Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore and evoke an old educational concept called “study”. This is learning which leads to love and love which leads to learning. It is a dynamic experience which engenders transformation whose telos is simultaneously endlessly knowable and unknowable. The paper argues that it unites humans with the world, the material world with the transcendent, speed with slowness and alignment with resistance, in a series of antinomic relationships which come together in the heart. Study, it is argued, should form the basis of true education and a truly sustainable relationship with the world.

The paper’s approach is informed by the Eastern Orthodox Christian theology of ecology, particularly its complex and holistic concept of the heart and perceiving with the heart. It revels in the antinomies fostered by this tradition.

The paper’s findings are inevitably provisional. They stress the need for beauty in educational practice and indicate that the form of study described may foster an individual sense of vocation, which can transform self and the world.

The paper hopes to contribute to a re-orientation in education, sustainability and ecology.

The current neo-liberal trend in the United States insists that citizens must be self-supporting and are free to choose how they will involve themselves in the labor market. However, with the hardening of poverty in the inner cities, it is difficult to maintain the idea that everyone can choose to work. The collision between neo-liberal ideologies and economic crisis is evidenced by contemporary prison labor. The incarceration boom and use of prison labor suggests that work and unemployment is a matter of character, thus helping to maintain the idealization of labor as a marker of rationality, disciplined free will, and hence citizenship.

This paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, to give some insight into competitive intelligence practices in a little‐explored area in the field of competitive intelligence: the higher education sector. Secondly, to find out more about the factors influencing competitive intelligence practices, since little research on this subject has been published.

The investigation used a mixed‐methods approach, including face‐to‐face, semi structured interviews with 47 university managers (degree coordinators, deans and vice‐rectors), followed by a semi‐structured questionnaire carried out with 400 degree coordinators and deans and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The interviews informed the questionnaire design.

The survey confirms the proposed framework's usefulness for analysing the enabler and inhibitor factors in an organisation for promoting efficient competitive intelligence practice and also gives some insight into which factors enable or inhibit the efficacy of competitive intelligence practices in Spanish universities.

The research focused on degree design adapted to the EHEA. A larger study designed to focus on other management areas in universities would provide a fuller picture of factors influencing competitive intelligence practices.

The findings indicate the areas where universities could plan actions to optimise intelligence activities, make the most of them and stand out from the rest.

This paper sets out a framework to describe factors related to intelligence function and cycle. In addition, the study reveals which indicators act as enablers or inhibitors for competitive intelligence practices and takes account of some of the particular features of the higher education sector.

Academic engagement is considered to be a hallmark of an optimal studying experience and a key to academic success for all students, including those from abroad. Accordingly, creating an engaging learning environment for higher education students is among the most pressing issues currently facing universities. This essay first summarises authors’ research perspectives focussing on international students’ engagement in university studies. The authors especially have attempted to understand to what extent international students from different backgrounds engage in their studies and whether the impacts of factors in students’ learning environment on their academic engagement vary between different international student cohorts. Second, we introduce three emerging perspectives: students’ academic engagement in relation to their future self-visions, doctoral education and short-term study abroad programs, which are all closely tied with international education. Third, the essay proposes several gaps in the literature that the authors find important for future investigation to contribute to students’ academic engagement in globalising higher educational institutions.

This research presents an ontological model, to communicate the impact of dynamic preconditions for peri-urban communities. As such, this paper approaches perturbation communities as social-complex-adaptive-systems.

Previous assessment of dynamic preconditions have typically been based on top-down approaches. Through the lens of social-complex-adaptive and systemic design approaches (requiring a range of different disciplines), this work focuses on providing a broader view towards periurban research. The methodological approach involved academic literature, fieldwork observations, in-depth discussions with community, government, experts and research groups, focusing on a region called “Xochimilco” on the outskirts of Mexico City, a unique pre-Hispanic, Aztec ecosystem. This evolving man made agricultural/ecological structure of island plots, still provides environmental services to Mexico City. This region provides the basis of the research and subsequent ontological model. Ontology, in this instance, refers to the nature of being within a range of constraining dynamic forces relating to resilient behaviors of the current Xochimilco perturbation ecosystem.

Xochimilco can be considered as a longitudinal phenomenon that contributed to the understanding of observable resilient and precondition elements between the past and present of a living complex-adaptive-system.

The research has provided a better understanding of community resilience through preconditions, contributing towards preparation of environmental change and future urbanization. To this end, the research focused on visualizing key dynamics elements for communities attempting to absorb new urban conditions (being continuously pushed into it).

The outcomes of this research have provided specific systemic, bottom up approaches with ontological modeling to assist with visualizing and understanding intangible dynamic conditions that impact high complex areas of perturbation regions.

Since the seminal contributions of Chandler and Williamson, a substantial body of research in industrial organization has examined the performance benefits of the organizational innovation of divisionalization. While existing empirical work has, for the most part, utilized a static framework to analyse the performance effects of divisionalization, adopts a dynamic approach, thereby allowing the intertemporal nature of any such performance benefits to be examined. Presents results from the UK manufacturing industry; the model estimated uses a spline function to incorporate differing organizational regimes over time. The results obtained are less supportive of the benefits of divisionalization than certain of the earlier empirical studies; thus the evidence presented lends no support to the view that organizational change provides unambiguous performance benefits for the firm.

The purpose of this research paper is to consider the aesthetic and commercial success of the “early music” or “historically informed performance” (HIP) movement during the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. Particular attention is given to the relationship between HIP performers and “the authenticity business” (i.e. the market‐driven commercial exploitation of this form of musical performance).

Through applying the metaphor of the “false relation” (a musical compositional device characteristic of the renaissance period), the paper explores the contradictory relationship between HIP and the market. The research is based on a detailed literature review relating to the emergence of the early music labour market, and interviews with 40 experts in the field (including HIP music directors, performers, agents, broadcasters, record company directors and instrument makers in the UK).

Far from being a mere backdrop to the ideologically driven practice of HIP, the paper demonstrates the close connection between market‐led entrepreneurial activity of some performers, and the subsequent success of early music performance. Particular attention is brought to the mediating role of authenticity discourse in bridging the art‐commerce divide and marketing early music successfully.

The paper offers a novel perspective from which to understand the artistic and commercial development of this cultural movement. It is suggested that the emphasis on the mediating role of authenticity discourse; and the closeness of the relationship between performance ideology and market‐based practices warrants further research across artistic and cultural movements more broadly.

Many organisations are encouraging their staff to integrate work and non‐work, but a qualitative study of young professionals found that many crave greater segregation rather than more integration. Most wished to build boundaries to separate the two and simplify a complex world. Where working practices render traditional boundaries of time and space ineffective, this population seems to create new idiosyncratic boundaries to segregate work from non‐work. These idiosyncratic boundaries depended on age, culture and life‐stage though for most of this population there was no appreciable gender difference in attitudes to segregating work and non‐work. Gender differences only became noticeable for parents. A matrix defining the dimensions to these boundaries is proposed that may advance understanding of how individuals separate their work and personal lives. In turn, this may facilitate the development of policies and practices to integrate work and non‐work that meet individual as well as organisational needs.