Triaging Values:

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the past decades, value-led organizations and networks have assumed a greater role in processes of governance, that is in processes that affect the distribution of material and symbolic resources. They act as mediators in our responses to a number of social and political problems and provide for needs in a number of different policy areas. For "Triaging Values", I will be conducting interviews with managers in value-led organizations to investigate the ways in which they make decisions about how to allocate resources, and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people and specific territorial units. The term triage comes initially from emergency medicine, where it describes the process by which doctors decide whom to treat first, based on medical need but also based on chances of survival. But processes further upstream also entail triage and have a potentially larger impact on the distribution of resources. The problem of triage is a specific challenge for value-driven organizations: The values themselves usually do not lend themselves easily to prioritization. Pragmatic decisions about effectiveness usually involve complex knowledge-claims about the world and the effects of intervention within it, and criteria for success in non-profits defy easy calculation. The problem of triage is especially interesting in organizations committed to universal or global values, because these values guide triage even less.Humanitarian relief NGOs, human rights organizations, environmental conservation agencies and Christian churches are all are committed to values that are universal, or global in ambition. How do these organizations allocate resources to specific areas, and specific groups of beneficiaries and specific types of activities? What are the time-frames of allocating resources, measuring results, and managing staff and partners? What are knowledge-claims involved and how are these resolved? What is the role of ideas? What moral dilemmas arise for actors involved in these decisions and how do they manage these dilemmas? Middle-managers are a strategic group to interview, because they sit in-between incoming and outgoing funds, and asking them about their own day-to-day practices provides key insights into the workings of the larger organization.In this way, the project will generate a map of the possible ways in which value-driven organizations deal with dilemmas of triage and it will generate data about how practices are distributed among different organizations; it will establish how ideas, management tools, controversies about knowledge and organizational constraints affect provision. It will offer new understandings of how territoriality and space is managed by non-state organizations. Bridging sociological subfields through a comparative perspective, the project will contribute to the development of sociology as a progressive research programme. It will contribute to recasting our knowledge of political order based on the interdisciplinary systematic comparative investigation of practices. By uncovering taken-for-granted aspects of organizational practices in the context of other possible practices, the project will contribute to a more informed debate about choices for policy makers, managers and the general public.