These processes can lead to sectors of the workforce becoming demoralized, to the wastage of skills and other resources and problems in staff retention.
The term network has become a hallmark of the development industry. In principle networks have the potential to provide a more flexible and non-hierarchical means of exchange and interaction that is also more innovative, responsive and dynamic whilst overcoming spatial separation and providing scale economies. Although the label networks currently pervades discourses about the relationships between organisations in development, there has been surprisingly little research or theorisation of them. This article is a critical evaluation of the claims of developmental networks from a theoretical perspective. While networks are regarded as a counter hegemonic force we argue that networks are not static entities but must be seen as an ongoing and emergent process. Moreover theory overlooks power relationships within networks and is unable to conceptualise the relationship between power and values. These observations open up a research agenda that the authors are exploring empirically in forthcoming publications.
In recent years the role of social networks and of social capital in shaping migrants’ lived experiences and, particularly, their employment opportunity has increasingly come to be recognized. However, very little of this research has adopted a relational understanding of the migrant experience, taking the influence of nonmigrants’ own networks on migrants as an important factor in influencing their labour market outcomes. This article critiques the alterity and marginality automatically ascribed to migrants that is implicit in existing ways of thinking about migrant networks. The article draws on oral history interviews with geriatricians who played an important role in the establishment of the discipline during the second half of the 20th century to explore the importance and power of non-migrant networks in influencing migrant labour market opportunities in the UK medical labour market.
Using two data sets in parallel, generated at different times by different researchers, the case is made for the re-use of archived qualitative data. Two sets of oral history interviews one, dating from 1990-1, with doctors and others who pioneered the development of the geriatric specialty in the early years of the National Health Service, the other, ESRC funded during 2007-9, with South Asian doctors who came to work in the UK and found work in geriatric medicine, are subjected to parallel investigation. The article argues that by considering the two sets of interviews together, each informs the other, leading to reconceptualisation and unexpected links between the data sets, new research questions and finally suggests additional dimensions to issues relating to the ethics of secondary analysis.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.