Harry Wels

Harry Wels
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · Department of Organisation Sciences

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68
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Publications

Publications (68)
Article
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Article
This interdisciplinary book lays out the contours of a new academic discipline, Animal Organization Studies, thus answering timely calls for more attention to nonhuman life in traditionally human-centred fields in social science. The book first immerses the reader in the history of human-animal relationships within a commercial context, as well as...
Article
Teaching and researching multispecies organizational ethnography needs a pedagogy that decentres the human animal and has a basic multisensorial approach to sensemaking in organizations, in order to try to do (more) justice to nonhuman sentience, animals, and plants, that is to be included in the research. A wild pedagogy claims that getting outdoo...
Article
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ABSTRACT Cultures have usually been studied as a purely human phenomenon. Recent research challenges this single-focused perspective on exclusively human agency in the formation and sustainability of cultures and offers a more inclusive format for exploring cultural processes, specifically the role that human and animal co-existence plays in them....
Article
In lion conservation, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and Trade Records Analyses of Flora and Fauna in Commerce (TRAFFIC) are considered key United Nations (UN) institutions for “science-based decisions” on global policy formulati...
Article
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Purpose To further develop research methodologies for multi-species ethnographic fieldwork, based on researcher's experiences with multi-species fieldwork in private wildlife conservancies in South Africa and inspired by San tracking techniques. Design/methodology/approach Reflections on methodological lessons learnt during multi-species ethnograp...
Book
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Academia is standing at a junction in time. Behind lies the community of the curious, ahead the mass and the market. This book joins in a growing stream of works that explore the vicissitudes of present-day European universities in what Bauman coined as liquid times. Here, a number of concerned (engaged) European scholars attempt to defend and brus...
Article
The aim of the study was to explore whether a relationship exists between balance performance and basic soccer skills. To this end, participants (N=263) divided over three age-groups, 11-12 (GR1), 13-14 (GR2), 15-16 (GR3) years of age, performed three balance tasks (i.e., walking forward (WF) and walking backward (WB) on a balance beam, and single...
Article
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show the complex positionality and the complexity that comes with the study of whiteness in South African higher education by Dutch, white academics. This complexity stems from the long-standing relationship between Dutch universities, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) in particular, with their South Afr...
Article
Based on a(n) (interrupted) period of 15 years of fieldwork, this study explores the question whether cultural villages in South Africa are to be considered an effective way to conserve a particular cultural heritage in an authentic way. In order to answer this question, three notions of authenticity are juxtaposed with three types of cultural vill...
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This paper explores the Dutch concept ‘ probeerruimte ’ in relation to the statement ‘human as a contested concept’, a highly relevant topic in disability studies. Probeerruimte encompasses the idea that people need space to ‘try things out’, a liminal space that facilitates personal development. It was conceived in a context where institutional pr...
Article
The article explores theoretically the juxtaposition of local stories about landscape with institutional arrangements and exclusionary practices around a conservation area in South Africa. The Masebe Nature Reserve is used as a case study. The article argues that the institutional arrangements in which the nature reserve is currently positioned are...
Article
Purpose – Now that the human-animal distinction is increasingly critiqued from various disciplinary perspectives, to the point where some suggest even letting go of the distinction completely, the purpose of this paper is to argue that organizational ethnography should start to explore in more detail what this means for organizational ethnographic...
Article
Saving the world's flora and fauna, especially high-profile examples such as chimpanzees, whales and the tropical rain forests, is big business. Individuals and companies channel their resources to the preservation of nature through various ways, one of which is the funding of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and community-based...
Chapter
According to world famous primatologist Frans de Waal we live in ‘the age of empathy’. De Waal is part of a long tradition of biologists who have argued for recognizing individual emotions, altruism and morality in human and non-human animals alike. This is an intellectual tradition that resonates with the current-day attention for the emotional li...
Article
Waiting is a common feature of everyday encounters between individuals and organisations. Government officials and private sector workers make us wait for decisions, wait for services and sometimes, simply wait our turn. Yet, little attention has been devoted to theorising and developing the concept of 'waiting', and it is noticeably absent in the...
Article
  The article investigates the increasingly important connections between the private sector and nature conservation agencies. It looks specifically at the connections between two important philanthropists, the late Anton Rupert, a South African business tycoon, and the late Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. Both have been highly successful in ra...
Chapter
This book discusses tourism development in Namibia. It consists of 12 major chapters. Chapter 2 explores the opportunities and challenges of implementing a national tourism policy in Namibia, as perceived by tourism entrepreneurs. Chapter 3 presents the South African experiences for local economic development (LED) in rural route tourism, also a po...
Book
Much of the ‘mystery’ of organizational life is hidden in plain sight in individuals’ everyday communications and everyday practices. Ethnographic approaches provide in-depth and up-close understandings of how the everyday-ness of work is organized and how work organizes people in everyday organizational life. Organizational Ethnography brings cont...
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"The Great Limpopo is one of the largest TransFrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in the world, encompassing vast areas in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. By arguing that residents living in or close to the TFCA will participate in its management and benefit economically, TFCA proponents claim social legitimacy for the project. The establis...
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The New Regionalism in Africa edited by J. Andrew Grant and Fredrik Söderbaum Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 243. £55.00. Regionalism and Uneven Development in Southern Africa: the case of the Maputo Development Corridor edited by Fredrik Söderbaum and Ian Taylor Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xii+128. £50.00. - - Volume 45 Issue 2 - HARRY WELS
Article
Despite the dramatic political and economic changes in Southern Africa over the last ten years, European primitivist and colonial images of 'wild' Africa(ns) have shown great resilience. This is particularly evident in nature conservation. Although the new (black) political and economic elites entered this domain in the 1990s, and in spite of an in...
Article
Full-text available
This article provides a brief history of the use of maps and fences in wildlife conservation. Analysis of the promotional materials of one of the main promoters of Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, the Peace Parks Foundation, reveals the importance of mapping as a planning and promotion tool. These maps, however, appear t...
Article
Full-text available
The Great Limpopo is one of the largest Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in the world, encompassing vast areas in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The TFCA concept is embraced by practically all (international) conservation agencies. The rationale for the support is that the boundaries of ecosystems generally do not overlap with thos...
Article
Introduction Charles is a landowner in an area of KwaZulu-Natal province known locally as the Midlands. Over the past decades he has built up a profitable business as a cattle breeder. Now however, there is pressure for him to participate in a land-use change fuelled by the tourism industry: the conversion of some sixteen privately owned farms in t...
Article
Full-text available
"The Great Limpopo is one of the largest TransFrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in the world, encompassing vast areas in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. By arguing that local communities living in or close to the TFCA will participate in its management and benefit economically, TFCA proponents claim social legitimacy for the project. Anal...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we argue that there is a paradox in the managerial attempt of the South African Peace Park Foundation, to foster cohesion within the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa by focusing on community participation and development. Cohesion is mainly found at the level of the elite – both European and...
Chapter
In the white-dominated wildlife-utilization industry in southern Africa, farms sometimes pooled their land together to create large areas for wildlife conservation and wildlife tourism. These were called “private wildlife conservancies,” or just “conservancies” and developed mainly in South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Electrified fences enclosed...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we argue that there is a basic ambivalence in the managerial attempt of the South African Peace Park Foundation (PPF), presided by Anton Rupert, to foster cohesion within the development of TFCAs in southern Africa by focusing on community participation and development. Our argument is structured as follows: first we will describe the...

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