This paper is a conversation between a management academic and a practitioner from the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the largest sporting and cultural organisation in Ireland. The GAA is an alternative organisation in that it (a) has a particular understanding of 'management', (b) emphasises place and community, (c) prohibits a market for players; (d) is volunteer-led; (e) operates on democratic principles; and (f) is concerned with more than sport. In the conversation, the practitioner asserts that, for him, critical performativity is arrogant and self-serving, with academics using practitioners as tropes in faux performative research. Instead, he argues that academic practice should become normative with academics becoming critics, adjudicating on what's good and the bad in their objects of study.
The chemical composition and sources of ambient fine particulate matter (PM1) over a period of 2.5 years for a regional background site in the western Mediterranean are presented in this work. Furthermore, sub-micron particle number concentrations and the sources of these particles are also presented. The mean PM1 concentration for the measurement period was 8.9 μgm-3, with organic matter (OM) and sulphate comprising most of the mass (3.2 and 1.5 μgm-3 respectively). Six sources were identified in PM1 by Positive Matrix Factorisation (PMF): secondary organic aerosol, secondary nitrate, industrial, traffic + biomass burning, fuel oil combustion and secondary sulphate. Typically anthropogenic sources displayed elevated concentrations during the week with reductions at weekends. Nitrate levels were elevated in winter and negligible in summer, whereas secondary sulphate levels underwent a contrasting seasonal evolution with highest concentrations in summer, similar to the fuel oil combustion source. The SOA source was influenced by episodes of sustained pollution as a result of anticyclonic conditions occurring during winter, giving rise to thermal inversions and the accumulation of pollutants in the mixing layer. Increased levels in summer were owing to higher biogenic emissions and regional recirculation of air masses. The industrial source decreased in August due to decreased emissions during the vacation period. Increases in the traffic + biomass burning source were recorded in January, April and October, which were attributed to the occurrence of the aforementioned pollution episodes and local biomass burning emission sources, which include agriculture and domestic heating systems. Average particle number concentrations (N9-825 nm) from 5/11/2010 to 01/06/2011 and from 15/10/2011 to 18/12/2011 reached 3097 cm -3. Five emission sources of particle of sub-micron particles were determined by Principal Component Analysis (PCA); industrial + traffic + biomass burning, new particle formation + growth, secondary sulphate + fuel oil combustion, crustal material and secondary nitrate. The new particle formation + growth source dominated the particle number concentration (56% of total particle number concentration), especially for particles 100 nm) and thus did not influence the particle number concentration significantly. ; This study was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds under the projects CARIATI (CGL2008-06294/CLI), VAMOS (CGL2010 19464/CLI) and GRACCIE (CSD 2007-00067). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) ACTRIS under grant agreement no. 262254 and the Generalitat de Catalunya (AGRUAR-2009SGR8). ; Peer reviewed
This study focuses on the daily and seasonal variability of particle number size distributions and concentrations, performed at the Montseny (MSY) regional background station in the western Mediterranean from October 2010 to June 2011. Particle number concentrations at MSY were shown to be within range of various other sites across Europe reported in literature, but the seasonality of the particle number size distributions revealed significant differences. The Aitken mode is the dominant particle mode at MSY, with arithmetic mean concentrations of 1698 cm3, followed by the accumulation mode (877 cm-3) and the nucleation mode (246 cm-3). Concentrations showed a strong seasonal variability with large increases in particle number concentrations observed from the colder to warmer months. The modality of median size distributions was typically bimodal, except under polluted conditions when the size distribution was unimodal. During the colder months, the daily variation of particle number size distributions are strongly influenced by a diurnal breeze system, whereby the Aitken and accumulation modes vary similarly to PM1 and BC mass concentrations, with nocturnal minima and sharp day-time increases owing to the development of a diurnal mountain breeze. Under clean air conditions, high levels of nucleation and lower Aitken mode concentrations were measured, highlighting the importance of new particle formation as a source of particles in the absence of a significant condensation sink. During the warmer months, nucleation mode concentrations were observed to be relatively elevated both under polluted and clean conditions due to increased photochemical reactions, with enhanced subsequent growth owing to elevated concentrations of condensable organic vapours produced from biogenic volatile organic compounds, indicating that nucleation at MSY does not exclusively occur under clean air conditions. Finally, mixing of air masses between polluted and non-polluted boundary layer air, and brief changes in the air mass being sampled gave rise to unusual particle number size distributions, with specific cases of such behaviour discussed at length. ; This study was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds under the projects CARIATI (CGL2008-06294/CLI), VAMOS (CGL2010 19464/CLI) and GRACCIE (CSD 2007-00067), and from the Generalitat de Catalunya 2009 SGR8. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/ 2007-2013) ACTRIS under grant agreement no. 262254. The authors would like to extend their gratitude to Jesu´ s Parga and Jordi Gil for their technical support. The authors also thank METEOCAT for the meteorological data and the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for the provision of the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model and/or READY website (http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ ready.html) used in this publication. ; Peer reviewed
Sequestration of plastics in sediments is considered the ultimate sink of marine plastic pollution that would justify unexpectedly low loads found in surface waters. Here, we demonstrate that mangroves, generally supporting high sediment accretion rates, efficiently sequester plastics in their sediments. To this end, we extracted microplastics from dated sediment cores of the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf mangrove (Avicennia marina) forests along the Saudi Arabian coast. We found that microplastics <0.5 mm dominated in mangrove sediments, helping explain their scarcity, in surface waters. We estimate that 50 ± 30 and 110 ± 80 metric tons of plastic may have been buried since the 1930s in mangrove sediments across the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, respectively. We observed an exponential increase in the plastic burial rate (8.5 ± 1.2% year$^{−1}$) since the 1950s in line with the global plastic production increase, confirming mangrove sediments as long-term sinks for plastics. ; We thank A. Qasem and P. Priahartato, from Saudi Aramco, for support and advice on sampling design; R. Lindo, R. Magalles, P. Bacquiran, S. Ibrahim, and M. Lopez, at the Marine Studies section of the Center for Environment and Water of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, for contribution in fieldwork sampling in the Arabian Gulf; and Z. Batang and staff from the Coastal and Marine Resources core laboratory at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for help with sampling in the Red Sea. We thank I. Schulz, N. Geraldi, K. Rowe, S. Roth, M. Ennasri, and D. Prabowo for helping with processing of the cores. We thank the KAUST Workshop for manufacturing the SMI unit. We thank R. al Nahdi for help during plastic extraction. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is grateful for the support provided to its Environment Laboratories by the government of the Principality of Monaco. ; This work was supported and funded by KAUST through the baseline funding of C.M.D. and by the Australian Research Council LIEF Project (LE170100219) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (grant 2017 SGR-1588) through the funding provided to P.M. This work is contributing to the ICTA "Unit of Excellence" (MinECo, MDM2015-0552).
