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This chapter identifies the serious issue of the mental health and wellbeing of English paramedics working in the emergency ambulance service. It identifies the case of the extant top-down performance measurement regime and the absence of indicators of wellbeing in ambulance performance reporting. The impact of such measures on frontline staff and the implications for their motivation and commitment are also documented. More decentralised, open and discursive approaches to performance management in the public sector are advocated as key methods for re-imagining ambulance and wider public services in a global context.

Drawing on relevant literature, the chapter provides the context of the English ambulance service and the challenges it faces with reference to the New Public Management (NPM) and New Public Governance (NPG). Key issues concerning performance metrics and staff wellbeing and welfare are then identified and discussed. The notions of communicative rationality, deliberative democracy and agonistic pluralism are introduced as a framework for analysing the state of both wellbeing and resilience and the performance regime within the English ambulance service. The chapter relates these themes to the re-imagining of public services internationally, proposing a more participative and discursive approach.

It is desirable for the evaluation of public services to include the wellbeing of the healthcare provider, as well as the public service recipient. Additionally, there is a case for greater participative and dialogic engagement to address the intertwined relationship of ambulance staff wellbeing and the performance management regime of the service. The process should be revised, therefore, to take into account the wellbeing of ambulance staff as an integral and intrinsic part of the delivery of the service, and it is recommended that deliberative methods of participation are deployed in reimagining ambulance services and public services more generally.

The challenges facing ambulance services and, more generally, health services globally continue to proliferate and intensify. They are exacerbated by foreseeable contextual challenges such as the demographic profile of patients and service users and budgetary cuts. Traditional and more recent NPM approaches are proving inadequate for this challenge and appear unsustainable in practice. The lack of acknowledgement of welfare indicators in the performance metrics make them unfit for purpose. Our suggested discursive approach would help to re-imagine the service by improving its sustainability and resilience in parallel with the improved wellbeing and personal resilience of the people who provide the service.

Peacebuilding is often premised on international intervention in post-conflict situations. This epilogue extends the concept to address preventative peacebuilding in pre-conflict societies. Social movement organizations that spring from democratically oriented movements can either reproduce dominant and dominating leadership styles, or they can cultivate democratizing leadership (Klein, 2016) by developing democratic practices, structures, and cultures within and between organizations. Democratizing leadership promotes leadership as a verb more than a noun: as the operation of power in relationship between people, rather than as positional power grounded in an authority figure. In democratizing leadership, democratic decision-making is preceded by the development of individual and collective voice and followed by responsible collective action. In addition to these processes, democratic values are also essential, including: freedom (differentiated from autonomy), justice (procedural, social, and restorative justice), and equity (more than equality), which underlie structural processes and inform practices. When social movement organizations find creative tension between ad hoc leadership and the tendency toward bureaucratization, they can cultivate a democratic culture through organizational practices and structures for preventative peacebuilding work. Leadership in such organizations recognizes and utilizes creative conflict to sustain agonistic pluralism and promote conflictual consensus (Mouffe, 2013). This epilogue provides examples of democratizing leadership from social movement organizations, including: In the Heart of the Beast Theater, Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers, Neighborhood Leadership Program, and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs, that illustrate how democratizing leadership can be developed in pre-conflict preventative peacebuilding organizations by integrating democratic practices, structures, and cultures.

Relations between Indigenous women and the Australian women’s movement have never been easy. For some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the white women’s movement has seemed irrelevant to the real struggles in Aboriginal women’s lives, which have tended to be more politically aligned with Indigenous struggles more broadly. Many Aboriginal women have viewed white feminists as insensitive to their own role in Australia’s colonial history and the implications of this for contemporary intercultural relations. In response to such criticism, many white feminists have struggled with the challenge of effective cross cultural engagement and collaboration.

This chapter brings an intersectional analysis to bear in an effort to understand these challenges, developing a framing of agonistic processes of collective identity as a way of thinking about the potentially productive role of conflict in social movements. Through an examination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous responses to a particular policy framework, the chapter suggests that feminist interventions focussing on the negative, racist impacts of the policy have tended to neglect the gendered dimensions of the underlying problem. As a result these arguments risk neglecting (some) women’s lived experiences.

Managers are increasingly finding their organisations being drawn into polarising socio-political issues. While not an entirely novel form of risk for organisations, the ability to avoid this form of risk is eroding, resulting in a new risk environment. This chapter is a conceptual piece that explores why organisations are compelled to address polarising socio-political issues, and how they might navigate issues communicatively through the use of values advocacy. Stakeholder expectations and potential benefits from taking stances on issues result in organisational managers taking stands on polarising, socio-political issues. However, the polarisation creates dangers by risking to intensify the issue division among constituents, causing segments of organisational constituents to turn against the organisation. Values advocacy may be one way to limit the dangers when taking stands on socio-political issues.

Recognizing the existence of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and more precisely a social impact related to diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI), organizations today are confronted with the question of what is considered as good. How is the good life created and communicatively constructed inside an organization? Who (agent) is responsible to realize, secure, and manage the process of value creation and social change, or moral agency? I offer a new perspective on the ethical duty of public relations (PR) practitioners to be revolutionary, to be communicative rebels. I conceptualize PR from a critical theoretical perspective as process of problematization, as process of cracking open common sense and underlying systems of power and norms in an organization. Then I offer strategies for creating shared (communication) spaces in which to imagine and experience transformation and social change. In these spaces (huddles), good life is courageously problematized to offer a new narrative of sustainability including DEI as communicatively codesigned. The aim is to highlight opportunities and tools for PR practitioners and PR scholars to be revolutionary – more than an organization's conscience, but an agent of change for exciting, innovative, and transformative communication practices at the core of the discipline.

The contribution draws upon the protests against a proposed trade deal between the European Union (EU) and the United States as an example of the potential to identify as European citizens. It is relevant given the multiple challenges the EU is currently facing, particularly a crisis of democratic legitimacy. While trust in EU institutions is at a historic low, some citizens – such as the Anti-Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) protestors – want to have a say in EU decision-making. The resulting conflicts should not be misunderstood as a threat. Instead, the author’s suggestion here is that democratic conflict has the potential to contribute to the politicisation and the identification of citizens with the European project. Following this line of thought, the potential of the Anti-TTIP protests lies in a civic democratisation of the EU through conflict. The author focusses on protestors’ participation experiences and their self-understanding processes as European citizens. The author explores the different ways in which protestors experience themselves as European citizens which aims to open up the discourse about the multiplicity of European citizenship. This variety of meanings ascribed to European citizenship is not regarded as a danger, but as the potential to enrich Europe with new ways of being and acting as European citizens.