Search results

This chapter critiques the forceful institutionalization of gender mainstreaming into development programs.

The data was generated from literature review and a research-based case study of the World Bank’s Community-Based Rural Development Projects in a Ghanaian township using ethnographic research methods such as participant-observation, focus group discussion, and individual interviews.

Our study found that gender mainstreaming has become popular, with the majority of international development agencies, such as The World Bank, AusAID, USAID, and the UNDP, adopting it as an overarching framework for developing and delivering their programs and services. The concept has also made its way into government policies globally over the past decade and has a strong influence on aid projects, even on gender-neutral programs. Our ethnographic research revealed that it is problematic to simply use gender mainstreaming as a policy initiative. The research case study presented showed that, in their quest to involve women in decision-making processes in rural localities, officials who implemented the CBRDP targeted women, although improving gender equality (through the process of gender mainstreaming) was not an objective of the CBRDP project per se. As a result, the project was jeopardized, some local people misconceptualized the CBRDP as a “women’s empowerment initiative,” leading to apathy on the part of men, some of whom resented the CBRDP by preventing their wives and daughters from participating in it, ultimately causing a negative outcome.

We seek to alert international development organizations and practitioners that implementing gender mainstreaming programs and policies without considering local conditions and social relationships will fail to deliver the desired outcomes for the intended beneficiaries.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of seven variables that emerge from forensic research on facial-composite construction and naming using contemporary police systems: EvoFIT, Feature and Sketch.

The paper involves regression- and meta-analyses on composite-naming data from 23 studies that have followed procedures used by police practitioners for forensic face construction. The corpus for analyses contains 6,464 individual naming responses from 1,069 participants in 41 experimental conditions.

The analyses reveal that composites constructed from the holistic EvoFIT system were over four-times more identifiable than composites from “Feature” (E-FIT and PRO-fit) and Sketch systems; Sketch was somewhat more effective than Feature systems. EvoFIT was more effective when internal features were created before rather than after selecting hair and the other (blurred) external features. Adding questions about the global appearance of the face (as part of the holistic-cognitive interview (H-CI)) gives a valuable improvement in naming over the standard face-recall cognitive interview (CI) for all three system types tested. The analysis also confirmed that composites were considerably less effective when constructed from a long (one to two days) compared with a short (0-3.5 hours) retention interval.

Variables were assessed that are of importance to forensic practitioners who construct composites with witnesses and victims of crime.

Using a large corpus of forensically-relevant data, the main result is that EvoFIT using the internal-features method of construction is superior; an H-CI administered prior to face construction is also advantageous (cf. face-recall CI) for EvoFIT as well as for two further contrasting production systems.

The introduction of a three-quarter-view database in the PRO-fit facial-composite system has enabled an investigation into the effects of image view in face construction. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of constructing full-face and three-quarter-view composites under different encoding conditions. It also examines the potential value of three-quarter-view composites that can be generated automatically from a front-view composite. The authors also investigate whether there is an identification benefit for presenting full-face and three-quarter composites together.

Three experiments examine the impact of encoding conditions on composite construction and presentation of composites at the evaluation stage.

The work revealed that while standard full-face composites perform well when all views of the face have been encoded, care should be taken when a person has only seen one view. When a witness has seen a side view of a suspect, a three-quarter-view composite should be constructed. Also, it would be beneficial for a witness to construct two composites of a suspect, one in full-face view and one in a three-quarter-view, particularly when the witness has only encoded one view. No benefit emerged for use of three-quarter-view composites generated automatically.

This is the first study to examine viewpoint in facial composite construction. While a great deal of research has examined viewpoint dependency in face recognition tasks, composite construction is a reconstruction task involving both recall and recognition. The results indicate that there is a viewpoint effect that is similar to that described in the recognition literature. However, more research is needed in this area.

The practical implications of this research are that it is extremely important for facial composite operators in the field (police operators) to know who will make a good likeness of the target. Research such as this which examines real-life issues is incredibly important. This research shows that if a witness has seen all views of a perpetrator’s face then standard composite construction using a full-face view will work well. However, if they have only seen a single view then it will not.

There are obvious wider societal implications for any research which deals with eyewitness memory and the potential identification of perpetrators.

No research to date has formally examined the impact of viewpoint in facial-composite construction.

In 1995, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) launched the quantitative Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) in its Human Development Report (1999). The GEM has been a feature of this report ever since. In 2004/05, a group of researchers from Edith Cowan University (Perth, Australia) intended to rely on the GEM to study the experiences of factory women in two of Sri Lanka's Export Processing Zones (EPZs). The experience of this team – at the heart of this chapter – is that the quantitative measures of the GEM, particularly the specific ways in which it causes researchers to conceptualise gender and empowerment, are not adequate to understand the nuanced and complex processes of women's experiences in regards to empowerment. The team's experience caused it to question the relevance and utility of the GEM, and in turn, its sole reliance on a quantitative methodology. As a result, the researchers from Edith Cowan changed their original methodological approach and adopted a stronger qualitative emphasis. In turn, this provided a far more realistic insight into the concepts of gender and empowerment, and indeed the lived experiences of the women it sought to represent.

The end of the twentieth century was filled with an ironic mix of panic and fatalism; together with optimism and hope. ‘Digital armageddon’ in the form of the Y2K bug was reportedly on the horizon (Vulliamy, 2000), but as we know, never transpired. If, however, Y2K had materialised and affected technology as predicted, the consequences would have had profound macro and micro impacts – economically, politically, socially and spatially. Cities – with their super-concentration of technological infrastructure, hardware and software – would arguably have endured the brunt of this catastrophe. Had this disaster occurred, its reach would have been well beyond the city, spiralling out from the CBD to the suburbs, rural settlements, jumping national boundaries, and ultimately bringing economic, transport and communication systems to a near halt, rendering day-to-day living experiences unbearable, if not virtually impossible.

CEO turnover and chronic corporate underperformance are examined through the lens of Transgenerational Response.

The criteria for investigating Transgenerational Response in corporations consisted of identifying a Critical Corporate Incident, the number of corporate generations and the resultant corporate financial performance.

The evidence presented in the case studies illustrates how a Critical Corporate Incident has produced the consequential effect of chronic financial performance in the years following the incident.

These case studies have not presented the “actual” adaptive responses, inherited attitudes and behaviours that have subsequently embedded themselves in a new corporate culture, post the Critical Corporate Incident, to the detriment of the long-term health and performance of each firm.

Examining CEO turnover and chronic corporate underperformance through the lens of Transgenerational Response means that business leaders can identify how a historic event has affected the performance of their firm in subsequent generations. With this knowledge in hand, they will be able to examine the inherited attitudes and behaviours, organizational policies, strategy and adaptive cultural routines that have combined to consolidate the firms chronic under performance.

This is a highly original, evidence based, idea that has the potential to reshape our current understanding of CEO turnover and underperforming firms. It will help business leaders identify how a historic event has affected the performance of a firm in subsequent generations.