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The year 2020 is an epochal moment for governance and public administration. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upset social and economic life, including the delivery of public services, and eroded domestic and international politics. It comes in an era of uncertainty resulting from the end of the New Public Management boom and a looming breakdown of the contemporary US-defined international order. Against such a sea change, we can hardly take business as usual. Change breeds indeterminacy but also induces reimagining. Any renewal and renaissance of public management has to address the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions of governance in a low-trust and high-risk society. Both the capacity and legitimacy of the state need to be re-empowered, but no longer through the market. The dual failure of democratic politics and bureaucratic excellence in many countries has rendered the Wilsonian politics-administration dichotomy redundant. Amid the rise of East Asia, there are growing contentions over the conceptualization of meritocracy as alternative systems of governance and public service models seem to be delivering effective rivals. Governance performance may not be predetermined by regime types within a poly-polar world. We need to search for new reconnections, new leadership, a new basis for trust and consensus, and a new public service bargain to avoid getting bogged down in old wine in re-labelled bottle, or another singular universalist paradigm.

This paper sets out to analyse both the dominant constructions of childhood and the prevailing sexual scripts embedded in international reports on the sexualisation of childhood debate.

Four international reports from the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States are analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis whereby the sexual subjecthoods made available to children and images of childhood itself can be interrogated.

This paper finds that a broad-brush approach to sexualisation renders consumption and embodiment as ‘sexualised’ and problematic. Gender remains unproblematised and sexuality as an issue is palpable by its absence. The reports show a lack of attention to the voices of children and a denial of their moral agency. Innocence is constructed as a fundamental yet unstable feature of childhood which requires protection from the insidious external forces of 21st century sexual cultures. Childhood thus functions as a motif for the state of society as a whole.

Identifying the dominant constructions of childhood, sexualisation, gender and sexuality, by analysing how these concepts are defined, understood and talked about within international responses to the issue of the sexualisation of childhood, light can be shed upon the sanctioned ways made available to ‘do’ sex, gender and sexuality and to ‘be’ a child, a boy, a girl, a ‘sexual’ or a ‘sexualised’ being. In addition, this enables evaluation of the ways in which images of the child are mobilised for policy and political agendas and how childhood functions as both a barometer for, and symbol of, the well-being of a society.

Lawrence Angus is Professor is Head of the School of Education at the University of Ballarat. His most recent book (with Professor Terri Seddon of Monash University) is Reshaping Australian Education: Beyond Nostalgia. His publications include several books over 50 refereed book chapters and articles in academic journals. His particular research and teaching interests include education equity and policy.Eve Gregory is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London She joined the Department of Educational Studies in 1987, after having taught for nine years in schools and two years at Nene College, Northampton. During her years at Goldsmiths, she has co-ordinated language and literacy programmes for the BA Ed, taught across Early Years programmes and established student exchanges in France, Spain and Austria. Recent research has included studies on family literacy history, on siblings (both funded by the ESRC) and children’s home and school literacy practices (funded by the Leverhulme Trust).Kathleen Gwinner began her career in education as a high school art teacher in rural areas near Kansas City, Missouri and El Paso, Texas, and then in Houston’s urban schools. Travel and a continuing interest in art history prompted her to return to university for a Masters degree in European history, and she subsequently taught history and art history courses at private and public schools with a great variety of student populations. Her doctoral research was conducted at a specialized vocational school within the Houston metropolitan district where she was a teacher. She now teaches at a school for the gifted and talented where she is continuing her research on high achieving girls.Martyn Hammersley is Professor of Educational and Social Research, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, the Open University. His early work was in the sociology of education. Much of his more recent work has been concerned with the methodological issues surrounding social and educational research. He is currently investigating the representation of research findings in the mass media. He has written several books, including: (with Paul Atkinson) Ethnography: principles in practice (Routledge, 1995); The Dilemma of Qualitative Method (Routledge, 1989); Reading Ethnographic Research (Longman, 1998); What’s Wrong with Ethnography? (Routledge, 1992); The Politics of Social Research (Sage, 1995); (with Peter Foster and Roger Gomm) Constructing Educational Inequality (Falmer, 1996); Taking Sides in Social Research (Routledge, 1999); and Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice (Paul Chapman, 2002).Sam Hillyard is a lecturer in sociology at the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society and a member of Nottingham’s Institute for Rural Research. Her research interests include ethnographic research and theorising; the Sociology of Education; the history of symbolic interactionism and the sociology of Erving Goffman. At Nottingham, she teaches rural sociology and recently finished a research project studying images of farming in children’s literature.Caroline Hudson is Basic Skills Advisor in the Home Office National Probation Directorate. Caroline has published on offending and education, evidence-based policy, and family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear, single parent and care) and young people’s perceptions of family and schooling. Her principal research interest is issues related to social exclusion. Prior to working in the Home Office, Caroline was a researcher at Oxford University Department of Educational Studies and Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research. Before doing a Master’s and doctorate at Oxford University, Caroline was a secondary school English teacher for 12 years.Bob Jeffrey’s ethnographic research at The Open University has focussed on the effects of policy reform and managerialism on the creativity of primary teachers in England. Together with Peter Woods, he has identified their dilemmas and tensions, their creative responses, identity reconstructions, and changes in professional role. He has, together with Geoff Troman, and Dennis Beach, established an extensive European network of ethnographic research interests and his current research project involves ten European partners focussing on the student’s perspectives of their learning experiences with particular reference to their creativity. He has maintained a regular flow of articles concerned with ethnographic methodology.Susi Long is an Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education and Language and Literacy at the University of South Carolina in the U.S. Her research interests include language and literacy learning in marginalized populations and teacher education. In 1997, she received the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Promising Researcher Award for her ethnographic study of cross cultural learning in Iceland. She continues similar work in the United States with projects that include a study of professional development at the University of South Carolina’s Children’s Center, a six month study of Mexican American kindergartners, and a long-term study of new teachers during their first three years of teaching. Key publications can be found in the journals, Research in the Teaching of English; The Journal of Teacher Education; Reading, Language and Literacy; NCTE’s Primary Voices; and in an upcoming issue of the NCTE’s Language Arts. Her most recent work is coedited with Eve Gregory of Goldsmiths College and Dinah Volk of Cleveland State University. The volume, Many Pathways to Literacy (Routledge Falmer, 2004) is a collection of studies that illuminate mediators of language and literacy learning in the lives of young children across a range of cultural settings in the U.S. and in the U.K.Colton Paul worked as a primary school teacher for a number of years in the London Borough of Haringey and Tower Hamlets. He is now employed as a lecturer at Goldsmiths College educational department. Colton Paul is primarily concerned in his research with culture, identity and education, in particular the ways in which notions of race, power, and representation interact to influence cognitive development. his current area of research for his PhD thesis is focused on the effects of mythologies and power relations on the educational development of children of Caribbean heritage.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Ruth Silva teaches at the College of Education, University of North Texas having completed her doctorate in teacher education at the University of Houston. She has been a teacher and administrator in high schools in Australia and an administrator with the Department of Education (Independent and Catholic Schools) in Sydney. Her research focuses on the role of the classroom teacher as researcher, instructional supervision, and pre-service teacher education.Katie Van Sluys is a doctoral research student at Indiana University.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a lawyer turned teacher and an Associate- Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University. She has taught in secondary and tertiary institutions for the past fourteen years. Currently, she is teaching Corporations and Business Law to international students, whilst also undertaking doctoral studies in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia. Her Ph.D is a cross-disciplinary investigation of notions of plagiarism, from perspectives of Legal and Literary theory. She is particularly interested in the Internet literacy practices of tertiary undergraduate ESL students. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is focuses on Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field. She applies these critically in analyses of international ESL students’ academic writing, both print-text and Web-text based, with respect to plagiarism and intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher (2002), Prospect (2002), and TESOL Journal (2003) on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments. She has also published in the broader area of the nexus between linguistic and legal theory. Her email address is wendyss@deakin.edu.au.Dinah Volk is a Professor and Coordinator of the Early Childhood Program, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. She has taught young children in the U.S. and Latin America and her research interests include sibling and peer teaching and the language and literacy practices of young bilingual children and their families. Volk is co-editor, with Gregory and Long, of Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Peers, Grandparents, and Communities (RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) and is co-author, with DeGaetano and Williams, of Kaleidoscope: A Multicultural Approach for the Primary School Classroom (Prentice Hall, 1998). Her articles have been published in Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Reading: Language and Literacy, and the Early Childhood Research Quarterly.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, Ed.). Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001) and British Private Schools: Research on policy and practice (Woburn Press, 2003, Ed.). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, private schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He is editor of the Oxford Review of Education and has recently completed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.Sue Walters completed her DPhil research in the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University and is now a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes (researching Ethnicities and Contemporary Rural Identities). She was previously a Secondary School English teacher and an English as an Additional Language specialist and has academic degrees in Literature, Women’s Studies and Educational Research Methods. Her current research interests lie in issues concerning academic achievement and Bangladeshi pupils, ethnic minority and bilingual pupil’s experiences of schooling and ethnicities and identities.

Debriefs are a type of workplace meeting that often use after events and critical incidents. Debriefs are used to review performance, promote shared learning and understanding, and improve future team performance. Similarly, reflexivity refers to the extent to which team members reflect upon and openly discuss group processes, procedures, and actions to improve future team performance. In this chapter, the authors review the separate literatures and explore the relationship between debriefs and reflexivity. While the debrief literature does focus on aspects of reflection, what occurs between the aspects of reflection, planning, and action is left unexplored. The concept of reflexivity fits well with the successful use of debriefs, as reflexivity ensures that reflection results in outcomes and moves beyond just an overview or discussion during debriefing. Additionally, important constructs such as psychological safety and sensemaking are relevant to both debriefs and reflexivity such that open and honest discussion as well as developing shared understanding are necessary for effective debriefing and reflection. Using the constructs of psychological safety and sensemaking, the authors propose a model that situates both reflexivity and effective debriefs in the context of team learning. This model integrates team reflexivity with team debriefs, provides a better understanding of how teams can carry out more effective debriefs, and explains how more effective debriefing and greater team reflexivity lead to enhanced learning and improvement in team performance.

Accounting practitioners and educators agree that effective oral and written communication skills are essential to success in the accounting profession. Despite numerous initiatives to improve accounting majors’ communication skills, many students remain deficient in this area. Communication literature suggests that one factor rendering these initiatives ineffective is communication apprehension (CA). There is general agreement that accounting students around the globe have higher levels of CA than other majors. Therefore, accounting educators interested in improving students’ communication skills need to be aware of the dimensions and implications of CA. This chapter provides a review of the relevant literature on CA, with a focus on CA in accounting majors. It also presents intervention techniques for use in the classroom and makes suggestions for future research.

Purpose – Driver education and licensing are two mechanisms used to reduce crash rates. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of these countermeasures and consider how simulators can be used to augment more traditional approaches.

Approach – A literature review was undertaken evaluating key concepts in driver licensing including graduated driver licensing (GDL), the role of parents in licensing, compliance and enforcement, driver testing and how the driver licensing system impacts on levels of unlicensed driving. Literature regarding driver education for individuals who have and not yet obtained a licence was also reviewed.

Findings – GDL is a successful countermeasure for reducing the crash rates of young novice drivers as it limits their exposure to higher risk situations. The support for driver education initiatives is mixed. As there are big differences between education programs, there is a need to consider each program on its own merits. Driving simulators provide a safe environment for novices to gain experience. In particular, they may be bifacial for development of hazard perception and visual scanning skills.

Practical Implications – GDL systems should be introduced where appropriate. Existing systems should be strengthened where possible by including additional, best-practice and restrictions. When considering driver education as a countermeasure, the type of program is very important. Education programs that have been shown to increase crashes should not be introduced. Further research and development are necessary to ensure that driver education and licensing adequately equip novice drivers with the skills necessary to drive in the 21st century.