This paper presents an empirical study examining how professionals in contemporary workplaces interpret and apply Stoic philosophy to shape their ethical conduct. Conceptualised as ‘Neo-Stoic’ philosophy, the study contributes to scholarly understanding of how an ancient ethical tradition informs contemporary social-ecological systems (SES) thinking and practice. The exploratory study included a mixed qualitative/quantitative survey of professionals practicing Stoicism in their work setting, with more detailed follow-up interviews with participants recruited through the survey. Drawing on these data, the paper presents instances representative of the intention, contribution and ethical guidance of Stoic philosophy in professional practice through the reported experiences of practitioners navigating workplace challenges. Thematic analysis revealed three main themes: ‘being Stoic’ in a contemporary workplace; contribution to a ‘common good’; and providing guidance to others. The findings reveal how the ancient philosophy of Stoicism has been adapted to contemporary workplaces, particularly through the attention paid to the broader SES implications of (Neo-) Stoic practitioners’ pursuit of the common good. Neo-Stoic practices are seen to promote a ‘beyond compliance’ ethics-as-practice and aspire to address SES sustainability issues, particularly in circumstances of unrest and crisis, such as experienced through the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper demonstrates how Neo-Stoic practices can inform professional workplace responses to SES sustainability imperatives.

The global health community has recognized the importance of integrating and sustaining health programs within national health systems rather than managing stand-alone 'vertical' interventions. Corresponding with these objectives, international aid donors are embracing the principle of localization. Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) in Zimbabwe is a large vertical HIV prevention program that was primarily funded through development assistance for health. Program stakeholders want to sustainably integrate VMMC into routine health services so that the program will continue to be a cost-effective HIV prevention strategy. The research team studied the effectiveness of a district-level intervention to empower local stakeholders in this integration effort. To evaluate this intervention, the research team conducted a document review of district-level work plans, combined with a survey administered to district teams assessing sustainability capacity of the program. Over a two-year period, Task Teams in all five intervention districts successfully integrated the VMMC program by reducing barriers and leveraging opportunities in other parts of the health system. Key outcomes impacted all WHO health system building blocks, including enhanced leadership and governance, improved service delivery through better access and acceptability, an expanded health workforce through training, more efficient use of medical technologies, improved data quality, and the mobilization of local funds to support program financing and sustainability. The sustainability survey showed a reduction in funding stability but a significant increase in communications, program adaptation, and organizational capacity. By institutionalizing participatory work planning, fostering local ownership, and mobilizing resources, the project demonstrated a successful model for integrating, scaling, and sustaining VMMC services. Other health programs in low- and middle-income countries seeking to integrate and sustain health services at subnational levels should consider this diagonal, bottom-up model to promote local leadership development and health system strengthening.

Introduction The transition of voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC), an HIV prevention service, in Zimbabwe from a donor-funded to a government-owned programme involves the collective efforts and alignment of national and subnational government leaders, managers, healthcare providers, village health workers, community members, donors and implementing partners. We sought to understand stakeholders’ perspectives on barriers, facilitators and recommendations as a vertical HIV prevention programme transitioned to an integrated, government-led model.Methods We conducted 54 semistructured stakeholder interviews at the national and subnational levels. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed.Results Participants highlighted a range of psychological and structural barriers and facilitators to integrating and sustaining the VMMC programme. Respondents mentioned financing and staffing barriers to integration, particularly a lack of domestic resources, the transition from a fee-for-service to a facility-based performance model and staff attrition. Notably, resistance to changing the VMMC programme’s operations was a significant barrier that may be tied to individual psychological barriers such as loss of power and job security. Donors and partners continued to control the funding for VMMC. Ideally, the Ministry of Health and Child Care should have more autonomy over these decisions. At the subnational level, there is an opportunity for increased responsibility and a greater sense of ownership through the decentralisation of governance.Conclusions To ensure successful integration and local ownership of VMMC as an HIV prevention programme, stakeholders must address both psychological and structural barriers while aligning their perspectives on the transition. Individual providers have valid concerns about their financial security and the burden of additional responsibilities without adequate compensation. It is crucial for donors and partners to reduce their involvement and oversight. Additionally, resolving the financial barriers that prevent the government from having complete control of the programme will require empowering local government stakeholders to fully take ownership.

While academics are aware of the drawbacks of the neoliberalist system within institutions of higher education, paradoxically they are partly complicit in perpetuating it. Drawing upon Bowlby's (1969) attachment theory and a Buddhist perspective on attachment, we develop a Bowlby-Buddhist lens to unpack this paradox and the complicity of academics, whose fear and craving for self-excellence and careerism prompt anxious and avoidant attachments that sustain the very system they critique. These attachments confine academics to a conventional state of being, in which clinging to instrumental outcomes and metrics masks the impermanent, fundamentally unsatisfactory, and interdependent nature of reality. To overcome such an embodied paradox in academia, we propose a mindful response, through which academics can develop the personal power to liberate themselves from the entrapments of anxious and avoidant attachments engendered within neoliberal academia, affording opportunities to reinvigorate academic agency and reclaim scholarly vocation.

AbstractThe global health community has recognized the importance of integrating and sustaining health programs and forming equitable partnerships. Corresponding with these objectives, international aid donors are embracing the principle of localization. The Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision (VMMC) in Zimbabwe is a large vertical HIV prevention program primarily funded through development assistance for health. Program stakeholders want to sustainably integrate VMMC into routine health services so that the program will continue to be a cost-effective HIV prevention strategy through 2030. The purpose of this paper is to describe a bottom-up process of sustainably integrating the program into routine health services through an approach that empowers local stakeholders. At the district level, we facilitated changes to accelerate integration and sustainability. To evaluate our intervention, we used a mixed methods design comprising analysis of district-level work plans with qualitative and quantitative indicators, combined with a survey assessing sustainability capacity of the program, administered at midline and endline to district teams. In all five pilot districts we facilitated the transition of VMMC into the government’s district administration, resulting in a locally owned and managed program, while also strengthening individual and team capacity. We observed improvements across all World Health Organization health system building blocks, suggesting that the intervention strengthened the overall health system. The sustainability survey showed a reduction in funding stability but a significant increase in communications, program adaptation, and organizational capacity. Compared to traditional top-down change initiatives, the participatory approach to integration was an effective way of addressing specific VMMC challenges at the district level whilst maintaining management and oversight at provincial and national levels. Other health programs in low- and middle-income countries seeking to integrate and sustain health services at subnational levels should consider this diagonal, bottom-up model to promote local leadership development and health system strengthening.

The role that communication plays in social organization and processes of organizing has received considerable scholarly attention from multiple disciplines over several decades. This paper provides a review of the diverse literature that has sought to contribute to the understanding of communication and its implication for management and organization studies. An analysis of the SCOPUS database for the period 1980-2022 enabled us to cluster reference material and identify five perspectives which emerge from a review of the literature: communication as transfer, discourse, conversation (analysis), narrative, and Communicative Constitution of Organizations. These categories are not intended to be exhaustive, but they do provide a useful critical heuristic for navigating a field of study that might otherwise appear overwhelming. To map the terrain's theoretical underpinnings, our study also adopted a problematizing approach to the review which revealed various conspicuous conceptual and empirical absences at a 'field level' which merit further attention. The paper offers provocations and suggestions that we expect will inform future studies of organizational communication. Possibilities for developing the field include paying attention to: (a) paralinguistic dimensions of communication; (b) communication in relation to actual work practices; (c) monologic communication and (d) organizational communication in non-Western contexts.

The United Nations has sought a new standard of leadership aligned with a sustainability agenda consistent with recent scholarship calls for greater reflection and independence of thought, pro-social outcomes and understanding of the place of leadership. Through this conceptual paper, we outline how the practice of Stoic principles can inform the enactment of contemporary leadership to address sustainability challenges. The teachings of Epictetus and Seneca provide context for potential contemporary applications of these principles in leadership conduct aligned with Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory within social-ecological systems (SES). Leadership practices, captured in the reflective journals of Roman Emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, encourage consideration of leadership conduct that is informed through broader SES perspectives. This conceptual enquiry contributes insight into the potential for Stoicism to provide practical leadership responses to the UN sustainability agenda and emerging 'sustainability leadership' debate.

Abstract This chapter deploys the concept of translation as a “metaphor of metaphor” from which to learn. Thus, the authors explore the relationship between universals and particulars with respect to organizational metaphors and address the contradiction of the practice of translating metaphors from one language/culture to another and the consequences of metaphorical imposition and manipulation. In doing this, they find that metaphor is both universal and particular in its power to translate and transform social realities: metaphorizing is universal in its capacity but particular in its operations. Each instance of metaphor usage is so particular in its operations that its translation carries many interpretive possibilities. This is the source of both its appeal and its translational risks. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that we need to practice an open attitude in order to learn to “learn with the other” as we experience and appreciate each other’s metaphors.

This article explores a conceptually modified notion of liminality in order to make better sense of contemporary ‘flexible’ working life. Previous conceptualizations of liminality rely on the assumed existence of socially sustained boundaries and the possibility of boundary spanning. Under conditions of liquid modernity, however, boundaries or thresholds have been destabilized to the point of collapse. Nonetheless, individuals still feel the need to establish and maintain intersubjective boundaries to preserve their own sense of well-being. To understand the new predicament faced by employees, we reconceptualise liminality for liquid times – through the notion of liquid liminality – and, simultaneously, problematize dominant conceptions of work-life balance. The implications that liquid liminality carries for the notion of flexible knowledge work are discussed. Our auto-ethnographic visual study of an academic returning from maternity leave uses a socio-material lens to exemplify the struggles of the contemporary flexible knowledge worker. It also demonstrates how the constant transition between workplace and home life is freighted with anxiety and exhaustion. We also outline opportunities for establishing new learning habits that follow from our theoretical framing and empirical analysis.

In this essay, we propose that recent work in management and organization studies is typically inclined to understand organization and organizing as dialogic in form. Dialogicity is characterized by dynamic interlocution on the part of active human sense-makers and, in our critical reading, evokes a romanticized social landscape that fails to reflect the more prosaic features of organizational life. To address what we see as certain limitations of the dialogic view, we introduce a complementary point of reference: that of monologic organization. This perspective provokes reflection on those situations in which meanings are predetermined at the outset and communication consists of the strictly controlled, routine reproduction of formal scripts. We draw on the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Serres to reclaim monologic as a pertinent view of organization and its processes. Finally, we provide micro-, meso- and macro-level examples to illustrate and discuss the heuristic potential of a monologic view.

ABSTRACT. Leadership and management skills are critical for health programs to deliver high-quality interventions in complex systems. In malaria-eliminating countries, national and subnational health teams are reorienting strategies to address focal transmission while preventing new cases and adapting to decentralization and declines in external financing. A capacity-strengthening program in two regions in Namibia helped malaria program implementers identify and address key operational, political, and financial challenges. The program focused on developing skills and techniques in problem-solving and teamwork, engaging decision-makers, and using financial evidence to prioritize domestic resources for malaria through participatory approaches. Results of the program included an observed 40% increase in malaria case reporting, 32% increase in reporting and tracing of imported malaria cases, 10% increase in malaria case management, integration of malaria activities into local operational plans, and an increase in subnational resources for malaria teams. To promote program sustainability beyond the implementation period, key program aspects were institutionalized into existing health system structures, program staff were trained in change leadership, and participants integrated the skills and approaches into their professional roles. A capacity-strengthening program with joint focus on leadership, management, and advocacy has potential for application to other health issues and geographies.

This article contributes to the growing body of literature developed within the leadership-as-practice perspective, focusing on issues of learning and power. It draws on a co-constructed (auto)ethnographic account of an individual’s longitudinal experience of leadership in the context of an international development project in Laos. This person’s circumstances as a non-Lao-speaking foreigner provided him with a unique opportunity to learn about and participate in the embodied, sociomaterial unfolding of leadership practice in an unfamiliar setting. The analysis examines (1) what ‘leadership learning’ involves when viewed through an ‘entative soft’ leadership-as-practice lens and (2) how individual attempts at exercising power and influence can be understood and represented in leadership-as-practice terms. The study highlights that participants are not given equal scope to exercise power within the emerging, hybrid agency orienting the flow of leadership, and that one task of leadership learning at an individual level is to develop reflexive knowledge about one’s own and others’ contribution to the unfolding of leadership process. Such knowledge draws increased attention to the responsibilities commensurate with attempts to exercise influence within leadership practice.

Traditional lifestyles of lowland rice farmers of the southern provinces of Lao People's Democratic Republic are rapidly changing, due to two important trends. Firstly, there is a push towards modernization and commercialization of farming. Secondly, though farmers still focus on rice farming as a key activity, there is an increasing move towards diversification of livelihoods. The changes have seen the uptake of non-rice crops, livestock husbandry and forest and river utilization; as well as non-farming activities. This has influenced gender relations, impacting household agricultural production decisions and amplified transitional trends. To explore the processes, we analyzed data from a study of innovation adoption amongst rice farmers in southern Lao PDR. The study revealed nuances of gender-based differences in the priorities and attitudes towards farming and off-farm activities, as well as differences in behaviour related to the adoption of new practices. Women were more focused on non-farming practices and considered engaging in the modern, non-traditional, economy more so than men. Women also reported experiencing greater challenges when engaging and trading in the agricultural marketplace. The study supports the importance of taking a gendered approach to understanding the inherent complexities within agrarian change.

It would be wrong to think that the banking sector is far removed from magical practices. Risk and risk management, which are at the heart of their business, are extremely complex and unpredictable. Risks are transformed into one-page reports, leading to ritual enactments that supposedly are able to purge them. Behind the calculations and figures, risks seem to vanish: they are exorcised, like a demon or a devilish appearance repelled by incantations. This chapter examines a set of rituals within the banking sector. The 2008 global financial crisis highlighted the limits of the risk calculations, yet little has changed with respect to the underlying approach to handling risk in the finance sector. Risk management is revealed less as a rational science than as an art of divination and the practical mastery of metis. The link drawn between magical arts and risk calculations implies a relationship that goes beyond the metaphorical suggesting, instead, that there is something fundamentally trans-historical and trans-culture about divination practices.

Background Focus for improved malaria programme performance is often placed on the technical challenges, while operational issues are neglected. Many of the operational challenges that inhibit malaria programme effectiveness can be addressed by improving communication and coordination, increasing accountability, maintaining motivation, providing adequate training and supervision, and removing bureaucratic silos. Methods A programme of work was piloted in Zimbabwe with one malaria eliminating province, Matabeleland South in 2016-2017, and scaled up to include two other provinces, Matabeleland North and Midlands, in 2017-2018. The intervention included participatory, organization development and quality improvement methods. Results Workshop participants in Matabeleland South reported an improvement in data management. In Matabeleland North, motivation among nurses improved as they gained confidence in case management from training, and overall staff morale improved. There was also an improvement in data quality and data sharing. In Midlands, the poorly performing district was motivated to improve, and both participating districts became more goal-oriented. They also became more focused on monitoring their data regularly. Participants from all provinces reported having gained skills in listening, communicating, facilitating discussions, and making presentations. Participation in the intervention changed the mindset of malaria programme staff, increasing ownership and accountability, and empowering them to identify and solve problems, make decisions, and act within their sphere of influence, elevating challenges when appropriate. Conclusions This pilot demonstrates that a participatory, organization development and quality improvement approach has broad ranging effects, including improving local delivery of interventions, tailoring strategies to target specific populations, finding efficiencies in the system that could not be found using the traditional top-down approach, and improving motivation and communication between different cadres of health workers. Scale-up of this simple model can be achieved and benefits sustained over time if the process is imbedded into the programme with the training of health staff who can serve as management improvement coaches. Methods to improve operational performance that are scalable at the district level are urgently needed: this approach is a possible tactic that can significantly contribute to the achievement of global malaria eradication goals.