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We bring a science-as-rhetoric framework, which has been used to study the claims of scientists, to examine lay claims about science. Using qualitative content analysis, we scrutinize the rhetoric of science in online reader comments sent in response to New York Times articles covering two recent measles outbreaks. Provaccine commenters use a variety of rhetorical tactics that simultaneously venerate science and denounce the antivaccination stance. These commenters, thus, participate in the ideological practices of boundary-work to demarcate science from nonscience for the purposes of defeating their opponents and advancing their agenda. Our analysis foregrounds how and why this publics’ demarcation of science is a type of moral crusade, that equates antiscientific beliefs with normative chaos. We situate our analysis in the larger cultural landscape wherein laypeople create “us” versus “them” using “science” as their wedge. The importance of developing sociological accounts of these dynamics has been made especially clear in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its many science-based controversies, including those related to vaccination.

Context A research agenda for oral health care was established in the Netherlands using the Dialogue Model. This project served as a case study in which we applied boundary‐work theory as a framework to understand boundaries (ie demarcations) between and within groups, and how these boundaries can be overcome. Objective To gain insights into the boundaries encountered when setting a research agenda, we analysed how this agenda served as a boundary object (ie circumstances, situations or material that connect actor groups and allow boundary crossing) that facilitated crossing boundaries and uniting the perspectives of patients and practitioners. Methods We used a thematic approach to analyse researchers' observations, meeting materials, emails, interviews with patients (n = 11) and a survey among patients and practitioners (n = 18). Results Setting the research agenda helped to cross boundaries in oral health care, which demonstrates its role as a boundary object. First, this made it possible to integrate research topics representing the perspectives and priorities of all patients and also to unite those perspectives. It was essential to involve practitioners at an early stage of the project so that they could better accept the patients' perspectives. This resulted in support for an integrated research agenda, which facilitated the crossing of boundaries. Conclusions The research agenda‐setting project was found to serve as a boundary object in uniting the perspectives and priorities of patients and practitioners. Patient contribution Patient involvement in this case study was structured in the process of research agenda setting using the Dialogue Model.

Management of domestic and wild animals is an integral part of conservation and is often based on how an animal is categorised. For example, feral cats are often killed, while valued companion cats and native wildcats are protected.Drawing on qualitative research and using the concept of boundary-work, this paper examines the complex categorisation and management of cats within conservation in Britain and Aotearoa, New Zealand (NZ). We examine how, both in theory and in practice, valued companion and wildcats are distinguished from unprotected feral cats, and in-between categories of stray and hybrid cats.We demonstrate that stakeholders draw boundaries between cat categories differently. These differences in boundary-drawing reflect the inherent blurriness of category boundaries, practical challenges and, importantly, differences in values, in particular whether priority is placed on the life of the cat or the cat's potential victim, particularly native or game birds. This can mean that laws outlining protections for specific categories of animals have limited effect if, in practice, those encountering cats draw boundaries differently.This paper also reports on important differences between the two case studies. In NZ, even cat advocates support the humane killing of unambiguously feral cats while this is less true in Britain. Furthermore, due to the nature of the contexts, conservationists in NZ are more inclined to assume that ambiguous cats are feral whereas conservationists in Britain are more inclined to assume that they are wildcats.This paper demonstrates that values not only shape people's perceptions and treatment of animals but also how they draw boundaries between them. This finding may have important implications for understanding other controversies in conservation and animal management.Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

In From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders , Norma Fuentes-Mayorga compares the immigration and integration experiences of Dominican and Mexican women in New York City, a traditional destination for Dominicans but a relatively new one for Mexicans. Her book documents the significance of women-led migration within an increasingly racialized context and underscores the contributions women make to their communities of origin and of settlement. Fuentes-Mayorga’s research is timely, especially against the backdrop of policy debates about the future of family reunification laws and the unprecedented immigration of women and minors from Latin America, many of whom seek human rights protection or to reunite with families in the US. From Homemakers to Breadwinners to Community Leaders provides a compelling look at the suffering of migrant mothers and the mourning of family separation, but also at the agency and contributions that women make with their imported human capital and remittances to the receiving and sending community. Ultimately the book contributes further understanding to the heterogeneity of Latin American immigration and highlights the social mobility of Afro-Caribbean and indigenous migrant women in New York. 

This article is about boundary work and the accomplishment of work among various groups claiming professional status at the bedside in the hospital. The author analyzes qualitative data from 110 in-depth interviews and participant observation with physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, social workers, and occupational, physical, and speech therapists. The findings show how work roles, and hence occupational boundaries, are flexible and malleable. Practitioners usually cross these boundaries within reason, and thus boundary work engenders ironic dualities; it generates both conflict and cooperation, questioning and affirmation, and that is why most reasonable work role transgressions do not fundamentally undermine the social order of the hospital. Boundary work provides insights on the dynamic nature of professionalism as the outcome of a negotiated order that reveals itself at the ideological and behavioral levels. Understanding how and why boundary work is done also has policy implications at the workplace and health care service levels.

Using a longitudinal in-depth field study at NASA, I investigate how the open, or peer-production, innovation model affects R&D professionals, their work, and the locus of innovation. R&D professionals are known for keeping their knowledge work within clearly defined boundaries, protecting it from individuals outside those boundaries, and rejecting meritorious innovation that is created outside disciplinary boundaries. The open innovation model challenges these boundaries and opens the knowledge work to be conducted by anyone who chooses to contribute. At NASA, the open model led to a scientific breakthrough at unprecedented speed using unusually limited resources; yet it challenged not only the knowledge-work boundaries but also the professional identity of the R&D professionals. This led to divergent reactions from R&D professionals, as adopting the open model required them to go through a multifaceted transformation. Only R&D professionals who underwent identity refocusing work dismantled their boundaries, truly adopting the knowledge from outside and sharing their internal knowledge. Others who did not go through that identity work failed to incorporate the solutions the open model produced. Adopting open innovation without a change in R&D professionals’identity resulted in no real change in the R&D process. This paper reveals how such processes unfold and illustrates the critical role of professional identity work in changing knowledge-work boundaries and shifting the locus of innovation.

PurposePrivilege is often silent, invisible and not made explicit, and silence is a key question for theorizing on organizations. This paper examines interrelations between privilege and silence for relatively privileged professionals in high-intensity knowledge businesses (KIBs).Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on 112 interviews in two rounds of interviews using the collaborative interactive action research method. The analysis focuses on processes of recruitment, careers and negotiation of boundaries between work and nonwork in these KIBs. The authors study how relative privilege within social inequalities connects with silences in multiple ways, and how the invisibility of privilege operates at different levels: individual identities and interpersonal actions of privilege (micro), as organizational level phenomena (meso) or as societally constructed (macro).FindingsAt each level, privilege is reproduced in part through silence. The authors also examine how processes connecting silence, privilege and social inequalities operate differently in relation to both disadvantage and the disadvantaged, and privilege and the privileged.Originality/valueThis study is relevant for organization studies, especially in the kinds of “multi-privileged” contexts where inequalities, disadvantages and subordination may remain hidden and silenced, and, thus, are continuously reproduced.

The article examines some of the findings of a qualitative research project that looked into the issue of daily “boundary work” as experienced by working adults with and without children during the COVID-19 pandemic. We define boundary work as work that occurs at the intersection of two domains: work and life. We concentrate on border locations in the context of two major issues: first, how people identify borders (boundary identity), and second, what individual coping strategies (cognitive and emotional boundary work) were produced by the pandemic. Because of the frequent spatial overlap between the two spheres (work and life), temporal and spatial boundaries became ineffective, and the majority of the labor of creating borders was moved to mental and emotional levels.

When organization members strive to radically change routines, they face a puzzle: How can they bring about change in performances when these are guided by pre-existing ideas on how to perform the routine, that are themselves recursively reproduced? Drawing on insights from longitudinal case studies of two initiatives to change patient processes in hospitals, this paper suggests that two types of “spaces”—bounded social settings characterized by social, physical, temporal, and symbolic boundaries—are important mechanisms through which actors engage in deliberate efforts to alter both performances (performative aspect) and abstract understandings (ostensive aspect) of a given routine. Specifically, whereas reflective spaces are set apart by social, physical, and temporal boundaries and involve interactions that are geared toward developing novel conceptualizations of a routine, experimental spaces enable the integration of new actions into routine performances by locating them within the original routine, while establishing symbolic and temporal boundaries that signal the provisional and localized nature of experimental performances. As both types of spaces contribute to achieving change in complementary ways, they need to be enacted iteratively in relation to each other. The study offers a model of intentional routine change that articulates the role of spaces in interrupting and reorienting their recursive dynamics.

This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.