Search results

Qualitative research offers a unique insight into the behaviour and beliefs and meanings of the organisations, situations and people studied. Often these meanings express themselves in narrative forms. The researcher’s own experience of research itself takes a narrative form, and has similarities with autobiography. The reflexive elements of autobiography can make for more self‐aware research, above all when the researchers are researching organisations, situations and groups of which they themselves are a part.

For better understanding the connections between the Viennese circles in which Menger was involved, it is necessary to make some remarks on the Viennese context where they developed. Since the end of the 19th century up to the interwar period, Vienna was a very lively city from a cultural point of view, the birthplace of modernism (Janik & Toulmin, 1973). In the age of the late Habsburg monarchy as well as in the post-First War ‘Red Vienna’, the intellectual, scientific and artistic life of the Austrian capital was so fervent that those years are recalled by historians as the Viennese Enlightenment, the gay apocalypse and the golden autumn: ‘two generations were enough to cover the whole period. The economist Carl Menger (1841–1920) shaped the beginning, and his son, the mathematician Karl Menger (1902–1985), witnessed the end’ (Golland & Sigmund, 2000, p. 34). After the First World War, from an economic point of view, a high inflation overwhelmed the country; while from a political point of view, ‘the new Austria was fragmented and labyrinthine’ (Leonard, 1998, p. 6): the Christian socialists were the conservative part of the society, but one third of citizens supported the new social-democratic party, which had the majority in Vienna.

This study, carried out in the bilingual and bicultural border area of South Texas, is an exploration of bilingual preservice teachers’ identity formation and their experiences and beliefs about literacy and biliteracy during an undergraduate class focused on learning about emergent literacy in the bilingual classroom. This study is based on a sociocultural approach to learning and identity development, and research that explores how bilingual teachers’ identity is shaped through their participation in cultural and linguistic practices. The purpose of this practitioner research is to provide insights into preservice teachers’ identities as they start to explore literacy and biliteracy practices. Two research questions guide the study: What experiences about literacy and biliteracy development do prospective teachers identify as meaningful? How do these experiences contribute to define bilingual preservice teachers’ identities? Findings indicate that bilingual preservice teachers’ identities are shaped by cultural and linguistic experiences that define the bilingual and bicultural dynamics of the region. Two predominant types of experiences impact bilingual preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy/biliteracy development. Particularly significant in defining their perceptions are the lessons learned from meaningful others – especially mothers and teachers – and certain relevant memories regarding effective practices they experienced when learning to read and write. Implications for teacher education preparation of bilingual teachers are identified.

WITHIN THE PAST HALF CENTURY OR SO certain autobiographies have stood out from one's reading and reviewing, not always for their literary quality. Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was a 1933 landmark because, sensitively, earnestly written, it achieved its author's aim: to show what the 1914 war and postwar period had meant to men and women of her generation, the changes wrought in the minds of a large section of the middle class, her own as daughter of a Staffordshire paper‐mill owner.

The purpose of this special issue is to extend the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC)-funded UK seminar series–Challenging Gendered Media (Mis)Representations of Women Professionals and Leaders; and to highlight research into the gendered media constructions of women managers and leaders and outline effective methods and methodologies into diverse media.

Gendered analysis of television, autobiographies (of Sheryl Sandberg, Karren Brady, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard), broadcast news media and media press through critical discourse analysis, thematic analysis, metaphor and computer-aided text analysis software following the format of the Gender Media Monitoring Project (2015) and [critical] ecological framework for advancing social change.

The papers surface the gendered nature of media constructions of women managers and leaders and offer methods and methodologies for others to follow to interrogate gendered media. Further, the papers discuss – how women’s leadership is glamourized, fetishized and sexualized; the embodiment of leadership for women; how popular culture can subvert the dominant gaze; how women use agency and how powerful gendered norms shape perceptions, discourses and norms and how these are resisted, repudiated and represented.

The papers focus upon how the media constructs women managers and leaders and offer implications of how media influences and is influenced by practice. There are recommendations provided as to how the media could itself be organized differently to reflect diverse audiences, and what can be done to challenge gendered media.

Challenging gendered media representations of women managers and leaders is critical to social justice and equality for women in management and leadership.

This is an invited Special Issue comprising inaugural collection of research through which we get to “see” women and leaders and the gendered media gaze and to learn from research into popular culture through analysis of television, autobiographies and media press.

The Co‐ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) is a social constructionist theory of human action which provides insight into the structure and process of multi‐person decision making. In the CMM analysis presented here, the Hughes family′s vacation decision making supplies an episode within which the family′s socially constructed resources are expressed and recreated. CMM is a technology offering considerable promise to new paradigm consumer researchers.

Begins by considering whether the economic theory of the supply, nature and demand for biographies developed by James M. Buchanan and Robert Tollison might apply to this autobiography. Outlines Tisdell’s experiences in his pre‐school years (1939‐1945), at school (1946‐1956) and as a university student (1957‐1963). Covers the period of his first appointment as a temporary lecturer at the Australian National University (1964) and of his postdoctoral travelling scholarship (1965) which took him to Princeton and Stanford and the period of his employment from 1966 onwards. His family and its history are given particular attention.