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ABSTRACTThis study contributes to the discussion of children’s participation in educational practices. In particular we are interested from the moments that reach beyond formal modes of participation. For this purpose, we use the concept of micropolitics and examine happenings in which children’s actions collide with everyday school practices and larger social and political surfaces. The data consist of one year-long ethnographic fieldwork produced in two Finnish comprehensive schools. Based on the analysis, we identified two different types of events – ‘smooth’ and ‘sticky’ – to which micropolitics entangled. Identifying these two types of events aids us in understanding the kinds of situations in which children have or do not have political power in their everyday school lives. Our analysis show that children take part in discussing wide societal issues, such as social class and local education policies, but it raises questions about the ability of schools as institutions to recognize children’s initiatives. Based on the findings, we propose that the concept of micropolitics can be particularly useful in understanding why some modes of participation become difficult and stay hidden while others are easier to recognize.

This article suggests that citizenship should be seen not as a status to be acquired, lost or refused by an individual. Rather it is an emergent and relational capacity produced and reproduced in everyday material interactions, across a spectrum of activities from work to lifestyle practices. We examine one example of such a material interaction: the engagements that young people have with sexualities education. To aid this endeavour, we apply a new materialist, relational framework that addresses the micropolitical interactions between humans and non-human materialities. Using data from two studies of sexualities education, we assess how the capacities produced during sexualities education interactions – such as a capacity to express specific sexual desires or to manage fertility proactively – contribute inter alia to young people’s ‘becoming-citizen’. Informed by this analysis, we argue that sociology may usefully apply a bottom–up model of citizenship as becoming, constituted materially from diverse engagements.

Background Healthcare organisations are complex social entities, comprising of multiple stakeholders with differing priorities, roles, and expectations about how care should be delivered. To reach agreement among these diverse interest groups and achieve safe, cost-effective patient care, healthcare staff must navigate the micropolitical context of the health service. Micropolitics in this study refers to the use of power, authority, and influence to affect team goals, vision, and decision-making processes. Although these concepts are influential when cultivating change, there is a dearth of literature examining the mechanisms through which micropolitics influences implementation processes among teams. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the role of power, authority, and influence when implementing a collective leadership intervention in two multidisciplinary healthcare teams. Methods The multiple case study design adopted employed a triangulation of qualitative research methods. Over thirty hours of observations (Case A = 16, Case B = 15) and twenty-five interviews (Case A = 13, Case B = 12) were completed. An in-depth thematic analysis of the data using an inductive coding approach was completed to understand the mechanisms through which contextual factors influenced implementation success. A context coding framework was also employed throughout implementation to succinctly collate the data into a visual display and to provide a high-level overview of implementation effect (i.e. the positive, neutral, or negative impact of contextual determinants on implementation). Results The findings emphasised that implementing change in healthcare teams is an inherently political process influenced by prevailing power structures. Two key themes were generated which revealed the dynamic role of these concepts throughout implementation: 1) Exerting hierarchical influence for implementation; and 2) Traditional power structures constraining implementation. Gaining support across multiple levels of leadership was influential to implementation success as the influence exercised by these individuals persuaded follower engagement. However, the historical dynamics of each team determined how this influence was exerted and perceived, which negatively impacted some participants’ experiences of the implementation process. Conclusion To date, micropolitics has received scant attention in implementation science literature. This study introduces the micropolitical concepts of power, authority and influence as essential contextual determinants and outlines the mechanisms through which these concepts influence implementation processes.

Adoption of Maker programs entails deep cultural and structural changes within schools. In this case study, we interviewed a principal and seven faculty members in a high school in the United States, after the first year of implementing making-centered curricula. We report how faculty members responded to the reform, their motivations and beliefs, and the concomitant shifts in power and status. We found that educators are required to make non-trivial adaptations to their skills, instructional approaches, and pedagogical beliefs, and that successful adaptation may lead them to gain status, resources, and support within the school. Those are gained on account of technical expertise and educators’ efforts to promote the vision of the reform. The extent to which faculty members adapt to a reform, accommodate and support others in their process of adapting, or resist it, may determine whether the reform is successful or not. As such, school leaders face the challenge of encouraging faculty to buy into such reforms. The case study provides a unique perspective on Maker-centered reforms and outlines important implications for administrators seeking to implement similar programs.

This article presents further opportunities to develop the Global Production Network (GPN) approach by reopening the ‘black box’ of the multinational enterprise (MNE) through a structuration perspective. It emphasises three aspects to a renewed focus on the agency of MNEs, namely: the importance of the variety of relationships within MNEs between parent and subsidiaries; the importance of dynamic capabilities in underpinning corporate change; and, the micropolitics of MNEs and subsidiaries which impact on firm-institutional change within regional economies. The agency exercised by MNEs in these ways influences the ‘selection’ of investment locations, ‘coupling’ processes, and the depth and pace of host territorial institutional change. In conclusion, this article argues that future research needs to place greater emphasis on the contribution of dynamics internal to the MNE to understand evolution in regional economies and GPNs.

The notion of belonging is an often-referenced but under-theorized concept in studies of school organization. The purpose of this study is to examine the politics of belonging in schools and accompanying implications for how schools are organized and led. This research employs an autophotographic methodology. Student participants took photographs across 2 years of data collection of spaces where they did and did not “fit in” and participated in interviews to explain their photographs. Students identified four themes in their photographs regarding their sense of membership at school: (a) the importance of spaces where belonging is noncontingent; (b) the distinction between calm spaces and surveilled spaces; (c) anxiety in public, “wild” spaces where no help was available; and (d) generally positive but mixed impressions of teachers. An increased understanding of organization leadership for belonging is linked to numerous other timely concerns in educational administration, including equity and inclusion.

Participatory Action Research (PAR) combines local experimentation, empirical research and action learning to co-produce solutions to complex problems. PAR projects tend to bring to the frontstage the collaborative process and promises of social change. Yet evidence for real change is sparse, and possible explanations are kept backstage: friction, conflict and power asymmetries. In our projects, we repeatedly encountered conflicts that could not be constructively addressed; we coined these Participation Shenanigans. They presented as high-drama, low-substance micropolitics such as emotional outbursts, ad hominem arguments and silent exclusions. Because they defy participatory logic, we unconsciously smoothed them over or ignored them. Drawing on Foucault’s philosophy of power and his notion of the dispositif, we analyzed three cases from PAR projects in Dutch urban neighborhoods. We used an abductive approach and Participation Shenanigans as a sensitizing concept to trace micropolitical conflict and power dynamics. Neighborhood Gossip, Schoolyard Politics and Property Drama show how legitimate concerns are classified as gossip, how critique of systemic asymmetry is empathically redirected to interpersonal drama, and how institutional norms are installed in physical locations determining who may speak and who is ignored or excluded. We demonstrate how Participation Shenanigans signal the working of a participation dispositif in which citizens’ concerns and critiques are defused, redirected and absorbed within public governance practices and made inactionable for local governments. The dispositif sorts “good” participatory residents from troublemakers, sets norms about who can participate and how, and bends participation to legitimize public governance. Participation Shenanigans, then, mark places where this dispositif destabilizes and harmony and dialogue falter. Rather than ignoring or smoothing them over, PAR researchers should engage with them as resistance and counter-conduct and meddle in micropolitics to support action; writing about our own shenanigans was our way of taking responsibility for our role in silencing and exclusion.

Climate change is more than a discrete issue demanding political attention and response. A changing climate permeates political life as material processes of planetary change reverberate in our bodies, affecting subterranean processes of attention and evoking bodily responses at and below the register of awareness. By way of example, I explore the register of bodily feeling to raise the possibility that proliferating anomalies in atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic activities are entering into subliminal experiences of time and confounding embodied expectations of how the future is likely to flow from the past. The essay concludes with a preliminary discussion of how micropolitical strategies to amplify visceral experiences of climatic changes might valuably contribute to larger programs for climate action.

Mental health recovery takes place in a social and material world. However, socio-material contexts have often been absent from recovery studies. The present study was conducted in Norway, a Scandinavian welfare country. We interviewed people at meeting places who had experiences as service users, focusing on their experiences of becoming well, and analyzed their recovery stories using an assemblage framework. Our analysis identified four constitutive dimensions that promote mental health recovery: an atmosphere of togetherness , doings as more than the act , personal development , and integration in society. We discuss how these dimensions might be seen as social, relational, and material forces that create important micropolitics that challenge the individualistic professionalization of the recovery concept.

There is a growing interest in cultural geography in the potential of moving imagery and moving image methodologies for grasping the more-than-human and non-representational dimensions of life. This paper explores this potential to develop moving image methodologies for witnessing and evoking human-nonhuman interactions. Drawing on recent work in film theory, anthropology and ethology, it develops both a practical methodology and a critical, affirmative vocabulary for unpacking the work done by circulating imagery and engaging with its micropolitical power and promise. This analysis is illustrated through a focus on elephants and images of their behaviours, ecologies and interactions with diverse humans. It outlines how video techniques can be used to witness and make sense of elephant encounters. It then maps and compares four of the many affective logics according to which elephants are evoked in popular moving imagery. It reflects on the techniques and the micropolitics of such evocations, before examining what they offer for new ways of engaging with nonhuman difference. Elephants provide an accessible, popular and telegenic nonhuman case study.