Search results
1 – 10 of 256Daniel Ashton, Ronda Gowland-Pryde, Silke Roth and Fraser Sturt
Socioeconomic aims and impacts are an explicit part of the UK City of Culture (UKCoC) application, bidding, delivery and evaluation stages. This article engages with existing…
Abstract
Purpose
Socioeconomic aims and impacts are an explicit part of the UK City of Culture (UKCoC) application, bidding, delivery and evaluation stages. This article engages with existing debates on evaluating cities of culture and introduces perspectives from critical data studies to examine the collection and analysis of different data for the purposes of the CoC application and evaluation processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The meta-methodological concept of accompanying researcher is used to analyse the experiences of researchers based within a city bidding for UKCoC 2025 in dialogue with the evaluation reports from past UKCoC host cities.
Findings
Findings are analysed under three themes: defining data morsels; local histories and infrastructures of data generation and sharing; and resources, capacities and expertise for data generation and evaluation. The discussion examines data still to be generated and/or brought into relation; tensions around data and measurement; and how constructing an evaluation baseline is generative—creating new organisations, relationships and practices.
Practical implications
The conceptual and methodological approach and empirical findings will be relevant for academic, policymakers and practitioners engaging with cultural evaluation.
Originality/value
In focussing on the bidding stage in real time through the accompanying researcher position, this article presents original empirical insights into the process of creating a baseline for cities of culture evaluation. The conceptual originality of this article is in using critical data studies to explain strategies of data generation and analyse data relations and frictions.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of “employability” in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of “employability” in industry and career context‐specific ways. The paper further seeks to explore potential critical reflections on emerging professional practice and future employment conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with students located within a university‐operated industry‐facing media production studio, this paper focuses on how students articulate their career development and aspirations.
Findings
Discussing their studio experience and forms of “identity work”, students would nuance “employability” in terms of media industry‐specific concepts of creativity and professionalism. Anxieties around future professional practice were also voiced, signaling the potential value of a Career Studies approach that creates a space for explicitly exploring employment conditions as personally meaningful concerns.
Research limitations/implications
Noting how employability is articulated in terms of industry professionalism, this paper encourages analysis that is attentive to situated understandings and identity work. Given the studio and media focus, application of findings may be limited.
Practical implications
Relevant for industry employers is how students make sense of their future career aspirations and undertake “work on the self” that is bound up with but also potentially critical of professional norms, quality of life and work conditions.
Originality/value
Recognising how employment can be understood in terms of “professionalism”, this paper suggests how an exploration of discourses and practices of professionalism can be part of a wider examination of employability. This paper explores the value of the Career Studies approach for integrating questions of student identity with subject‐specific accounts critical to employment conditions and practices.
Details
Keywords
The aim of this paper is to present qualitative research with higher education games design students to explore situated understandings of work and the negotiation of “work” and…
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to present qualitative research with higher education games design students to explore situated understandings of work and the negotiation of “work” and “non‐work” boundaries.
Design/methodology/approach
Situated understandings of work are examined through interviews and focus groups with games design students in the UK and contextualised with interviews with games industry professionals and attendance at industry careers events. The theoretical approach of “occupational devotion” is used to explore work practices and motivations, and “technological action” is then used to draw out the significance of relations with games technologies in this negotiation.
Findings
The main finding concerns the continued significance of a fixed field of “work” for students intending to progress from education into “work”. The importance of “work” was identified in how students positioned themselves (occupational devotion) and engaged with games technologies (technological action). This is contrasted with the emphasis on co‐creative relations and broadbrush assertions of blurring boundaries between work and non‐work.
Research limitations/implications
A larger sample of students that ranged across different digital gaming disciplines within higher education (programming; art) would add breadth and further perspectives. Further research would connect student perceptions of the games industry, from attending events such as careers fairs, and the industry promotional discourses and representational strategies. A longitudinal study would be valuable for tracing changes in recruitment strategies and industry and education intersections.
Practical implications
The paper provides insights into how higher education students engage with the games industry and articulates their personal development and employability attributes.
Originality/value
This paper makes a case for research with students as a means to explore boundaries of “work” and “non‐work”. It questions the blurring of “work” and “non‐work”, and provides conceptual pointers, combined with empirical research, that indicate the continued purchase of fixed notions of “work” for workers‐in‐the‐making. This is relevant for scholarly research into the sociology of work, higher education pedagogy, and industry‐education relations.
Details
Keywords
Alexandra Oancă, Franco Bianchini, Juliet Simpson, Enrico Tommarchi and David Wright
Morteza Moallemi, Daniel Melser, Ashton de Silva and Xiaoyan Chen
The purpose of this paper is on developing and implementing a model which provides a fuller and more comprehensive reflection of the interaction of house prices at the suburb…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is on developing and implementing a model which provides a fuller and more comprehensive reflection of the interaction of house prices at the suburb level.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors examine how changes in housing prices evolve across space within the suburban context. In doing so, the authors developed a model which allows for suburbs to be connected both because of their geographic proximity but also by non-spatial factors, such as similarities in socioeconomic or demographic characteristics. This approach is applied to modelling home price dynamics in Melbourne, Australia, from 2007 to 2018.
Findings
The authors found that including both spatial and non-spatial linkages between suburbs provides a better representation of the data. It also provides new insights into the way spatial shocks are transmitted around the city and how suburban housing markets are clustered.
Originality/value
The authors have generalized the widely used SAR model and advocated building a spatial weights matrix that allows for both geographic and socioeconomic linkages between suburbs within the HOSAR framework. As the authors outlined, such a model can be easily estimated using maximum likelihood. The benefits of such a model are that it yields an improved fit to the data and more accurate spatial spill-over estimates.
Details
Keywords
H. Gin Chong, Reader and Gerald Vinten
Risk is closely associated with return of investments and materiality. Investments with considerably higher risk normally attract a higher rate of return. Whereas, higher level of…
Abstract
Risk is closely associated with return of investments and materiality. Investments with considerably higher risk normally attract a higher rate of return. Whereas, higher level of risk needs a higher threshold of materiality. There are occasions in which financial managers, fail to take the materiality effects in the process of risk evaluation. This paper assesses risk in the auditing context. Audit risk models established by researchers reveal that there is a need to look into the effects of materiality. An extension on the existing audit models, to incorporate the effects of materiality is made. With this, 128 permutations were resulted. It is understandable that auditors may not be cost benefit for auditors to evaluate all the 128 possible outcomes before the issuance of audit reports; however, this by no means prevents auditors being sued for negligence due to neglecting one of the possible audit outcomes. This model could seriously be served as a reference to both auditors and financial managers in the light of evaluating risk.
In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still…
Abstract
In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.
Leanne Weber, Jarrett Blaustein, Kathryn Benier, Rebecca Wickes and Diana Johns
Katarzyna Czernek-Marszałek, Patrycja Klimas, Patrycja Juszczyk and Dagmara Wójcik
Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological…
Abstract
Social relationships play an important role in organizational entrepreneurship. They are crucial to entrepreneurs’ decisions because, despite the bleeding-edge technological advancements observed nowadays, entrepreneurs as human beings will always strive to be social. During the COVID-19 pandemic many companies moved activities into the virtual world and as a result offline Social relationships became rarer, but as it turns out, even more valuable, likewise, the inter-organizational cooperation enabling many companies to survive.
This chapter aims to develop knowledge about entrepreneurs’ SR and their links with inter-organizational cooperation. The results of an integrative systematic literature review show that the concept of Social relationships, although often investigated, lacks a clear definition, conceptualization, and operationalization. This chapter revealed a great diversity of definitions for Social relationships, including different scopes of meaning and levels of analysis. The authors identify 10 building blocks and nine sources of entrepreneurs’ Social relationships. The authors offer an original typology of Social relationships using 12 criteria. Interestingly, with regard to building blocks, besides those frequently considered such as trust, reciprocity and commitment, the authors also point to others more rarely and narrowly discussed, such as gratitude, satisfaction and affection. Similarly, the authors discuss the varied scope of sources, including workplace, family/friendship, past relationships, and ethnic or religious bonds. The findings of this study point to a variety of links between Social relationships and inter-organizational cooperation, including their positive and negative influences on one another. These links appear to be extremely dynamic, bi-directional and highly complex.
Details