Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Lebanese Subjectivities and Media Use: Post/Global Contexts

Media use is neither socially determined nor socially determinative outside of subjectivity, the process by which the self makes meaning of its place in the world. To further our understandings of media and social change, this dissertation examines the relationship between Lebanese media use and subjectivities in different times and geographic locations, including within the Lebanese diaspora. It incorporates three case studies, including textual analyses of 1) representations of Syro-Lebanese Oklahoman immigrants in The Oklahoman from 1901 to 1958; 2) discourses on media and communication in the contemporary Lebanese civil war novel; and 3) constructions of journalistic authority within the Lebanese blogosphere during the 2006 Summer Israeli-Hizballah war. Through these case studies, this dissertation investigates how global power is constructed/perpetuated/resisted via existing communication channels and patterns of relating that have been created throughout history

City innovation as resonance: : the case of outdoor offices and conferences in the open air museum

This paper explores an innovation case within a “smart” Swedish mid-sized city that works extensively with digitalization.Over a long period in time, city populations and city tourism have increased, while more urgentchallenges connected to sustainability have emerged along with health-related problems. In parallel the already established and ongoing digitalization of society was fortified in the pandemic period, something that may have changed the tourism industry. Today, manyprofessional meetings happen both on- and offline.One challenge for public officials who manage urban space, is a societal expectation to maximize and improve tax payers ́ life quality on limited budgets and resources that are commonly owned.This is one of the reasons to why contemporary urban planners and city tourism development organizations need to find new solutions in response to problems related to local and global change. I will focus on norm- changes related to digital nomadism (Makimoto & Manners, 1997) and in connection with a movement for outdoor office work (www. outdoorofficeday.nl,Petersson et al., 2021). The city culture department is testing to offer outdoor offices and meetings in an urban public open air museum, a place that is used for leisure and for pedagogicpurposes.These new offerings can be conceptualized as innovative value propositions (Corvellec & Hultman, 2014) because new values, for instance rich nature experiences or a feeling of doingthe right thing, are made available for tourism consumers. These proposed services can be understood as a re-negotiation of socio-cultural values, where the public institution re-frames space in response to external change.In sociologist Hartmut Rosas (2019) words, this constitutes a form of an ongoing dialogue withthe world, in resonance. Based on eight qualitative interviews with local managers, participant observations, online communication and documents, I explore innovation from this sociologicalperspective.The aim of this research project is to understand tourism innovation discursive practices in public management, as responses to local and global change. Three research questions guide the study; How are outdoor offices and conferences constructed as value propositions for potential visitors? To which problems/risks do these value propositions respond? With what terms are outdoor offices constructed as answers to problems?So far, it was found that some of the strategic actions taken by the project leader was to launchthe outdoor office through a local innovation program, and to frequently work with professionalsocial media platforms.ReferencesCorvellec, & Hultman. (2014). Managing the politics of value propositions. MarketingTheory, 1470593114523445.Makimoto, T., & Manners, D. (1997). Digital nomad: Wiley.Petersson, T., C., Lisberg, J., E., Stenfors, C., Bodin, D., C., Hoff, E., Mårtensson, F., & Toivanen, S. (2021). Outdoor Office Work – AnInteractive Research Project Showingthe Way Out. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.636091 Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance : a sociology of the relationship to the world: Polity Press.https://www.outdoorofficeday.n

Commodification of recreational hunting in Sweden : hunting tourism experiences as ‘peculiar goods’

The paper is based on a study of hunting tourism enterprising in Sweden. The study examines how hunting tourism businesses in Sweden navigate in a complex social, economic and moral environment. The aim of the present paper is to identify how tensions between a market- oriented value sphere and a value sphere based on friendship- and community reciprocity are played out in hunting tourism entrepreneurship. In particular, the study focuses on the ambiguous character of the hunting experience product and the different narratives and discourses framing what is considered, by the actors themselves, to be a ‘good’ hunting tourism experience

Advances in knowledge discovery and data mining Part II

19th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2015, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, May 19-22, 2015, Proceedings, Part II</p

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo