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Scholars have focused their attention on systemic reform as a way to support instructional coherence. These efforts are often layered on to existing social relationships between school staff that are rarely taken into account when enacting reform. Social network theory posits that the structure of social relationships may influence the direction, speed, and depth of organizational change and therefore may provide valuable insights in the social forces that may support or constrain reform efforts. This study aims to discuss this issue.

This mixed‐methods exploratory case study examined five schools within one under‐performing school district as it enacted a system‐wide reform. Quantitative survey data were collected to assess social networks and teacher work perception of five schools enacting the reform. Qualitative data were gathered through individual interviews from educators within representative grade levels as a way to better understand the diffusion and implementation of the reform.

Despite being enacted as a system‐wide reform effort, the results suggest significant variance within and between schools in terms of reform‐related social networks. These networks were significantly related to the uptake, depth, and spread of the change. Densely connected grade levels were also associated with more interactions focused on teaching and learning and an increased sense of grade level efficacy.

The findings underline the importance of attending to relational linkages as a complementary strategy to the technical emphasis of reform efforts, as social networks were found to significantly facilitate or constrain reform efforts. Implications and recommendations are offered for leadership, policy and practice that may support the design and implementation of reforms, which may ultimately increase student performance.

The study makes a unique contribution to the reform literature by drawing on social network theory as a way to understand efforts at reform. The work suggests that the informal social linkages on which reform is layered may support or constrain the depth of reform.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an emerging approach in research on school leadership, within the framework of the “International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP)”, where one of the three key research strands is “Principals’ identities”.

The paper responds, from a biographical-narrative approach, to knowledge about the impact of the Spanish model of school management on the professional identity of school principals. It analyses the biographical interviews of 15 school principals, through a process of structuring and categorizing the data collected, applying content analysis.

The dimensions of the principals’ identities emerge in different categories: personal identity, professional identity (internal perspective), professional identity (external perspective), social identity, professionalization and dual identity.

The authors studied identities in a project entitled “Successful school principals”, understanding that successful leadership practices largely depend on headteachers’ identities. That is, when the identities are weak and unstable, with a poor identification with the managerial tasks and functions, and not recognised by the teaching staff, the school will probably be unsuccessful. On the contrary, when there are headteachers with a strong professional identity, the authors want to show that there is a positive impact on improvement of results. In the future, in the development of the research project, the authors aim to verify the relationship between headteachers’ identities and educational improvement.

The knowledge gained in our study would enable us to reimagine lines in order to increase the professionalization and identities of headteachers, redesigning work contexts in ways which can strengthen fragile and unstable identities. Finally, the implications of the study in relation to future research can be summarised by the following ideas.

Understanding the world of the lives (lebenswelt) of Spanish headteachers means adopting a hermeneutic approach, observing the self-interpretation comments expressed by the subjects, where the temporal and biographical dimensions occupy a key role. The authors understand professional identity as a socially constructed and personally created experience with its own meanings, feelings and intentions. Therefore, it is logical to use, for data collection, individual interviews which explore the school context and the impact which it has on those subjects who are part of the professional environment. In addition, the authors have the intention of following up the study of identities.

It formulates, first, the theoretical framework for the professional identity from a narrative approach, linked – at the same time – to the practice of leadership, as an interactive relationship with the other members of the school. Successful leadership practices depend to a large degree on strong principals’ identities. Finally, the results are discussed, and future lines are proposed to articulate and strengthen the identity of school principals in Spain.

The purpose of this paper is to generate a virtual knee angle reference to be followed by a knee prosthesis control, using an adaptive central pattern generator (CPG). Also, to study the feasibility of this approach to implement a continuous control strategy on the prosthesis.

A CPG based on amplitude controlled phase oscillators (ACPOs) to track the current percentage of gait cycle on the prosthesis is proposed. Then, the virtual knee angle reference is generated along gait cycle, by interpolation with the corresponding angle of a sound knee. The structure and coupling of the CPG, as well as the control strategy are presented.

The coupling of the CPG with real gait on the prosthesis was proven, regardless of gait speed. Also, it was found that the maximum knee angle reached during walking is proportional to gait speed. Finally, generation of virtual knee angle reference to be followed by a prosthesis is demonstrated.

As only one event detected along gait cycle was used to update the CPG phase, the response to gait speed changes might be slow. Updating the CPG with more events remains for a future work.

The coupling of the CPG with real gait on the prosthesis results in a continuous gait cycle tracker, useful for any control strategy to be applied.

It is the first time a bio‐inspired concept as CPGs is applied to the prosthetic field. This could mean the beginning of a new era of cybernetic prostheses, which reproduce the lost limb and also the control functions of it.

The majority stockholders are not the same as parent company stockholders in a consolidated entity when one or more subsidiaries own parent company’s shares. In this milieu, the allocation of income could be performed: a) among majority and minority stockholders; b) among parent company stockholders and minority stockholders. Considering minority interest as a component of the consolidated equity, this paper demonstrates how the criterion used to allocate income can influence on the consolidated financial statements and, thereby, analysis based these financial statements.

This chapter intends to make an extended periodization of economic discussions that have taken place in Latin America throughout its history. The task is ambitious; we begin, however, with the periodization elaborated by Oreste Popescu, which we then expand and modify. As educators, we still have to work on the training of Latin American economists, due to the lack of knowledge they have not only about the region as a whole, but also of the economic debates that took place within it. This work is a first approximation and provocation aimed to jumpstart a discussion on these issues.

“When James Boswell returned from a tour of Corsica in 1765 he wrote: ‘It is indeed amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known.’ The same might be said today of Puerto Rico.” Thus began Millard Hansen and Henry Wells in the foreword to their 1953 look at Puerto Rico's democratic development. Four decades later, the same could again be said about the island.

When the 13 colonies in North America, the slave colony of Saint-Domingue, and the colonial territories of the Portuguese and Spanish Americas all rose against their imperial rulers, a new postcolonial order seemingly emerged in the Western Hemisphere. The reality of this situation forced political theorists and practitioners of the early 19th century to rethink the way in which they envisioned the nature and dynamics of international order. But a careful analysis of this shift reveals that it was not the radical break with prior notions of sovereignty and territoriality, often described in the literature. This was not the emergence of a new postimperial system of independent, nationally anchored states. Rather, it reflected a creative rethinking of existing notions of divided sovereignty and composite polities, rife with political experiments – from the formation of a new multi-centered empire in North America to the quasi-states and federations of Latin America. This moment of political experimentation and postcolonial order-making presented a distinctly new world repertoire of empire and state-building, parts of which were at least as violent and authoritarian as those of the old world empires it had replaced. The most radical ideas of freedom and liberty, championed by the black republic of Haiti, remained marginalized and sidelined by more conservative powers on both sides of the Atlantic.