240 research outputs found

    The Opportunities and Challenges of Female Entrepreneurial Leadership in Modern China

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    Female entrepreneurial leadership is becoming one of China’s economic development dynamics. However, the opportunities and challenges for female entrepreneurial leaders are still underdeveloped in research. Thus, this study seeks to analyse the opportunities and challenges of female entrepreneurial leadership by utilising the interpretive methodology from the perspective of cultural psychology and subsequently introducing the concept of “cultural gateway." Specifically, cultural tightness and looseness together often form a cultural gateway towards female entrepreneurial leaders. This study makes contributions to the research on female entrepreneurial leadership in five aspects. Firstly, a family-oriented culture is explored as a new finding compared with extant research. Secondly, the concept of a ‘cultural gateway’ is proposed to systematically interpret how the opportunities and challenges formulate. This means that the status of a cultural gateway, such as closed or open, correspondingly becomes a challenge or opportunity for female entrepreneurial leaders. Thirdly, the concept of ‘gender gateway’ is inferred from the concept of ‘cultural gateway’ to interpret gender inequality, which can contribute to understanding Chinese feminism. Based on this point of view, this study proposes that Chinese feminism is a transcendence of ‘gender gateway’. Fourthly, a model of female entrepreneurial leadership for identifying challenges and opportunities is constructed as a contribution to cultural psychology. Particularly, this model reorganises the four levels of Culture Cyle (i.e., Individuals, Interactions, Institutes, and Ideas) into the relationship between psychological adaptation (at the Individuals level) and cultural gateway (at the levels of Interactions, Institutes, and Ideas). Cultural gateways and psychological adaptations usually interact together and formulate a coupling structure. In this situation, the psychological adaptation of female entrepreneurial leaders needs to match the cultural gateway. Both of these determinants will create real opportunities for female entrepreneurial leaders if they are matched. Conversely, if both are mismatched, the determinants will challenge female entrepreneurial leaders. Fifthly, this study proposes that female entrepreneurial leadership is a practical path for women to realise a transcendence of both self and cultural gateway. Specifically, this study finds that geographic cultures with the properties of cultural tightness and looseness influence the opportunities and challenges of female entrepreneurial leadership. In detail, cultural tightness geographically exists in socioeconomic-developing areas, and cultural looseness exists in socioeconomic-developed areas. Thus, this study recommends that those Chinese women who are in the areas with cultural tightness need to learn from and reference the female entrepreneurial leaders who have business foresight and are successful in the areas with cultural looseness to realise their entrepreneurial visions. Generally, this study recommends that policymakers, female entrepreneurial leaders, non-entrepreneurial women, and Westerners transcend the self or cultural gateways with different solutions to seize opportunities and deal with challenges

    Summer/Fall 2023

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    Collective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Change

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    “Collective Embodiment and Communal Feeling: A Critical Somatics Approach to Performance for Social Change” argues for a novel approach to performance for social change that focuses on the sensory and somatic dimensions of collectivity as the basis for countering the atomizing politics of neoliberalism. It proposes a critical somatics approach to the deconstruction and reconfiguration of participants’ embodied subjectivities, emphasizing the cultivation of conditions that facilitate experiences of collective embodiment and affective interdependence. Whether in the kinesthetic awareness of bodies dancing together, the situational or proprioceptive awareness of a collective engaged in creative disruption, or the physical contact of activists’ clasped arms forming a human chain in protest, these conditions require multisensory engagement, improvisational coordination, and shared feeling. Based on ethnographic accounts of the phenomenological experience of collective embodiment, I argue that such experiences enact—rather than merely argue for—forms of collectivity through their operation on the level of the body. This approach to performance for social change builds on the experience of practitioners and artist-activists in an effort to preserve the core contributions of existing techniques while seeking avenues to overcome their susceptibility to the influence of increasingly ubiquitous neoliberal frameworks. Opening with a consideration of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as a touchstone example, I argue that the technique’s cognitive approach to social change and its emphasis on discursive techniques contribute to the manner in which it individualizes responsibility for combating systemic oppression. Turning to Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter’s InterPlay as an example of an affective approach to performance for social change, I critique its practitioners’ culture of individualism, but identify the critical potential of its recognition of collective embodiment. Extending this analysis to protest and direct action, I explore the existential prefiguration of communities of care and the cultivation of communal feeling, an affective and collective form of embodied cognition. After offering a series of activities designed to create the conditions for experiences of collective embodiment and develop the affective bonds of communal feeling, I close with a consideration of the broader implications of positioning speculative theory at the forefront of movements’ political practice.Doctor of Philosoph

    The Expectations, Experiences and Satisfaction of Students Within a Nutrition and Dietetics Program Regarding Faculty Academic Advising Using a Prescriptive or Developmental Advising Lens

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    This research study examined student’s expectation, experiences and satisfaction with faculty academic advising using a prescriptive vs. developmental lens. The intent was to explore the student’s expectations of academic advising, determine if their experiences aligned with their expectation and if this led to satisfaction of their academic advising. This study utilized the Systems theory to determine how academic advising is performed by the program and if that experience for the student is how the systems (institution, college, department, and program) are promoting the form of advising. This study utilized a qualitative case study approach, guided by three research questions. Data collected consisted of survey for background information, interviews and artifacts (documents). Data analysis explored themes among student responses to determine if their experiences and expectations were connected to developmental academic advising or prescriptive academic advising and if this led to satisfaction of advising. The finding of this study can be used to inform future decision making about the delivery of academic advising (faculty vs professional) the administrative value placed on academic advising and the time that advisors are dedicating to academic advising

    Towards an ecosystem view of legitimacy of third sector organisations

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    The study aims to provide a better understanding of the legitimacy and legitimation of third sector organisations (TSOs). It does so by integrating insights from contemporary legitimacy literature and public administration management literature into the context of Scottish-based TSOs that deliver services to young people. Legitimacy can support the resource acquisition and long-term survival of TSOs. Therefore, legitimacy should not be taken for granted and must be actively managed to gain endorsement, support, and resources from the legitimating environment. However, much of the previous non-profit literature has tended to focus on the study of dyads, where the funder is often viewed as the main constituency who grants legitimacy to TSOs. TSOs are complex organisations because they have multiple constituent groups who may have different interests. The non-profit underpinnings of TSOs, the multiplicity of funding mechanisms and the presence of multiple constituents require expanding the focus to embrace these characteristics into the study of TSO legitimacy. The study employed a qualitative multiple case study approach to explore legitimacy of four TSOs with different funding structures. Major data collection tools included semi-structured interviews with selected organisations and their funding institutions, observations and site visits, and analysis of relevant documents. The data was thematically analysed. The research study was guided by abductive reasoning which allowed for the exploration of the appropriate theoretical framework during the research and identified the relevance of the ecosystem approach in the study of the phenomena. The application of the ecosystem approached has allowed to account for the complexity of TSOs and uncover a range of interlinked processes that contribute to TSO legitimacy. By embracing a holistic view on legitimacy, the study has provided an empirical demonstration that in the TSO context, legitimation of TSOs does not occur in dyadic relationships between the organisation and the funder but requires ongoing interactions with other elements in the wider ecosystem, the role of which becomes apparent only after the whole ecosystem has been explored and understood. Accordingly, the study has proposed a framework of the legitimacy ecosystem of TSOs and offered three different approaches to legitimation based on the core element, which has more legitimising potential than others when viewed within the whole ecosystem

    The Administrative Turn in Contemporary Art: The Figure of the Arts Administrator — a case study of the Taipei Biennial (1996-2020)

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    This PhD uses “the Administrative Turn” to describe the specific, but also the more general, changing nature of the local and global administrative networks which support contemporary art. Through a case study of the figure of the arts administrator at the Taipei Biennial (TB), this research examines these changes in three ways – on (1) changes in institutional principles of arts administration, (2) changes in administrative methodology, and (3) changes in function for arts administrators. Taking a transdisciplinary approach drawing on Arts Management, Curatorial Studies, Museum Studies and Art History, this thesis engages critically with the value of “the administrative” as a necessary approach to catalyse a shift in focus away from the highly visible and spectacularised norm of the global contemporary art world, towards the infrastructural significance of the backstage. This change in perspective through the study of the TB arts administrators sets out to present a missing puzzle of what makes that art world functions as it does and how in fact the support network of the contemporary art practices have transformed because of changes in the administrative capacity in terms of its institution, methodology and function. Chapter 1 details the developmental history of the system of arts administration at TB, as an institution situated within a government-backed, museum-based, contemporary art exhibitionary ecosystem, and finds that the institution history and design principles of arts administration are not only a reflection but also an active author of Taiwanese national identity. Chapter 2 demonstrates how arts management and its methodology as a practice-centric tradecraft based on the narrative of professionalism and a stewardship process, is iterative and relies on a balance of control and care. With a close analysis of the administrative capacity, Chapter 3 establishes the figure of the arts administrators as reflexive and its function pedagogical and consultative. This research concludes that acting as critical infrastructure, arts administrators as ascending co-development stewards, possess the transformative agency to radically re-imagine their sphere of practice and re-conceptualise how the support network could better function for a fast-evolving and increasingly multi-stakeholder production reality, which underpins the culture of contemporary art biennials globally

    The Varieties of Contemplative Experiences and Practices

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    While the diverse contemplative techniques are employed across a plethora of traditions around the world, contemplative research over the years has not reflected this variety. Despite growing interest in research on meditation, studies in contemplative science have largely focused on a narrow selection of practices (e.g., mindfulness, compassion, etc.) and traditions (i.e. Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation etc.). By choosing this topic, we hope to broaden the scope of contemplative science

    Breaking the silence about institutional child abuse in Sri Lanka

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    Background: In Sri Lanka where seventy per cent of the population is Buddhist, there are more than twelve thousand Buddhist monasteries accessed by children for educational and religious purposes. Despite scandalous media reports on incidents of child abuse in Buddhist monasteries in Sri Lanka (BMS), no previous academic or public inquiry has been undertaken on this issue. Aim: The study set out to explore and describe the silence around child abuse in the monastic context at an interpersonal, institutional, professional and academic level. Method: Operationally defining the incidents of child abuse in the BMS as the case, an instrumental case study approach was employed (Stake, 1998). Using social constructionism (Burger and Luckman, 1967) and ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) as a theoretical framework, data were gathered from multiple sources including semi-structured interviews with four former monks who had experienced child abuse as novice monks, three senior monks who were familiar with and willing to discuss the issue, and three child protection officers with relevant work experience. Interview data were analysed using thematic networking (Attride-Sterling, 2001) and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019). Other data sources included a reflexive journal, and publicly available data such as policy documents, media reports and interviews. Results: Data analysis produced three thematic clusters: predisposing silencers, precipitating silencers, and perpetuating silencers. While survivors’ accounts converged on other data sources, accounts of monastic leaders and child protection officers contained a mixture of convergent and divergent views. Conclusions: Overall, the findings indicated that: the survivors silently absorbed the memories of abuse due to various interpersonal, social, and structural limitations, the monastic leadership remained reticent due to ignorance, interest in institutional power and reputation, while the child protection service towards children in monasteries was hampered by structural, cultural and policy limitations. The findings contribute to the existing literature by providing unique insights into the social ecological barriers to recognition, disclosure, and intervention of child abuse in loosely regulated institutions in developing countries
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