Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore job satisfaction, and how the work-life interface might affect job satisfaction, among residential aged care staff. The statistical package PROCESS was used to analyse the impacts of workplace stressors (poor safety climate, poor relationships with colleagues and poor relationships with management) and potential mediating variables that measured aspects of the work-life interface, specifically work-family conflict (WFC) and work-life balance.

This survey research was carried out through distribution of a paper-based questionnaire to approximately 800 permanent, fixed term and casual employees working in residential aged care. All job roles, including both direct care and support staff, were represented in the sample.

WFC and work-life balance act serially to mediate the relationships between workplace stressors and job satisfaction.

Study participants were restricted to residential aged care facilities in the metropolitan Melbourne area, Australia, limiting generalisability of the findings.

The work-life interface is a legitimate concern for human resources managers. Implications include need for greater understanding of the contribution of work-life fit to job satisfaction. Interventions to improve job satisfaction should take into account how workplace stressors affect the work-life interface, as well as job-related outcomes. Enhanced work-life fit should improve job-related outcomes.

This paper explores the potential mediating roles of WFC and work-life balance on job satisfaction and demonstrates a pathway through which the work-life interface affects job satisfaction for workers in residential aged care.

Traditional visions of masculinity are inextricably linked to some tropes believed as ‘essential’ in men such as valour or strength. If a man fails in comply with these ‘essences’, then he fits into a form of deviant masculinity that transforms him into an Other.

Now, what happens with the issues of ageing in masculinity? The ageing man slowly but naturally loses all the aspects that made him ‘manly’ enough, becoming instead a double of himself. Men are doomed to fail as their bodies start to malfunction.

Two horror films highlight ageing and failed masculinity as a way to engage with these new concerns. Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2012) and Late Phases (Adrián García Bogliano, 2014) revolves around two aged heroes (Elvis Presley in the former, an ageing war veteran in the latter) who live within retirement communities. There, in the last years of their life, both men must face supernatural menaces: a walking mummy and a werewolf respectively. Facing supernatural horror, the ageing heroes must compensate their failing masculinity – a body that does not work as well as it used to do – with new forms of empathy and manliness.

Uniting film studies with investigations on masculinity and ageing, we propose to read these two films to point the ways in which both stories engage with the cultural politics of ageing masculinity.

COVID-19 pandemic deepens structures of division and inequality in a fractured world. Responses to the pandemic demonstrate that fundamental change to time-honoured social organisation and practices is not only possible, but it is also essential for survival. Social distancing has prompted the discovery that connection is essential for good mental health and wellbeing. This chapter suggests that claims of the success of universal schooling not only warrant the critical scrutiny they have attracted, but there is also the case that reforms remain chimeric for excluded population cohorts. A radical rethinking of the purpose and structure of education is overdue. Pandemic tells us that such rethinking is possible.

This paper reviews the emergent literature on ecological modernisation and considers its theoretical utility in terms of assessing environmental employment opportunities in Australia. It explores the potential for ecologically modernist policy to offer a way beyond “jobs versus environment” obstacles to greener employment. The future development of post industrial economies is said by ecological modernists to depend upon an ability to produce high value, high quality products with stringent enforcement standards. In these terms, environmental amenity becomes a superior good, and environmental protection not an economic burden, but an opportunity for enhanced growth and job creation. The employment impact of such claims is examined in the Australian context.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

This study aims to benchmark Chinese TEFL academics’ research productivities, as a way to identify and, subsequently, address research productivity issues. This study investigated 182 Chinese TEFL academics’ research outputs and perceptions about research across three Chinese higher education institutions using a literature‐based survey. ANOVA, t‐tests and descriptive statistics were used to analyse data from and between the three institutions. Findings indicated that more than 70 per cent of the TEFL academics had produced no research in 10 of the 12 research output fields during 2004‐2008. The English Language and Literature Department in the national university outperformed all other departments at the three institutes for most of the research output categories. While a majority of the participants seemed to hold positive perceptions about research, t‐tests and ANOVA indicated that their research perceptions were significantly different across institutes and departments. Developing TEFL research capacity requires tertiary institutions to provide research‐learning opportunities.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a fast-moving pandemic that has brought about calamities and challenges to the human world. In the field of international higher education (IHE), it problematizes and challenges the operation of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales, while generating disruptions and impediments to the flows of globalization. Drawing upon extant research on IHE across spatial and cultural contexts, this essay aims to: (1) unravel the deficiencies of neo-liberal mentalities and rationales in coping with the challenges of COVID-19 to IHE; (2) assess the impacts of COVID-19 on the developments of globalization and internationalization of higher education with particular focus on the complications therein; and (3) explore the possible spill-over effects on and implications for the re-positioning of IHE in the post-COVID-19 era. Albeit the negative impacts of COVID-19 may not last, its spill-over effects are bound to cast a long shadow over IHE’s future development. This essay explores how IHE can persist in spite of deficiencies in neo-liberalism and fluidity in globalization.

THE very earliest type of Ledger used in connection with Lending Libraries was a kind of receipt book, in which were entered particulars of the book borrowed, and this register was signed by the person who took away the book. We have not been able to find an actual specimen of this type of Ledger, but believe it was simply an ordinary blank volume, in which the entries succeeded each other without columns or other classified features. When Libraries were small and borrowers few in number there was no need for elaboration in the accounts of books issued and returned. As books multiplied and Libraries increased a gradual extension would occur all round, and the necessity would arise for some ready method of distinguishing books returned from those still on loan. Thus would the column method of ruling come into existence, with its many varieties and uses. One form was designed to show by the presence or absence of a signature, whether books were out or in.

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.