Introducing sustainability policies in the cement industry involves changing not only production technologies, but the organizational culture of a mature industry that is characterized by huge CO₂ emissions and significant environmental impacts. This research attempts to understand the transition process of the industry and its employees as the process is taking place. The actors involved are strongly influenced by often contradictory forces: On one hand the naturalized market dynamics in the context of the automobile dependent society and widespread networks of highways and other concrete structures, and on the other, the growing concern of preserving resources for future generations as a shared responsibility that raises awareness of the negative environmental impacts of cement production. The fieldwork component of the project was comprised of two complementary parts: First, an ethnographic study of how the abstract goal of becoming sustainable is given meaning as it is implemented in Cemex, one of the largest companies in the cement industry at the global level. Second, an analysis of the audit culture mechanisms present in the production of knowledge among experts involved in designing sustainability assessment mechanisms for infrastructure projects. The latter component took place among experts in the academy and in the Texas Department of Transportation, which represents at the same time a regulating force and a key client of the cement industry. To present the findings, I approach the subject of sustainability as a construction project where cement and sustainability act as boundary objects between multiple communities (Star and Griesemer 1989) at the same time that sustainability is being constructed. I attempt to present the interactions as an institutional ecology with multiple actors and layers of meaning which are interdependent. The work first describes the prevailing landscape of the urban environment pointing to the influence of aesthetic discourses through the course of history from modernism to brutalism and place-making as well as to the prevailing regulatory, geographic and cultural conditions. Here, the landscape is taken as the point of departure where the construction project of sustainability is to take place given that its characteristics allow certain constructions of sustainability while thwarting others. I consider the built environment to be the response to the surrounding conditions that constitute the landscape and to the prevailing preferences of key players. To follow, I describe the main actors who participate in the construction of sustainability including internal and external stakeholders. I take these groups as members of the construction crew of sustainability presenting their interests as they relate to the triple bottom line and to their affiliation to multiple publics (Warner 2002). Next, I turn to the accreditation mechanisms and the dynamics followed by experts and their interlocutors defining the blueprints which the cement industry must follow while sustainability is being constructed within the company and in dialogue with stakeholders. These blueprints are the result of negotiations between experts in industry, government and academy and portray the influence of audit culture, the widespread trust in quantification and the importance of the efficiency paradigm as described by informants. Afterwards, I focus on the construction of sustainability project that takes place within the cement company where multiple avenues are followed to complete the building of sustainability as a material object, combining the blueprints defined by experts as they are translated into concrete demonstrations of sustainability with the subjective interpretations of actors within the material constraints set by concrete and the plasticity of sustainability. While this is the institutional response to comply with sustainability expectations, the final construction of sustainability needs to include the construction of the sustainable subject where individuals incorporate into their mindset sustainability considerations. As the last part of the work, I discuss the emergence of sustainable subjectivities among key participating members of the construction crew of sustainability taken as employees and other stakeholders, presenting the distinct logics followed by individuals while becoming committed to sustainability. Finally, I present the conclusions of this constructive analysis. Foucault’s (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991) concept of governmentality and Strathern’s (Strathern 2000b) analysis of audit culture frame this study, offering a common thread that transforms the need of corporate legitimacy into a process of accountability and transparency that resembles Rose and Miller’s (Rose and Miller 2008) description of the neoliberal rationalities of government. Paradoxically, sustainability as an ideal is transformed into an established system that tends to be mechanical. For this to occur, experts shape the meaning of sustainability and determine the parameters that must be met, creating metrics and certification processes that define a set of procedures that track and evaluate sustainability performance, hence defining what practices are selected by cement companies to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, and how these are implemented. Furthermore, both sustainability and cement are vibrant matters (Bennett 2010) with an agency of their own which introduces further constraints into the construction of sustainability process and influences the pace of change. However, the process of becoming sustainable is far from homogenous since each individual relates to sustainability according to the gamut of personal ethical convictions, affective needs, aesthetic preferences and gender perceptions which vary among many factors, including social class, geographic region, educational level and gender. Hence, it is not suitable for a single definition even when subjected to seemingly objective standards. In addition, in the case of employees, the interaction with different groups of stakeholders raises awareness about particular interests also influencing the meaning making process for each of them. Hence, the making of sustainable subjects not only involves the creation of specific regulatory practices tied to the emergence of a greater concern for social and environmental challenges but also the particular context of the individual. Even in this highly structured environment, the affect/emotion dynamic strongly shapes the interpretation and the weight that sustainability eventually gains. The material expressions of sustainability mediate the process and materialize morality at the same time (Verbeek 2006) given the underlying ethical position that sustainability as an idea conveys. As sustainability is becoming widely adopted and introduced into the conscience of more people, it is also being transformed into a numerical parameter that makes possible the perpetuation of market efficiency parameters. Capitalism is thus legitimated through the meta-narrative of sustainability as the triple bottom line that promises to fulfill the desire of progress for all while not really transforming the life-style and consumption patterns of today. As the concept of the triple bottom line enables sustainability to be adopted by key economic, governmental and NGO actors, it also contributes to the naturalization of market forces and profit oriented priorities making it difficult to re-orient human activities towards more environmentally friendly and socially inclusive models of community organization.

In the United States, a growing proportion of the population is aged 65 and older. Associated with this demographic transition is a rise in the number of people who are aging with chronic disease. While there is a cultural ideal for older adults to remain in the community and out of institutional settings ("aging in place"), there is little recognition of the work and experience of trying to accomplish this. In the following papers, I draw on 12 months of ethnographic research in the Southwest US to describe the work of "aging in place." As a starting point, I use Medicare-funded home health care (HHC), which stands at the crossroads of acute-based institutional care and custodial, long-term care. In the first paper, using definitions of place from cultural geography, I explore the work of aging from the perspective of chronically ill older adult HHC users. I illustrate how bodies, practices, and places shift as processes of disease and medicalization inscribe them with risk, and the ways in which people accept, resist, and negotiate these changes. The second paper extends the work on audit culture to describe how Medicare's audit system has structured the organization and practice of HHC, and how this has reinforced the commodification of patients. I note how HHC nurses can draw on personal and professional logics in their documentation practices as a means of resisting rationalizing forces and opening up eligibility for care. The third paper uses case studies to push the literature on family caregiver burden to include the fraught, yet highly meaning-filled experience of caregiving. The cases show the difficulties and ambivalence in providing care to a chronically ill family member. Throughout these articles, underlying the tensions, uncertainties, and gaps I explore questions about what type of care is needed, who is worthy of care, and how responsibilities are distributed. I focus on how people's worlds and work are structured by larger scale social, cultural, and economic forces, and attend to the ways in which they reproduce, contend, and negotiate these forces from their unique positions, in effort to protect what they value.

While many adolescents list unstructured "hangout" spaces as central to their social lives and activities, the availability of such spaces has dramatically declined in the last two decades, and attendance at afterschool programs has increased. Concurrently, these programs have drawn new scrutiny: from researchers eager to show their educational value, and from funders and policy makers seeking measureable evidence of that value. Even youth centers that were deliberately designed to give young people a space to "hang out" have been forced to reorganize due to the pressure to demonstrate program results. In this dissertation, through participant-observation, archival documents, and interviews with youth workers and young people, the author investigates and critiques the complex politics of representation in the funding, research, and day-to-day existence of one unstructured youth program, the Youth Action Alliance's offering known simply as Hang Out. Rather than producing a unified picture of Hang Out, the author takes a non-dialectic approach, using poststructuralist and posthuman theory to propose multiple plausible and powerful perspectives, and to explore their productive tensions with one another.

This thesis examines the establishment and maintenance of an early childhood playgroup project in an Australian university setting. It examines the playing out of the intention of a university to create a collaborative partnership with an early childhood playgroup initiative within a higher education policy climate actively promoting such endeavours. The study documents the struggle to establish the playgroup project, elaborating the conditions that enabled and/or constrained its inclusion into a university setting. To do so, it investigates the contextual and relational issues that sustained or impeded the operationalisation of the playgroup project, identifying the stakeholders and the parts they played in supporting the initiative. The aim of the study is to generate new knowledge of a little-researched area, namely that of partnerships between universities and the community in the area of early childhood education. The study is underpinned by the feminist theoretical work of Dorothy Smith (1987), and so takes the everyday world as problematic, using this standpoint as an analytic framework through which to observe and understand women's lives as they worked to establish the playgroup project in the university setting. Additionally the work of Marilyn Strathern (1997) concerning the audit culture of universities was used to enhance Smith's epistemological approach. The data collection methods for the study were in-depth interviews, participant observations and document analysis. In-depth, unstructured interviews were conducted with seventeen women involved with the playgroup project. The sample comprised ten playgroup parents, four women from the Centre for Human Services, and three lecturers from the Child and Family Studies section of the School for Human Services. Additionally participant observations were completed and recorded as field notes. The majority of these took place in the playgroup rooms. The collection and examination of documentation associated with the playgroup project focused on significant documents ranging from emails and parking permits, to government and university policy imperatives. These documents were analysed as texts mediating the playgroup initiative. Findings detailed the conditions that enabled and/or constrained the inclusion of the playgroup project into a university setting. It was found the playgroup project was enabled by: government and university policies encouraging university and community partnership; a genuine intention on behalf of the university to promote partnerships with the community; thematics in the discourse of early childhood education promoting the profession's caring nature; and, committed people who worked to ensure the continuation of the playgroup project. It was found that the playgroup project was constrained by: government and university policies promoting research agendas; a partnership that was not collaborative in nature; disagreements about decision-making and leadership within the playgroups; the hierarchical nature of the university; and, differing notions of work and play that made the playgroups difficult to sustain. The study identified factors that enabled and/or constrained a specific community and university partnership in relation to early childhood education. In doing so it begins to fill a gap in the literature in this area. Findings from this study may be used to inform early childhood professionals and academics by expanding their awareness of the issues involved in undertaking a partnership such as this one. The implications that flow from the study included the need for greater understanding of the anthropology of the university and its systemic organisation, a formal contract for the partnership specifying the obligations of each party and outlining expectations, and the inclusion of committed people, prepared to work toward genuine collaborative partnerships.

Since the 1990’s the Swedish school system has undergone major and recurring structural reforms. Two of the most comprehensive changes has been the shift of primary schools as an integral part of the welfare state to the responsibility of the municipalities as well as the introduction of free school choice for the students. Through two months of participant observations and semi-structured interviews this thesis seeks to answer the question of how these reforms has come to effect the work of teachers in a medium sized public school in a small municipality in the outskirts of Stockholm. Earlier research has shown that public schools in socio-economically vulnerable areas are disadvantaged due to the reformation of the school system (Beach & Sernhede, 2011; Östh, Andersson, & Malmberg, 2013).  This thesis is thus seeking to find the vantage point of primary school teachers in one such school, in order to grasp how these policy changes has come to impact their perceptions of a professional self and the amount of professional autonomy in their work.     Through the theoretical concept of audit culture (Shore & Wright, 1999) I show that these reforms have changed not only the structure of the school system but also how actors within the school setting relate to their work and professional role. On the basis of my fieldwork and previous research in the topic (Apple, 2005; Shore, 2008; Karlefjärd, 2011), I argue that the reformation of the school system has brought a shift in the relations of trust within the system, where the growing amount of confidence in measurement, optimization techniques and control has resulted in a lack of trust in teachers as professionals. The voices of teachers, as actors in the educational environment, has to a great extent been missing in the public debate surrounding the Swedish schools as well as overlooked by research in the field. This thesis therefore calls for a growing anthropological attention to primary school teachers and the workings of audit culture in the lower levels of the educational system.

This thesis studies the Weberian notion of rationality in the context of speedrunning and the speedrunning community. By contrasting the instrumental rationality of the speedrunning practice with the value-oriented rationality of the community, it crystallizes the difference between "performing the metrics" as an extension of community values and as a function of externally imposed constraints. The former is an expression of autonomy, while the latter an expression of heteronomy. This difference, it is argued, is found in many different areas of society, sometimes in the guise of "audit culture", at other times as an unintended side-effect of established forms of practice. In either case, a return to communal values (e.g. the sociological imagination) is seen as an antidote to becoming an extension of someone else’s metrics; autonomy is not a function of performing to external specifications, but of being able to rationally choose which measurements to use and which to leave aside. Speedrunners, in their endeavor to go fast, express such autonomy, albeit implicitly. By analyzing YouTube videos wherein runners explain their tactics and methods, this thesis endeavors to make this aspect of autonomy ever so slightly more explicit.

This study explores the consequences for a historically black university (HBU) of the South African state’s focus on routine and strategic quality evaluation within a policy framework that views higher education as a lever for social change and economic development. It analyses the changing nature of academic work and probes the motivations and understandings of institutional managers and academics in an attempt to explain their responses to policy requirements. The theory of the Evaluative State is employed to examine the nature and consequences of overzealous responsiveness by a historically black university in transition in South Africa. It suggests that the changing relationship between state and university is characterised by contradictions and ambivalence, a result of the interplay between a strong sense of loyalty to the state on the one hand and a recognition of the failure of the state to recognise and reward achievements valued by the HBU. This study suggests that state steering, through the use of output evaluation and efficiency-directed performance indicators, has resulted in failure to achieve central policy goals of development, equity and social justice. The study is guided by one main research question: How do academics in a historically black South African university in transition engage with and implement internal and external quality assurance processes and policies? The literature review reveals significant gaps in understanding the consequences of the rise of the Evaluative State in higher education. A major limitation has been a lack of focus on higher education systems in developing countries and on the consequences of imposing neo-liberal frameworks upon local realities which require redress to remedy historically constructed economic and social disadvantage. The descriptions of academics and institutional managers that emerge in this study highlight stark differences between the two groups in perceptions of and approaches to quality improvement and university work. Significantly, institutional history, context and mission emerge as strong factors shaping academics’ and managers’ responses to change, factors that have largely been disregarded by state policy which focuses more on output achievement than on input variables. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted