Search results

Schooling expansion is typically operationalized as the proportion of the population attending and the number of years attained; however, expansion can also be examined through new fields of study. Early childhood education entered the university as occupational training and has grown into a legitimate field of study. For example, an analysis of the expansion of early childhood papers and topics in scientific journal articles shows a slow steady rise before a dramatic increase in the 1956–2021 time period. The expansion of early childhood education as a field has been synergistic with the process of academization. Training in the occupation of early childhood education started first in its country of origin and then moved to independent training programs and normal schools in the United States before landing in four-year institutions that include everything from small colleges to large universities.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

The purpose of this study is to understand user perceptions and misconceptions regarding security tools. Security and privacy-preserving tools (for brevity, the authors term them as “security tools” in this paper, unless otherwise specified) are designed to protect the security and privacy of people in the digital environment. However, inappropriate use of these tools can lead to unexpected consequences that are preventable. Hence, it is significant to examine why users do not understand the security tools.

The authors conducted a qualitative study with 40 participants in the USA to investigate the prevalent misconceptions of people regarding security tools, their perceptions of data access and the corresponding impact on their usage behavior and data protection strategies.

While security vulnerabilities are often rooted in people’s internet usage behavior, this study examined user’s mental models of the internet and unpacked how the misconceptions about security tools relate to those mental models.

Based on the findings, this study offers recommendations highlighting the design aspects of security tools that need careful attention from researchers and industry practitioners, to alleviate users’ misconceptions and provide them with accurate conceptual models toward the desired use of security tools.