Kirstie McAllum

• PhD
• Associate Professor at Université de Montréal

This forum joins communication researchers who explore high reliability organizations (HROs) and teams to discuss the communicative foundations of HRO. We argue that organizational communication researchers can make meaningful contributions to present challenges in HRO research. These challenges include (1) HRO’s focus on organizations versus proce...

Interprofessional collaboration requires the development and maintenance of multiple relationships: with other healthcare providers, supervisors, as well as patients and their families who need to be considered as team members. This chapter documents two distinct orientations to the relationships essential for collaboration: a task orientation and...

The introductory chapter argues for a deeper theoretical understanding of communication’s relationship to interprofessional work. Introducing the books’s goals and intended audience, the chapter defines key terms, such as interprofessional and the different forms of interprofessional working together, including teamworking, collaborating, coordinat...

This chapter reflects on the overall and combined contributions of the different chapters, reiterating the need for and the importance of a deeper theoretical understanding of communication and its role in interprofessional work. It proposes areas for future development in both interprofessional research and teaching, in light of current and antici...

When conceptualizing collaboration in the context of health and social care, most definitions privilege interactions among members of the interprofessional team. To achieve joint goals and solve problems more effectively, these professionals must combine and integrate their disciplinary knowledge with that of others, including those outside the imm...

For nonprofit organizations (NPOs) struggling to attract adequate numbers of volunteers, examining what makes nonprofit engagement meaningful is essential because disenchanted volunteers can simply quit. Yet, the assumption that freedom is a core aspect of the volunteer experience and of meaningful work may not hold true in high-stakes environments...

As the population of Aotearoa New Zealand ages, informal family carers will play an increasingly important role in caring for older adults at home. Multi-generational living arrangements are a growing trend, particularly among Māori communities, where caring for older relatives within the family home is widespread. This article uses in-depth, semi-...

Much research in the field of communication studies has evidenced a ‘performative turn’ in how it views professionalism, professionals, and the professions. This special issue, Opening up the meanings of ‘the professional’, professional organizations, and professionalism in communication studies, documents this process and lays out a research agend...

The occupational images associated with paid care work for older adults range from a job carried out by earthly angels to a form of stigmatized dirty work: This ambiguity makes maintaining a committed long-term care workforce challenging. Encouraging careworkers to view their work as meaningful has been touted as a potential solution. Moving beyond...

This article explores the theoretical terrain surrounding compassion in organizational settings to clarify how conceptually (dis)similar concepts like social support, team care, and organizational compassion manifest different agentic perspectives on compassion. Toward this end, we articulate a working definition of compassion and suggest that a co...

Examining team care for the care team, this scoping literature review highlights the relational and compassionate dimensions of collaboration and teamwork that can alleviate healthcare worker suffering and promote well-being in challenging contexts of care. Its goal is to provide greater conceptual clarity about team care and examine the contextual...

Caring for older adults is relational, complex, and multifaceted; it implies both private and public concerns. In Western societies, it is colored by ideals of autonomy and self‐determination. However, it also can be understood through a continuum of interdependence, where an older adult's care needs vary by their cognitive and physical capacities,...

Background There is growing interest in palliative care within Indigenous communities, and within Aotearoa New Zealand, of the significant role that Māori (Indigenous people) families play in caring for older relatives. This study explored the centrality of culture in how Māori extended families ( whānau) in Aotearoa New Zealand interpret and enact...

As unpaid family caregiving of older adults becomes increasingly prevalent, it is imperative to understand how family caregivers are socialized and how they understand the caregiving role. This PRISMA-ScR-based scoping review examines the published literature between 1995–2019 on the socialization of potential and current unpaid family caregivers o...

By Degrees: Resilience, Relationships, and Success in Communication Graduate Studies provides readers with an indispensable guide to navigating the graduate school experience in Communication Studies programs. The book helps current and future graduate students consider their options, make wise choices, and thrive within their master's or doctoral...

As the population of Aotearoa/New Zealand heads towards one-in-four being aged over 65-years-and-over by 2040, it is anticipated that family members will play an increasingly important role in caring for older relatives with chronic and age-related health issues. Multi-generational, and in particular three-generational living arrangements, combined...

An interpretive qualitative approach insists on the plural and negotiated nature of the meanings that humans attach to their social realities. Thus, the qualitative researcher must navigate multiple and sometimes conflicting commitments to method, data, oneself, participants, and one’s reader. This can lead us to obscure the messiness of data analy...

This study focuses on the thorny problematic of how mentors and mentees negotiate on-the-job learning in emergency ambulance work. Based on fieldnotes and interviews with 54 volunteer and paid ambulance crew from Aotearoa New Zealand's largest emergency ambulance service, the analysis identifies six ways of organizing the mentoring relationship and...

Refugee resettlement organizations hope that, by acting as intercultural mediators who navigate multiple cultural perspectives and translate them for others, volunteers will foster reciprocal adaptation by refugees and host nationals. However, intercultural mediation is challenging when divergent cultural frameworks generate discomfort or misunders...

This article employs a boundary work framework to analyze how volunteers from two nonprofit human services organizations navigated the tensions between volunteerism and professionalism. Based on interview data and analysis of organizational documents, the study found that volunteers at the first organization, fundraisers for child health promotion...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the author’s status as an international academic wanting to maintain “local” research relationships in the author’s country of origin both improved and derailed the process of conducting an organizational ethnography. Design/methodology/approach Using visual representations of the research desig...

As members of local host communities, volunteers play an important role in effective long-term refugee resettlement. This study investigated the nature of volunteer commitment by organizational volunteers who were assigned a front-line role in organizing material assistance and providing information about cultural practices for newly arrived refuge...

Despite initial enthusiasm about the potential of voluntourism to promote sustainable development and intercultural learning, recent critiques have focused on voluntourists’ tendency to reinforce status differences by “Othering” their hosts. This study expands the literature on Othering in international voluntourism contexts by examining how local...

Despite universities’ enthusiasm for internationalization, international academic mobility requires considerable institutional and cultural adjustment in terms of teaching and supervision styles, research expectations, and departmental relationships. Although language competency underpins these practices, research on international academics has neg...

Volunteers and volunteering make an essential contribution to nonprofit organizations and the development of more cohesive communities. Whereas varied interdisciplinary approaches have presented volunteering as the result of a dominant socioeconomic status or an altruistic personality type, organizational communication scholarship has focused on vo...

All economies are confronted by a growing care crisis: Both public and private organizations are struggling to recruit and retain adequate numbers of workers willing to provide care for elderly or chronically ill persons. While some social commentators argue that poor pay and excessive workload, caused by understaffing and insufficient funding, lie...

Despite the practical need to cultivate individuals' engagement with nonprofit organizations and theoretical interest in volunteerism across multiple disciplines and perspectives, the conceptual boundaries of volunteering remain vague. Although definitions from the literature emphasize free will, lack of financial gain, and benefit to others, they...

The sustained global popularity, prevalence, and influence of the term wellbeing are manifest in the definition of health offered by the World Health Organization since 1948: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not only the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948, p. 1). The discursive converge...