Intergenerational programs can support social connectedness, and an important element is engaging in activities together, known as ‘co-occupation’. To address gaps in the literature, we explored how older adults and university students living together in a retirement home enacted co-occupations, the factors that shaped the co-occupations, and how the co-occupations affected intergenerational relationship-building and connections. We conducted a focused ethnography using a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm, interviews with university students and older adults, and on-site observations. We analysed data using reflexive thematic analysis. Co-occupations were critical in creating connections and mutually beneficial intergenerational relationships. Participants often transformed co-occupations to promote interactions. Important features of intergenerational housing appear to be access to co-occupations that are structured and unstructured, flexibility to modify co-occupations, and physical spaces that promote co-occupation. This research illustrates how co-occupation within intergenerational housing programs can support connection and relationship-building. Findings can be applied within intergenerational housing and other intergenerational programs.

This perspective article is to celebrate the 30th birthday of the Journal of Management & Organization. To remember its achievements and to reflect on its successes a number of management academics were quizzed about their thoughts. This helps to identify future growth areas of management interest and to project new developments. By doing so it enables a holistic view about the role of management in practice, policy and society.

In the context of an ever growing importance and usage of referendums around the globe, this article provides a comprehensive approach to analyse the determinants of participation in direct democratic votes. In the absence of conclusive empirical evidence about which factors drive direct democratic participation, studies tend to adopt election-specific findings and assume the determinants of electoral turnout to equally apply for referendums. Yet, a strict empirical test of these numerous determinants in a referendum context is still missing. By examining aspects stemming from both election-specific and referendum-specific contexts, this article aims to first test the applicability of common electoral theories of turnout for direct democratic participation and second to analyse the relevance of each factor when simultaneously examined with other contextual and individual factors. This holistic approach represents reality as adequate as possible, that is, to consider various factors that may simultaneously influence the individual decision to vote. Next to individual variables, the analysis particularly focuses on two contextual levels, the community a person lives in and factors linked to a given referendum. The discussion and joint analysis of competing factors addresses the problem of underspecified turnout models, which commonly prevents a detailed assessment of the relative importance of the determinants of turnout. The study uses registered data from the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, which provides official information about individual participation across 43 referendums in 45 communities. We match this individual data with referendum-related factors, such as campaign intensity and importance of the issues at stake, and community-level variables, such as wealth and urbanization. The results of our multilevel, cross-classified models show significant context-related effects, stemming mainly from the referendum and less from the community level. Still, the main driver of direct democratic participation is individual determinants, in particular citizens' past participation record.

This article seeks to analyze the resilience of arts and cultural nonprofit organizations in France during the Covid-19 crisis. A broad survey and multiple logistic regressions highlight the resources availability, the crisis impact, the NPOs’ needs and the reforms they conducted during the first French lockdown. This study shows that the resilience of these NPOs must be differentiated between activity continuity and organizational persistence. Resilience in culture and the arts is specific, based on reforms, and requires special support from partners.

Despite the role that non-government organisations, including community development organisations, play in social transformation, their approach to managing projects has received little attention. Employing a processual approach and participatory methodology, this paper investigates how a small, distributed, community-based organisation negotiates the challenges associated with managing its geographically dispersed development projects. It examines lessons that this organisation’s project management approach offers for managing projects at a distance in ways that encourage community ownership, partnership with project beneficiaries and their maximum participation in the process. The paper underlines the need for positioning people’s participation in development projects as a key component of development, rather than as a tool for project implementation. It concludes by advocating a blend of participation and empowerment with technical assistance for recipient communities.

The 60th anniversary of the Department of Government at the University of Essex provides an opportunity to reflect on its many achievements and why these have been possible. This article argues that research excellence is a collective outcome that cannot be reduced to individuals. Research institutions tend to be successful because they manage to create productive environments, which can make individual scholars better and create synergies. The thesis is backed up by examples from the history of the department and more general research on the role of environments for research. The article considers possible insights with regard to present challenges to academic institutions, why productive environments can be difficult to maintain, and how we can try to nurture them.

The Japanese political science community has grown considerably in recent years and has succeeded in achieving internationalisation. However, there exists a significant generation gap concerning views on science, in particular, concerning the role of values in the social sciences. This has led to contrasting assessments of the history and achievements of political science. This article provides some information concerning political science and the community of political scientists in Japan, knowledge of which is lacking in Europe.

Among Arab-American Muslims, secular ethnic and humanitarian giving, focused on ‘results’ and ‘measurable impact,’ is displacing religiously inspired giving, that is driven by ‘charity’ and ‘love of mankind.’ This trend is supported by evidence of the way donors position themselves and philanthropic organizations appeal to their donor base. The case is supported by qualitative data drawn from interviews with key informants and from trend data on giving. I propose a new model of giving based on identity and giving, using Grounded Theory methods. This model challenges our understanding about the connection between community and philanthropy and proposes that philanthropy can create ‘community.’

Most research suggests that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) should professionalize in order to become more efficient. Yet, a growing body of literature emphasizes the importance of preserving some of their original grassroots culture. Based on a qualitative meta-analysis of 19 in-depth cases from the past decade, our integrative model contributes to this debate in three important ways: first, we suggest that most NPO pathways of development are characterized by the acquisition of a dual nature i.e., a community setting a value-based mission (stage 1) and a professional structure involving formal and centralized coordination aimed at effectiveness (stage 2); second, that this dual system often leads NPOs to an existential crisis characterized by contradiction and indetermination (stage 3); and third, that this indetermination constitutes a window of opportunity for deciders to more deliberately arbitrate the orientation adopted by their NPOs (stage 4). We discuss the role of deciders, beyond institutional pressures, to explain why the nonprofit sector is still relatively diverse. We propose voluntarism and institutional entrepreneurship as important mainstays of nonprofitness.

When announcing The Life of a Showgirl on the New Heights podcast, Taylor Swift called her 12th album “exuberant and electric and vibrant.” In the weeks leading up to the album’s release, fans wondered what this would mean for Swift’s notoriously vulnerable Track 5. How would we reconcile an “infectiously joyful” album with the admittedly somber concept of Track 5’s “Eldest Daughter”? One theory lies in the location of “Eldest Daughter” in the tracklist, specifically positioned as a Track 5 and following “Father Figure.” It maintains the vulnerability traditionally associated with the position, but does so in a way that redefines it: “Eldest Daughter” is Swift’s first Track 5 not to be rooted in pain or doubt, but instead offering hope and reassurance. Thie vulnerability of Swift’s Track 5s allows her listeners to experience others’ (specifically Swift’s) stories of pain (or hope), which in turn provides them with a language to verbalize their own pain, a necessary step for healing and growth.

This article considers people’s relations with ruins in the Mesoamerican past from the perspective of two approaches within the ontological turn. The first examines ruins drawing on Indigenous ontologies, while the second involves the application of a new materialist perspective that incorporates Peircean semiotics. Both approaches view matter as animate and share a relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing position. Research drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of Native American perspectives considers ruins as living entities often inhabited by divinities, ancestors, or pre-Sunrise beings, which could require propitiation and reverence or provoke denigration and erasure. A new materialist perspective allows archaeologists to better recognize what ruins did beyond holding meanings imposed on them by people. Ruins in ancient Mesoamerica had the vibrancy and power to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead in ways that constituted community and temporality, contested or legitimated authority, and invoked the cosmic creation.