Search results

1 – 5 of 5
Book part
Publication date: 18 September 2024

John Buchanan

Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for…

Abstract

Education tends to colonize. Established authorities (teachers, curricula, and examinations) instruct newcomers, extending conditional membership. This presents a dilemma for teachers seeking to instill in their students habits of critical, creative, and lateral thinking. In Australia as elsewhere, blueprint educational documents embody lofty aspirational statements of inclusion and investment in people and their potential. Yoked to this is a regime routinely imposing high-stakes basic-skills testing on school students, with increasingly constrictive ways of doing, while privileging competition over collaboration. This chapter explores more informal, organic learning. This self-study narrative inquiry explores my career in terms of a struggle to be my most evolved, enlightened self, as opposed to a small-minded, small-hearted mini-me. To balance this, I examine responsible autonomy (including my own), rather than freedom. This chapter also explores investment in humans, with the reasonable expectation of a return on that investment. It draws and reflects upon events in or impacting my hometown, Sydney, Australia, focusing largely on WorldPride, the Women's World Cup, and a referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament, all of which took place as I compiled this chapter. Accordingly, the narrative focuses primarily on sexuality, gender, and race. I explore the capacity of my surroundings to teach me and my capacity to learn from my surroundings. The findings and discussion comprise diary-type entries of significant events and their implications for (my) excessive entitlement. The final section of this chapter reviews what and how I have learned.

Details

After Excessive Teacher and Faculty Entitlement
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83797-877-9

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 September 2024

Lavagnon Ika, Jack Meredith and Ofer Zwikael

The performance of large-scale projects is often challenged due to major environmental changes that occur during their life. However, literature has paid little attention to the…

Abstract

Purpose

The performance of large-scale projects is often challenged due to major environmental changes that occur during their life. However, literature has paid little attention to the governance adaptations required to respond effectively to these changes. This paper aims to study changes in the project environment over time, the corresponding governance adaptations and their impact on project performance.

Design/methodology/approach

To ensure triangulation between two sources of evidence, we used both primary and secondary data sources and examined 14 projects through 2 studies, the first focused on seven documented, illustrative case projects and the second on interviews with senior and project managers involved in seven additional projects.

Findings

We found the key environmental changes that should trigger appropriate governance adaptations to be market evolutions, technological advancements and sociopolitical events. However, we also found that these necessary governance adaptations are not commonly implemented timely, sufficiently or effectively.

Originality/value

The paper distills the dynamics of large-scale projects in achieving project effectiveness and raises theoretical propositions on the combination of environmental changes and deficient governance adaptations that, over time, turns efficient projects into ineffective projects and discusses implications for theory and practice.

Details

International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1753-8378

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 16 September 2024

Natalie Le Clue

Some fairy tale characters have transcended their original fairy tale genre and their influence can be perceived in other fictional genres. One illustration of this is the…

Abstract

Some fairy tale characters have transcended their original fairy tale genre and their influence can be perceived in other fictional genres. One illustration of this is the character of Blue Beard. This story, written by Charles Perrault, was first published in 1697 (Hermansson, 2010, p. 2). It moved through several themes or topics from anxiety to money to the right of the husband and wives (Warner, 2014, p. 82). In Perrault's story, Blue Beard is conceived as a serial killer and a jealous husband. ‘Whatever the medium, whatever the date: in opera, cartoon, X-rated film or graphic novel, he is an archetypal serial murderer, terrifying and yet alluring’ (2015, p. 76).

The influence of this character and examples that carry, at the very least, remnants of Blue Beard can be clearly identified in several contemporary narratives. In the BBC television series The Fall (Cubitt, 2013), Jamie Dornan portrays a serial killer named Paul Spector. Alternatively known as the Belfast Strangler, Spector, like Blue Beard, has a wife and children who are unaware of his murderous spree. Another example of the attempted enforcement of extreme patriarchy can be seen in Cult, the seventh season of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story anthology series. The season is dedicated to the 2016 US election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton (Raddish, 2017). In this fictional narrative Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) symbolises toxic masculinity and models patriarchal archetypes to create a cult and become a senator.

Through a contextual post-structuralist analysis of the aforementioned characters, this chapter intends to examine the representation and evolution of male character under the umbrella of the fairy tale ‘man’.

Details

Gender and the Male Character in 21st Century Fairy Tale Narratives
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83753-789-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 7 October 2024

Kaixiao Jiang and Liam O'Callaghan

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the…

Abstract

This chapter explores how the development of football fandom for the Chinese national team and local football clubs is strongly associated with societal changes. Although the performances of Chinese football teams, especially the national team, have failed to impress the world, football remains the most popular because of millions of supporters with loyalty and passion. Most studies related to fans mainly focus on the economic and political implications of spectatorship along with the rise of China. Nevertheless, few articles are available to answer the fundamental questions, such as ‘When did these supporters come out?’ and ‘What were the factors of the development of fandom?’. By going through archival records and published documents over the last decades, this chapter offers a comprehensive and historical analysis of the development of football fandom in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and deals with these unanswered questions. As such, this chapter does not intend to be the most authoritative one but is one of the rare sources to lay down the foundation for research on Chinese football fandom. Furthermore, this chapter also proves that studies on football fandom can be a useful window for observing Chinese society.

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 13 September 2024

Malin Ågren

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual…

Abstract

Purpose

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual citizens to take more responsibility for their security.

Design/methodology/approach

A multimodal discursive approach drawing on multimodal narrative analysis of video clips and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is used to examine how the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated in video material published on Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency's (MSB’s) YouTube channel.

Findings

The study finds that the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated through an ongoing but evolving normalization of threat. The findings also show how responsibilization is legitimated in moralizing terms of individual contribution to society, which may indicate a return from neo-liberal values to more traditional Swedish collectivist values.

Originality/value

The study shows how communication around preparedness and responsibilization is discursively constructed and legitimated through multimodal features, while previous research has mainly focused on verbal or written communication.

Details

Corporate Communications: An International Journal, vol. 29 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1356-3289

Keywords

1 – 5 of 5