Sleepwalking into the ‘Post-Racial’: Social Policy and Research-Led Teaching

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towards a re-envisioning of Social Policy, within a framework in which postcolonial and intersectional theory and praxis are championed. Only then might a decolonised curriculum be possible in which race is not peripheral to core teaching and learning.

Toward a behavioral approach of international shipping: a study of the inter-organisational dynamics of maritime safety

Classification societies play a major role in maritime safety and the regulation of the international shipping market. They have a dual mission, namely the classification and certification of ships. Paradoxically, the academic literature on the strategic behaviour of classification societies remains very limited. More often than not, the scope of prior research has been limited to the definition of their missions in the shipping ecosystem with an emphasis on their changing legitimacy as maritime accidents occur. Consequently, this paper aims at providing a better understanding of the specific role of classification societies in maritime safety and within the inter-organisational dynamics of international shipping. The study is based on a conceptual framework provided by the behaviourist approach and applied to the inter-organisational dynamics of supply chains. This approach enables in-depth analysis of actors’ strategic behaviours by focusing on four dimensions: power, leadership, conflict and cooperation. The main results highlight the increasingly central and paradoxical role of classification societies. This role encompasses, on the national level, classification and certification processes, and, on the supranational level, the creation of new rules and regulations. The study highlights the importance of their ability to master the official framework and institutional vocabulary, which enable them to strengthen their power and leadership in the shipping market. This capacity helps them to limit conflicts between actors and to encourage certain cooperative behaviours based on relationships of dependence and inter-organisational interdependence.

Diversity and Humanitarian Negotiation

The humanitarian sector has steadily pushed forward with efforts to cultivate negotiation capacity among aid workers. However, considerations of how the profile of the humanitarian negotiator might shape negotiation outcomes have been, at best, in the background of ongoing professional discussions or, at worst, entirely overlooked. This working paper aims to fill this gap. Based on semi-structured interviews and survey data, this working paper assesses the role of identity characteristics in humanitarian negotiation processes. As the interview and survey results suggest, a negotiator’s profile—including identity characteristics and past professional experiences—can shape counterparts’ perceptions of humanitarian negotiators; fuel humanitarians’ own biases and stereotypes of their interlocutors; and feed into challenging internal organisational dynamics, as humanitarian organisations seek to promote diversity and foster inclusion and belonging among staff.

Internet Campaigning in an Unfamiliar Context: A Study of the Internet Campaigns of the Two Major Political Parties in the 2015 Nigerian Presidential Election

This thesis addresses the following research question: How can we best understand the effects of internet campaigning on the campaign practices of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 Nigerian Presidential election? This research represents an important contribution to the broader study of internet campaigning; widening the theoretical and empirical scope of the literature. From a theoretical perspective, three major approaches are deployed across the thesis: modernisation, Americanisation, and hybridisation. While all three lenses play an important part in understanding the effect of the internet on Nigerian campaign practices, the hybridisation perspective is particularly important – pointing towards a broader need in the literature to integrate this theoretical emphasis. From an empirical perspective, over 50 original, elite interviews in Nigeria were conducted with members of both parties’ campaign teams and campaign consultants. In analysing these data, the thesis unpacks three sub-questions: How was internet campaigning adopted and adapted by the campaign teams? What factors help to explain variations in the internet campaigns practices of the presidential candidates of the PDP and APC? How did the internet affect the intra-campaign organisational dynamics of the presidential candidates of the PDP and APC? The analysis across these questions concludes that the importance of the 2015 Nigerian online campaign should not be underestimated – it clearly impacted on campaign practices and organisation. However, the nature of this impact falls far short of a full realisation of the potential impact that the web could have exerted. Understanding this reality requires that close attention be paid to the national and party contexts within which internet campaigning was adopted – meaning that a hybridisation perspective is central to explaining how the internet impacts campaign practices in states such as Nigeria.

What you see is not what you get: multiple states and dialogues in borderline presentations

The recently revised NICE guidelines on treatment and management of borderline personality disorder (BPD) (NICE, 2018) presents new evidence on psychological therapies being effective treatments for patients diagnosed with BPD. This article will describe some of the challenges we face as clinicians working with complex co-morbid presentations in a healthcare setting. It will briefly discuss the different modalities as suggested by NICE guidelines and expand on the implications of this guidance in relation to service development and constant restructuring, often acted out as an organisational procedure to avoid the harsh reality of limited resources within the NHS. The impact of this on patient care, organisational dynamics, the need for joined-up thinking, and contextual formulations will be discussed using case scenarios. Clinical examples will be used to highlight that pseudo hallucinations, core thoughts, self-to-self dialogues, which trigger "state shifts", can be understood and formulated using dialogic sequence analysis (Leiman, 1998) and concepts from cognitive analytic therapy (CAT). This article will offer some pointers as to how we as clinicians can build resilience, survive the powerful projections and countertransference reactions, recognise the importance of self-care, supervision, and personal therapy in order to be effective, minimise harm, and develop compassion for our patients.

Space lost, space found—a psychodynamic perspective on spaces, places, architecture, and furniture inside and around us

This article presents some considerations and perspectives on the issue of how to deal with rooms, spaces, places, and bodies informed by psychodynamic theory and practice. The armchair and the famous couch in the classic psychoanalytic arrangement, and the serious occupation with chairs in group relations and group analysis (circles and spirals, all the chairs of the same kind, no special chair for the group convenor) indicate that space and furniture are important. The reluctance to experiment with space and settings may signify that important areas may need to be investigated. This article presents a number of basic concepts that we apply and further develop to capture the impact of space and design on social and organisational dynamics in the network society and the interplay between conscious and unconscious motives in space and design: container; projective space; presenting oneself; staging and being staged; destruction and creativity; the making of culture and history and the house; the senses; and the organisation of memory.