Search results
1 – 10 of 16Angela Dawn James and Lynne Halley Johnston
This study examines the extent to which physical activity specialists are emerging within health promotion. Hierarchical content analysis was used to analyse 70 telephone…
Abstract
This study examines the extent to which physical activity specialists are emerging within health promotion. Hierarchical content analysis was used to analyse 70 telephone interviews with health promotion workers across England. The findings indicated that although many successful physical activity initiatives have, and are, being implemented throughout the country, the priority given to physical activity promotion, and the appointment of specialist physical activity posts, does not reflect the stated commitment from government health policy to boost physical activity levels in the general population. Physical activity promoters highlighted the need for partnership working in the delivery of physical activity initiatives. Failure to adapt to the implications of the changing structure within the health service may mean that within health promotion physical activity specialists do not achieve either the status or the outcomes they require.
Details
Keywords
To encourage the ongoing transformation of the UN system by conceptualising leadership challenges within a cybernetics/systems paradigm.
Abstract
Purpose
To encourage the ongoing transformation of the UN system by conceptualising leadership challenges within a cybernetics/systems paradigm.
Design/methodology/approach
A grounded theory methodology was used to explore the “paradox of plenty” within the UN system in Southern Africa – how the system can more effectively metabolise the considerable latent creative synergic potential within it, to respond to the challenges of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Findings
Statements from UN leaders call for a new paradigm of humanitarian assistance if the challenges of HIV and AIDS are to be met. However, conversations with a wide range of people both within the UN system and closely connected to it suggest a disconnect between what the system does and what the system espouses – a bias toward “doing things right” rather than “doing the right thing”. Drawing on the writings of Berry (eco‐spirituality), Beer (VSM), Argyris and Schon (double loop learning), Hock (chaordic organisation) and Ackoff (corporate planning) the sub‐optimal organisational performance is interpreted as an “autistic” condition, whereby organisations become “so locked up inside themselves that nothing and no one can get in”. Interactive dialogue with primary health care workers in Swaziland generated five interconnected principles for developing a systemic response to HIV and AIDS. These are proposed as “antidotes” to counteract autistic tendencies within the UN system.
Research limitations/implications
The principles are offered for discussion and refinement through further research by cyberneticians and systems thinkers.
Originality/value
If internalised by UN leadership the perplexing challenges that HIV/AIDS is posing could be met with renewed confidence and hope.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ understanding of place in general and psychogeography in particular.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to stimulate researchers’ understanding of place in general and psychogeography in particular.
Design/methodology/approach
Melding hauntology, autoethnography, pseudo-psychogeography and object-orientated ontology, the provocation explores aspects of east Belfast’s “C.S. Lewis Trail”.
Findings
Psychogeography, purportedly, is moribund. This provocation contends that latter-day developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, digital real estate platforms and “imaginary worlds” more generally, open up new horizons, and offer more opportunities, for the psychogeographically inclined.
Originality/value
The provocation’s originality inheres in the approach adopted not the research findings.
Details
Keywords
PUBLIC librarians have had some experience of economy in this last month at the considering of annual estimates. In many towns, unfortunately, an increase in the general rates is…
Abstract
PUBLIC librarians have had some experience of economy in this last month at the considering of annual estimates. In many towns, unfortunately, an increase in the general rates is reported, and in all such times libraries are likely to suffer. The note we make below on Yarmouth does not show that one of the causes of the curious municipal hysteria it reveals was the burning desire to reduce the rates. That desire is in itself wholly laudable, and librarians can acquiesce in economies that do not discriminate against libraries. Our trouble is that libraries have nowhere yet been adequately financed, and reductions are more serious for them than for many departments which have never suffered from utter lack of means.
Millie Jackson, Ayse Gider, Celeste Feather, Kelly Smith, Amy Fry, Jamene Brooks‐Kieffer, Christopher D. Vidas and Rose Nelson
To keep librarians and colleagues informed about the issues and programs of the Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia on the Georgia…
Abstract
Purpose
To keep librarians and colleagues informed about the issues and programs of the Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference held in Atlanta, Georgia on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus in February 2007.
Design/methodology/approach
Provides a review of the conference.
Findings
Acquisitions staff, catalogers, public service staff, administrators, IT personnel, information providers from the vendor side, content managers, and others all came together to assess what needs to be done to continue high servicing of both born digital and electronically available resources in a hybrid environment that continues to describe all library settings today. As the percentage of electronic resources quickly grows, there are new challenges in acquiring, caring for, servicing, preserving, using and citing them that keep librarians up at night to consider short‐and long‐term solutions in how they should be organized bibliometrically and how we can re‐engineer some of our procedures to best treat the wide range of e‐Resources now common in all libraries.
Originality value
The program blended services with processing reinforcing the importance of electronic resources for the “total” library environment. It seemed like there was nothing left out.
Details
Keywords
HARROGATE will be notable as the venue of the Conference in one or two ways that distinctive. The Association Year is now to begin on January 1st and not in September as…
Abstract
HARROGATE will be notable as the venue of the Conference in one or two ways that distinctive. The Association Year is now to begin on January 1st and not in September as heretofore; and, in consequence, there will be no election of president or of new council until the end of the year. The Association's annual election is to take place in November, and the advantages of this arrangement must be apparent to everyone who considers the matter. Until now the nominations have been sent out at a time when members have been scattered to all parts of the country on holiday, and committees of the Council have been elected often without the full consideration that could be given in the more suitable winter time. In the circumstances, at Harrogate the Chair will still be occupied by Sir Henry Miers, who has won from all librarians and those interested in libraries a fuller measure of admiration, if that were possible, than he possessed before he undertook the presidency. There will be no presidential address in the ordinary sense, although Sir Henry Miers will make a speech in the nature of an address from the Chair at one of the meetings. What is usually understood by the presidential address will be an inaugural address which it is hoped will be given by Lord Irwin. The new arrangement must bring about a new state of affairs in regard to the inaugural addresses. We take it that in future there will be what will be called a presidential address at the Annual Meeting nine months after the President takes office. He will certainly then be in the position to review the facts of his year with some knowledge of events; he may chronicle as well as prophesy.
Emmanuel Raju, Suchismita Goswami, Nishara Fernando, Mayeda Rashid, Eti Akter, Nyima Dorjee Bhotia, Aditi Sharan, Mihir Bhatt and J.C. Gaillard
This conversation highlights the need to rethink how we approach disaster risk reduction in different South Asian contexts.
Abstract
Purpose
This conversation highlights the need to rethink how we approach disaster risk reduction in different South Asian contexts.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on the webinar held as part of Asia Week at the University of Copenhagen which was organised by Asian Dynamics Initiative and Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research on the September 12, 2023.
Findings
The prominent themes emerging from this conversation represents hybridity, self-rule and self-recovery. Along with this we suggest a fundamental turn to ensuring hope, solidarity and empathy is part of a post-colonial future.
Originality/value
The conversation contributes to the ongoing discussions on moving away from colonial practices in disaster risk reduction and disaster studies broadly.
Details
Keywords
Since its origins during the Second World War, the computer industry has grown more rapidly than any other technology in history, and this growth has spawned a wealth of new terms…
Abstract
Since its origins during the Second World War, the computer industry has grown more rapidly than any other technology in history, and this growth has spawned a wealth of new terms and manners‐of‐speaking to describe computers and the uses to which they can be put. Such terms are often referred to collectively as computerese. The thesis of Barry's entertaining book is that the use of computerese is increasingly being extended to a wealth of other subjects that are often totally unrelated to computing. Barry refers to this use (or abuse) of language as technobabble: the subject matter and the pleasingly tongue‐in‐cheek style can be judged from the introduction, which starts as follows: ‘This paper‐based, productized bookware module is designed to support the robust implementation of a friendly, context‐driven interface between the developer and the end‐user. Did you understand this sentence? If so, you are fluent in technobabble’.
MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how…
Abstract
MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.