Search results

This paper describes the findings of a comparative study of rural and urban communities in Cyprus concerning the perceptions of primary school teachers and community stakeholders as regards school–community relations. The data were collected via a semi-structured interviewing technique amongst primary school teachers and community stakeholders. The analysis of the qualitative data demonstrates that both primary teachers and community stakeholders whether in a rural or an urban area consider school– community cooperation as a positive and important factor in their respective spheres of interest. However, teachers were found to maintain a more conservative stance towards relationships with the local community, believing that their professional autonomy is threatened by interferences of community stakeholders and agents. Furthermore, there was a divergence of perceptions between rural participants and their urban counterparts as regards to the extent to which such a cooperation should take place; both teachers and community stakeholders in rural areas seemed to be more willing to extend their communication and their relations in additional fields. On the contrary, teachers and community stakeholders in urban sites seemed more conservative towards such a situation; they regard that such a cooperation and such relations should be limited. The findings come to validate similar findings reported in the limited literature in Cyprus (Georgiou, 1998; Symeou, 2002) and indicate that there is a lot of ground to be covered towards extending and improving school–community relations for the benefit of all institutions concerned.

AbstractIn 2022, a new Federal Labor government introduced an NDIA Act amendment and initiatives that indicate a reorientation to partnership working and integration of co‐design principles. "Partnership working" reflects collaborative aspirations where parties commit to trust, shared goals and respect for diverse knowledges and experiences. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) espouses a partnership approach and rights‐based values, yet the neoliberal emphasis on individual choice and marketisation within a social insurance model can privilege certain voices and produce adversarial processes and dynamics. Our focus group research with disability leaders, family carers and disability service professionals explored experiences in the NDIS planning phase with a focus on the extent to which partnership principles operated in practice. Our findings suggest embedded paradoxes; time and resources are required to build the trust and relationships central to interpersonal partnerships between individuals, carers and services but are undermined by organisational and structural factors such as workload pressures, administrative burden and adversarial practices produced in a cost containment context. Tensions in partnership working must also negotiate carers' workload and responsibilities with the autonomy of people with disability. We argue that partnership working is difficult to achieve where structural and systemic limitations and assumptions influence everyday practices. Partnership must operate from empowerment and relational, rather than transactional, principles if genuine participatory and inclusive practice is to be achieved.

AbstractThis research addresses an identified need to further understand digital literacies (DL) and whether undergraduate students view DL as being important in their lives and in their learning. Using a cross-sectional survey sent to a stratified random sample of 2500 undergraduates representative of the overall student population at a medium-sized Canadian undergraduate university (survey response rate of 19.8%, N = 496), we explored the relationships between social media and digital literacies, particularly in different disciplinary contexts. We also explored the ways in which students report using social media in their university learning, showing that students value social media for collaboration, discussion, information finding and sharing, and practise activities related to their learning. Additionally, we examined the importance students place on DL, and how they perceive and rate their own abilities with digital literacies across three domains: procedural and technical, cognitive, and sociocultural. Findings illustrate an observable gap between the high importance that students place on digital literacies (including DL for social media) in their learning and their lives and the lack of coverage students reported receiving about these topics in their undergraduate education. Based on the study's findings, we discuss the specific ways that those in the higher education community can address this gap by engaging with and fostering development of digital literacies within specific disciplinary and professional contexts, and in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary learning settings across the curriculum.

Home health care services are an extension of the hospital services provided in the home of the patients. These services cover systematic nursing care and professional caregiving to chronically ill and bedridden patients. There are a substantial number of such patients who are immobile or suffer from chronic illnesses such as dementia, cancer, hypertension and similar ill-health conditions where constant care is necessary. The home care services, therefore, range from basic support for conducting the routine daily activities of dressing, grooming, ambulation and preparing prescribed meals to complex nursing services such as feeding through a nasogastric tube, catheter change, administering injections, medications and tending to tracheotomy. There is a growing need for the successful retention of people working in home care. This article provides vital insights into the job experiences of nurses and General Duty Assistants, which have been provided through qualitative findings of the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among 40 nurses and 40 General Duty Assistants. Open-ended questions were used to obtain the views of participants, and three primary relationships affecting their emotional state were identified. Relationship with the patient, family members of the patient and agency supervisor were studied. The participants were asked to describe the reasons why they do their jobs and the challenges they face while working in home care. Short-term and long-term recommendations were formulated based on the participant's narratives.

In the US, street-based sex workers and people convicted of sex offences are both 'special populations', often with additional conditions of community supervision. People convicted of sex offences experience a complicated mix of assistance and surveillance as they re-enter society post-conviction, including numerous restrictions on housing and employment. As a result, they are especially likely to experience homelessness upon release. This article uses I-Poems drawn from interviews with volunteers and professionals who navigate the obstacles to re-entry that govern people on the sex offender registry. We focus on people with religious affiliations (n=38) who provide urgent support during the re-entry process. I-poems are a feminist technique for analysing qualitative data that forefronts the voices of people not often heard and distils complex experiences into accessible narratives. While few in our study overtly exploited re-entering persons on the registry, most support was problematic in subtler ways: we found that re-entering registrants are asked to accept constrained choices involving labour, religious participation, and romantic and other personal relationships in order to receive assistance. Given the secondary stigma attached to work with people convicted of sex offences, and the obscurity within in which many of these religiously-affiliated programmes operate, I-Poems both humanise and reveal the complexities of coercion, religious calling, and supportive housing.

PurposeAgile principles have been widely used in software development team practice since the creation of the Agile Manifesto. Studies have examined variables related to agile principles without systematically considering the relationships among key team, agile methodology, and process variables underlying the agile principles and how these variables jointly influence the achievement of software development agility. In this study, the authors tested a team/methodology–process–agility model that links team variables (team autonomy and team competence) and methodological variable (iterative development) to process variables (communication and collaborative decision-making), which are in turn linked to software development agility (ability to sense, respond and learn).Design/methodology/approachSurvey data from one hundred and sixty software development professionals were analyzed using structural equation modeling methods.FindingsThe results support the team/methodology–process–agility model. Process variables (communication and collaborative decision-making) mediated the effects of team (autonomy and competence) and methodological (iterative development) variables on software development agility. In addition, team, methodology and process variables had different effects on the three dimensions of software development agility.Originality/valueThe results contribute to the literature on organizational IT management by establishing a team/methodology–process–agility model that can serve as a basis for developing a core theoretical foundation underlying agile principles and practices. The results also have practical implications for organizations in understanding and managing holistically the different roles that agile methodological, team and process factors play in achieving software development agility.

Social workers carry much of the frontline authority to define risk to children and discuss it with families. Assessment reports and other institutional documents record professional views about family information, and also have the potential to convey the 'voice' of the family to institutions. Social workers have responsibility for sharing these documents with families, yet little is known about how they do this. This paper focuses on episodes when social workers introduce institutional documents in home visits, and on the family responses elicited. These are high-stakes encounters which, when they go seriously wrong, emerge in the press as tragedies and scandals. For families, these documents carry an emotional depth-charge as intimate, potentially shaming and sometimes inaccurate details of their lives are inscribed in them by and for others. Latour's (1996) concept of interobjectivity sheds light on the use of documents, while concepts of epistemic authority ( Heritage and Raymond, 2005 ) and epistemic injustice ( Fricker, 2007 ) are employed to examine how social workers respond to parental testimony about themselves and their children. Learning how to present institutional documentation in ways that reduce the risk of emotional reactivity and treating family perspectives with epistemic justice may enhance social work practice. At a policy level, the design of documents warrants review, so that they facilitate rather than obstruct social workers' efforts to build what are already fragile relationships with families.

The relevance of the chosen topic of the article is determined by the fact that in the contemporary digital economy, society is growing increasingly reliant on information technologies, efficient data management and the necessity to transform knowledge management. The aim of the article is to study and substantiate the importance of transforming knowledge management to make it responsive to the volatile digital economy, highlight knowledge as a factor in the development of management systems in the digital economy, elaborate on the information technology capacity in knowledge management, and analyze the knowledge management models applicable in the digital economy. The article analyzes the preconditions of an effective knowledge management model for the development of the quality management system and digital economy. It also studies the concept of the digital economy, and defines the role of human resources in digitalization. We have examined the prerequisites for knowledge management, relationships between human resources management processes, quality management systems and information technologies with the purpose of building an efficient quality management system inside an organization. At the present stage, information technologies are developing rapidly and their management requires continuous education and self-development. Thus, one of the priority tasks of economic development is the professional application of computer technology in all fields of activity. The formation of the computer literacy skill set of the general public will become an indicator of the readiness of society to comply with the up-to-date requirements.

AbstractRelationship‐based practice refers to approaches within human services which centralise inter‐personal relationships—either those between clients and workers or between clients and their own network—as a way to achieve positive service outcomes. Relationship‐based practice is increasingly recognised as a critical component in many areas of human services, particularly youth services. Despite increasing policy intentions for programs to adopt a relationship‐based approach, it is not always clear how services can implement this in practice. While relationship‐based skill training can be offered to individual workers, a question remains as to what can be done at an organisational and policy level to cultivate relationship‐based practice. Within this context, this paper explores how programs can be designed to foster relationship‐based practice. The paper draws on the evaluation of an intensive and tailored service for addressing long‐term youth unemployment in Australia: the your job your way pilot program run by yourtown. A key success of the program was strong relationship‐based practice, and this paper explores five features of the program's design that enabled this: (1) small caseloads, (2) intensive support, (3) staff with complementary skills and a professional and 'youth friendly' demeanour, (4) staff discretion about some aspects of program implementation, and (5) support delivered through social and group activities. The paper draws implications for how service provider organisations and governments can cultivate relationship‐based practice in human services.

Collaborations between individuals in firms have important implications for the development of relational and human capital. In knowledge-intensive contexts where collaborations are formed to deliver services to clients, collaboration decisions can involve nontrivial tradeoffs between short-term and long-term benefits: individuals and firms must carefully manage the tradeoffs between leveraging existing relational and human capital for the reliable performance of repeat collaboration and creating new relational and human capital through new collaboration. Building from the premise that servicing clients is central to collaboration decisions in human asset–intensive firms, we examine how client-related factors shape collaboration decisions among lawyers (partners) in UK law firms providing M&A legal advisory services. We focus on three key client-related dimensions that we predict govern collaboration decisions: the depth of individual- and firm-level relationships with the focal client, key client attributes that reflect the client's status and its use of different firms to undertake its outsourced work, and client-driven individual- and firm-level resource constraint. Our empirical findings support our proposition that client-related factors influence the pattern of collaborations between individuals in firms. We also reveal how client-related factors at the individual level can have opposite effects on collaboration decisions from those at the firm level. Overall, our findings contribute to research on relational capital, strategic human capital, team formation, professional service firms, and the microfoundations of strategy.

Purpose: In the rational model of the democratic governing chain, intervening spaces at all levels are neglected in relation to the policy process. An intervening space is a group of persons with the power and responsibility to interpret policy at their level in an organization. The research question is as follows: How are democratic policy ideas visible in the intervening spaces of a governing chain in public schools. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on two municipalities representing the 25 most populated cities in Sweden. The data are based on interviews with 66 informants with leadership roles on the district level and two schools in each municipality. Findings: Leadership is obviously more than making decisions. It is also about facilitating and creating trust, engagement, motivation and willingness to take responsibility. In this process, intervening spaces are central. They exist at all levels from the national ministry to the classroom. The empirical examples show the importance and challenges in how different leadership roles, relationships and interaction transform policy intentions to practice on the local level. Originality/value: The authors contribute by highlighting the parallel interpretation processes that take place at various leadership levels locally. There are possibilities and challenges in aligning the intervening spaces into a rational governing chain. The findings indicate that intervening spaces and policy drift is vital to support, control and use professional competence in the process to transfer political ideas to classroom practice.

Government policy has placed increasing emphasis on the need for robust labour market projections. The job vacancy rate is a key indicator of the state of the economy underpinning most monetary policy decisions. However, its variation over time is rarely studied in relation to employment variations, especially at the sectoral level. The present paper assesses whether changes in the number of vacancies from quarter to quarter are a leading anticipator of employment variation in certain economic sectors over the previous decade in Italy, using multivariate time-series tools (the vector autoregressive and error correction models) with Eurostat data. As robustness checks for integration order and cointegration, we compare traditional critical values with those provided by response surface models. To the best of our knowledge, no previous study has evaluated this relationship using Italian data over the last decade. The results demonstrate that percentage changes in numbers employed (occupied persons) react to percentage changes in vacancies (one-quarter lagged), but not vice versa, indicating that variations of vacancies are weakly exogenous. The fastest short-term adjustment from disequilibrium is seen in the construction industry, whereas the manufacturing and the information and communication technology sectors demonstrate the strongest long-run relationships among variations. This suggests that the matching rates - the likelihood that a vacancy is filled - are higher for these than for other sectors, as a result of developments in recruitment technology for professional figures of such industries.

This study aimed to: (1) examine differences in physical performance across birth-quartiles and maturity-status, and (2) determine the relationships among relative age, maturation and physical performance in young male soccer players. The sample included 199 males aged between 8.1 and 18.9 years, from two professional soccer academies in the English Football League. Data were collected for height, weight, self-reported biological parent heights, 30 m sprint time and countermovement jump (CMJ) height. Relative age was conveyed as a decimal, while maturity status was determined as the percentage of predicted adult height (PAH). There were no significant differences in any measure between birth quartiles, however early maturers outperformed on-time and later maturers in most performance measures. Pearson-product-moment correlations revealed that maturation was inversely associated with 30 m sprint time in U12 to U16 (r = −0.370–0.738; p < 0.05), but only positively associated with CMJ performance in U12 (r = 0.497; p < 0.05). In contrast, relative age was unrelated to sprint performance and only significantly associated with superior CMJ performance in U16. This study indicates that maturity has a greater association with sprint performance than relative age in English male academy soccer players. Practitioners should monitor and assess biological maturation in young soccer players to attempt to control for the influence on physical performance, and avoid biasing selection on absolute performance rather than identifying the most talented player.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the quality of the relationship between a supervisor and their subordinate, conceptualised as leader member exchange (LMX), and the mediating influence of subordinate's job embeddedness on job satisfaction. The LMX model considered the four-gender dominant leadership style facets, female – affect and loyalty (communal), and male – contribution and professional respect (agentic). Social role theory was applied to explain societies influence on leadership style. The moderating influence of supervisor gender on the relationship of LMX facets and subordinate embeddedness is investigated.Design/methodology/approachThis cross-sectional survey study of 213 self-selected employed participants investigated the mediation of job embeddedness LMX and job embeddedness and the moderation impact of supervisor gender on this mediation.FindingsJob embeddedness mediated the relationship between all four facets of LMX and job satisfaction. Supervisor gender did not moderate the relationships of the four LMX facets and job embeddedness. These findings highlight the potential impact of a homogeniuos sample in relation to industry type and culture as this may impact on the findings. That is, participants in this study were predominantly females working in female dominant industries.Originality/valueThis study builds on the work of Collinset al.(2014) who examined the moderating impact of subordinate gender on the mediating relationship of job embeddedness on the relationship between LMX facets and job satisfaction. Previously, the gender role of supervisors on this relationship was not explored.

Abstract
Historians have described how powerful eugenic ideologies fueled the rapid expansion of custodial institutionalization of the so-called feebleminded in the early twentieth century. Using new sources from the recently opened archive of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn, this article argues that in practice, this transition to custodialism was difficult, uneven, and subject to constant compromise. Institutional residents and their families contested expert prognoses and disciplinary methods and maintained relationships across institutional boundaries. Their vernacular ideas about mental impairment, curability, and the purpose of institutional segregation produced a gap between eugenic discourse and institutional life. The challenges that residents and their families levied were neither absolute nor consistent: their force and success depended on their class status, community contexts, and most significantly, the perceived severity of a resident's impairment. Residents with greater care needs were frequently relegated to the background, not only in psycho-medical professionals' treatises and administration but in the expectations that families brought to bear on the institution. Decades before institutionalized people and their families formed political advocacy groups that struggled for deinstitutionalization and civil rights, they fought individual battles that pitted their intimate knowledge against expertise. Although their victories were small and statistically rare, they tested the bounds of psycho-medical authority and established the ideological and practical limits of eugenic mass institutionalization.