Search results

The purpose of this paper is to address the benefits of a participatory approach to autism research, demonstrating the positive effects of giving autistic project assistants (PAs) the opportunity to design and undertake a project researching the experiences of autistic university students.

A participatory approach was implemented, engaging autistic university students as research assistants. All the research team except project co-ordinators were autistic. Undergraduate autistic students developed and conducted a set of semi-structured interviews, with two autistic alumni responsible for data analysis and both scheduling and moderating focus groups. Participation in dissemination of the findings was open to all.

The results included in this paper reflect a portion of the overall findings, specifically regarding the participatory approach. The findings of the study indicate the perceptions of respondents being interviewed by autistic researchers in relation to their shared understanding, facilitating positive feelings and a sense of rapport in the interview process. The PAs were able to improve their research skills through the project, which contributed constructively to their CV and allowed them to feel more positive about being autistic, and specifically about being an autistic researcher.

This paper is one of the first to discuss the challenges and benefits of including autistic participant researchers at all stages of the research project, including research design, data collection, analysis and dissemination, being co-written by both project co-ordinators and autistic project researchers.

The aim of this paper is to explore the support that project managers receive from construction project-based organisations (PBOs) in their early careers.

Fifty-seven semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with four key stakeholder groups including early career project managers (ECPMs) and employers from Australian construction PBOs, project management professional bodies, and university educators to ascertain (1) what organizations are currently doing and (2) what organizations can do better to support project managers in their early careers.

Thematic analysis revealed that construction PBOs' responsibilities to ECPMs entailed: (1) providing mentoring, (2) offering training, (3) collaborating with universities, (4) giving time and feedback and (5) assigning manageable workloads. However, the findings revealed inconsistencies in companies enacting these responsibilities.

This research is limited to the context of the Australian construction industry, yet the findings shed valuable insights into the current practices of construction PBOs in supporting ECPMs. From a strategic resource-based view perspective, ECPMs have the potential to serve as long-term valuable organizational resources. Failure to invest in new professional entrants constitutes an area of untapped competitive advantage.

Construction PBOs looking to better support their ECPMs may use the results of this research as a guide to tailor their early career professional development initiatives.

The study adopts a holistic, multi-vocal approach by interviewing four key stakeholder groups. The findings contribute new insights into the role of construction PBOs in supporting ECPMs and the implications this has on the sustainability of their project management talent pool.

The purpose of this paper is to determine systematically the broader relationship between news media sentiment, extracted through textual analysis of articles published by leading US newspapers, and the securitized real estate market.

The methodology is divided into two stages. First, roughly 125,000 US newspaper article headlines from Bloomberg, The Financial Times, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal are investigated with a dictionary-based approach, and different measures of sentiment are created. Second, a vector autoregressive framework is used to analyse the relationship between media-expressed sentiment and REIT market movements over the period 2005–2015.

The empirical results provide significant evidence for a leading relationship between media sentiment and future REIT market movements. Furthermore, applying the dictionary-based approach for textual analysis, the results exhibit that a domain-specific dictionary is superior to a general dictionary. In addition, better results are achieved by a sentiment measure incorporating both positive and negative sentiment, rather than just one polarity.

In connection with fundamentals of the REIT market, these findings can be utilised to further improve the understanding of securitized real estate market movements and investment decisions. Furthermore, this paper highlights the importance of paying attention to new media and digitalization. The results are robust for different REIT sectors and when conventional control variables are considered.

This paper demonstrates for the first time, that textual analysis is able to capture media sentiment from news relevant to the US securitized real estate market. Furthermore, the broad collection of newspaper articles from four different sources is unique.

This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning.

The paper provides a reflexive case study of the design, content and impact of a course on eco-justice that integrates relational learning with an equity and justice lens. The reflexive case study provides a critical, exploratory self-assessment, including interviews, group discussions and surveys with key stakeholders and course participants.

The results show how relational approaches can support transformative learning for sustainability and provide concrete practices, pathways and recommendations for curricula development that other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.

Sustainability research, practice and education generally focuses on structural or systemic factors of transformation (e.g. technology, governance and policy) without due consideration as to how institutions and systems are shaping and shaped by the transformation of personal agency and subjectivity. This presents a vast untapped and under-studied potential for addressing deep leverage points for change by using a relational approach to link personal, societal and ecological transformations for sustainability.

The purpose of this study is to collect data that allows researchers to capture both affective and cognitive buy-in influenced by both product and product strategy targets.

Analysis of 13 salesperson interviews followed the cluster and axial coding of grounded theory interview protocol.

This study finds two types of buy-in that are uniquely contingent on the target, and for which are influenced by both cognitive and affective states of being. Additionally, it finds that either affective or cognitive states of being can both drive and inhibit salesperson buy-in of either target. While the targets of buy-in appear to be mutually exclusive, the cognitive nature of disconfirming evidence appears to directly inhibit both targets of buy-in while also resulting in negative affect.

Further study that uncovers the causal role of an affective state inhibiting buy-in after the introduction of disconfirming evidence is warranted.

Managerial training and messaging approaches for achieving the two buy-in targets will likely differ or focus on only one type for efficient training.

This study is the first to examine the simultaneous effects of the two underlying states of cognition and affect on buy-in development. It is found that the two states can influence each other to stunt buy-in. The present study contributes to sales behavior literature by allowing the possibility of a sequence of states that stunt buy-in, positioning simultaneous examination is vital to the conceptualization of buy-in.

Procurement of public infrastructure that is fit for purpose partly depends on the competencies of procurement personnel. In many developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Nigeria, there is a deficit in the quantity and quality of infrastructure and their procurement is further riddled with deficiencies in the capacity of public procuring entities. The purpose of this study was to ascertain the critical skills development needs of public personnel involved in the procurement of infrastructure in Nigeria.

Based on a quantitative research strategy, this study sought to address the knowledge gap through a survey of public infrastructure procurement personnel (n = 288) in different tiers of government (i.e. state and local government) and geopolitical contexts (north and south) in Nigeria.

Of the 45 procurement skill areas operationalised, there is need for further development in 38 of them including: computing/ICT; problem-solving; communication; decision-making; health and safety management; quality management; relationship management; team building; project monitoring and evaluation; time management and procurement planning.

A key implication of this study is for policymakers in state and local government to formulate and implement infrastructure procurement capacity development reforms that address the competency gaps of procurement personnel. Such reforms need to take into account the suitable methods for developing procurement competencies. Additionally, the procurement skill areas operationalised in this capacity assessment study could serve as a useful blueprint for studying capacity deficiencies amongst public infrastructure procurement personnel in other developing countries.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the utility of a postcolonial feminist girlhood studies approach to investigate, and better understand, how corporate-funded sport, gender and development (SGD) programs that adhere to the “Girl Effect” mantra take up: (1) the alleged benefits of SGD programming; (2) its (embodied) neoliberal tendencies; and (3) issues around gender and cultural difference in North-South aid relations.

This study uses qualitative methods, including 35 semi-structured interviews with staff members and young women, in order to investigate how a SGD program in Eastern Uganda that is funded by a Sport Transnational Corporation (STNC) and an International NGO used martial arts to build girls’ self-defense skills and address gender-based, sexual, and domestic violence.

Three major findings are revealed, including: (1) the martial arts program improved young women’s confidence levels, physical fitness, leadership capabilities, and social networks; (2) Western donors tended to use and frame sport (i.e., martial arts) as paramount for educating and training Ugandan young women to be (neoliberal) global “girl” citizens; and (3) issues of representation, racialized subjectivity, and cultural difference in SGD adversely influenced aid relations.

Evidence from this chapter suggests that it is crucial to question how global neoliberal development, as promoted via SGD practices, is not only racialized and classed, but also distinctly gendered. Infusing girlhood studies with a postcolonial feminist perspective enables a deconstruction, and attendance to, the ways in which colonial legacies, neoliberal processes, and the political resistance of development practices are taken up, and impelled by, SGD programs.

This study aims to explore the influence of internal and external factors on the entrepreneurial performance of rural indigenous women entrepreneurs (RIWEs) in Sarawak.

The study uses a qualitative approach in data collection and analysis. Data are collected by means of a semistructured interview from 19 RIWEs at rural areas in Sarawak. Data are then analyzed using thematic analysis in NVivo software.

The study finds that RIWEs’ decision to start their business is mainly motivated by pull factors such as ego to succeed, ability to be self-employed and financially independent and to contribute to household income. The important personality traits of RIWEs to succeed in the entrepreneurial venture include self-belief, perseverance, commitment and risk-taking. Functional competencies and relationship competencies are cited as the most important core competencies to succeed. In terms of external factors, social networks, financial resources and support, business training and workshops and government’s preferential treatment policies are found to be important to RIWE’s entrepreneurial success.

This study is one of the few that explores the determinants of successful RIWEs in an emerging economy.

This paper compares the work values of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) millennials with their parents.

The Chinese version of the multidimensional work ethic profile (1. productive use of time; 2. centrality of work; 3. hard work; 4. delay of gratification; 5. leisure; 6. self-reliance; and 7. moral reasoning) was used to survey PRC millennials and their parents. A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for comparing work values for a subsample of 68 same-gender parent/child dyads. A one-way ANOVA was used for comparing the work values of the total sample of 217 PRC millennials and their parents.

The repeated measures ANOVA found that one of the seven work values for the male dyads and three of the seven work values for the female dyads were significantly different. The one-way ANOVA found that four of the seven work values for males grouping and five of the seven work values for the females grouping were significantly different.

Social norms and socialization by parents may moderate the influences of changing social conditions on personal values formation predicted by the theory of generations. Researchers need to sample across demographic and socioeconomic subgroups to understand subgroup differences when conducting cross-generational research. Taking large samples, aggregating data and drawing conclusions about cross-generational values may not be a valid approach in trying to understand the complexity of cross-generational values differences.

Managers should be wary of broad declarations about cross-generational values differences. The differences in generational values are nuanced.

This paper shows when controlling for same-gender parents, cross-generational values are very similar. This contrasts other findings on cross-generational values.