Bearing Witness to Ontological Inquiry: Being Activists for Radical Democracy

The authors write a queered autoethnographic text that illuminates a course encounter with ontological inquiry to prepare radically democratic citizen-leaders and activist educators within the constraints of the corporatized neoliberal university. They seek to touch, move, and inspire readers to experiment with this counterintuitive form of learning as a critical pathway toward the realization of John Dewey’s moral meaning of democracy and the institutions of the society foster the all-around growth of all participants.

Expat or citizen? Raising the question of a potential impact of status on leader behavior

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore the concept that expatriate status, as opposed to national citizen status, may impact leader behavior. The intention is not to pursue a research question carved out from the expatriation and leadership research streams but rather to raise the issue of non-citizenship status as potentially moderating leader behavior. Design/methodology/approach The authors used grounded theory methodology, including interviews to gather data on the behavior of non-citizen leaders in the UAE. The resulting 28 interview transcripts were analyzed using inductive coding to arrive at aggregate theoretical dimensions. Findings Their findings reveal a keen tendency among expatriate leaders to display organizational legitimacy by remaining sedulously within established organizational schemata and monitoring employees closely. Research limitations/implications The study asks, rather than answers, a question and does not use an established theoretical framework, as its area of concern is not one that fits solely within the literatures on expatriation, international business, leadership, cross-cultural management or national citizenship. Furthermore, the context in which they conduct our investigation is the UAE whose workforce has a disproportionately high number of expatriates. Although this serves as a convenient context in which to study the rising occurrence of non-citizen leaders due to increased professional migration, the issue may be more meaningfully tested in geopolitical contexts with typical expatriate–citizen workforce ratios. Originality/value The central theoretical contribution of this preliminary study is to provide initial empirical evidence suggesting that the hitherto-ignored variable of national citizenship may be a significant one to address given increasing professional global migration.

Community Empowerment Through Grassroots Action: A Story of Building Personal and Local Resilience with the Transition Towns Model

Nils Palsson and Virajita Singh have partnered in telling Nils’ story of his personal and professional journey with the Transition Town movement – its thought leaders, philosophy, practices, and relationship to the partnership/domination paradigm shift. Through his participation in the grassroots Transition Town movement, Nils found, cultivated, and ultimately shared with others a sense of local empowerment. In his rural home in California’s Lake County, Nils found community, following great personal transformation in his life with the passing of his father. He learned about Transition Towns, permaculture, and other concepts dealing with local resilience, grassroots empowerment, and regenerative and holistic systems and lifestyles. He and others employed the Transition model, as described in Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook in transitioning Lake County. In 2015 he became Communications Director of Transition US. In this position, Nils has come to see that the world of Transition is much larger than he had imagined, with citizen-leaders and change agents in Transition Towns working toward environmental justice for all.

National citizenship as a mediator of organizational innovation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report an initial investigation into the role of national citizenship status in relation to leadership and organizational innovation in the context of the United Arab Emirates, an Arabian Gulf country with a workforce in which migrants far outweigh the number of locals.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use grounded theory methodology to gather initial data and reveal potentially appropriate theory for further research into the role of national citizenship as it correlates with organizational innovation.FindingsThe dominant themes that emerged were that citizen leaders display high levels of willingness to deviate from organizational schemata to respond to new situations; a preference for focus on the big picture; and low monitoring of subordinates. These findings indicate that citizen leaders experience greater ease in diverging from organizational schemata, suggesting that national citizenship status may afford a freedom that enhances the potential to contribute to organizational innovation.Research limitations/implicationsThe issue of national citizenship is clearly one of increasing significance in the global workplace and, therefore, must be added to the academic research agenda given the combination of more frequent worldwide professional migration and the growing imperative of organizational innovation. To this end, the authors suggest potentially useful frameworks for further study.Originality/valueThis pioneering research has applicability to other geopolitical regions with high numbers of migrants in their workforces.

Perceptions of Citizen Affiliated with Community Based Institutions on Social Norms and Practices Related Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health in Baitadi District of Nepal

The study attempted to explore and analyze perceptions of citizens affiliated with Community Based Institutions on social norms and practices related to adolescent sexual and reproductive health in Baitadi district of Nepal. The objective of this study was to assess social acceptance level of citizen to challenge prevailing social norms and their readiness to abandon unhealthy traditional practices related to sexual and reproductive health as a social accountability. Descriptive and analytical research design was used to take the citizens perspectives. A total of 337 respondents affiliated with the five different types of Community Based Institutions (CBIs) were interviewed using structured questionnaire for data collection and data analysis was done by using SPSS version 16.0. The findings of the study revealed that majority of citizens were sticky on traditional social norms and practices. Majority of citizens were not agree to allow adolescent girls to go to school during mensuration, to allow to stay inside home during mensuration and talking about sex and sexuality between parents and adolescents. Therefore, there is a need of social norms change and step up for positive social deviant by citizen leaders to promote enabling social environment for adolescent sexual and reproductive health.Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol.11, 2017; 151-163

A Curricular reform viewed through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames

Professions exist to serve the needs of society, communities and, in the case of the dental profession, patients. Academic dental institutions strive to help meet these needs by educating and developing future practitioners, educators, researchers, and citizen leaders who serve the community and shape the changing environment in which they practice and provide care. The American Dental Association Commission on Change and Innovation affirms, “If dental educators are to meet these purposes, change and innovation in dental education must be responsive to evolving societal needs, practice patterns, scientific developments, and economic conditions”(Haden, et al., 2006). Guiding any institution through such authentic reform requires a number of strategies. Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal suggest four organizational constructs, or frames, through which to view a complex organization: Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic (Bolman and Deal, 1997).“Like maps, frames are both windows on a territory and tools for navigation” (Bolman and Deal, 1997). This reflective case study examines a major curricular reform initiative in a North American school of dentistry through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames.

Empowerment and Participatory Evaluation of a Community Health Intervention: Implications for Occupational Therapy

Community-based organizations have experienced an increased demand for new and expanded programs, as well as pressure from private and public sources of funding to document the impact of their services and programs. This article highlights the importance of a participatory and empowerment approach to evaluating a community health intervention. A five-phase approach to implementing an empowerment and participatory evaluation process is described using a research study. The five phases included developing a partnership and planning the evaluation, developing a logic model, identifying the methodology and data collection, interpreting and reporting findings, and monitoring and utilizing evaluation findings. In this research study, a WebTV community intervention was implemented to assist community residents in accessing health information and resources through the project's home web page and the Internet. A group of citizen leaders was provided with a WebTV unit, training, and ongoing support and assistance. Citizen leaders used the unit as a tool to obtain health information and resources and to advocate and support community action. Implications of empowerment and participatory evaluation of this type of community intervention are discussed for community occupational therapy, including occupational therapists as agents of change and facilitators of skills building and organizational capacity.