Anglia Ruskin Research Online (ARRO)
Browse

Empowering citizens or mining resources? The contested domain of citizen engagement in professional care services

Download (48.88 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2023-08-30, 15:05 authored by Ludo Glimmerveen, Sierk Ybema, Henk Nies
When studying individual attempts to foster citizen engagement, scholars have pointed to the coexistence of competing rationales. Thus far, however, current literature barely elaborates on the socio-political processes through which employees of professional organizations deal with such disparate considerations. To address this gap, this article builds on an ethnographic study, conducted in the Netherlands between 2013 and 2016, of a professional care organization’s attempts to engage local citizens in one of its elderly care homes. To investigate how citizen engagement is ‘done’ in the context of daily organizing, we followed employees as they gradually created and demarcated the scope for such engagement by approaching citizens as either strategic partners (pursuing ‘democratic’ rationales) or as operational volunteers (pursuing ‘instrumental’ rationales). In order to deal with such potentially incongruent orientations, we found that employees used discursive strategies to influence the balance that was struck between competing rationales; either through depoliticization—i.e., the downplaying of incongruities and the framing of disparate considerations as being complementary within the pursuit of a shared, overarching goal—or through politicization, i.e., the active challenging of how their colleagues prioritized one consideration over another. By showing how the successful conveyance of such (de)politicized accounts helped employees either defend or redraw the boundaries of what citizen engagement was (not) about, we contribute to extant theorization by (1) developing a processual approach to studying citizen engagement that (2) is sensitive to organizational politics.

History

Refereed

  • Yes

Volume

203

Page range

1-8

Publication title

Social Science & Medicine

ISSN

0277-9536

Publisher

Elsevier

File version

  • Accepted version

Language

  • eng

Legacy posted date

2018-05-30

Legacy creation date

2018-05-30

Legacy Faculty/School/Department

ARCHIVED Lord Ashcroft International Business School (until September 2018)

Usage metrics

    ARU Outputs

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC