Accomplishing desired benefits from investments in planned change is problematical for organizations, their leaders and the change agents charged with delivery. This is despite a well-developed literature, replete with advice on how change should be achieved. Examination of this literature shows the primary focus on change agents and their practices. This research widens the focus by observing the influence of change agents, change recipients and line managers on organizational routines undergoing planned change. It examines the interplay between stability and change in organizational routines, adopting a social practice perspective, and the routine intended to change as the unit of analysis (Feldman and Pentland, 2003, 2005). The research builds on claims that to understand the patterns of action within routines requires the internal dynamics – the claimed duality between ostensive (in principle) and performative (in practice) aspects - to be examined. A research method to operationalize the study of this claimed duality was devised following the principles of Strong Structuration (Stones, 2005). This method enabled a unique conceptualization of the study of routine dynamics, focused on planned change from the perspective of multiple, interdependent actors. Two cases of change agents following the advice in the planned change literature were explored. In one case, stability of the routine persisted when change was intended. In the other, change was relatively easy to achieve irrespective of change agent actions. The primary contribution is the demonstration of how the attitudes to change of change recipients, line managers and change agents influence the internal dynamics of routines undergoing planned change. Other contributions pertain to the method of ‘unpacking’ organizational routines and its potential for shaping future practice. This research does not offer new ‘normative’ advice but instead sensitizes planned change practitioners to the level of analysis they need to carry out to ensure that their interventions are suitably designed.

A teacher’s understandings of literacy have an impact on the pedagogical decisions that the teacher makes. Such understandings of literacy may evolve through professional learning, experiences, and reflective practice, but this evolution is seldom documented and therefore not often considered as a systematic means for improving practice. Similarly, educators are rarely able to document the longitudinal literacy life of one learner. This autoethnographic study explores and documents how the researcher’s understandings of literacy have changed over time. The researcher is the primary participant in the study, but her daughter’s literacy learning (from early childhood into adolescence) informs the three eras of the researcher’s teaching life. These three eras are named: teacher, teacher-mother, and teacher-mother-researcher. In each era the researcher interprets her daughter’s literacy learning through the theoretical lens of literacy as social practice. The study draws upon documents, interviews, and artefacts from both the researcher’s life and from her daughter’s literacy life in order to construct stories that express the lived experience of an educator in the act of examining her own literacy theory-practice evolutionary process. Findings from this study can inform educators of the need to challenge their understandings of literacy theories in relation to their past and current literacy practices, enabling them to effectively construct their future practices.

The Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Directorate (MUST) is a producer of knowledge, a knowledge that is fundamental for decisionmaking in foreign and security policy. The intelligence knowledge production is often held as objective, value neutral, and with the intention of ‘speaking truth onto power’. However, this study holds that such a perspective on intelligence knowledge production calls for a revision. Hence, the overall purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of knowledge in intelligence analysis and also to investigate how that knowledge is affected by the social context of its production, the military intelligence service. The source material is of three kinds; first texts and documents, second interviews with intelligence analysts and managers, and third observations of seminars and meetings during the production process of estimates. The results are that there is a strong presence of an implicit interpretive framework that continuously influences and guides the knowledge production and thereby makes the knowledge dependent on one specific perspective contrary to the intentional objectivity within the intelligence service. Further, the study reveals that the social and discursive practices for intelligence knowledge production include a ‘logic of appropriateness’ suggesting the presence of a structured Denkkollektiv with a structured Denkstil. The actions and choices of the individuals are transformed to create conformity to the norms within the social discursive practices. Thus, the inherited frame of interpretation, as well as the socialised norm of staying within the existing accepted frames ofthinking and acting ends up to the stability and duration of the not always accurate and fruitful Denkstil. At the core of political science resides the question of how policy is shaped. Even though this study has focused merely on one organisation in a specific policy field in one country it brings insights to the knowledge and policy nexus.

Midwifery is a dynamic, ever changing, specialised field of nursing involving the care of women and childbearing families. Clients are central to the practice of midwifery and thus their well-being is the main focus of midwives. So, it is not surprising that much of the relatively small body of midwifery research is client focused. As a result, client perspectives have been studied in a number of ways, regarding several aspects of midwifery care. This research, however, aimed to consider midwifery from the midwives' perspective by exploring the everyday encounters of everyday midwives who are working in institutional settings, and identifying the ethical aspects of those encounters. From the researcher's standpoint, it is clear that midwives' everyday encounters are ethical encounters and have potential to be either beneficent or harmful. There was, however, uncertainty that midwives recognized this "everydayness" of ethics. This research sought to clarify the place of ethics within midwives' everyday activities. A further purpose was to ascertain how the ethics that entered into the encounters and activities midwives participated in on a daily basis had affected their practise, their profession and/ or themselves. In doing this, the intent was to broaden the understandings of the ethical dimension of the practice. A particular ethical approach was adopted for this project. It is a view of ethics where persons have regard for, and responsibility toward, each other (Isaacs, 1998). The fact that midwifery is a social practice was expected to be significant in both the everyday encounters that midwives experienced and the ethical responses to those encounters. Members of social practices share an overall purpose and have a moral obligation or desire to practise ethically. As they share a culture and a covenantal commitment to care for those the profession seeks to serve - in a context of gift, fidelity and trust (Isaacs, 1993; Langford, 1978), it was anticipated that midwives would, generally, work in an ethically laden "world". Narrative research offered an appropriate framework for investigating these dimensions of midwifery practice. Many authors have noted the value of story-telling for making sense, and illuminating the ethical features, of our lives. It is, Kearney says, "an open-ended invitation to ethical ... responsiveness" (2000, p. 156). By enabling the participants to tell their stories, rich, contextual narrative material was obtained. The researcher was able to engage with both the participants and the stories as audience. An introduction to the study is provided in Chapter One, while Chapter Two explains both why narrative inquiry was chosen for this research project and the framework that was utilised. The insights from the study are presented in Chapters Three through Six. Each chapter considers the issues and concepts arising from stories that involve midwives' relationships and interactions with a different group of people: midwives, institutions and administration ("them"), doctors and families. In Chapter Three different types of interactions between midwives and their colleagues are explored. Some of the issues that arise are the importance of understanding one's own values and the place of ethics in practice, as well as the need to "do ethics-on-the-run". Many ethical concepts are evident including autonomy, integrity and professional identity. Participants had many negative experiences, and some conveyed feeling a lack of support, threatened or overwhelmed. Conversely, some stories share very positive images of mutual understanding where midwives worked together empathetically. Chapter Four looks at how managers' interactions with midwives impacted upon them and their practice. Unfortunately, this seems to be mostly negative. The midwives convey a sense of feeling undervalued both professionally and personally. Doctors have their turn to interact with the midwives in Chapter Five. In this chapter it becomes evident that doctors and midwives view birth from different perspectives. The participants' stories tell of challenging situations that alert us to the fact that normal, in the context of birth, is not as simple and common place as one might think when doctors and midwives have to work together. Wonderful, positive stories of midwives and doctors working together told of the symbiotic relationship that these two groups of professionals can have when the client is the focus. The last of the insights chapters, Chapter Six, focuses on the relationships midwives have with families. Interestingly, these are the people they spoke of least, even though they are the people for whom the profession exists. Here the concept of midwife as friend is discussed. Then, through their stories some of the participants help us to learn how midwives work together with their clients, care about them, not just for them, and how their past experience has had a lasting impact on their practice. Professionalism (or a lack of it) was implicated as a possible cause of some of the participants' concerns, as was the improper use of power. Both of these concepts arose many times throughout the project. Chapter 7 discusses these issues in some depth. The final chapter provides an overview of midwives situated within their practice. An account is offered of how the participants see the future of their practice and it is questioned if midwifery is, in fact, a social practice with common goals. The thesis draws attention to the embeddedness of ethics in the everyday practice of midwives, and to the vital role that relationships play in midwifery practice. This suggests the need for a relational, contextual ethics approach if the practice is to flourish.

This thesis purports to make two contributions to understandings of biotechnology. First, it presents a novel framework through which to view biotechnology as a complex series of fundamentally social and politically economic mediations rather than a decontextualised collection of technical and scientific phenomena. Second, the thesis presents a method for analysing contemporary discourses about biotechnology within this framework. The framework presented in the first content chapter of the thesis identifies what I see to be the four primary mediating "movements" that are central to seeing Biotechnology as Media: Alienation, Translation, Recontextualisation, and Absorption. The next chapter explicates these movements more fully using a combination of social practice and discourse theory. Using these four movements and the mediation framework as a guide, I then critically analyse a corpus of seventy two exemplary texts (approximately 700,000 words) about contemporary biotechnology. Mediation, in the sense I use it here, is not concerned with one particular media form or technology. Rather, it focuses on the process of mediation as the movement of meanings (Silverstone, 1999). I argue that seeing biotechnologies as mediations can provide a deeper and more critical understanding of how ways of seeing, being, acting, and describing (discourses) associated with contemporary biotechnology are moved from micro- and macro-biological and scientific contexts into the everyday lives of citizens and ecosystems. In particular, such a view highlights the forces and voices that currently determine the path and substance of political-economic movements in biotechnology and, consequently, how everyday perceptions of biotechnology are shaped or silenced in processes of mediation. A core assumption of the thesis is that processes of mediation are not neutral. Rather, they are always inherently interpretive, politically economic, and ethically significant. Any mediation involves "filtering" processes via which "content" is transformed into a form that is appropriate for a given medium by persons who have control over the medium, and by the nature of the medium itself. This applies as much in laboratory and scientific contexts as it does in the contexts of mass consumption, whether in newspapers, policy papers, movies (such as Gattaca), or consumer goods. The same is true in the mediation of biotechnology: there are technological and discursive restrictions on what and who can "contribute to" and "come out" of biotechnology and also what is construed as being a valuable and desirable outcome of biotechnology research and development. The three central analysis chapters of the thesis outline firstly how biotechnology can function as a time-based medium for the reproduction of already powerful discourses on, for example, the role of technology in human development and the consumer market as the moral medium between generators of new technologies and their "consumers". I identify exemplars of how the history of biotechnology and mediation (movement) is expressed in the corpus. This is followed by a more concentrated analysis of the ethical and social significance of the key "official" mediations presented in the corpus. I focus in particular on how the predominant policy evaluations of biotechnological mediations expressed in state, national, and international policy documents construct a "virtuous cycle" of product development that will ostensibly "deliver the benefits" of biotechnology to all citizens who, in the corpus, are framed predominantly as "consumers". The final chapter of the thesis reflects on the significance of biotechnology at the macro level of social practices and systems. Apart from its direct function as a technical medium for alienating hitherto inalienable aspects of life, such as configurations of DNA, and turning them into products for sale, I argue that, as a suite of mediating movements, biotechnology has the potential to effectively, and for the most part invisibly, mediate our more general understandings and experiences of ourselves, of other species, and of the world we live in. More specifically, I argue that biotechnological mediations actively, and often forcefully, promote a narrowing of the range of evaluative resources on offer to the general community, and indeed to biotechnologists themselves. Biotechnological mediations can therefore be described as part of a broader movement away from conditions of heteroglossia or dialogue (multi language, multi voice) toward conditions of monologia (one language, one voice). The thesis concludes with an important question: if we can identify these narrowing effects or mediations of biotechnology by using techniques such as Critical Discourse Analysis and by seeing biotechnology in a mediation framework, what can we do to interrupt them and generate movements that are more generative of heteroglossic and socially responsive ways of seeing, being, and acting? I offer a number of responses to the question in the conclusion.

Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS as a global pandemic in the 1980’s, the focus of the scientific community has been to firstly identify, then treat and ultimately find a cure for, this disease. This has proven to be challenging and far from realistically achievable by the scientific community or the communities affected by this disease. / A funding allocation from the National Institutes of Health in the United States came to a consortium in Australia seeking to develop a prime-boost preventative HIV vaccine. The consortium included members of the Australian HIV/AIDS Partnership. This partnership emerged from a particular set of historical contexts and included affected community. The Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations was the affected community representative on the consortium. This thesis sets out the contextual and ethical reasons for this arrangement, and explores how this unusual partnership worked in practice, with a view to identifying its broader implications. / HIV vaccine development, and AFAO’s role in that development, is complex and multifaceted. The consortium existed within a particular social context which I explore by describing the social history of HIV in Australia. The search for an HIV vaccine is difficult and complex work requiring significant effort and I describe the challenges involved in such an enterprise. Biomedical research more generally exists in the context of international and national research documents which govern the way in which researchers may conduct human experimental trialling. I discuss these documents and highlight the underlying ethical principles. / This research involved 9 interviews with 7 key informants who were members of the consortium. The accounts were analysed following a grounded theory approach, utilising the sensitising concepts outlined in the discussion of the social history of HIV in Australia, the science of HIV vaccine development and the general and specific ethical principles. Following this methodological approach, I identify common themes in the data and discuss the results in greater detail, paying particular attention to the ways this particular social practice plays out in practice and the key ethical considerations arising from the accounts. I also explore the risks, costs and benefits to AFAO of its involvement in the consortium. The overall aim of this research is to understand how practicable, feasible and effective community involvement was in this consortium. / Finally, I come to three major conclusions. First, that the consortium is an emerging social practice, which is the intersection of three established social practices; biomedical research, the affected community and the Australian HIV/AIDS Partnership. Using Langford’s criteria for a social practice, I demonstrate the social practice of the consortium was clearly made up of members who were aware of each other’s intentions and beliefs. It was clear from the commencement of the consortium’s project that the consortium was directed at the overall purpose of developing an efficacious preventative prime-boost HIV vaccine. The unique history and tradition of the social practice of the consortium is slightly less clear but what the accounts of the informants demonstrated is that the histories and traditions of the Australian HIV/AIDS Partnership approach and biomedical research, in particular, were a significant influence on most of the consortium members. So much so, that the consortium adopted that unique history and tradition and it was this factor, perhaps above all others, that facilitated AFAO becoming a full partner in the vaccine development enterprise in the first place. Importantly, my research theoretically extends the notion of shared ways of seeing and doing within a social practice. The socialisation aspects are highlighted very strongly within the accounts. / Second, AFAO’s involvement was highly concordant with the core principles of the Good Participatory Practice Guidelines for biomedical HIV prevention trials document, and it influenced important protocols within the consortium, but there were also conflict of interest issues for AFAO to manage. Third, the different approaches for community involvement in biomedical HIV prevention trialling (the partnership approach and the Community Advisory Board approach) each has strengths and weaknesses and should be carefully considered in light of the context of the trialling to be conducted. / This thesis concludes with a series of recommendations for future biomedical HIV prevention trials.

This research focuses on artefactual assemblages from temples in the south-east and east of England from 50 BCE to 250 CE. In order to evaluate these data, which primarily consists of faunal remains, coins, and items of personal adornment, quantitative methods to perform intra-site and inter-site analyses are utilised. As a result of the analyses conducted, a range of social practices were identified, including those specific to individual temples, and those that were shared to varying degrees across the breadth of the study area. The study also examines how a site’s unique environmental and political conditions characterised the assemblages of each temple. Moreover, it reveals that the pre-Roman Eastern and Southern kingdoms continued to influence the nature of practices on temple sites into the Roman period, and that the impact of Roman conquest was much less persuasive as might be expected from previous research on religion in Roman Britain. The conclusions of this study emphasise the significant future potential of the finds evidence to illuminate studies of religion in the Roman empire, as well as highlighting the diverse nature of religion in early Roman Britain.

Au début des années 1990, apparaît une nouvelle pratique contemporaine : l’art participatif. Celle-ci se caractérise d’abord par une création hors-atelier : la création s’inscrit dans l’espace social. Elle se distingue ensuite par le fait qu’elle n’est pas le fruit du travail de l’artiste seul, mais celui d’une collaboration en présence entre artiste et participants. Notre thèse constitue une enquête sur les enjeux à la fois artistiques et politiques de cette pratique. Nous inscrivons ainsi l’art participatif dans une histoire artistique de la participation sur le XXème siècle, afin de comprendre les problèmes communs justifiant la mobilisation d’un tel dispositif de création, et la spécificité de ce dernier en art participatif ; mais aussi dans une histoire esthétique permettant d’éclairer la façon dont la participation remet en question nos préconceptions les plus profondes sur l’art. Une deuxième partie de notre travail consiste à étudier le développement de cette pratique, en relation avec la politique, au Royaume-Uni de 1997 à 2015. Les gouvernements successifs promeuvent la participation au rang de valeur, et multiplient la mise en place de dispositifs de participatory democracy. Avoir recours à un dispositif de création participatif acquiert, dans ce contexte, une autre dimension et signification. Nous étudions également l’art participatif en rapport avec le politique, que nous analysons comme la tentative de réinventer de nouvelles formes du commun et de la communauté. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que le processus de collaboration entre artiste et participants fait émerger une forme d’association politique nouvelle : la communauté de singularités. / In the early 1990’s emerged a new artistic practice: participatory art. This post-studio practice is characterized by an embodied collaboration between the artist and the participants. Our thesis is an investigation on the artistic and political stakes of this practice. We inscribe participatory art in an artistic history of participation, in order to understand the shared problems encountered by artists along the 20th century calling for the mobilization of this creative device, and also its specific use and functioning in participatory art. We also inscribe this practice in an aesthetic history which enlightens how participation questions our most rooted preconceptions about art. A second part of our work is dedicated to the study of the development of participatory art in relationship to politics (understood here as policies) in the UK from 1997 to 2015. Participation is promoted as a value in itself by the successive governments and participatory democracy is said to be developed by various kinds of public consultations. Participatory art acquires in this context a different meaning and dimension. Finally we intend to show how participatory art can be interpreted as an attempt to create new forms of communality and community. We suggest the idea that the collaborative process between the artist and the participants produces a new kind of political association: the community of singularities.

The continued growth of aviation poses a major challenge to climate change mitigation. Many argue that absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not be possible without restricting demand and call for fundamental changes in travel patterns, particularly flying shorter distances. However, research shows that voluntary behaviour change in this area is unlikely: even those who express concern over aviation emissions are unwilling to sacrifice their travel plans for the sake of the environment. It has been argued, therefore, that researchers and policy makers should direct their attention to the collective nature of unsustainable air travel, rather than blaming individual passengers for their “choices”. This thesis provides an in-depth and socially situated understanding of long-haul flying within the gap year context, which is an increasingly popular activity for the British youth. Drawing on Giddens’s structuration theory and using data from a study, which employed a variety of qualitative research methods, this thesis first positions the gap year as a social practice, characterized by shared social meanings, norms and resources; second, it explores factors influencing its current long-haul character; and third, examines the role of agency in gap year participation and mobility decisions. The findings suggest that travel to (often several) long-haul destinations is a particularly desirable, appropriate and convenient way of “doing a gap year” and that opportunities for making more sustainable choices, whilst not completely absent, are constrained. Moreover, the rules and resources that form the terrain for action for prospective gap year takers are shaped by numerous networked agents. As such, this thesis joins the calls for redefining the problem of unsustainable mobility from that of individual “choice” to collective travel practices. Strong structuration is suggested as a particularly useful conceptual framework to study non-routine forms of travel, such as gap years. Policy implications are discussed, specifically potential interventions that could shift the gap year practice into a more sustainable trajectory, or substitute it for a less carbon-intensive equivalent.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the preschool teachers’ interpretationwith regards to children's literacy in preschool and how it can be understood as aconstruction of social practice. This thesis is written from a social-constructionist and discourse-analyticalperspective and I will also argue in favor of a critical perspective on literacy.I have studied preschool teachers’ constructions of children's literacy through lookingfor common discourses. I conducted semi-structured interviews with five preschool teachers in which theygot to answer questions about children's literacy practice and literacy events.The preschool teachers where then allowed to reflect on and interpret the types ofpractices and events. My transcribed material was the foundation for my discourse analysis and Iidentified three discourses expressed by all preschool teachers when asked aboutchildren's literacy. These where: the other culture, not teach and interest. My final conclusion is that from a critical perspective, literacy can be seen as aproduct of the norms and values embraced in the preschool culture.