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1 – 10 of 61Bonnie Cord, Chris Sykes and Michael Clements
Higher education is seeking ways to close the perceived gap between employer's expectations of graduates and the current preparation these graduates receive. Experiential learning…
Abstract
Purpose
Higher education is seeking ways to close the perceived gap between employer's expectations of graduates and the current preparation these graduates receive. Experiential learning programs offer students one such opportunity to develop professionally and acquire generic workplace skills. This transition however, from the classroom to the workplace, can be a challenging process for students, and is the focus of this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper discusses the importance of programs and their supervisors integrating “caring” into work placements. Several stages of the transition process are discussed before seven principles of a successful student transition are outlined.
Findings
This paper demonstrates how a beyond duty of care approach can be adopted in experiential learning programs through seven key principles.
Practical implications
It is anticipated that prioritizing a transition that enlarges the notion of student “care” and adoption of the seven key principles will narrow the perceived gap between employers and higher education's expectations of graduates.
Originality/value
While experiential learning programs involve three stakeholders, the literature has not yet recognised the importance of each of these roles in the students' progressional development in the workplace. This paper outlines these roles and identifies seven ways the approach can be incorportaed into the pratices of an expereintial learning program.
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Lesley Treleaven and Chris Sykes
This paper seeks to explore the loss of organizational knowledge during organizational change processes from a knowledge perspective.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to explore the loss of organizational knowledge during organizational change processes from a knowledge perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
Recent developments in the fields of organizational change and organizational knowledge are reviewed, then the relation of organizational knowledge to discourse and power is drawn out. Using critical discourse analysis, dominant and marginalized discourses are foregrounded, different types of organizational knowledge loss distinguished, and their effects in a human services organization identified.
Findings
The analysis shows how the linguistic and discursive practices of financial management are marginalizing and displacing practitioners' organizational knowledge. An illustration is given of how situated and heuristic organizational knowledge is vulnerable to marginalization, and hence loss, as organizations seek to codify knowledge into generalizable abstractions. It is concluded that these losses of organizational knowledge are the effects of re‐organizing around corporate managerialism without attention to multi‐vocality and differential evaluations of worth.
Research limitations/implications
These findings, within a large community services not‐for‐profit organization, may differ in business organizations where research into knowledge management has typically focused. However, the findings are worth examining in other sites, given the migration of corporate managerialism.
Practical implications
Organization development practitioners, consultants and leaders need to take into account both the emergent nature of change itself and how re‐organizing around corporate managerialism can marginalize or lose organizational knowledge that is valued differentially.
Originality/value
The paper's contribution is its understanding of discursive change processes as tensions between competing bodies of knowledge. Re‐conceptualizing organizational change to address such multi‐vocality opens up new ways of examining how organizing and re‐organizing processes in organizations affect organizational knowledge and thus organizational capability.
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Riya Elizabeth George, Nisha Dogra and Bill Fulford
The purpose of this paper is to review the challenges of teaching values and ethics in mental-health, explore the differing perspectives of the key stakeholders and stimulate…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to review the challenges of teaching values and ethics in mental-health, explore the differing perspectives of the key stakeholders and stimulate further questions for debate in this area; leading to a proposal of an alternative approach to educating mental-health professionals on values and ethics.
Originality/value
In current mental-health care settings, very few professionals work with homogeneous populations. It is imperative that mental-health education and training ensures health professionals are competent to practice in diverse settings; where ethics and values are bound to differ. Establishing professional practice not only involves considering concepts such as values and ethics, but also equality, diversity and culture. Incorporating values-based practice and cultural diversity training holds promise to education and training, that is truly reflective of the complexity of clinical decision making in mental-health. Further research is needed as to how these two frameworks can be unified and taught.
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Clive Nancarrow, Len Tiu Wright and Chris Woolston
Focuses on the pre‐testing of a global press advertising campaign for Seagram’s Chivas Regal whisky and contrasts the contributions of qualitative and quantitative applications…
Abstract
Focuses on the pre‐testing of a global press advertising campaign for Seagram’s Chivas Regal whisky and contrasts the contributions of qualitative and quantitative applications. Examines how an informed decision could be made on the most appropriate research approach ‐ in particular the value of the concept of validity; and the strengths and weaknesses of qualitative and quantitative pre‐testing given the emotional nature of the product category, importance of branding and nature of advertising. These questions are addressed in this paper through focusing on the research needs for the “global campaign” as well as the need in Japan to evaluate the global campaign and an independently developed local campaign. In the case of Japan, Seagram’s management elected to examine two different research approaches ‐ qualitative and quantitative ‐ to address the question “how to effectively pre‐test international press advertising”. This exercise demonstrated that the two approaches produced seemingly contradictory findings. Reasons for this are discussed.
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Prison social environments play an important role in the health of prisoners. How they respond to imprisonment is partially dependent upon how effectively they integrate into an…
Abstract
Prison social environments play an important role in the health of prisoners. How they respond to imprisonment is partially dependent upon how effectively they integrate into an institution’s social structure, learn to fit in with others and adapt to and cope with becoming detached from society, community and family ‐ hence, how they personally manage the transition from free society to a closed carceral community. This paper reports on findings of an ethnography conducted in an adult male training prison in England, which used participant observation, group interviewing, and one‐to‐one semi‐structured interviews with prisoners and prison officers. The research explored participants’ perceptions of imprisonment, particularly with regard to how they learned to adapt to and ‘survive’ in prison and their perceptions of how prison affected their mental, social and physical well‐being. It revealed that the social world of prison and a prisoner’s dislocation from society constitute two key areas of ‘deprivation’ that can have important health impacts.
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The conventional distinction between quantitative and qualitative research is constructed around a familiar dichotomy. Within it, the former is construed as more “factual” and…
Abstract
Purpose
The conventional distinction between quantitative and qualitative research is constructed around a familiar dichotomy. Within it, the former is construed as more “factual” and “objective” and it is contrasted with the more interpretative approaches of qualitative research. The latter, in this account, is enlisted to enhance understanding of the consumer even if it is considered inherently less reliable and less “valid” in nature. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this familiar distinction and propose a more fundamental one in its place.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative research is conventionally understood within a framework delineated by modern psychology. The task of qualitative research within this model is to understand the motivations of consumers and to provide explanations that are deeper and less “on the surface” than those elicited by quantitative methods. Such a perspective on qualitative research ignores the fact, however, that the distinctions which exist between the two methodologies are much more profound. We need to look at the underlying philosophical foundations of the two approaches and recognise that they can be distinguished at a more critical level. This paper will argue that they can be understood with much greater clarity in terms of how subjects and predicates are related to each other.
Findings
This reframing of the theoretical assumptions of qualitative research would lead, one might expect, to a radical reinterpretation of qualitative research. This paper goes on to demonstrate, however, that, paradoxically, this is not the case. What will be demonstrated is that some of the more important methodologies developed in qualitative research correspond precisely with the new theoretical model that is being put forward. As such, they tend to confirm the fundamental assumptions of the subject/predicate model proposed.
Originality/value
The value of this paper is to encourage greater theoretical perspective on the nature of qualitative research and its methodologies.
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This chapter contributes to drawing Melanesian ethnography out of the exoticizing interest for gift exchange and demand-sharing. Furthermore, it provides an analytical perspective…
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter contributes to drawing Melanesian ethnography out of the exoticizing interest for gift exchange and demand-sharing. Furthermore, it provides an analytical perspective from which it is possible to conceptualize the manipulation of gift and commodity logics as mutually compatible frameworks. Rather than seeing them as contradictory, this perspective enables the theorization of shared calculative agencies that are becoming increasingly common in contemporary Melanesia.
Methodology/approach
The chapter draws on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Gilbert Camp, a peri-urban settlement on the outskirts of Honiara, Solomon Islands with a focus on the domestic moral economy of its inhabitants.
Findings
The people of Gilbert Camp are confronting a difficult economic and moral dilemma. On the one hand, they are at constant risk of financial failure because of their general conditions of scarcity. On the other, they face the prospect of disrupting some of their much-valued social relationships because such scarcity prevents them from fulfilling their cultural obligations. In order to avoid both risks, they make use of their financial competence and cultural creativity to set up strategies that save them money and preserve these relationships. Situated at the interface between kinship and market values, these strategies contribute to achieving the kind of ‘good’ life that they see as the correct balance between financial prosperity and morality.
Originality/value
Current negotiations over the meaning of buying, selling and taking are changing the values of contemporary sociality in Honiara, Port Vila, and other Melanesian cities. Tradestores simultaneously supply households with food and money, create a sense of sharing, and limit the demand-sharing and the taking of wantoks. Hence they create the conditions for the resolution of tensions over the incompatibility of values of kinship and market that confront the inhabitants of Melanesian cities. Household tradestores thus constitute a major site of these negotiations, and they provide a unique vantage point from which to look at the moral and economic processes that are leading to the future identity of urban Melanesia.
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