Running the Family Firm

In today’s world, we are offered a constantly expanding number of technologies to integrate into our lives. We now utilise a range of interconnected technologies at work, at home and at leisure. The realm of sport is no exception, where new technologies or enhancements are available to athletes, coaches, scientists, umpires, governing bodies and broadcasters. However, this book argues that in a world where time has become a precious commodity and numerous options are always on offer, functionality is no longer enough to drive their usage within elite sports training, competition and broadcasting. Consistent with an actor-network theory approach as developed by Bruno Latour, John Law, Michele Callon and Annemarie Mol, the book shows how those involved in sport must grapple with a unique set of understandings and connections in order to determine the best combination of technologies and other factors to serve their particular purpose. This book uses a case study approach to demonstrate how there are multiple explanations and factors at play in the use of technology that cannot be reduced to singular explanations like performance enhancement or commercialisation. Specific cases examined include doping, swimsuits, GPS units, Hawk-Eye and kayaks, along with broader areas such as the use of sports scientists in training and the integration of new enhancements in broadcasting. In all cases, the book demonstrates how multiple actors can affect the use or non-use of technology.

Healthcare aims to be patient-centred but a large gap remains between the fine words and the reality. Care often feels designed for the convenience of the organisations that deliver it, and not enough around patients and their families, or even around the frontline staff who provide it. Why does this happen? What does it feel like? What can be done about it? This book stimulates reflection on these questions by listening closely to those at the frontline. It provides accounts from patients, carers and healthcare professionals who are patients about what it’s like when services get it right, and wrong, from birth up to the end of life. Quite simply, we want to draw upon the power of storytelling – which is increasingly valued as a tool for learning – to help policymakers and practitioners to understand how to deliver better care. We also hope to enlighten the general reader about how they might go about navigating “the system” while it remains imperfect. There is a growing literature of first-person accounts from patients and from healthcare professionals. This book differs by providing a collection of narratives of experiences of the NHS in England to paint a rich and varied picture. Alongside these narratives we provide some international context, and an overview of the history of moves towards a more patient-centred approach to care. We present the theory and practice of storytelling in the context of healthcare. We also seek to help the reader to draw out the practical learning from the individual accounts.

This book outlines the ways in which sport helps to create transnational social fields that interconnect migrants dispersed across a region known as the Black Atlantic: England, North America and the Caribbean. Many Caribbean men’s stories about their experiences migrating to Canada, settling in Toronto’s urban and suburban neighbourhoods, finding jobs, returning home for visits, and traveling to other diasporic locations involved some contact with a cricket and social club. The cricket ground brings black Canadians together as a unified community, not only to celebrate their homeland cultures or assuage the pain of the “racial terror” that unifies the Black Atlantic, but also to allay the pain of aging in the diaspora. Players and spectators corporeal practices, post-game activities, sport-related travel, as well as music, food, meetings, fundraisers, parties, and shared stories are analysed in this text as resources deployed to maintain the Black Atlantic, that is, to create deterritorialized communities and racial identities; A close look at what goes on before, during, and after cricket matches provides insights into the contradictions and complexities of Afro-diasporic identity performances, the simultaneous representation of sameness and difference among Afro-Caribbean, African-American, Black British, Indo-Caribbean and South-Asian groups in Canada. This book describes twenty-one months of ethnographic empirical evidence of how black identities are gendered, age-dependent and formed relationally, with boundary making (and crossing) as an active process in multicultural Canada.