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A piece of frequently given informal advice to those starting in the world of research is to ‘pick a topic you'll be able to stick with for three or four years’ – and often that's the end of it. This chapter suggests that we should understand the importance of confronting the ‘affective gap’ in how research is currently conceived. It does so by considering how usually we do not engage with the issues underlying this ‘sticking with’ and what allows us to sustain our attention and effort across the years of a research project. Through a case study of my own confrontation with the question of how I chose and changed my own PhD research topic, this chapter introduces the idea of affective research through an exploration of the concept of affect and its relevance to research. The first part of this chapter explores affect through a brief overview of four different scholarly literatures, to provide an initial framework and some clarity for what is often an opaque subject. This is then grounded through an affective engagement with the issue of choosing a research topic and how this affects our research. It concludes with a brief overview of the other chapters in the volume.

The paper aims to offer an exploration of the Banking Act 1987 which was passed following the failure of Johnson Matthey Bankers (JMB) in 1984. This Act extended the role of auditors in banking supervision by removing traditional confidentiality constraints and created a new role of “reporting accountant”. The paper seeks to examine the origin and development of these new reporting roles. In addition, the paper considers the extent to which the findings of this historical investigation might contribute to current debates on the role of auditors in banking supervision.

The paper draws on official documents, personal accounts of individuals responsible for dealing with the JMB crisis, and semi‐structured interviews conducted with audit partners and banking supervisors who had direct experience of implementing the supervisory reforms instituted under the Banking Act 1987. Power's explanatory schema of controversy, closure and credibility is adopted as a framework for the analysis of documentary sources and interview data.

The failure of JMB generated sufficient controversy so as to require reform of the system of banking supervision. The paper shows that JMB was a controversy since it disturbed what went before and carried with it sufficient allies for change. To achieve closure of the controversy, agreement by key actors about changes to the nature of the role of auditors was required to ensure legitimacy for the reforms. Backstage work undertaken by the auditing profession and the Bank of England provided the necessary credibility to renormalise practice around the new supervisory arrangements.

The paper develops Power's schema which is then employed to analyse the emergence of the new role of reporting accountant and extended role for auditors in UK banking supervision. The paper provides empirical evidence on the processes of controversy, closure and credibility that help to ensure the legitimacy of accounting and auditing change.

Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.

Drawing on sometimes provocative offerings of others, and the seminal work of Grant, views are presented that problematise supervision, challenging its representation as something to be transparently understood, planned and managed. Sophisticated theories of supervision have been offered in literature to hold its inherent paradoxes while opening up its practice for inquiry. It is suggested that supervision is usefully understood as the development of praxis: challenging supervisor and student to understand their practice journey as one of interwoven, often tacit, dimensions of knowing, doing, being and becoming (that are personally and therefore distinctively resolved.

Generative metaphors drawn from other complex domains of human experience suggest useful ways of engaging with the intensity, individuality and murkiness of supervision. Such metaphors draw attention to the identities and authorities that are in play and offer markers that can be identified even through the fog.

Voice work is explored as a metaphor for supervision, suggesting reflective practices that ask supervisor and candidate to pay deep attention to the sounds of their voices as well as to the nuances of the dialogue they create together.

The purpose of this paper is to strengthen the role of management supervision in the competence of management and its support. Competence in organizations consists of the human, social and structural dimensions. It involves controlling explicit and tacit knowledge, know‐how and experiences. Competence‐based management requires the ability to manage, as well as the skills to consider, build, evaluate, support and leverage competence in an organization. The competence and well‐being of a manager needs to be supported.

The study represented in this article is a qualitative comparison and the new knowledge of experienced material has been evaluated. It is done during two periods and based on interviews with public and private managers in social and health services (n=22 and n=12). The data have been analysed through the use of content analysis inspired by the theory and the data.

Management supervision includes dialogue and reflective thinking as features of competence‐based management and its development. It is a strategic method of support for management and at the same time is a part of a manager's welfare. Management supervision as one support system clarifies strategic competence‐based management, gives support to leadership know‐how and helps a manager to feel better at work.

Because strategic competence based management in social and health care organizations is a very demanding and multidimensional function, it needs a lot of support. Management supervision is a strategic method of support for management and at the same time is a part of a manager's welfare. The significance of this method should be emphasized more in the management of social and health services.

Regulations to promote sanity in microfinance institutions and improve their operational problems yielded some results but lacked equal voice for effective implementation for its full realization. Much therefore has not changed in sub-Sahara African countries, though various types of regulation for microfinance exist. The nature and implementation of such policies therefore matter more than their mere presence. This paper aims to evaluate the nature of microfinance financial policies, given their social nature and the dynamism of their operational environment, and explores factors mitigating effective implementation of microfinance policy in Ghana.

A structured questionnaire was used to obtain data from the management and other officials of 63 microfinance institutions, and the outcome was organized into graphs and tables for descriptive analysis.

The results identified adequate adapted prudential regulation for microfinance institutions, but the formulation process lacked user input and adequate supervision, hindering effective sector policy implementation. The author therefore recommends a more inclusive and participatory policy formulation approach, creation of information platform for complete microfinance data through semi-autonomous supervisory body for microfinance services and regular full stakeholder engagement.

Though the study is limited to tier-two microfinance institutions in Accra, it is evident that the results can be applied to the entire sector and across national borders because microfinance institutions exhibit similar or same characteristics.

This paper has not been submitted to or published by any other journal. The author certifies that the content of this paper is the product of his own work, and that other sources used in preparing this paper and their respective sources have been duly acknowledged.

With the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, higher education is becoming a more contested and complex space for both teachers and students at different localities and contexts. Such complexities create possibilities as well as challenges for educators who should address these diversities yet maintain the quality of teaching and learning. Both local scholars/educators and transnationally mobile academics/teachers face these challenges in different ways. This chapter focusses on the affordances of the latter: academics who have been engaged in diverse teaching/research contexts and developed certain perceptions of ‘Being’ in ‘intercultural’ spaces within and without boundaries and across time. In particular, the experiences of a female academic, from the Middle East, involved in teaching and researching English Literacy pedagogy transnationally, as a former academic at an Iranian university and then in a Western university, will be examined through autoethnography and in reflection upon her positioning, both as a student and a teacher in these local and global contexts. Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of insided-ness, outsided-ness, and in-between-ness, and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka’s (2010) Dialogical Self Theory (DST) will inform this chapter philosophically. Recent work in higher education on ‘complexity thinking’ and ‘relationality’ (Beckett & Hager, 2018) will ground this chapter too. These conceptual frameworks enable the author to scrutinise diverse perspectives on ‘Being’ and ideologies (ontologies), and diverse formation of knowledge (epistemologies) which result in diverse teaching and learning practices. The author links these diversities to the notion of ‘literacy’ in global times and shows, through her narratives, how her particular cultural, social, historical, and embodied literacies position her pedagogically as a non-Anglo academic in English education within a Western university. This affords her to construct her in-between position by not fully assimilating the target culture, nor fading her Middle Eastern identities. Instead, she brings affordances of her intercultural Being in creation of the ‘third space’ for her own teaching and learning practices. In turn, this has led to how her students across subjects are encouraged not to dissolve into the dominant frame of thinking; but to search for their own ‘Being’ through reviving individual, local stories and to express themselves globally, yet act as ‘glocally’ literate people who are able to make particular changes in their own life and in the lives of others.

This chapter concludes with challenging the implicit ideological position in global higher education which promotes a unified and homogenised epistemology (often Western/Anglo) within the multicultural, multilingual, and even plurilingual context of education. The author, echoing Yun and Standish (2018) specifically questions how internationalisation of education has led to a reductive dichotomisation of local students versus international students (through a deficit lens) rather than of establishing a rich platform for bringing to the fore heterogenous voices, diverse narratives, and plural/multiple knowledge platforms to argue, create, reflect, narrate, and collaborate more fruitfully. Instead she claims for expanding, extending, and extrapolating ways in which knowledge can be (de/re) constructed by people (both learners and teachers) as active agents of change, inter/trans-culturally.

Middle managers in health care today are expected to continuously and efficiently decide and act in administration, finance, care quality, and work environment, and strategic communication has become paramount. Since dialogical communication is considered to promote a healthy work environment, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which health care managers experienced observing subordinates’ dialogue training.

A qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and documents from eight middle managers in a dialogue programme intervention conducted by dialogue trainers. Focus was on fostering and assisting workplace dialogue. Conventional qualitative content analysis was used.

Managers’ experiences were both enriching and demanding, and consisted of becoming aware of communication, meaning perceiving interaction between subordinates as well as own silent interaction with subordinates and trainer; Discovering communicative actions for leadership, by gaining self-knowledge and recognizing relational leadership models from trainers – such as acting democratically and pedagogically – and converting theory into practice, signifying practising dialogue-promoting conversation behaviour with subordinates, peers, and superiors.

Only eight managers participated in the intervention, but data afforded a basis for further research.

Findings stressed the importance of listening, and of support from superiors, for well-functioning leadership communication at work.

Studies focusing on health care managers’ communication and dialogue are few. This study contributes to knowledge about these activities in managerial leadership.

The UK government proposals for services for individuals considered to be dangerous with a severe personality disorder (DSPD) are developing. The complex task of balancing safety and therapeutic change in DSPD services will rest largely upon the skills, knowledge and practice of the staff group. As a result, one challenge for DSPD services is to provide sufficient training and support to staff, in order to ensure that adequate resources are available to assist them in processing their emotional reactions to their work. As part of this, clinical supervision systems need to be developed to offer professional support and learning, enabling individual practitioners to develop knowledge and competence and assume responsibility for their own practice (DoH, 1993). Among the service developments at Rampton Hospital an innovative multi‐professional supervision strategy has been introduced for all staff working in the unit. This paper describes the evolving supervision framework, including a new tool, the ‘Supervision Matrix’, and implementation guidelines, and describes how this supervision framework will be evaluated.

This chapter focusses on the role of reflective practices within initial teacher education courses and the context of the practicum and the role that school-based mentors have in helping student-teachers to learn the skills of ‘reading’ the classroom. It will also discuss how lesson study can support student-teachers and their school-based mentors in their collaborative planning, execution and discussions so that their reflections can be used to further their professional development. Finally, suggestions will be made to support the reflective development of student-teachers.