Search results

What kinds of changes do mentoring programs initiate for children and their schools? According to a study by Public/Private Ventures which specializes in social policy, just under half of mentoring programs are based at a particular site (Herrera, 1999). Schools are the most common site recognized. Schools purchase the mentoring program examined in the study to follow. Adults work with children primarily on academic activities and they are paid to do so. The school pays half of the cost of the NSCC (National School and Community Corp) program and federal funds provide the remaining support. Herrera (1999, p. 11) has argued the most direct benefit of school-based programs is the mentor's integration into the school environment and the role of advocate that the mentor can play. Advocacy has been recognized as the critical task performed by mentors. As advocate, mentors develop a relationship with a child, which advances youth development and deters youth detrimental behavior (Herrera, 1999). This singular relationship, the advocate mentor and child, is challenged by research that follows. The advocate mentor recognizes a socialization model used in studying children that assumes the mentor as the active role taker shaping the child as passive recipient of mentoring. This model relies on an adult perspective, assuming the child to be an empty vessel serving as clay to be shaped (Waksler, 1994). Waksler (1994) has criticized this model, arguing that children must be taken seriously as a topic of study – not as objects of socialization. The interpretive model of childhood development by contrast is more useful for examining the data gathered in the following study. Rather than focus on the advocate mentor in relationship with a child, the interpretive model recognizes the child as actor and highlights the range of peer relationships sponsored through mentoring activities. This collective view as contrasted with the singular relationship assumes a different perspective on childhood development.

This chapter seeks to identify the challenges faced by virtual teams and offers solutions to meet those challenges. Basic underlining concepts behind virtual teams are provided along with the most popular forms of virtual teams. Organizational, crowdsourcing, and peer production/online communities are the most common forms of virtual teams. Understanding these basic concepts will help HRD and HRM professionals to develop virtual teams that are suitable for middle- and low-skilled workers. The chapter also presents the various types of communication technologies used in virtual along with the pros and cons associated with each type.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how social media features enable crowdsourcing and to gain rich understanding of mechanisms that lead from online community design practices to success in crowdsourcing initiatives.

Inductive qualitative methods were used for investigating the case of crowdsourcing-based microstock business model. Twenty-three in-depth interviews with stock photography industry insiders were combined with netnography data and documents.

Two mechanisms influencing participants’ motivation and peer-to-peer learning were identified. Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are important for participants’ engagement.

Findings of this inductive effort should be replicated in other industry settings and used to develop testable propositions of antecedents and outcomes of crowdsourcing implementations.

Companies embarking on crowdsourcing initiatives can enhance participants’ motivations through social media and enable learning through online communities. Managers must understand who participates in the crowd and what their motivation is.

This study is investigating under-researched peer-vetted creative production crowdsourcing model. Managers can use presented ideas for developing crowdsourcing online communities.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework – the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model – to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).

This study examines the variety of cooperative strategies used to organize the international co-production of motion pictures. Motion picture production is a high-goal singularity, project-based industry in which the structure of relationships between companies involved in cooperative strategies is highly visible. Working from existing theories of co-production and drawing on the strategic joint ventures literature, I examine archival data, first for evidence of the strategies predicted by theory, and then for project participation strategies that theory does not account for. I identify four strategies on the basis of the ways that firms participate in international co-productions. A large number of relatively short-lived firms enact strategies of supplying resources and skills to the persistent firms dominate the industry. Two types of persistent firms cooperate with both direct competitors and complementors but pursue different markets, whereas a third type avoids cooperation with peers. The observed strategies constitute a hierarchy of strategic roles, and thus demonstrate the complexity of strategic behavior involved in project-based production.

This paper investigates the adoption, structure, and function of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Whereas grievance procedures in unionized workplaces have been an important area of study in the field of industrial relations, research on dispute resolution procedures in nonunion workplaces has lagged behind. As a result, our knowledge of the development of nonunion procedures remains relatively limited. Similarly, with a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Lewin, 1987, 1990), our knowledge of workplace grievance activity is almost entirely based on research conducted in unionized settings. Given the major differences in the institutional contexts of union and nonunion workplaces in the United States, existing ideas about workplace dispute resolution developed in the unionized setting will likely require significant modification in order to understand dispute resolution procedures and activity in the nonunion workplace. Issues relating to dispute resolution in the nonunion workplace are of increasing importance to public policy given the combination of continued stagnation in levels of union representation and mounting concerns over rising levels of employment litigation in the courts. Knowing what nonunion dispute resolution procedures look like and how they function will help answer the question of what role these procedures may play in the future governance of the workplace.

This chapter investigates children’s play and social interactions in a multilingual preschool context where the lingua franca (common language) is English. This investigation follows the experiences of one child for whom English is a second language (L2). The analytic focus explores how the child gains access and participation in play activities in relation to the peer culture of the group.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis approaches, this chapter offers turn-by-turn analysis to show how the children’s interactions unfold and identifies children’s interactional approaches as they enter play and make friends. Particular attention is focused on how one of the children manages his attempts at entry into the peer group’s games using the building blocks.

The close detailed analysis of one extended episode highlighted the co-produced nature of interaction. The findings identify a repertoire of four resources used by one of the L2 children within the peer group, to access play activities in the building space: (1) linguistic resources of requests, such as “Can I play?” “Are you building?”; (2) “tailing” others closely; (3) references to the moral obligations of being a best friend; and (4) using objects as resources for entry. While the analytic focus is on one child’s strategies, analysis considers this child’s individual actions in relation to his peers. What is made apparent is that children’s uptake and participation in peer interaction is dependent on the social agenda and the local aspects of peer culture, not solely on children's language proficiency.

Attention to how children employ strategies to play and understanding the local conditions of peer culture can assist educators to support children’s attempts for participation and friendship in multilingual early years settings.