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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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a case of companies cooperating with the State to prevent a public controversy over nuclear power following the Fukushima disaster and achieve mutually beneficial policy outcomes. It analyses the private and public communication of pro-nuclear corporate, political and regulatory actors.

Drawing on the political economy theory, the study examines how actors mobilised power by accessing an existing social network to agree a joint public communication strategy in order to ensure public support for the continuation of nuclear power generation in the UK. It traces discursive frames from their inception in private communication to their reproduction in public communication and their dissemination via the media.

The study provides evidence of pro-nuclear actors cooperating behind the scenes to achieve consistent public pro-nuclear messaging. It finds evidence of four discursive frames: avoiding knee-jerk reactions, lessons learned, safety and nuclear renaissance. In combination, they guide audiences’ evaluation of the consequences of the Fukushima disaster for the UK in favour of continuing the commercial use of nuclear energy.

The private e-mail exchange between pro-nuclear actors presents a unique opportunity to examine the mobilisation of less visible forms of power in the form of agenda setting (manipulation) and discursive framing (domination) in order to influence policy outcomes and shape public opinion on nuclear energy. This is problematic because it constitutes a lack of transparency and accountability on part of the State with respect to policy outcomes and restricts the civic space by curtailing the articulation of alternative interests and voices.

There are explicit calls for research devoted to how political actors present their brand to the electorate and how this is interpreted. Responding to this, the purpose of this paper is to build an understanding of how political brand messages and values are received and aligned with voter expectations, which in turn shapes the consistency of a political brand.

Using an interpretivist perspective, this two-stage approach first focuses on semi-structured interviews with internal stakeholders of the UK Conservative Party and second uses focus group discussions with external stakeholders (voters) of age 18-24 years. Data was collected between 1 December 2014 and 6 May 2015.

The findings suggest that the UK Conservative brand had recovered from the “nasty party” reputation. Further, the Conservative brand was perceived as credible, trustworthy and responsible, with positive associations of “economic competence”. However, while the nasty party imagery has declined, the UK Conservative brand continues to face challenges particularly in terms of longstanding negative associations perceived by both internal and external markets.

It must be acknowledged that all research methods have their own limitations, and acknowledging these will strengthen the ability to draw conclusions. In this study, for example, due to time constraints during the election campaign period, 7 participants supported stage one of the study and 25 participants supported stage two of the study. However, participants from stage one of the study represented all three elements of the UK Conservative Party (Parliamentary, Professional and Voluntary). In addition, the elite interviews were longer in duration and this provided a greater opportunity to capture detailed stories of their life experiences and how this affected their brand relationship. Similarly, participants for stage two focussed on young voters of age 18-24 years, a segment actively targeted by the UK Conservative Party.

The brand alignment framework can help practitioners illuminate components of the political brand and how it is interpreted by the electorate. The increasing polarisation in politics has made this a vital area for study, as we see need to understand if, how or why citizens are persuaded by a more polarised brand message. There are also social media issues for the political brand which can distort the carefully constructed brand. There are opportunities to evaluate and operationalize this framework in other political contexts.

The brand alignment model extends current branding theory first by building on an understanding of the complexities of creating brand meaning, second, by operationalizing differences between the brand and how it is interpreted by the electorate, finally, by identifying if internal divisions within the political party pose a threat to the consistency of the brand.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on one of the key complexities of collaboration and co-operative working in the public service within the UK.

The paper focuses the attention on the difficulty of partnership working at a time when leading collaboration is a necessity for all leaders in the public sector. It explores one area of this complexity, namely game theory in order to offer an explanation why departments or organisations find it difficult to co-operate as they should.

The paper allows leaders to understand the complexities of co-operation and the reason why there is often a tendency for individuals to act in a selfish manner on behalf of their organisation. Being aware of this behaviour will provide leaders with a greater ability to build trust and develop joint strategies which will provide positive outcomes.

The paper will highlight how greater understanding of game theory including the prisoner dilemma and the stag hunt can help improve leadership, relationships and outcomes within partnerships.

This study aims to understand how three political leaders – the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu; the Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron; and the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama – communicate through Twitter.

This paper presents an analysis of tweets produced between August and October 2010 by three political leaders, using statistical descriptive analysis and content analysis.

The research shows that the US President tweets more than the other leaders, with the British Prime Minister tweeting the least, and that all three leaders use Twitter for both transparency and outreach.

As Twitter has become widespread over the last few years, and several studies have focused on Twitter and its impact on different sectors in our society, it is interesting to focus on political leaders' use of Twitter.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how values from within Abrahamic religions could be adopted to improve liberal market economies’ (LMEs’) corporate governance business practices.

The concept of spiritual capitalism is explained from an Islamic perspective by adopting three universal Abrahamic values to critically analyse LMEs and offer an ethical alternative to current capitalism concerns.

It is found that LMEs can be improved by considering all stakeholders, putting ethics before economics, and introducing shared risk/reward plus lower debt.

The paper compares LMEs/Co‐ordinated market economies (CMEs)/Islamic countries economies (ICEs) within an ethical framework for LMEs.

The successful identification and management of environmental risks remains one of the most important challenges facing mankind. The global nature of environmental risks makes the assumption and practice of environmental responsibility difficult. This paper aims to examine the nature of this difficulty, arguing that although environmental responsibility remains global, it is situated and practiced at the local level.

Using a case study methodology, the paper examines three family dairy farms in Belsize, New South Wales, Australia. Repeated interviews with adult members of the farming families explored their perspectives of the past, present and future of the farm, eliciting rich narratives about relationships between farm, environment, community and individual, and the role that responsibility plays in negotiating these relationships.

Environmental responsibility is established as multi‐faceted, and negotiated between social actors as one of myriad other, competing responsibilities. Responsibility is positioned as a critical factor in the generation and maintenance of social relationships, but one which is often mobilized as a mechanism of governance. The paper argues that this can result in tension for some social actors.

This paper positions responsibility generally, and environmental responsibility in particular, as situated on the junction between local and global networks. This occurs as a result of the intrusion of the global into the local, and the corresponding need for individuals to act on the global stage through the medium of their local contexts. In managing the changes in behavior and identity necessary to do this successfully, responsibility is identified as one means of establishing social identity and group members, and a way of defining specific social roles.

This paper aimed to focus on political marketing and utilised a number of projective techniques to explore the UK Conservative Party’s “brand image” amongst young adults aged 18-24 years. There is little guidance in the extant literature regarding projective technique analysis. Furthermore, there are explicit calls for insight and more understanding into the analytical process. Responding to this identified gap in the literature, this paper provides an illustrative guide that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques.

This paper opted for an exploratory study using focus group discussions, combined with qualitative projective techniques. Eight two-hour focus group discussions were conducted with 46 young citizens aged 18-24 years from three locations in England. Focus groups were conducted prior to the 2010 UK General Election. The data from the projective techniques were thematically analysed by the researcher.

This research provides insight into the broad process used to analyse and interpret the qualitative projective expressions in relation to the UK Conservative Party’s brand image from the perspective of young adults. Furthermore, this paper highlights that projective techniques can provide an insight into underlying feelings and deep-seated attitudes towards political parties, candidates and the positive and negative aspects of brand image.

Several limitations became apparent at the end of this study. As this is a qualitative study, findings cannot be generalisable to the wider population. Additionally, it is important to note that the researcher had limited experience of conducting focus group discussions combined with projective techniques, and this can be considered a limitation. Nevertheless, the researcher did attend professional “effective depth interviewing” training delivered by the “Marketing Research Society” before data collection. This goes some way in addressing this limitation.

This paper provides an illustrative guide and insight into the analytical process that can be used to analyse and interpret findings generated from qualitative projective techniques. This can be used by academics with little experience of projective techniques. Furthermore, this framework may be useful for practitioners such as marketers, political parties and candidates to explore and analyse the external image of other political brands. The elicitation ability of qualitative projective techniques facilitates greater expressive insight that may remain hidden if traditional direct data collection tools such as interviews and questionnaires are used.

This paper provides some understanding into how to analyse subjective meaning such as feelings, attitudes, perceptions and associations revealed through projective techniques. Furthermore, projective techniques can provide access to the private conscious and unconscious inner-world of the participant. They allow respondents to express themselves with greater detail and discussion compared with direct questioning. This research, therefore, presents greater insight in managing and analysing expressions generated from this non-intrusive approach that can encourage open disclosure with less hesitancy, verbally less demanding and suitable to overcome emotional, language and cultural barriers.

This paper adds to the under-researched and undefined practice of analysing projective expressions by providing an illustrative process to interpret and understand insight generated from qualitative projective techniques. Thus, answers the explicit calls for detailed guidance in this area of research. This was achieved by critically reviewing and adapting the approaches taken by Boddy, 2005, Butler-Kisber, 2010 and Hofstede et al., 2007 and incorporating them into a pragmatic systematic framework. This research could be used as a foundation for future studies and a point of reference for people with limited knowledge of projective technique analysis.

At the 2009 Devos economic forum on the global financial crisis, David Cameron, then leader of the British Conservative Party and now Britain's Prime Minister, called for embracing a “moral capitalism.” The purpose of this paper is to consider the insights into a moral framework for the modern economic order that might be drawn from natural religions perceived by Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen.

A review of the two perceptions of natural religions provide the basis for assessing their compatibilities with the type of competitive market economy that Smith observed in the eighteenth century, and with a modern market economy of large corporate enterprises and global financial markets. Particular attention is given to reforms that curb the practices that led to the global financial crisis.

Smith's “pure and rational” natural religion has been interpreted as being compatible with the type of competitive market economy that he analyzed in Wealth of Nations. Veblen's natural religion of “Christian morals” had a natural rights analogue in the ethics of a competitive market economy in which market relationships were heavily influenced by production resting heavily on personal skills of craftsmen and trade relying on the honesty of small merchants.

The primary focus is on reforms in those aspects of the financial sector of the modern market system that have been associated with the current global financial crisis. What the two natural religions might suggest in the nature of broader socio‐economic reforms, e.g. corporate governance issues, would require a much larger study.

While debates over a “moral capitalism” will be influenced doctrinal stances of institutional religions, sectarian differences may be bridged by considering natural religions that are rational and rest on the principle of fair play and mutual service.

Because of the attention that has been given to Smith's and Veblen's critical commentaries on institutional religions, the paper shows that their perceptions of natural religions and how those religions might relate to the economic order are easily overlooked.