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1 – 10 of over 1000The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which external subject-specific mentoring can influence the professional identity construction of early career physics teachers…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which external subject-specific mentoring can influence the professional identity construction of early career physics teachers (ECPT).
Design/methodology/approach
The methodology evolved from the evaluation of a mentoring project, involving semi-structured interviews with a number of early career teachers. Responses from 18 teachers, which related to the impact of the mentoring relationship on their professional identity development, were subject to a process of iterative thematic coding in the context of interpretative repertoires via a collaborative “developmental dialogue” between the managers of the mentoring project and its external evaluators.
Findings
The analysis of participants’ responses suggested that the nature of the relationship between early career teacher and mentor played a role in the emergence, or suppression, of their professional identities as physics teachers at the start of their teaching careers. In some cases, mentoring provision was little short of a “lifeline” for the teachers.
Practical implications
Mentors need the opportunity to develop their professional practice and identity through contact with the community of teacher educators. The practice of training, mentoring and coaching teachers should be valued at least as much as teaching itself and should be recognised as its own professional practice.
Originality/value
This study builds on a number of well-established pieces of research and concepts relating to the challenges facing early career teachers and their professional identity construction. It provides insight into the challenges facing ECPTs specifically, which includes the risk of isolation and unrealistic expectations from colleagues. It not only confirms the merits of external mentoring, but also demonstrates the significant responsibility, which comes with the mentor’s role and the negative impact on teachers’ professional identity construction caused by deficiencies in mentoring.
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Jasmina Sermijn, Gerrit Loots and Patrick Devlieger
The advent of postmodernism, post structuralism and social constructionism led over the last years to a multitude of theoretical philosophical reflections on possible meanings of…
Abstract
The advent of postmodernism, post structuralism and social constructionism led over the last years to a multitude of theoretical philosophical reflections on possible meanings of the psychological basic concept ‘selfhood’ or ‘subjectivity’. The modern, sovereign self was deconstructed and no longer considered as an ontological fact but rather as a product of language. The stable core self from which many traditional psychological theories start, was dethroned and substituted by a narrative, multiple and variable self that is permanently constructed and reconstructed in social situations. May we invite the reader to reflect on this fascinating subject together with Anna and Tom, the two interlocutors. Starting from the question ‘Who are we?’, we make a tour of the different schools of thought on subjectivity. Departing from the subject concept of Descartes, we track symbolic interactionistic, post‐structuralistic, social constructionistic and narrative hermeneutic ways. All these ways provide us with a different ‘view’ on subjectivity/selfhood and raise new questions that are relevant to researchers in the social sciences.
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Sarah Dodds, Rebekah Russell–Bennett, Tom Chen, Anna-Sophie Oertzen, Luis Salvador-Carulla and Yu-Chen Hung
The healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of…
Abstract
Purpose
The healthcare sector is experiencing a major paradigm shift toward a people-centered approach. The key issue with transitioning to a people-centered approach is a lack of understanding of the ever-increasing role of technology in blended human-technology healthcare interactions and the impacts on healthcare actors' well-being. The purpose of the paper is to identify the key mechanisms and influencing factors through which blended service realities affect engaged actors' well-being in a healthcare context.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper takes a human-centric perspective and a value co-creation lens and uses theory synthesis and adaptation to investigate blended human-technology service realities in healthcare services.
Findings
The authors conceptualize three blended human-technology service realities – human-dominant, balanced and technology-dominant – and identify two key mechanisms – shared control and emotional-social and cognitive complexity – and three influencing factors – meaningful human-technology experiences, agency and DART (dialogue, access, risk, transparency) – that affect the well-being outcome of engaged actors in these blended human-technology service realities.
Practical implications
Managerially, the framework provides a useful tool for the design and management of blended human-technology realities. The paper explains how healthcare services should pay attention to management and interventions of different services realities and their impact on engaged actors. Blended human-technology reality examples – telehealth, virtual reality (VR) and service robots in healthcare – are used to support and contextualize the study’s conceptual work. A future research agenda is provided.
Originality/value
This study contributes to service literature by developing a new conceptual framework that underpins the mechanisms and factors that influence the relationships between blended human-technology service realities and engaged actors' well-being.
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Anna Coote, co‐author of a recently published guide to civil liberties, explains the important features of student law and describes some case histories.
Stephanie Anne Shelton and Shelly Melchior
This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces.
Design/methodology/approach
This study’s methodology centers participants’ experiences and understandings over the course of two years of interviews, classroom observations and discussion groups. The study is conceptually informed by Sara Ahmed’s argument that social justice is often approached as something that education “can do,” which is problematic because it assumes that successful enactment is “intrinsic to the term.” Discussing and/or intending social justice replaces real change, and those leading the conversations believe that they have made meaningful differences. Instead, true shifts in thinking and action are “dependent on forms of institutional commitment […and] how it [diversity/social justice] gets taken up” (p. 241).
Findings
Using an in vivo coding approach – i.e. using direct quotations of participants’ words to name the new codes – the authors organized their findings into two discussions: “Damn – Every Time I’m with the Kids, I Just End Up Feeling Frozen”; and “Maybe I’m Just Not Giving These Kids a Fair Shake – Maybe I’m the Problem”.
Originality/value
The participants centered a participatory examination of intersectionality, rather than the previous teacher-mandated one. They “put into action” -xplorations of intersectionality that were predicated on students’ identities and experiences, thus making intersectionality a lived concept, rather than an intellectual one, and transforming students’ and their own engagement.
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Bożena Frączek, Katarzyna Plutecka, Anna Gagat-Matuła and Anna Czyż
The purpose of this study is to identify consumer buying behavior, sense of security on the market and basic economic knowledge among young people with autism spectrum disorder…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to identify consumer buying behavior, sense of security on the market and basic economic knowledge among young people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – Asperger Syndrome, while the empirical goal is the development of conclusions and implications, which may be used in consumer strategies.
Design/methodology/approach
The research consisted of a pilot study and used the diagnostic survey method. A survey questionnaire of the own devising was used. The study used a purposive (arbitrary) sample. This was a non-probability respondent sample, consisting of subjective selection by researchers among a selected closed representative sample, the aim of which was to test the research tool (survey questionnaire) during the pilot study. The survey questionnaire was constructed on the basis of theoretical assumptions explaining consumer buying behavior and on a literature review regarding research conducted in this area. The study was conducted on adolescents aged between 16 and 19 years of age, 40 of whom suffered from ASD – Asperger syndrome and 50 of whom were without ASD – Asperger syndrome (control group).
Findings
The results indicate a limited range of consumer behaviors, a relatively poor sense of security in consumer (retail) spending and a limited understanding of fundamental consumer issues among young consumers with ASD – Asperger syndrome in comparison to people from the control group.
Practical implications
This study suggests that marketers should prepare diverse means of communication with consumers and a variety of sales strategies targeted at consumers with communication disorders. The research may be extended to include the large number of factors that influence consumer behavior among people with ASD – Asperger syndrome, together with the determination of the predictors. The factors contribute to a varying extent to constant changes in consumer behavior, which makes it necessary for longitudinal or even cyclical studies to be carried out. In further research, the research tool should be improved in terms of more precise questions relevant to a given issue and random sampling should be implemented.
Social implications
The research concept can be transferred to other vulnerable groups with communication disorders (e.g. with hearing disorders).
Originality/value
To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to investigate selected aspects of consumer (and financial consumer) behavior among young people with ASD – Asperger syndrome.
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Valentina Cucino, Nicola Del Sarto, Giulio Ferrigno, Andrea Mario Cuore Piccaluga and Alberto Di Minin
This study investigates the role of “soft” factors of total quality management – in terms of empowerment and engagement of employees – in facilitating or hindering organizational…
Abstract
Purpose
This study investigates the role of “soft” factors of total quality management – in terms of empowerment and engagement of employees – in facilitating or hindering organizational performance of the university technology transfer offices.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors developed an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), multiple regression model to test if empowerment and engagement affect organizational performance of the university technology transfer offices.
Findings
The authors found that “soft” factors of total quality management – in terms of empowerment and engagement – facilitate the improvement of organizational performance in university technology transfer offices.
Practical implications
The authors’ analysis shows that soft total quality management practices create the conditions for improving organizational performance. This study provides practical implications by showing that, in the evaluation of the technology transfer office, not only the “hard” variables (e.g. number of employees and employee experience) but also the “soft” one (e.g. empowerment and engagement) matter. Therefore, university technology transfer managers or university technology transfer delegates should take actions to promote not only empowering employees but also create a climate conducive to employees' engagement in the university technology transfer offices.
Originality/value
With regards to the differences in organizational performances of university technology transfer offices, several studies have focused their attention on technology transfer professionals in technology transfer offices, but only a few of them have examined the “soft side” of total quality management. Thus, this study examines the organizational goals of technology transfer offices through “soft” factors of total quality management in terms of empowerment and engagement employees.
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The starting point of this paper is the propositional model of conflict resolution which was presented and critically discussed in Lempp (2016). Based on this model, a software…
Abstract
Purpose
The starting point of this paper is the propositional model of conflict resolution which was presented and critically discussed in Lempp (2016). Based on this model, a software implementation, called ProCON, is introduced and applied to three scenarios. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how ProCON can be used by negotiators and to evaluate ProCON’s practical usefulness as an automated negotiation support system.
Design/methodology/approach
The propositional model is implemented as a computer program. The implementation consists of an input module to enter data about a negotiation situation, an output module to generate outputs (e.g. a list of all incompatible goal pairs or a graph displaying the compatibility relations between goals) and a queries module to run queries on particular aspects of a negotiation situation.
Findings
The author demonstrates how ProCON can be used to capture a simple two-party, non-iterative prisoner’s dilemma, applies ProCON to a contract negotiation between a supplier and a purchaser of goods, and uses it to model the negotiations between the Iranian and six Western governments over Iran’s nuclear enrichment and stockpiling capacities.
Research limitations/implications
A limitation of the current version of ProCON arises from the fact that the computational complexity of the underlying algorithm is EXPTIME (i.e. the computing time required to process information in ProCON grows exponentially with respect to the number of issues fed into the program). This means that computing time can be quite long for even relatively small negotiation scenarios.
Practical implications
The three case studies demonstrate how ProCON can provide support for negotiators in a wide range of multi-party, multi-issue negotiations. In particular, ProCON can be used to visualise the compatibility relations between parties’ goals, generate possible outcomes and solutions and evaluate solutions regarding the extent to which they satisfy the parties’ goals.
Originality/value
In contrast to standard game-theoretic models of negotiation, ProCON does not require users to provide data about their preferences across their goals. Consequently, it can operate in situations where no information about the parties’ goal preferences is available. Compared to game-theoretical models, ProCON represents a more general approach of looking at possible outcomes in the context of negotiations.
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Giulio Ferrigno, Nicola Del Sarto, Valentina Cucino and Andrea Piccaluga
This study aims to combine open innovation (OI) and organizational learning (OL) literature in the context of strategic alliances.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to combine open innovation (OI) and organizational learning (OL) literature in the context of strategic alliances.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors develop a conceptual framework that links OI to OL literatures. The authors empirically validate this framework through four representative cases of dyadic strategic alliances in which the allied partners have (mainly) adopted an inbound or outbound OI strategy and (mainly) used an experiential or experimental learning approach to access knowledge in the alliance.
Findings
The authors propose and validate a framework that links two well-known OI strategies (inbound and outbound) and two types of OL, namely, experiential and experimental learning. This, in turn, allows us to propose four different typologies of learning opportunities that could be pursued by alliance partners.
Research limitations/implications
The research offers a framework that links experiential and experimental learning to inbound and outbound OI strategies. However, the authors focused on inbound and outbound OI. The authors are aware that sometimes coupled innovation could take place in alliances.
Practical implications
This study proposes best practices for companies willing to open their innovation processes with alliance partners by bearing in mind the learning outcomes that may be exploited through the alliance.
Originality/value
This study highlights four alliance archetypes emerging from the nexus between OI strategies to OL methods.
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