Search

In this paper, we use practice theory to expand what is known about entrepreneurial expertise. The study presents evidence suggesting that expertise is accomplished by entrepreneurial team members for and by themselves in ordinary workplace interactions. We discuss four types of expertise that reveal how entrepreneuring practitioners establish and assess knowledge positions given uncertainty constraints, integrate external abstract knowledge into their situation, and reject or replace their lived experiences with abstract knowledge. The study advances theory on entrepreneurial expertise and contributes to the literature of the entrepreneurship-as-practice.

This article reviews the literature on non-profit volunteering to argue that the concept of ‘work calling’ is critical to broadening our understanding of volunteer motivation and retention. As an emerging concept, work calling is generally used to explain how individuals satisfy their calling by doing meaningful work. This concept is introduced to the issue of volunteer motivation and retention to detail why volunteers decide to join non-profit organisations and then willingly stay longer. Current theories explain volunteer motivation and retention by focusing on individual factors (commitment and job satisfaction) and organisational factors (management practices, volunteer tasks and organisational reputation). This article integrates work calling with these theories and thus contributes two important insights: (a) volunteers may choose to engage in meaningful work and, therefore, experience self-satisfaction and meaningful life by volunteering; and (b) work calling improves current theories of volunteering motivation and retention at both the individual and organisational levels.

PurposeDespite the gains that have been made by adopting contemporary theories of practice in entrepreneurship studies, the field still lacks a comprehensive practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. In this article, we develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning by elaborating on the relations between practicing, knowing and learning.Design/methodology/approachUsing a video ethnography of a two-day “Startup Weekend for Refugees” event in Amsterdam, our aim is to further theorise the relational, material and embodied nature of entrepreneurial learning through analysing video fragments of naturally occurring practices.FindingsOur findings demonstrate that entrepreneurial learning transpires through, and is emergent from, practices and their relations. On the one hand, practitioners learn to competently participate in various practices by sensing, observing and experimenting with the meaning of others' gestures and utterances. On the other, the learning of new opportunities for value creation emerges as practitioners connect various practices to one another through translation.Originality/valueThis article contributes by illustrating and explaining real-time instances of learning to develop a practice theory of entrepreneurial learning. This contributes to the literature by detailing the relations between learning, knowing and practising entrepreneurship, which leads to a novel alternative to existing individual- and organisational-level learning theories.

The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organization, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

Little is known of the effect of entrepreneurs’ happiness on living standards in the world’s developing countries. This study explores (1) the causal relationship of entrepreneurs’ happiness and living standards; and (2) examines the interaction effects of socio-demographics (i.e. gender, age and education) and happiness on living standards in a developing context: Zambia. Following a qualitative pre-study with local experts, we develop a quantitative survey study including a unique sample of 170 entrepreneurs in Zambia. The analyses show that the entrepreneurs are relatively happy and an increasing level of happiness is related to an increasing standard of living. Moreover, the entrepreneurs’ happiness moderated by age (i.e. being older and happy) and education (i.e. being better-educated and happy) is a strong positive determinant of their living standard. The entrepreneurs’ awareness of the factors conducive to being happy, as well as the practitioners focussing on the social conditions of happiness, is instrumental.

The central role of meaning making has long been recognized in the literature relating to loss, grief and trauma, but its significance in relation to resilience has tended to feature much less. This chapter explores the complex interrelationships between resilience and meaning making. It locates meaning making and, by extension, resilience in a broader sociological context by showing that personal (or “biographical”) meanings need to be understood as part of wider frameworks of meaning—frameworks that have much to do with cultural and structural aspects of wider society. While it is recognized that we each, in a very real sense, create our own meanings; the “raw materials” from which we do so and the patterns we adopt in doing so are rooted in social processes, institutions, discourses and so on.

If we are to develop an adequate understanding of those forms of loss and grief that are not directly connected with death, one important aspect of social life that needs to be considered is social justice—or, more specifically, social injustice. This chapter therefore explores the significance of discrimination and oppression and their relationship with loss and grief. The primary focus is on discrimination and oppression associated with race and ethnicity, but there are strong parallels with other forms of inequality, such as sexism and ageism. The aim is to highlight a number of key issues that connect discrimination and oppression on the one hand with loss and grief on the other, with a view to contributing to a fuller understanding of the complexities involved.

Understanding experiences of and responses to anxiety is foundational to developing robust theories of entrepreneurial behavior. Using open-ended, vignette and graphical elicitation interviews with 77 entrepreneurs, we inductively investigate the experience of and coping responses to anxiety during the entrepreneurship process. We develop a comprehensive and dynamic goal-striving model to explain experiencing and coping with entrepreneurial anxiety by integrating empirical findings with appraisal and control theories. In doing so, we theorize that entrepreneurial anxiety is endogenous to a cyclical conception of goal-striving, such that various sources of anxiety make sense only in consideration of the goals, standards or values to which they pertain. In this regard, entrepreneurs’ coping responses influence four different points of an iterative goal-striving cycle—an insight that moves beyond problematic static and binary coping classifications.

PurposeEntrepreneurship research in the context of developing countries has typically investigated the ways in which culture, politics or economic institutions prohibit or enable entrepreneurial activities using macro-level surveys and deductive designs. In contrast, the purpose of this paper is to take a micro-institutional perspective to study these three institutions influencing entrepreneurial activities in such a context.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on inductive, qualitative field data from a challenging institutional environment, Tanzania. This includes two focus groups, one with experts and one with entrepreneurs; and 24 individual interviews with entrepreneurs.FindingsEntrepreneurial activities in Tanzania are not constrained only by bureaucracy and arbitrary enforcement, access to capital, competition and consumer spending, but also by language barriers, negative media portrayals and gender disparity. In their favour, recent trade policy, opening up of borders and changing gender relations, has led to more opportunities, but just as important are traditional festivals, marital gift-giving and familial support. Entrepreneurs respond to institutional constraints in many creative ways, including undertaking entrepreneurial strategies, developing inner strength, joining associations, giving back to communities and skilfully managing relations with authorities.Originality/valueThe fine-grained discussion of the findings of this study specifically contributes to theory by illustrating the constraining and enabling role of under-represented institutions, such as festivals and marriages, as well as entrepreneurial creative responses that define everyday entrepreneurial life in a developing country.

Deliberate self-harm (DSH) involves a physical act with the intent of harming the self. There are many precipitants to this behavior, with dissociation receiving increasing attention. The current study examined the quartile risk model for predicting deliberate self-harm, which proposes that four quadrants of dissociation (low normative, high normative, low clinical, and high clinical) represent varying levels of risk for engagement in DSH. The model posits that quadrants one and three (low normative, low clinical), protect against engagement in deliberate self-harm. Quadrants two and four (high normative, high clinical), represent an increased risk of engaging in DSH. The current study also investigated the association between shame and deliberate self-harm. College students (

The topic of well-being is one that is receiving increasing attention in a number of academic fields and professional disciplines. It is a concept that can be used as a unifying theme to link together a number of important concepts that have significant implications for professional education and practice across the human services. This article explores different aspects of well-being, differentiates well-being from the now-stigmatized term of welfare, and argues that professional education has much to be gained from adopting a well-being approach. It presents well-being as an important basis for addressing issues relating to illness, crisis, and loss.

Dying, death, and bereavement do not occur in a social vacuum. How individuals and groups experience these phenomena will be largely influenced by the social context in which they occur. To develop an adequate understanding of dying, death, and bereavement we therefore need to incorporate a sociological perspective into our analysis. This article examines why a sociological perspective is necessary and explores various ways in which sociology can be of practical value in both intellectual and professional contexts. A case study comparing psychological and sociological perspectives is offered by way of illustration.

Scholars adopting a relational ontology of organisational creativity have shifted attention away from a preoccupation with individual minds towards that which is enacted, emergent, shared, unpredictable and contingent. This article follows suit, yet breaks new ground by reconsidering how the mind plays an active role in unfolding creative interactions by building a bridge between literature on organisational creativity, aesthetics and philosophy of imagination. I draw on English Romanticism to craft a theoretical model of organisational creativity as an aesthetic and relational process of shared imagining. This model demonstrates how organisational members use primary and secondary modes of imagination and creative expression to develop, materialise and share perceptions and images of possible futures. By elaborating on their interplay, this article contributes to literature by theorising an active and generative role of mind that does not have the ontological shortcomings of leading theories. In turn, this has a number of implications for literature on entrepreneurship and organisational creativity in terms of situating and embodying creative thinking, explaining the intentionality and motivation for creative actions, overcoming perceptual differences and changing practices and routines.

This chapter explores the subject of child development from an existentialist point of view. Central to existentialist thought is the critique of "essentialism", the tendency to adopt a view of individuals as relatively fixed entities. Existentialism therefore rejects the idea of child development as the description of a process of maturation that produces a relatively fixed "personality". The chapter reviews the dominant approaches to child development and highlights their often essentialist assumptions. Many approaches to child development have placed considerable emphasis on psychological factors, albeit not without retaining a strong biological focus. A further example of traditional theoretical approaches to child development is attachment theory. A wide range of professional groups work with children and young people and need to have at least a basic understanding of child development. Ageism can be seen to apply to children and young people in relation to loss and grief through the medium of disenfranchised grief.

There is no part of human existence that loss and grief do not reach, and the workplace is no exception to this. This article is therefore concerned with some of the implications of loss and grief in work settings in general and for workplace leaders in particular. By way of example, it explores in particular the needs of bereaved caregivers returning to work and the potential for stigma to emerge in relation to employment and bereavement. Central to the article is an argument in favor of the need for change within the workplace, specifically within the structures and systems that support bereaved caregivers returning to work. This article critically reflects on the leadership management challenge of supporting bereaved caregivers returning to, or seeking, work and addressing the problem of stigma in relation to employment and bereavement. Some structural and policy changes are highlighted to assist employers and bereaved caregivers faced with this situation.

Reflective practice has become an influential concept in various forms of professional education, for example, in nursing and social work. However, there has been a common tendency for it to be oversimplified in practice, and, furthermore, dominant understandings of reflective practice can themselves be criticised for lacking theoretical sophistication in some respects – particularly in relation to the social and political dimensions of learning and professional practice. This paper therefore seeks to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of reflective practice and to propose developments in relation to the missing sociological elements. It briefly reviews current dominant understandings of reflective practice before proposing developments in the theory base to make it more theoretically sophisticated in general and more sociologically informed in particular. In this way, the foundations for a critically reflective practice are sketched out.

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on employee welfare or, as it is being referred to with increasing frequency, “workplace well-being.” Traditional approaches to such issues have tended to be either medicalized (via occupational health interventions) or individualized (for example, through employee assistance programs—EAPs). This article proposes a broader approach based on the problem-solving perspective of occupational social work. It is argued that such a broader approach offers a sounder foundation for tackling workplace problems and promoting well-being in general and for addressing the challenges of loss, grief, and trauma in the workplace in particular.

* Summary: A review of the neglected area of the relationship between loss and grief and the less well-documented areas of discrimination in relation to age, disability and sexuality. * Findings: There is an extensive and long-standing literature base relating to loss and grief. However, the major focus of such work is predominantly psychological and individualistic in its focus. Only recently a solid body of work relating to the sociological dimensions of loss and grief has begun to build up. This new literature has largely followed the pattern of the development of anti-discriminatory practice in social work, with a major emphasis on class, race and gender, and little attention paid to the less well-established forms of discrimination such as ageism, disablism and heterosexism. * Applications: This article explores the relationship between these three forms of discrimination and loss and grief, with a view to establishing the importance of developing a broad-based anti-discriminatory practice in this important area of social work.

• Summary: This article explores models and strategies for developing empowering forms of social work practice with older people. • Findings: Social work with older people has strong roots in a predominantly medical model in which the primary objective is to ensure that care is provided. While social work with other client groups has made major steps forward in developing less medicalized approaches, the work undertaken with older people has seen far less progress. This article examines the differences between a care model and an empowerment model, identifies some of the barriers standing in the way of movement from one to the other and considers ways of responding to such barriers. • Applications: The authors identify strategies for developing empowering forms of practice.

The position of children in the social order can be seen as an ambiguous one. On the one hand, they are highly valued, at a rhetorical level at least, as the basis of the future generation. On the other hand, however, they can be seen to be marginalized and disenfranchised, protected from more aspects of social life than is strictly necessary. This paper explores some of the important issues relating to children’s disenfranchised social position, with specific reference to issues relating to death, dying and bereavement.

Background Persistent auditory hallucinations are common, disabling and difficult to treat. Cognitive behavioural therapy is recommended in their treatment though there is limited empirical evidence of the role of cognitive factors in the formation and persistence of voices. Low self-esteem is thought to play a causal and maintaining role in a range of clinical disorders, particularly depression, which is prevalent and disabling in schizophrenia. It was hypothesized that low self-esteem is prominent in, and contributes to, depression in voice hearers. Methods Beliefs about persistent auditory hallucinations were investigated in 82 patients using the Beliefs About Voices Questionnaire — revised in a cross-sectional design. Self-esteem and depression were assessed using standardized measures. Results Depression and low self-esteem were prominent as were beliefs about the omnipotence and malevolence of auditory hallucinations. Beliefs about the uncontrollability and dominance of auditory hallucinations and low self-esteem were significantly correlated with depression. Low self-esteem did not mediate the effect of beliefs about auditory hallucinations- both acted independently to contribute to depression in this sample of patients with schizophrenia and persistent auditory hallucinations. Conclusions Low self-esteem is of fundamental importance to the understanding of affective disturbance in voice hearers. Therapeutic interventions need to address both the appraisal of self and hallucinations in schizophrenia. Measures which ameliorate low self-esteem can be expected to improve depressed mood in this patient group. Further elucidation of the mechanisms involved can strengthen existing models of positive psychotic symptoms and provide targets for more effective treatments.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: WORKPLACE PROBLEMS Stress N.Thompson Conflict, Aggression and Bullying N.Thompson & L.Brooksbank Drug and Alcohol Problems I.Madoc Jones Mental Health Problems S.Desai Racism G.Singh Loss, Grief and Trauma N.Thompson & S.Thompson PART II: PROMOTING WELL-BEING Learning and Development J.Bates Leadership P.Gilbert Managing Sickness Absence M.Tehan Women-friendly Workplaces B.Metcalf Spirituality in the Workplace B.Moss PART III: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES A United States Perspective S.de Mello A Hong Kong Perspective S.Ng An Australian Perspective J.Bottomley A Greek Perspective V.Ioakimidis An Indian Perspective G.Prem Singh Conclusion References Index

There is a growing literature on the subject of workplace well-being, covering a wide range of workplace problems. However, two sets of issues that have received relatively little attention are those of loss and grief and the related subject of trauma. For example, MacDonald (2005), a book published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the leading human resource organization in the United Kingdom, makes no reference at all to such matters.

For many people the topic of sickness absence is quite straightforward: people on sick leave fall into one of two categories, those who are ‘genuinely’ ill and who deserve support and those who are ‘malingering’ who deserve contempt, if not actual punishment. The reality of the situation is far more complex than this. In this chapter, we shall see that what constitutes ‘sickness’ or ‘illness’ is subject to debate and competing theoretical understandings, especially when mental illness is the topic under consideration. We shall also see that the reasons for sickness absence are many and varied, and that there are various factors involved at various levels. I shall therefore be arguing that simple solutions are unlikely to work and may actually prove counterproductive. A much more sophisticated understanding is called for, one that connects with the wider field of workplace well-being and the emerging knowledge base about such matters.

The nature of grief as the emotional response to the experience of loss has been the subject of considerable debate and discussion (Raphael 1983; Stroebe et al. 1993). However, the gendered nature of such a response has received relatively little attention. This chapter therefore begins to address some of the important issues relating to grief as a social construct shaped to a large extent by dominant gender expectations, rather than a ‘natural’ response to loss. Grief is presented as an emotion that needs to be understood in the context of mourning, defined as a socially constructed and codified set of expectations as to how a loss should normatively be dealt with.

Promoting equality, as we have seen, involves countering discrimination and oppression. This chapter therefore examines: the relationship between discrimination and oppression; the various processes by which discrimination occurs; the ways in which discrimination can be categorized; and the forms of oppression that arise as a result of the various categories of discrimination.

When we interact with other people, we do not start from a neutral standpoint. We bring with us a whole range of values, beliefs and assumptions. These are linked to the person we are, and to the range of social factors that influence and shape identity (see Chapter 1). For example, the way I relate to other people will owe much to my gender, my ethnic group, my class background and so on. These factors, in turn, will interact significantly with the equivalent factors for the persons concerned. That is, the gender, class and so on of the other people involved will also be significant in influencing the outcome of the interactions (see Figure 7.1).

SUMMARY This paper explores the negative impact of sexism on both women and men and considers what active part men can play in challenging and undermining sexism. The costs of living and working in a patriarchal society are outlined, and related to the differing experiences of women and men. It is argued that, although women clearly bear the brunt of sexism, gender stereotyping is not without significant costs for men. This leads us into an exploration of possible anti-sexist strategies that men can promote and implement as part of the development of anti-discriminatory and anti oppressive practice. The aim is not for men to 'colonize' or take over the struggle to achieve emancipation from oppressive gender norms. Rather, it is for men to play a part in the collective struggle to remove the inhumanity of patriarchal social relations. The paper is grounded within a professional value base premissed on a commitment to combating discrimination and oppression, and within a theory base informed by existentialist philosophy (Thompson, 1992a). The development of the Women's Movement played a major part in rais ing levels of awareness of the significance of gender in society and the extensive inequalities between the sexes in terms of the distribution of life-chances, opportunities and power. With historical roots in the suffra gette movement, women have increasingly become involved in political matters—for example the peace movement—and, more broadly, cam paigns to address inequality and oppression. This has led to a growth of interest in gender issues and the availability of women's studies as a sub ject for academic debate and study. However, what was not always appreciated was the inter-relationship of women's issues and 'men's