, project and meeting, respectively. The changing of team roles in project meetings arises from rational and emotional regulation. The findings have the potential to assist managers and supervisors to better understand and manage the team dynamics on their projects.

Team Role Adoption and Distribution in Engineering Project Meetings

Team communication plays a vital role in engineering management, however, there is a paucity of work that examines how team roles emerge as a response to the communicative processes between participants. This research explored role adoption using qualitative methods comprising observations, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Five student teams doing final year projects at a university in New Zealand were observed during the academic year and then interviewed at the final stage of project completion. A number of team roles in the engineering context were identified for students and their supervisors: Explorer; Initiator; Facilitator; Active and Passive Information Provider; Outsider; Active and Passive Connector; Passive Collector; Arbitrator; Gatekeeper and Representative. Personal factors, such as social sensitivity, were correlated with the choice of team behaviour pattern. In addition, the team roles could be arranged in circular order to create a circumplex, the two axes of which were identified as Personal Agency/Communion and Social engagement/Social disengagement.

New ways of working in mental health services: a qualitative, comparative case study assessing and informing the emergence of new peer worker roles in mental health services in England

BackgroundA variety of peer worker roles are being introduced into the mental health workforce in England, in a range of organisational contexts and service delivery settings. The evidence base demonstrating the effectiveness of peer worker-based interventions is inconclusive and largely from outside England. An emerging qualitative literature points to a range of benefits, as well as challenges to introducing the peer worker role.AimsIn this study we aimed to test the international evidence base, and what is known generally about role adoption in public services, in a range of mental health services in England. We also aimed to develop organisational learning supporting the introduction of peer worker roles, identifying learning that was generic across mental health services and that which was specific to organisational contexts or service delivery settings.TeamThe research was undertaken by a team that comprised researchers from a range of academic and clinical disciplines, service user researchers, a peer worker, and managers and service providers in the NHS and voluntary sector. Service user researchers undertook the majority of the data collection and analysis. We adopted a coproduction approach to research, integrating the range of perspectives in the team to shape the research process and interpret our findings.Study designThe study employed a qualitative, comparative case study design. We developed a framework, based on existing evidence and the experiential insight of the team, which conceptualised the challenges and facilitators of introducing peer worker roles into mental health services. The framework was used to inform data collection and to enable comparisons between different organisational contexts, service delivery settings and the perspectives of different stakeholders.SettingsThe study took place in 10 contrasting cases comprising mental health NHS trusts, voluntary sector service providers and partnerships between the NHS and voluntary sector or social care providers. Peer workers were employed in a variety of roles, paid and unpaid, in psychiatric inpatient settings, community mental health services and black and minority ethnic (BME)-specific services.ParticipantsParticipants were 89 people involved in services employing peer workers, recruited purposively in approximately equal proportion from the following stakeholder groups: service users; peer workers; (non-peer) coworkers; line managers; strategic managers; and commissioners.Data collectionAll participants completed an interview that comprised structured and open-ended questions. Structured questions addressed a number of domains identified in the existing evidence as barriers to, or facilitators of, peer worker role adoption. Open-ended questions elicited detailed data about participants’ views and experiences of peer worker roles.Data analysisStructured data were analysed using basic statistics to explore patterns in implementation across cases. Detailed data were analysed using a framework approach to produce a set of analytical categories. Patterns emerging in the structured analysis informed an in-depth interrogation of the detailed data set, using NVivo 9 qualitative software (QSR International Pty Ltd, Victoria, Australia) to compare data between organisational contexts, service delivery settings and stakeholder groups. Preliminary findings were refined through discussion with a range of stakeholders at feedback workshops.FindingsMany of the facilitators of peer worker role adoption identified in the existing evidence base were also evident in mental health services in England, although there were issues around pay, leadership, shared understanding of the role, training and management where good practice was uneven. A number of examples of good practice were evident in the voluntary sector, where peer worker roles had been established for longer and organisations were more flexible. In the NHS there were a range of challenges around introducing peer worker roles into existing structures and cultures of practice. Peer workers were able to engage people with services by building relationships based on shared lived experience – the language they used was particularly important in BME-specific services – but barriers to engagement could be created where roles were overformalised.ConclusionsKey barriers to, and facilitators of, peer worker role adoption were identified, including valuing the differential knowledge and practice that peer workers brought to the role (especially around maintaining personally, rather than professionally defined boundaries); maintaining peer identity in a role of work; changing organisational structures to support peer workers to remain well in their work; and challenging organisational cultures to empower peer workers to use their lived experience. Recommendations for future research include developing a theoretical framework articulating the change mechanisms underpinning ‘what peer workers do’, piloting and formally evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of peer worker interventions, and mixed-method research to better understand the impact of working as a peer worker.FundingThe National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

The Role of External Indicators in Measuring the Service Performance of Local Governments

This chapter discusses the role, adoption, and application of external performance indicators within local government. These indicators measure citizens’ satisfaction with offline and online public services and allow administrators to collect timely knowledge about their “customers.” In other words, they play the same role as customer satisfaction research in private companies’ marketing activities. Despite their relevance, external indicators are often overlooked and criticized by both professionals and researchers. This chapter will also review and challenge the main criticisms of external indicators, which state that external indicators are useless and unreliable. Through the analysis of a case study within Italian local governments, the discussion will demonstrate that these indicators have a significant role in public administrators’ decision making, provided that local government embraces a citizen-oriented culture.