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1 – 10 of 22Alireza Moghayedi, Kathy Michell, Karen Le Jeune and Mark Massyn
Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT)…
Abstract
Purpose
Safety and security (S&S) are critical concerns in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, one of the country’s most crime-ridden cities. The University of Cape Town (UCT), situated on a large, open campus, has experienced increased malefaction. Facilities management (FM) services at universities bear the primary responsibility for providing S&S to their communities. To comprehensively understand and address the community’s demands regarding S&S, the current study was conducted to investigate the challenges specific to open universities. This study aims to determine whether implementing community-based FM (CbFM) principles and using technological innovations could offer a more effective and sustainable solution.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopted interpretivist overarching case study methodology, which is ontologically based. A mixed-method approach was used to incorporate the strengths and limitations of the weaknesses of both methods. The data collection took the form of an online survey of the university community and semi-structured interviews with university executive management to obtain data from the single case study of UCT. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used to identify emergent themes from the qualitative data.
Findings
The study presents an overall view of the provision of S&S at UCT, the unique challenges faced by management and the main S&S issues affecting the community. Moreover, the study reveals that UCT has implemented community participation processes in the past with limited success. This is because the strategies implemented constitute a narrow perspective of community participation. Therefore, a much smarter and more inclusive perspective using technological innovation is required for successful community participation to occur and to be successfully used in providing S&S toward achieving future-proofing facilities.
Originality/value
This research has demonstrated the influence of CbFM and innovative technologies on the S&S of the open campus. Hence, future-proof facilities can be achieved when FM actively engages university communities in managing campuses through technological innovation.
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Karen Spector and Elizabeth Anne Murray
Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to…
Abstract
Purpose
Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.
Design/methodology/approach
In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.
Findings
This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.
Originality/value
The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.
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Jill Frances Atkins, Federica Doni, Karen McBride and Christopher Napier
This paper seeks to broaden the agenda for environmental and ecological accounting research across several dimensions, extending the form of accounting in this field by…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to broaden the agenda for environmental and ecological accounting research across several dimensions, extending the form of accounting in this field by encouraging research into its historical roots and developing a definition of accounting that can address the severe environmental and ecological challenges of the 21st century.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors explored environmental and ecological accounts from the dawn of human consciousness across a wide variety of media and in a broad range of forms. This theoretical approach reacts to the cold capitalist commodification of nature inherent in much environmental accounting practice, which documents, values and records usage of natural capital with little attempt to address depletion and loss.
Findings
By analysing the earliest ecological and environmental “accounts” recorded by humans at the dawn of human consciousness, and considering a wide array of subsequent accounts, the authors demonstrate that rather than being a secondary, relatively recent development emerging from financial accounting and reporting, environmental and ecological accounting predated financial accounting by tens of thousands of years. This research also provides a wealth of perspectives on diversity, not only in forms of account but also in the diversity of accountants, as well as the broadness of the stakeholders to whom and to which the accounts are rendered.
Research limitations/implications
The paper can be placed at the intersection of accounting history, the alternative, interdisciplinary and critical accounts literature, and environmental and ecological accounting research.
Practical implications
Practically, the authors can draw ideas and inspiration from the historical forms and content of ecological and environmental account that can inform new forms of and approaches to accounting.
Social implications
There are social implications including the diversity of accounts and accountants derived from studying historical ecological and environmental accounts from the dawn of human consciousness especially in the broadening out of the authors' understanding of the origins and cultural roots of accounting.
Originality/value
This study concludes with a new definition of accounting, fit for purpose in the 21st century, that integrates ecological, environmental concerns and is emancipatory, aiming to restore nature, revive biodiversity, conserve species and enhance ecosystems.
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Leading up to and now living amid the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers are faced with strong incentives, even pressure to adopt and use digital technologies. Previous research has…
Abstract
Leading up to and now living amid the Covid-19 pandemic, teachers are faced with strong incentives, even pressure to adopt and use digital technologies. Previous research has focused on teaching with digital technologies as a matter of believing in their importance and receiving specific preparation for integration strategies. Further, teaching with technologies must appear “seamless” during instruction to not distract from what is regarded to be the more important subject matter knowledge. In this chapter, I review and problematize digital instruction focused on convincing teachers to integrate strategies that use digital technologies in a “seamless” way and then propose an alternative view emphasizing posthumanist, relational views of integrating digital technologies.
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César Augusto Ferrari Martinez
This chapter is dedicated to understanding the idea of international as a key notion to the development of globalisation and to promoting the rescaling of spaces and subjects in…
Abstract
This chapter is dedicated to understanding the idea of international as a key notion to the development of globalisation and to promoting the rescaling of spaces and subjects in contemporary higher education. The author discusses the concept of scale as a performative device that activates the capacities of bodies. Instead of seeing scale as a naturalised and hierarchical structure of spatial distribution, the author understands it as an ensemble of discourses and practices that produce scalar effects. Globalisation uses scale to promote the idea that subjects would become ‘international’ by being linked to privileged spaces and bodies in the Global North. In this sense, globalisation is not merely about nodes where certain flows converge. Rather, the author understands it as the political conditions that control and constrain the space for certain flows to occur and not others. Using assemblage analysis, the author presents and analyses three scenes taken from his ethnographic records that have as a guiding line the materialisation of the international. These scenes report the experience of being a Latin American doctoral student attending a congress in the United States, a tense situation experienced at a Chilean university academic event, and the unpretentious manifestation of an elaborate idea of internationality from a personal experience of a trip to India. The results point to three elaborations of the international: an optimistic view of a shared world, a geopolitical internationality and the production of a global corporeality.
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Haya Al-Dajani, Nupur Pavan Bang, Rodrigo Basco, Andrea Calabrò, Jeremy Chi Yeung Cheng, Eric Clinton, Joshua J. Daspit, Alfredo De Massis, Allan Discua Cruz, Lucia Garcia-Lorenzo, William B. Gartner, Olivier Germain, Silvia Gherardi, Jenny Helin, Miguel Imas, Sarah Jack, Maura McAdam, Miruna Radu-Lefebvre, Paola Rovelli, Malin Tillmar, Mariateresa Torchia, Karen Verduijn and Friederike Welter
This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and…
Abstract
Purpose
This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.
Design/methodology/approach
Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.
Findings
Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.
Originality/value
This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.
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Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted…
Abstract
Purpose
Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.
Design/methodology/approach
Personal museums are conceptualized as spaces of knowing in-formation, ontological openings that are literally and figuratively entered into, that make a difference to human and material ways of knowing. Karen Barad's agential realism and Sianne Ngai's vernacular aesthetic categories provide the theoretical lenses through which the researcher's 2018 visit to one personal museum is revisited.
Findings
An ethnographic account of the author's visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in Timişoara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of thinking about information and knowledge.
Originality/value
Human expressions of liking reveal material agencies as ways of knowing and information beyond the realm of human experience and meaning. A vernacular aesthetics of liking is presented as a way to resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This approach is one way of resisting the assumptions of channel thinking that often shape how information is studied.
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This paper aims to offer a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to offer a reflection on the alliance between accounting theory and social research in general, focussing on the conjunction of accounting theory and ethnography in particular.
Design/methodology/approach
The author builds on Stefan Hirschauer’s methodological reflections on ethnography and the “silence of the social” to briefly re-articulate some of the ideas the author had associated, in an earlier piece, with the investigation of tacit coordination in accounting.
Findings
Ethnography is an intrinsically theoretical practice and also a particular form of accounting. As such, it presents a paradigm case for how accounting theory builds on, and emerges from, social research in joint efforts of breaking the silence of the social. Ethnographic research, like the practice of accounting and social research more generally, is associated with a stewardship of silence and an “ethics of mattering” (Karen Barad), and accounting theory is an invitation to reflect on the underlying practices of (dis-)articulation.
Originality/value
The paper invites readers to engage with accounting practice as a topic of systematic theoretical interest in exploring how we put the world on the record, understand the choices we make in the process and the silences we let lie.
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