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Research is starting to suggest the value of professional learning networks (PLN) in terms of supporting educators in their practice. But further research is needed into how teachers’ on-going learning and practice development can be supported by features unique to a PLN. To fill that gap, the research described in this chapter examined the ways in which opportunities and supports for educators embedded within a unique multi-layered PLN enhanced and strengthened their knowledge and practice. Across one-year of a longitudinal project, we gathered multiple forms of evidence to trace 18 teachers’ experiences. Findings reported in this chapter identified conditions in the PLN overall that were combining to support teachers’ inquiry-oriented learning and practice. In addition, the authors conducted an in-depth analysis of one teacher’s experiences. The detailed analyses of this embedded case further uncovered how supports at different “grain sizes” (i.e., across the year; out-of-class activities; reflections in/on practice) were combining to foster shifts in her practice and transformative learning over time. The authors conclude with implications for conceptualizing how a multi-layered PLN can be structured to support teachers’ professional learning and practice development.

Educational inequities that are often systemic and the result of structural oppression persist in schools under/serving minoritized youth and communities. This chapter illustrates how professional learning networks (PLNs) and the practice of collaborative professionalism within them have served to support educators, positioned at multiple levels, in their effort to serve all children well, and especially those who are most marginalized. Collaborative professionalism emphasizes collective responsibility and student and teacher empowerment through PLNs. Further, the collaborative professionalism model incorporates elements of culture and context to ensure that collaborative efforts are responsive to the students and communities educators are purposed to partner with and serve. In this chapter, the authors highlight two such cases of collaborative professionalism through PLNs in Colombia and Ontario, Canada. These cases provide a model for how collaborative professionalism within PLNs can be utilized to enhance teaching and learning for all teachers and students across cultures and contexts, while attending explicitly to educational inequities.

International educational research has shown that high quality coaching, mentoring, and induction for beginning teachers can enhance development and retention of highly effective teachers and, ultimately, increase student success. In Canada, like many jurisdictions, teacher induction programs have grown in popularity as a means to support beginning teachers, yet programs vary greatly in terms of delivery and effectiveness. This chapter presents the findings from a qualitative case study that examined one bespoke teacher induction program in the Western Québec School Board (WQSB). Specifically, it reports on the experience of mentor–coaches (MC) who are part of the school district’s Mentoring and Coaching Fellowship (MCF). In the district, mentoring and coaching are viewed as distinct, yet interconnected components of an effective induction program. In the WQSB, teaching fellows and MCs learn together in a social and situated context (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as they focus on four key elements: the practice of teaching, navigating school and district culture, what it means to be a teacher, and the formation of a teaching identity. Research has shown effective coaching and mentoring programs not only enhance teaching and learning, but also they offer powerful benefits to veteran teachers. With mentoring and coaching practice highly diverse and inconsistent depending on the quality of the relationship and the context, it is clear that effective selection, support and professional learning and development for MCs is essential. This chapter examines the strengths and challenges of the school district’s Mentor–Coach Professional Learning Network (MC PLN) from the perspective of network members. Data collected from questionnaires, focus groups and semi-structured interviews were abductively analyzed with and against Brown and Poortman’s (2018) five supporting conditions for effective PLNs. Study findings indicated that the MC PLN offers valuable professional learning and development for participants and is a critical feature in a powerful induction program that also focuses on “growing the top.” However, challenges also emerged that highlight the need for the district to ensure ongoing attention to the PLN’s structure and processes in order to sustain MC motivation, engagement, and commitment.

Abuse and misuse of Substitute Decision-Making (SDMg) authority impacts the lives of children and adults with decision-making disabilities. The concerns raised in this paper amplify previous attention addressed by advocacy agencies and law reformists such as the Law Commission of Ontario. I analyse problems associated with Plenary Guardianship from both the lived experience of the non-guardian perspective and from the authority bestowed to the Guardian pursuant to the Guardianship and Administration Act 1990 of Western Australia legitimating the unintended capacity to abuse one’s substitute decision-making authority. Substitute decision-making arrangements enable decisions to be made on behalf of a person with a decision-making disability; usually made when such arrangements are necessary and subject to safeguards. Detrimentally, the substitute decision-maker (SDM) can assert broader powers beyond sensible measures that include thwarting investigations undertaken by family members; removing family members from the life of the person for whom an order is made; inappropriately applying a paternalistic or ‘best interest’ approach to decision-making where other approaches are required; failing to consider the individual’s wishes or making decisions contrary to those wishes; having insufficient contact with the individual; and, sharing insufficient or incorrect information. Moreover, they may subject the individual for whom an SDM order is made to experimental medical treatment in tandem with imposing or condoning severe and harmful restrictive-practices. Consequently, the second issue addressed in this paper concerns normalising both chemical and physical restrictive-practices that are both morally abhorrent and clinically highly questionable. Furthermore, often undertaken by service providers and their contracted psychiatrists and treating teams, endorsed under authority of a collaborating Guardian or SDM.

In response to demands and opportunities of the labor market, contemporary employers and employees voluntarily are entering into highly customized agreements regarding nonstandard employment terms. We refer to such idiosyncratic deals as “i-deals,” acknowledging that these arrangements are intended to benefit all parties. Examples of i-deals include an employee with highly coveted skills who is compensated more generously than other employees doing comparable work, and an employee who is granted atypically flexible working hours to accommodate certain personal life demands. The nonstandard nature of i-deals is likely to prompt questions about the fairness of the arrangement among three principal stakeholders – employees who receive the i-deal, managers with whom the i-deal is negotiated, and the co-workers of these employees and managers. We analyze issues of fairness that arise in the relationships among all three pairings of these stakeholders through the lenses of four established forms of organizational justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, interpersonal justice, and informational justice. Our discussion sheds light on previously unexplored nuances of i-deals and identifies several neglected theoretical issues of organizational justice. In addition to highlighting these conceptual advances, we also discuss methods by which the fairness of i-deals can be promoted.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

To provide a conceptual framework for understanding the role of organizational control in the context of remote work arrangements.

The framework has been developed drawing on two distinct research streams. Existing frameworks on remote work arrangements enabled to identify relevant dimensions to include in our framework, namely drivers of adoption and outcomes of implementation. They also evidenced the importance of opening up the remote work implementation process addressing crucial management issues, notably organizational control. On the basis of extant organizational research we deconstructed the complexity of organizational control in its constituent elements and identified mechanisms of control enactment over time.

The framework links the dynamics of change in organizational control initiated by the adoption of remote work arrangements with its antecedents (drivers of adoption and characteristics of the remote work model) and implementation outcomes at individual, group and organizational level. It opens the implementation stage focusing on the dynamics of organizational control and clarifies its role when the organization decides to adopt remote working.

The framework assumes that organizational control is not a static entity but a process of mutual constitution between structures of controls and actions enacted over time by both managers and employees (remote workers and on-site colleagues). It shows the value of a process perspective that emphasizes time mechanisms underlying changes in organizational control of remote work. Moreover, it constitutes a valuable reference guide to interpret in an integrated way existing research on the issue and identify inconsistencies in empirical findings, relevant gaps and opportunities for future research.

This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.