Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Events, Social Connections, Place Identities And Extended Families, Bernadette Quinn, Theresa Ryan

Articles

The study reported here investigates the role that planned social gatherings play in shaping social connections, forging group identity and re-affirming connections with significant ‘home’ places within families where relationships extend across space. Empirically, it draws on a study of the Gathering, a 2013 national tourism initiative that encouraged people in Ireland to organise ‘gatherings’ to attract ‘home’ family members scattered across the globe. It reports data generated using mixed methods administered in two Irish counties. The findings demonstrate the profound meanings that the gatherings had for participating family members. The events served to strengthen existing family ties and to …

Contesting Early Childhood Professional Identities: A Cross-National Discussion, Sonja Arndt, Mathias Urban, Colette Murray, Kylie Smith, Beth Swadener, Tomas Ellegaard

Articles

In this collective article, the authors explore constructions of early childhood practitioners and how they disconnect and reconnect in a global neo-liberal education policy context. The contributions to the conversation provide windows into shifting professional identities across five national contexts: New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Australia and Denmark. The authors ask who benefits from the notion of distinct professional identities, linked to early childhood education as locally and culturally embedded practice. They conceptualize teachers’ shifting subjectivities, drawing on Kristeva’s philosophical conception of identity as constantly in construction, open and evolving. Arguments for the urgency to counter the global uniformity machine, …

Discursive Constructions Of Professional Identity In Policy And Regulatory Discourse, Gerard Fealy, Josephine Mary Hegarty, Martin Mcnamara, Mary Casey, Denise O'Leary, Catriona Kennedy, Pauline O’Reilly, Rhona O’Connell, Anne-Marie Brady, Emma Nicholson

Articles

Aim

To examine and describe disciplinary discourses conducted through professional policy and regulatory documents in nursing and midwifery in Ireland.

Background

A key tenet of discourse theory is that group identities are constructed in public discourses and these discursively constructed identities become social realities. Professional identities can be extracted from both the explicit and latent content of discourse. Studies of nursing's disciplinary discourse have drawn attention to a dominant discourse that confers nursing with particular identities, which privilege the relational and affective aspects of nursing and, in the process, marginalize scientific knowledge and the technical and body work of nursing. …

Re-Theorizing The “Structure–Agency” Relationship: Figurational Theory, Organizational Change And The Gaelic Athletic Association, John Connolly, Paddy Dolan

Articles

This article illustrates how the figurational sociology associated with Norbert Elias provides an alternative theoretical framework for explaining the relationship between, ‘individualorganization- society’ and organizational change, and in so doing transverses what is conceived as a false dichotomy between structure and agency. Through an historical case study of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ireland, the ‘individual-organization-society’ relationship is conceptualized as overlapping figurations and organizational change is explained as figurational dynamics—the shifting social interdependencies between the individuals and groups comprising an organization, between that organization and other organizations, between social groups on a higher level of integration and competition. In tandem …