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Publication date: 1 December 2005

Jim Lloyd

As people work through their daily lives, they interact with a variety of organisations. Some of those interactions are successful, and others are dreadful. And managers of…

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As people work through their daily lives, they interact with a variety of organisations. Some of those interactions are successful, and others are dreadful. And managers of organisations tend to look at their own organisational successes and failures and hope that the successes outnumber the failures. Managers observe that most of the successes come from the highest performing employees, and the failures tend to emanate from the worst performers. So, they try to encourage the worst performers to ‘become better team players’ or ‘be more sensitive to the customer's needs’, and hope that they eventually ‘get it’. Some will, and most will not. And then one day, a manager interacts with an organisation that ‘goes the extra mile’ and provides a great service or product, and he/she fantasises about what it is that makes this organisation successful, while his/hers is marginal at best. The answer to this question is actually quite simple, but to fix the problems can be time consuming and painful. The single quality that highly successful organisations all have in common is that they have an organisational culture which values leadership. They have achieved what few organisations have achieved: they have become a ‘Leadership Organisation’ (an organisation that has leaders at all levels of the organisational chart). Once an organisation has achieved this level of leadership, overall organisational success is easily achievable. This paper is intended to give managers a basic framework on how they can turn their organisations into high‐performing successes. Managers' ability to achieve this success can be limited by the legal process, the company's employment practices and culture, and their own willingness to make radical changes to their organisation. Once a manager has achieved building a Leadership Organisation, however, the rewards of success are well worth the effort.

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Journal of Facilities Management, vol. 3 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1472-5967

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Paula Fomby

Ambridge residents live with extended kin and non-family members much more often than the population of the United Kingdom as a whole. This chapter explores cultural norms…

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Ambridge residents live with extended kin and non-family members much more often than the population of the United Kingdom as a whole. This chapter explores cultural norms, economic need, and family and health care to explain patterns of coresidence in the village of Ambridge. In landed families, filial obligation and inheritance norms bind multigenerational families to a common dwelling, while scarcity of affordable rural housing inhibits residential independence and forces reliance on access to social networks and chance to find a home among the landless. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, coresidence wards off loneliness among unpartnered adults. Finally, for Archers listeners, extended kin and non-kin coresidence creates a private space where dialogue gives added dimensionality and depth to characters who would otherwise be known only through their interactions in public spaces.

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 5 October 2017

Jonathan Hustler

Rural theology is explained here as a form of practical theology that seeks to interpret the rural context in the light of the central themes of Christian theology and vice versa…

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Rural theology is explained here as a form of practical theology that seeks to interpret the rural context in the light of the central themes of Christian theology and vice versa. If Christian theology can be understood as concerning belief in God and the understanding of human relationships with God, the created order, and each other in the light of that belief, rural theology expresses that in the light of the lived experience in a rural context, which for these purposes is the daily bulletin from Ambridge. The author draws on his experience of teaching in the Cambridge Theological Federation to reflect on three recent examples: the recent changes at Brookfield in response to the perennial issue of the milk price lead us to ask who benefits from the production of higher quality food; the care for the land and Adam Macy’s reforms at Home Farm point us to issues about sustainability and responsibility; and the cohesion of a community with shared values and its treatment of Rob Titchener asks questions about the limits of inclusion. As with much practical theology, the outcome of the reflection is in ethical action and some further ethical questions, which, as the example of Jim Lloyd’s philosophical conversations with Alan Franks illustrate, are not the monopoly of the Church.

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Custard, Culverts and Cake
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-285-7

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Amy Sanders

This study examines the discursive accounts of civil society in a rural English village to understand what these reveal about contemporary political discourses. It employs a…

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This study examines the discursive accounts of civil society in a rural English village to understand what these reveal about contemporary political discourses. It employs a critical discourse analysis of the conversational interactions of Ambridge residents. The sample comprised all recorded conversations referencing charities, volunteering and civic action drawn from the two-week period corresponding with the change in UK Prime Minister (July 2019). Using three analytical tools derived from extant theory, it considers the salient political ideology underpinning these social interactions. These tools are illustrated with earlier examples of individual civil activities such as the oat-based civil disobedience of a respected older resident. This analysis scrutinises the philanthropic nature of Peggy Woolley's Ambridge Conservation Trust. The fraught process of village fete planning is cited as exemplifying conventional decision-making mechanisms. Problems of staffing a community shop are considered in the light of an increasing political reliance on community volunteers replacing paid staff. Thus, the relative impact of Thatcher, Blair, Cameron and May are considered in exchanges between Ambridge residents from Lynda and Robert Snell to Jazzer McCreery and Jill Archer. The aim is to explore what Ambridge's civil society tells us about Boris Johnson's Britain.

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Ruth Heilbronn and Rosalind Janssen

Care options for older people are important to individuals and to society, and currently, there is a crisis in this care. The chapter presents a research base projection onto the…

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Care options for older people are important to individuals and to society, and currently, there is a crisis in this care. The chapter presents a research base projection onto the situation in England in 2045, using Office for National Statistics (ONS) modelling based on current population reaching the age of 85-years plus. We take three The Archers characters and fantasise about their lives in 2045, Shula and Kenton Archer and Hazel Woolley. Through them, we illustrate three options for care, namely, cared for by family members, buying in care in own home and moving into a care home. The financial aspects of these choices are explored.

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 5 October 2017

Joanna Dobson

This chapter explores the role that birdwatching plays in The Archers. It demonstrates some significant similarities between the way that birdwatching is portrayed in present-day…

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This chapter explores the role that birdwatching plays in The Archers. It demonstrates some significant similarities between the way that birdwatching is portrayed in present-day Ambridge, and the way it was presented in both fictional and non-fictional literature of the 1940s. These similarities suggest that birdwatching in Ambridge is an activity that tends to perpetuate traditional class and gender divisions. Particularly in terms of gender, this is a surprising discovery, given the many strong female characters in the show, and suggests that cultural assumptions about gender and birdwatching run deep in UK society today. The chapter warns that a failure to recognise these assumptions not only hampers the progress of women who aspire to be taken seriously as ornithologists, but also risks reinforcing dualistic thinking about humans and nature at a time when the environmental crisis makes it more important than ever to recognise the ecological interconnectedness of human and nonhuman worlds. However, the recent development of Kirsty Miller’s storyline, in which she is rediscovering her earlier love of the natural world, not only offers hope of a shift away from this traditional bias but also opens a space for a more nuanced examination of the importance of birds in human–nature relations.

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Custard, Culverts and Cake
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-285-7

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Lalage Cambell

This paper presents a case study concerning the recovery of a young woman's wellbeing after a personal crisis in the summer of 2019. The analytical approach used draws on a…

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This paper presents a case study concerning the recovery of a young woman's wellbeing after a personal crisis in the summer of 2019. The analytical approach used draws on a conceptual model where wellbeing is a balance point between an individual's resources and the challenges they face. Therefore, stable wellbeing is when individuals have the physical, psychological and social resources they need to meet the physical, psychological and or social challenges they face. When individuals have more challenges than resources, the balance dips, along with their wellbeing, and vice versa. After outlining the theoretical base of the model, this paper presents a highly subjective analysis of the challenges faced by and resources available to the young woman in the case study. The daughter of a pig man and a Horrobin, she had worked three jobs in order to purchase a house for her young family. Her plans were precipitously destroyed leading to a breakdown in her marriage. This paper considers her path to recuperation in the aftermath of the crisis with a reference to her notion that ‘security is everything.’

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Nicola Headlam

The chapter explores how the recent storyline about modern slavery has landed in Ambridge, commending the writers and producers for the job they have done in engaging NGOs and…

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The chapter explores how the recent storyline about modern slavery has landed in Ambridge, commending the writers and producers for the job they have done in engaging NGOs and pressure groups active in this area. It situates the plight of ‘The Horses’ as hidden in plain sight and probes the dark side of this important social issue in the context of how far the systematic exploitation of vulnerable people provides a ground floor within a profoundly unequal economy. Modern slavery speaks of a wider form of neoliberal necropolitics – in which logics of accumulation and hierarchies are played out on the bodies of workers. In this form of political economy social and emotional vulnerability and economic precarity combine together, trapping those unable to escape exploitation. It explored the policy context for the Modern Slavery Act and the assessment of how many people are enslaved in the UK. I also make the link from the extreme nature of modern slavery and connections with extractive and abusive employment situations throughout the economy. While Modern Slavery is an extreme form of precarity, where people are controlled and forced to work, scholarship on precarity shows us that it is a spectrum disorder, where economic abandonment pushes people away from a liveable life.

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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Publication date: 16 March 2021

Helen M Burrows

Social Work education has seen some changes since my first paper on how The Archers could be used to enhance a student's understanding of service user experiences (Burrows, 2016)…

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Social Work education has seen some changes since my first paper on how The Archers could be used to enhance a student's understanding of service user experiences (Burrows, 2016). Social Work students still, however, need to understand the difficulties that their future service users may experience; learning is developed through lectures, seminars and workshops, and most of all through practice experience, but a real challenge for educators is how to show students the constant lived reality of families and communities who have complex difficulties. A visit to a household only gives a snapshot of their life, and service users may be guarded in their behaviour during a professional visit. My original paper considered the educational value of the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective of The Archers, in catching unguarded moments and drawing attention to issues in the community. From the impact of rural poverty and unaffordable housing, through issues of mental health, hospital discharge, to adult survivors of child sexual abuse and the tangled webs of modern slavery, these issues will resonate with any social worker, in Adult, Children and Families or Mental Health fields. These are not just issues in a rural setting; professionals in more urban settings will recognise these as things the families and individuals they work with must deal with from time to time.

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Flapjacks and Feudalism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80071-389-5

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