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This chapter aims to seek insight into engagement in context, conceived through Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE), which can be perceived as a condition for sustained disciplinary and interdisciplinary interest and motivation. Despite ongoing trends in the design and implementation of enriched learning environments that are expected to boost effective use of material and digital tools along with new sources of information, the empirical research on their motivational and emotional consequences is still in its infancy. These environments challenge, cognitively as well as motivationally, emotionally, and socially, both students and teachers alike. Keeping in mind the challenging times for future learning and work-life, engagement and motivation are discussed with a focus on science disciplines. In these fields, there is a strong call for proficient skills in collaborative team learning, problem-solving, and collective knowledge creation in anticipation of an uncertain, challenging future. Knowledge-intensive work and knowledge demands are escalating along with fast technological development, and simultaneously tasks that demand new, not yet even existing and partly unpredicted knowledge and expertise are increasing. In addition, knowledge and expertise are progressively more distributed, with new knowledge, products and innovations being created in collaboration that crosses disciplinary borders. In this chapter, three case illustrations in different science fields and learning contexts provide empirical evidence for the discussion on the learned lessons from these illustrated studies designed to support PDE, and the potential significance of PDE for productive collaboration, sustained disciplinary interest, and motivation given later development of adaptive expertise.

A growing body of education research considers practices; however, there is less focus on a methodology that enables practical analysis of practices. Use of practice theory is growing, particularly in work and organisational studies, but practice-focused studies more frequently address theoretical than methodological agenda. This chapter proposes a practice-focused, constructivist grounded theory methodology as one approach which can address this gap. After first considering the ways in which, separately and in combination, practice-theory and constructivist grounded theory can support higher education leadership and management research, the chapter considers implementation of this methodology by drawing on a study into the practice of authority in higher education leadership. It concludes by considering some implications for the ways in which practices can be understood and the affordances and limitations of this methodology.

In a multicase qualitative study, inclusive school leaders attempted to move their schools from the excessive use of suspension; they employed positive behavioral intervention and support (PBIS) as an alternative they thought would be therapeutic rather than punitive. However, the PBIS system traded a disciplinary system of control for a medicalized system of restoring order. Unwanted behavior came to be defined as evidence of possible behavioral disability. Hence, the PBIS system exchanged one deficit identity of “disorderly” student for another of “disordered” student, subsuming other considerations of race, class, and gender identity. Following the study’s findings, this chapter proposes more liberatory practices for PBIS that interrupt dominant culture discourses of normal behavior and power, and hold promise for establishing justice, rather than simply reinstating order.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

This chapter seeks to contribute to an ongoing discussion about Asian Canadian identities, model minority stereotypes, and structural racism against Asian Canadian youth in the Canadian education system. Using a Bourdieusian lens, this narrative study explores how to understand the experiences of Asian Canadian youth who are streamed into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)-related occupational trajectories. Using data obtained from semi-structured interviews, I explore how streaming in high schools affects the identity formation of these youth. I argue there is an insight to be gained by paying closer attention to homologies between racial tensions and disciplinary tensions within the public school system. Doing so opens up new ways of framing and recognizing partial and diffuse acts of resistance among Asian Canadian youth who would otherwise appear to have internalized dominant stereotypes and norms.

School disciplinary actions have numerous goals, including teaching social skills, promoting peer mediation, and increasing community involvement (Garnes & Menlove, 2003). Many school disciplinary actions are based upon behavior management principles, with consequences administered for behavior that is dangerous, disruptive, socially inappropriate, or incompatible with good academic deportment. Discipline often takes the form of punishment and is intended to quickly reduce undesirable behavior. Contingency management methods include detention, suspension, and expulsion (Turnbull, Wilcox, & Stowe, 2002).

I want to read the controversies and scandals surrounding Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) within a critical pedagogical, discourse. Ethics are pedagogies of practice. IRBs are institutional apparatuses that regulate a particular form of ethical conduct, a form that may be no longer workable in a transdisciplinary, global, and postcolonial world. I seek a progressive performative cultural politics that enacts a performance ethics based on feminist, communitarian assumptions. I will attempt to align these assumptions with the call by First and Fourth World scholars for an indigenous research ethic (Smith, 1999; Bishop, 1998; Rains, Archibald, & Deyhle, 2000). This allows me to criticize the dominant biomedical and ethical model that operates in many North American universities today. I conclude with a preliminary outline of an indigenous, feminist, communitarian research ethic. This ethic has two implications. It would replace the current utilitarian ethical model that IRBs utilize. It argues for a two-track, or three-track IRB model within the contemporary university setting.

The chapter first draws concepts underlying legitimacy theory (Suchman, 1995) to provide a basis to understand alternative approaches to the development of ethical cultures in global organization. The chapter then illustrates the institutionalization of Codes of Ethics through a “management” approach drawing from Simon’s Levers of Control as a framework to contextualize experiences of a large global conglomerate. The chapter adopts the case approach, applying the case of the Tata Group to highlight the integration of external institutions into the institutionalization process. The management of business ethics (MBE) can provide a basis to institutionalize ethics in global firms to create an internal culture consistent with ethical goals of the corporations that may also be different from the external environment. The MBE includes the application of managerial techniques and information technology to institutionalize ethics in organizational culture. Management Accountants can have a significant role in supporting this endeavor, given their expertise in measurement and control. The code is only one aspect through which firms develop their identity. Information on the case was unevenly distributed. For example, there was voluminous information on the code and its implementation. Therefore, some subjectivity was necessary in selecting relevant items. The chapter, to my knowledge, provides unique insights into the theoretical and practical aspects of institutionalizing ethics in corporate cultures using Codes of Ethics.