Vito Laterza

The Doubtful Guest? A Virtual Research Environment for Education.

In this paper the authors describe a novel ‘Virtual Research Environment’ (VRE) based on the Sakai Virtual Collaboration Environment and designed to support education research. This VRE has been used for the past two years by projects of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme, 10 of which were involved in a research and development project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. The authors present vignettes of how the VRE has been implemented by three projects, drawing on extensive case records built up over two years of supporting and researching these projects. Rather than adopting the VRE as their sole locus of communication and collaboration, project members were careful to adopt specific VRE components which aligned well with the design of their research projects and established patterns of collaboration, some projects ‘hacking’ tools and other VRE functions in order to address specific needs and ways of working. The authors offer some interpretations of the contrasting patterns of adoption observed, drawing on Ciborra’s work on the role of new technologies in a range of organisational settings, and conclude with a discussion of how new technologies might be integrated into established educational and research practices.

Resilient Labour: Workplace Regimes, Globalisation and Enclave Development in Swaziland

Abstract Are new forms of foreign investment in Africa having a major impact on local workers? Are they significantly altering labour practices and conditions? I explore these questions with reference to Swaziland and the ethnography of labour relations in a Christian company town. A comparative perspective looking at the South African regional economy shows that the legacy of apartheid enclave development casts a shadow over workers’ futures. Economic dualism, characterised by cheap labour drawn from an ever expanding informal sector and reinforced by social, political and institutional factors, tends to neutralise the possibility of inclusive economic growth driven by foreign capital.

Some notes towards a human economy approach

The diverse research activities carried out in the Human Economy Project focus on the economic practices that people on the ground perform in their everyday life, and the interactions between these actions and larger-scale political and economic structures and institutions. This article provides some partial reflections on what we mean by ‘human economy’. It will discuss some aspects of this approach that have influenced project members, including an ethnographic orientation, historical analysis and comparison across cases. Human economy research often cuts across geographic and theoretical scales. Many project members aim to move beyond the analytical distinction between local and global, and towards a conceptualisation of the economy as a Maussian ‘total social fact’. Finally, the knowledge produced within the project has the potential to help individuals and social groups in building a better world for all who live in it.

Co-interpretation of Usage Data: A Mixed Methods Approach to Evaluation of Online Environments

Abstract This paper describes a novel research approach in which server usage data collected from online environments provides a ‘focus’ for semi-structured interviews in the course of which research participants are involved in a process of co-interpretation and ‘sensemaking’. Online environments generate large volumes of data which are useful in determining trends in behaviour, broad patterns and sequences of events but tell us little about the working or learning environments in which online activities are located. We use our experience of researching the use of an online environment with groups of education researchers to demonstrate that it is possible to use these data in the construction of rich and illuminating qualitative accounts which help to ‘make sense’ of single events repeated sequences, activity-flows and long-term trends in online activities. Our findings suggest that using suitably reduced quantitative data as the focus of qualitative enquiry in this way allows greater understanding of working practices in complex environments and can contribute to evaluation, generation of user requirements and provision of improved support to users of online environments and infrastructures.

Extraction and beyond : people's economic responses to restructuring in southern and central Africa

People’s economic activities in southern and central Africa have undergone major transformations in the last three decades, influenced by significant structural changes in the configurations of big...

The Human Economy Project: first steps

The Human Economy Project is interdisciplinary in scope, but relies extensively on anthropological research methods. These methods are an appropriate counter to the methods adopted in mainstream economics, which has been criticised for its isolation from ‘the ordinary business of life’. Four essays in this collection illustrate the use of the ethnographic research method in posing questions about the way in which people in different parts of the world perceive the ‘big institutions’—the market, the state, business corporations—that impinge on their lives. The final two essays discuss the rationale behind the Human Economy Project and the meaning of the ‘human economy’ idea.

What’s in a “research passport”? A collaborative autoethnography of institutional approvals in public involvement in research

Plain English summaryPlain English summaryThe article analyses the process of securing permissions for members of the public (we refer to them as “research partners”) and academics involved in a qualitative study of public involvement in research (PIR) across eight health sciences projects in England and Wales. All researchers, including research partners, need to obtain a “research passport” from UK NHS trusts where they intend to carry out research. The article presents the experiences and observations of the authors, who all went through the process.Research partners encountered many challenges, as the overall bureaucratic procedures proved burdensome. The effects were felt by the academics too who had to manage the whole process. This influenced the way research partners and academics built social and personal relationships required for the successful conduct of the project. We also discuss the tensions that emerged around the issue of whether research partners should be treated as a professional category on their own, and other issues that influenced the PIR processes.In the concluding section, we make a number of practical recommendations. Project teams should allow enough time to go through all the hurdles and steps required for institutional permissions, and should plan in advance for the right amount of time and capacity needed from project leaders and administrators. Bureaucratic and organisational processes involved in PIR can sometimes produce unanticipated and unwanted negative effects on research partners. Our final recommendation to policy makers is to focus their efforts on making PIR bureaucracy more inclusive and ultimately more democratic.AbstractBackground In the growing literature on public involvement in research (PIR), very few works analyse PIR organizational and institutional dimensions in depth. We explore the complex interactions of PIR with institutions and bureaucratic procedures, with a focus on the process of securing institutional permissions for members of the public (we refer to them as “research partners”) and academics involved in health research. Methods We employ a collaborative autoethnographic approach to describe the process of validating “research passports” required by UK NHS trusts, and the individual experiences of the authors who went through this journey – research partners and academics involved in a qualitative study of PIR across eight health sciences projects in England and Wales. Results Our findings show that research partners encountered many challenges, as the overall bureaucratic procedures and the emotional work required to deal with them proved burdensome. The effects were felt by the academics too who had to manage the whole process at an early stage of team building in the project. Our thematic discussion focuses on two additional themes: the emerging tensions around professionalisation of research partners, and the reflexive effects on PIR processes. Conclusions In the concluding section, we make a number of practical recommendations. Project teams should allow enough time to go through all the hurdles and steps required for institutional permissions, and should plan in advance for the right amount of time and capacity needed from project leaders and administrators. Our findings are a reminder that the bureaucratic and organisational structures involved in PIR can sometimes produce unanticipated and unwanted negative effects on research partners, hence affecting the overall quality and effectiveness of PIR. Our final recommendation to policy makers is to focus their efforts on making PIR bureaucracy more inclusive and ultimately more democratic.