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This paper aims to offer an innovative approach to reflecting on research and practice around doctoral study and supervision. In the opening section of the paper, the authors discuss the idea that academic development as a doctoral candidate is concerned with how researchers write themselves into being as certain kinds of researchers, and how, in doing so, they become a character, like their supervisors, in the “figured world” of their research. This process of “becoming” can, the authors argue, be nurtured or hindered by different kinds of supervision practices.

With regard to the authors’ own experiences of doctoral supervision, the paper explores how their use of post-qualitative practices and methodologies encouraged new forms of intersubjectivity and academic development as their supervisory relationship advanced alongside the thesis itself.

The authors present the script of an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2111) which they wrote and performed on a number of occasions, as an alternative way of expressing their experiences of being in a relationship as doctoral supervisor and supervisor.

This choice of ethnodrama emerged out of a frustration with what the authors felt were increasingly predictable ways of discussing and reflecting upon the philosophy, content and assessment methods of postgraduate research and supervision across the educational disciplines.

The authors hope that their exploration of the imaginative spaces created through doctoral supervision will encourage other postgraduates and their supervisors to experiment with working creatively across interdisciplinary spaces and creating radical and even risky ways of mediating and sharing postgraduate teaching and learning relationships.

This case is a role-play exercise intended to give participants an opportunity to experience board meeting dynamics and logistics, determine how to scale a nonprofit for maximum impact, learn about governance best practices, and become generally familiar with nonprofit financial statements, dashboards, and new board member recruitment strategies. There is no right answer or correct outcome to the exercise; the value lies in participants' analysis of the situation, dialogue with one another, and post-meeting self-reflection.

This research aims to evaluate the status of project management best practices in the road infrastructure sector of Ghana through the inquiry of project managers’ competency.

Based on a thorough literature review on competency and project management best practices, a criterion for measuring best practices based on the competencies was identified. Using closed-ended questionnaires as a survey instrument, data was collected and analyzed using a one-sample t-test, Kendall’s concordance coefficient and simple regression.

The key finding reveals that in achieving project management best practices for the Ghanaian road infrastructure projects, project managers should straighten and strengthen their capability in terms of skills, personal characteristics and knowledge as ranked. An appropriate blend of these characteristics would be a necessary requirement for project managers. Through this, project managers and project-based road infrastructure organizations will be able to win the confidence of their stakeholders and attain improvements in cost-effectiveness, quality and time management.

This study provides project managers in the road infrastructure sector with relevant information on which criteria and variables are critical and are frequently required to manage such projects. This will be helpful for training programs and professional development of project managers in the road infrastructure sector.

The study provides a new direction and focuses for project managers in the road infrastructure industry toward best project management practices in developing countries. It also complements existing studies in this area which deepen the understanding of the subject area.

The present study aims to develop a risk-supported case-based reasoning (RS-CBR) approach for water-related projects by incorporating various uncertainties and risks in the revision step.

The cases were extracted by studying 68 water-related projects. This research employs earned value management (EVM) factors to consider time and cost features and economic, natural, technical, and project risks to account for uncertainties and supervised learning models to estimate cost overrun. Time-series algorithms were also used to predict construction cost indexes (CCI) and model improvements in future forecasts. Outliers were deleted by the pre-processing process. Next, datasets were split into testing and training sets, and algorithms were implemented. The accuracy of different models was measured with the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and the normalized root mean square error (NRSME) criteria.

The findings show an improvement in the accuracy of predictions using datasets that consider uncertainties, and ensemble algorithms such as Random Forest and AdaBoost had higher accuracy. Also, among the single algorithms, the support vector regressor (SVR) with the sigmoid kernel outperformed the others.

This research is the first attempt to develop a case-based reasoning model based on various risks and uncertainties. The developed model has provided an approving overlap with machine learning models to predict cost overruns. The model has been implemented in collected water-related projects and results have been reported.

The techniques for representing and analyzing business processes are referred to as business process modeling. Many business process modeling methods and their associated tools have been used to capture the characteristics of business processes. However, most methods view business processes from different perspectives and have different features and capabilities. Thus, an important research question is how process designers should select appropriate modeling methods for their BPR initiatives. In this paper, we propose a framework for selecting business process modeling methods based on modeling objectives. This framework can serve as the basis for evaluating modeling methods and generating selection procedures. A general selection procedure is also described. We use an expense claim process as an example to illustrate the application of the selection procedure.

This chapter applies recent theoretical developments linked to the concept of culture to the field of public relations research and practice, notably through the prism of creativity as a vector of cultural change.

The chapter is theoretical in nature and draws on relevant scientific literature in the field of public relations research, but also the social sciences more generally, and illustrates the issues being discussed with reference to relevant public relations campaigns.

While the field of public relations has moved beyond simplistic models of cultural values and characteristics, it is argued that more complex visions of culture have been neglected. Specifically, drawing on structuration theory, culture can be seen as a ‘system-generating mechanism’ relying on creativity to uphold and renew cultural references and norms. In this perspective, public relations is both producing/reproducing culture and being produced by culture. It follows that the concept should be apprehended not as an ontological category but as a social construct, as the source of heuristic and discursive categorisations.

A call is issued for public relations to also question the ideological underpinnings of the production of symbols in which practitioners partake on a daily basis.

While the chapter fits into an emerging body of work discussing the cultural dimension of public relations, the link with creativity and the use of structuration theory to conceptualise this link contribute to its originality.

Instructional leadership has been an active area of educational administration research over the past 30 years. However, there has been significant divergence in how instructional leadership has been conceptualized over time. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of 25 years of quantitative instructional leadership research, up through 2013, using a nationally generalizable data set.

The authors conducted a meta-narrative review of 109 studies that investigated at least one aspect of instructional leadership using the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) administered by the US National Center for Education Statistics.

There were four major themes of instructional leadership research that analyzed SASS data: principal leadership and influence, teacher autonomy and influence, adult development, and school climate. The three factors most researched in relationship to instructional leadership themes were: teacher satisfaction, teacher commitment, and teacher retention. This study details the major findings within each theme, describes the relationships between all seven factors, and integrates the relationships into a single model.

This paper provides the most comprehensive literature review to-date of quantitative findings investigating instructional leadership from the same nationally generalizable data set. This paper provides evidence that leadership for learning is the conceptual evolution of 25 years of diverse instructional leadership research.