9,235 research outputs found

    Chinese Knitwear Brands: The need for creative design to result in global business success

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    Chinese cashmere knitwear companies have become suppliers of international fashion brands because of their technological excellence, advantages of raw materials and competitive prices. However, their in-house brands are steadily declining. In the past 15 years, Chinese cashmere brands have progressively lost their market share to Chinese and Western fashion brands, with a few notable exceptions. Their brands lack differentiation from other Chinese competitors, causing low price competition, which contributes to sustainability issues such as unsold stock and material/manpower waste. The decline is likely to continue as the brands serve only an ageing market, rather than attracting younger generations to their products. Chinese cashmere companies invest little in design, which is a significant limitation for improving the brands’ opportunity to become successful and sustainable businesses. This study looks for solutions from the design perspective. The research aimed to investigate what design can do to help deal with the current problems of the Chinese knitwear brands to improve their prospects for future business success. The objectives of the study were to enquire into the challenges and opportunities facing the Chinese knitwear sector, to evaluate current design practice in knitwear brands, to understand how design and brand management can be integrated to generate a sustainable brand. Research questions were developed to explore the brand and design problems, the role of design and organisational structure, what the barriers and enablers for a thriving design culture were alongside possible solutions for design improvement. A pragmatic philosophy underpinned research design, guiding the adoption of methods in response to research questions. Interviews with stakeholders from both the knitwear industry and design education were undertaken. In addition, a case study using design action research with immersive field research was developed for investigating the knitwear brand issues; furthermore, a knitwear collection was created using western design approaches to demonstrate an exemplar design process for the sector and to illustrate the differences to current Chinese design methods. The study argues the obstacles to design culture enrichment in Chinese knitwear brands was caused by their design context, lack of brand positioning, limited understanding of their consumers and business models that are not fit for purpose. An absence of experienced leadership creates unclear design direction, instead of collections centred around a theme; Chinese brands sell unconnected designs. Brands lack the distinct brand characteristics that distinguish them from their competitors. The contribution to knowledge made by this study includes the identification of the reasons for the decline in Chinese cashmere brands, an understanding of their barriers to design culture to developing good designs and it also highlights the lack of awareness of sustainability issues in the sector. The study sheds new light on the rarely acknowledged issue of how to upgrade these brands as modern business for younger consumers, and how to enrich the design culture for brand business growth within sustainable contexts. The thesis analyses in depth the causes for the decline in these brands and makes recommendations for how design can make a contribution to reversing the brands’ decline and increasing their sustainability

    “Oh my god, how did I spend all that money?”: Lived experiences in two commodified fandom communities

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    This research explores the role of commodification in participation in celebrity-centric fandom communities, applying a leisure studies framework to understand the constraints fans face in their quest to participate and the negotiations they engage in to overcome these constraints. In fan studies scholarship, there is a propensity to focus on the ways fans oppose commodified industry structures; however, this ignores the many fans who happily participate within them. Using the fandoms for the pop star Taylor Swift and the television series Supernatural as case studies, this project uses a mixed-methodological approach to speak directly to fans via surveys and semistructured interviews to develop an understanding of fans’ lived experiences based on their own words. By focusing on celebrity-centric fandom communities rather than on the more frequently studied textual fandoms, this thesis turns to the role of the celebrity in fans’ ongoing desire to participate in commodified spaces. I argue that fans are motivated to continue spending money to participate within their chosen fandom when this form of participation is tied to the opportunity for engagement with the celebrity. While many fans seek community from their fandom participation, this research finds that for others, social ties are a secondary outcome of their overall desire for celebrity attention, which becomes a hobby in which they build a “leisure career” (Stebbins 2014). When fans successfully gain attention from their celebrity object of fandom, they gain status within their community, creating intra-fandom hierarchies based largely on financial resources and on freedom from structural constraints related to education, employment, and caring. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the broad neglect of celebrity fandom practices means we have overlooked the experiences of many fans, necessitating a much broader future scope for the field

    Understanding the Potential of Sport for Promoting Physical Activity and Psychological Well-Being in Middle-Aged and Older Adults

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    Insufficient physical activity is considered a global public health challenge. This thesis highlights that, for middle-aged and older adults, sport participation is associated with a wide range of psychosocial benefits. Then, the thesis offers insight into the potential of walking sport programmes to promote health-enhancing physical activity in middle-aged and older adults. Recommendations are provided to promote the appeal, feasibility, and sustainability of walking sport programmes in community-based settings

    A qualitative study exploring whether emotion work conducted by health visitors has an influence on their assessment and identification of children in need of care and protection?

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    There is an increased understanding that experiencing adversity in childhood can have a significantly negative impact on the long-term developmental wellbeing of children and young people, as well as their families and communities. Political and societal ambition is that such adverse experiences and their consequences are eradicated through preventative and early intervention measures taken by health, education, and social care practitioners on the identification of a child(ren) who requires support. Professionals working with children have become increasingly proficient in this type of work however no professional is infallible. As a result, many children and young people living with adverse circumstances can go unnoticed. For some this includes experiencing harm which often only comes to light when they have been significantly or fatally injured. Every child living in the United Kingdom is aligned with the universal health visiting service following birth to school entry. Health visitors play an essential role in “searching for health needs” through the “surveillance and assessment of the population’s health and wellbeing” (Nursing & Midwifery Council [NMC] 2004, page 11) . Such universal contact based on these core principles mean that health visitors are ideally positioned to identify children living in challenging situations but, like others, they can find this difficult on occasions. The purpose of this study is to explore whether health visitors view the emotion work they carry out as part of their role has an influence on their ability to assess, identify, and respond to children in need of care and protection. STUDY – METHOD: The study has been progressed qualitatively, using a reflexive ethnographic approach to interviews as the main data collection and analytic method with short periods of office-based observation. 16 health visitors who managed caseloads of between 100-450 pre-school children were observed and interviewed to understand their experiences, values, and beliefs. Gee’s (2014) toolkit was used to critically analyse the discourse shared during the interviews. FINDINGS: The emergent findings demonstrate that health visitors can be conceptualised as ‘applied clinical anthropologists’ in the way they develop relationships with families to gain access to their home environments. The approach taken is to gather information to the depth required for a social, bioecological assessment (Bronfenbrenner 2005) of a child in the context of their family and community system. Health visitors are welcomed by most families and are often successful in assessing and responding to child need. However, at times, the level of engagement necessary can be overwhelming for both the health visitor and parent/carer. This influences the level of child centred assessment obtained. The study has demonstrated that the influences on the work of the health visitor can be interpreted through a complex interplay of theoretical concepts. Firstly, Bourdieu’s “theory of practice” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992, page 4) provides the basis on which to understand why challenges and barriers arise during the relational work of the health visitor with the child and family. Secondly, Gross’ (2014) Emotion Regulation Framework and Hochschild’s (1983) theory of Emotional Labour, are utilised to consider how health visitors and families respond emotionally to these challenges. The study then goes on to demonstrate what impact these responses can have on the assessment of children. RECOMMENDATIONS: Implications for practice are that health visitors require increased rates of supervision. This should include an observational element. Educational programmes for health visitors, require a focus on promoting professional wellbeing with learning sessions on unconscious bias. Research and learning developments are suggested to influence assessment and decision-making practice. Research with other professional groups and children & families is recommended to build on the findings of this study in order to influence future safeguarding policy and practice to protect children

    Contextualising Universities’ Third Mission:A Study of African Women’s Participation in Academic Engagement

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    The traditional mandate of universities has been to undertake research and teaching activities. However, in recent times, universities are pursuing a ‘third mission’ by collaborating with societal partners, including firms. Research suggests that such academic engagement (AE) activities are expedient for achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Other studies have, however, drawn attention to the gender differences in men and women’s pursuit and practice of AE. In particular, scholars have shown that the masculine cultures and structures of universities and firms are averse to women researchers’ lived experiences and, thus, limit their participation in AE activities compared to their male colleagues. The emerging gender dynamics in AE has raised important, yet unanswered questions, regarding the potential of universities and firms to support the achievement of SDG5 (gender equality and women’s empowerment), especially in developing countries that are characterised by weak institutions. Given the importance of AE to the success of the SDGs, this thesis aims to fill this knowledge gap by first, providing an understanding of how the corporate sustainability practices of businesses are pragmatically contributing to the achievement of the SDGs related to gender, climate change, democracy, and poverty, within the contexts of Mexico, Ghana, Vietnam, and South Africa. Second, and focusing narrowly on the theme of gender and the sub-Saharan African context, the thesis sheds light on how and why gender differences exist in the opportunities for men and women researchers to participate in AE activities. Next, the study draws on Bourdieusian social theory and in-depth interviews with 36 women researchers from Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Botswana, to explicate how women researchers within these contexts utilise their agency to overcome the structural and cultural constraints impeding their involvement in AE activities. Finally, the thesis deepens insights into how, and why, the efforts of African women researchers to overcome the systemic constraints impeding their participation in AE activities, come to reinforce the very structures that establish those barriers. A key finding from the study is that AE promotes competitiveness and performativity in academia, which in turn distorts the gender equality targets enshrined in SDG5. In particular, the findings demonstrate that AE is a gendered and neoliberal activity that urges women researchers to develop and implement career strategies that sustain male privileges and female disadvantages within universities. Emerging from the analysis is also the fact that, although businesses can make significant contributions to the SDGs, a failure to embed community participation in their corporate sustainability principles and agendas, can reverse much of the progress made on SDG5. This thesis makes several contributions. First, it extends and pushes forward existing scholarship and policy discussions on the SDGs by empirically investigating a significant, but understudied group of women, whose voices and experiences in academia have rarely been acknowledged. In addition, the study provides novel insights into the socio-cultural dimension of sustainable development by highlighting the utility of community participation approaches to corporate sustainability practices. Importantly, this study offers another way of viewing the gender gap in AE by drawing on Bourdieu’s (1977) social theory to show how the current single-level and de-contextualised explanations of this problem limit our understanding of the interesting ways in which micro-individual career opportunities are shaped by contextual influences at the macro-level and organisational processes and practices at the meso-level

    “Not the story you want, I’m sure”: Mental health recovery and the narratives of people from marginalised communities

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    Background: The dominant narrative in mental health policy and practice has shifted in the 21st century from one of chronic ill health or incurability to an orientation towards recovery. A recovery-based approach is now the most frequently used in services in the Global North, and its relevance has also been explored in Global South settings. Despite the ubiquity of the recovery approach, people experiencing poverty, homelessness, intersecting oppressions (based for example on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or ability), and other forms of social marginalisation remain under-represented within recovery-oriented research. More inclusive research has been called for to ensure that knowledge of recovery processes is not based solely on the experiences of the relatively well-resourced. Personal narratives of recovery from mental distress have played a central role in the establishment of the recovery approach within mental health policy and practice. Originating in survivor/service-user movements, the use of ‘recovery narratives’ has now become widespread for diverse purposes, including staff training to improve service delivery and increase empathy, public health campaigns to challenge stigma, online interventions to increase access to self-care resources, and as a distinctive feature of peer support. Research suggests that recovery-focused narratives can have benefits and also risks for narrators and recipients. At the same time, the elicitation of such narratives by healthcare researchers, educators and practitioners has been problematised by survivor-researchers and other critical theorists, as a co-option of lived experience for neoliberal purposes. Following a systematic review of empirical research studies undertaken on characteristics of recovery narratives (presented in Chapter 4), a need for empirical research on the narratives of people from socially marginalised groups was identified. What kinds of stories might we/they be telling, and what are their experiences of telling their stories? What do their experiences tell us about the use of stories within a recovery approach? Aim: Drawing on a body of critical scholarship, my aim is to conduct an empirical inquiry into (i) characteristics of recovery stories told by people from socially marginalised groups, and (ii) their experiences of telling their stories in formal and everyday settings. Method: I undertook a critical narrative inquiry based on the stories of 77 people from marginalised groups, collected in the context of a wider study. This comprised narratives from people with lived experience of mental distress who additionally met one or more of the following criteria: (i) had experiences of psychosis; (ii) were from Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnic communities; (iii) are under-served by services (operationalised as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer + communities (LGBTQ+) or people identified as having multiple and complex needs); or (iv) had peer support roles. Two-part interviews were conducted (18 conducted by me). Part A consisted of an open-ended question designed to elicit a narrative, and part B was a semi-structured interview inviting participants to reflect on their experiences of telling their recovery stories in different contexts. Following Riessman’s analytical approach, I undertook three forms of analysis: a structural narrative analysis of Part A across the dataset (informed by a preliminary conceptual framework developed in Chapter 4); a thematic analysis of Part B where participants additionally reflected on telling their stories; and an in-depth performative narrative analysis of two accounts (parts A and B) from people with multiple and complex needs. Findings: In a structural analysis of Part A, the recovery narratives told by people from marginalised groups were found to be diverse and multidimensional. Most (97%) could be characterised by the nine dimensions described in the preliminary conceptual framework (Genre; Positioning; Emotional Tone; Relationship with Recovery; Trajectory; Turning Points; Narrative Sequence; Protagonists; and Use of Metaphors). Each dimension of the framework contained a number of different types. These were expanded as a result of the structural analysis to contain more types: for example, a ‘cyclical’ type of trajectory was added), and a more comprehensive typology of recovery narratives was produced. Two narratives were found to be ‘outliers’, in that their structure, form and content could not adequately be described by the majority of existing dimensions and types. These served as exemplars of the framework’s limitations. In a thematic analysis of Part B, my overarching finding was that power differentials between narrators and recipients could be seen as the key factor affecting participants’ experiences of telling their recovery stories in formal and everyday settings. Four themes describing the possibilities and problems raised by telling their stories were identified: (i) ‘Challenging the status quo’; (ii) ‘Risky consequences’; (iii) ‘Producing acceptable stories’ and (iv) ‘Untellable stories’. In a performative analysis of two narratives of people with multiple and complex needs (Parts A and B), I found two contrasting ways of responding to the invitation to tell a recovery story: a ‘narrative of personal lack’ and a ‘narrative of resistance’. I demonstrate how the genre of ‘recovery narrative’, with its focus on transformation at the level of personal identity, may function to occlude social and structural causes of distress, and reinforce ideas of personal responsibility for ongoing distress in the face of unchanging living conditions. Conclusion: The recovery narratives of people from socially marginalised groups are diverse and multidimensional. Told in some contexts, they may hold power to challenge the status quo. However, telling stories of lived experience and recovery is risky, and there may be pressure on narrators to produce ‘acceptable’ stories, or to omit or de-emphasise experiences which challenge dominant cultural narratives. A recovery-based approach to the use of lived experience narratives in research and practice may be contributing towards an over-emphasis on individualist approaches to the reduction of distress. This over-emphasis can be seen to reflect what has been identified as a global trend towards the ‘instrumental’ use of personal narratives for utilitarian purposes based on market values. Attention to power differentials and structural as well as agentic factors is vital to ensure that the use of narratives in research and practice does not contribute towards a decontextualised, reductionist form of recovery which pays insufficient attention to the economic, institutional and political injustices that people experiencing mental distress may systematically endure. A sensitive and socially just use of lived experience narratives will remain alert to a variety of power dimensions present within the contexts in which they are shared and hear

    Navigating expectations for sustainable product design: a discursive psychology analysis of designers’ accounts

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    Sustainable design is vital to achieving sustainable development. It is commonly argued that designers should ensure more sustainable design decisions are made, based on environmental values, and should take responsibility for the sustainability of product outcomes. In this thesis, I treat decision-making, personal values, and responsibility as psychological concepts, thus examining the setting of sustainable design through a psychological lens. I argue that the ways these concepts are talked about in design literature construct expectations regarding how designers should act. However, there is ambiguity in this literature regarding what the designer’s role is expected to be. There is a great deal of prescriptive literature providing tools to advise designers on how to make more sustainable design decisions. Yet there is debate regarding how decisions are or should be made, who makes design decisions related to sustainability, and who is responsible for how sustainable product outcomes are. How these concepts are theorised in design, and how practitioner guidance on decision-making in sustainable design is framed by campaign groups, is likely to influence how design is done in practice. There is therefore a need to find out how designers are navigating expectations that they should be doing more sustainable design. There is a key gap in empirical literature of gathering and analysing designers’ accounts of how decision-making, values, and responsibility come into their work from their own perspectives. To start to fill this gap, I collected instances of interactional talk involving product designers’ verbal accounts in two different contexts in 2020. I carried out sixteen semi-structured interviews with an international sample of sustainability-focused product designers, asking questions about decision-making, values, and responsibility in specific recent design projects. I selected seven recordings of panel discussions at design conferences with a focus on sustainability from YouTube, based on their relevance to the concepts of decision-making, values, and responsibility. These two types of data allow the identification of similarities in ways of talking to others about the same topics in both private and public settings. I analysed extracts of the verbal data using discursive psychology, a method that has been specifically developed to analyse interactions, treating talk as action, and commonly seeking to respecify how psychological concepts are understood. In the thesis, I present my analysis of how decision-making, values, and responsibility related to sustainability are constructed and managed in the designers’ accounts. This enables insights into how designers navigate the expectations that they should be making more sustainable design decisions. My analysis shows: 1) The designers manage the delicateness of decision-making, values, and responsibility in design in different ways. For example, participants either reject or orient to expectations regarding how design decision-making should be done, often contradicting themselves. Participants orient to the idea of values influencing their decisions but focus on explaining where values came from rather than how they influence. They negotiate expectations of responsibility by either deflecting or assuming it, depending on the framing of questions asked. 2) Participants take opportunities to portray their identities as sustainability-focused designers, depicting longstanding commitment. 3) When the designers portray a lack of agency to make sustainability-relevant design decisions, they then claim agency through focusing on their role in influencing and ‘pushing’ others. Thus, the complexity for designers of managing expectations, personal commitment, and limited agency related to making products more sustainable in professional settings is portrayed. The practical and theoretical contributions of these findings are provided, outlining how authors and practitioners who seek to make design more sustainable should carefully consider the expectations built into the way they frame their arguments and advice. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the usefulness of interdisciplinary research for providing novel insights, through examining sustainable design using a contemporary, qualitative method from psychology

    Agency and professionalism in translation and interpreting: navigating conflicting role identities among translation and interpreting practitioners working for local government in Japan

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    This thesis investigates the ethical choices of Coordinators for International Relations (CIRs), a group of largely non-professional translators and interpreters working for local government bodies in Japan. In addition to T&I, CIRs are tasked with engaging in intercultural relations, “internationalising” their local areas, and working with the public as members of the civil service. The thesis examines the different roles and particular circumstances of CIRs to describe and explain how they make ethical decisions in T&I. This was explored using an ethnographic methodology featuring both traditional and online sites. Specifically, data was collected from participant observation of an internet forum created by CIRs, through online surveys, and also by employing focus groups and interviews held with CIRs in Japan. Analysis of forum and survey data illuminated the ethical struggles experienced by CIRs in T&I. It indicated that professionalism and agency were of particular concern for these CIRs when dealing with questions of ethics. Through focus groups, more detailed data was elicited surrounding the ethical struggles faced by CIRs, with a particular focus on professionalism and agency. Forum and focus group data combined to create a set of hypothetical ethical scenarios discussed during semistructured interviews held to understand factors that influence CIR decision making. A theoretical framework combining Agency Theory (Mitnick, 1975) and Role Identity Theory (Stryker, 1968) was used to describe and explain CIR ethical decision making; foregrounding their potential to effect change in their workplaces (agency) and the prioritisation afforded to different roles with which they identify in their work (role identity). Ultimately, CIRs were most disposed to translate or interpret in a manner that they believed was in keeping with the wishes of their employers, based on their superior ability to monitor and control the CIRs. However, in instances where the CIR operated with free will, their choices were a result of complex structuring of the various identities that they had normalised within themselves. Keywords: translation, interpreting, Coordinator for International Relations (CIR), Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme, agency, professionalism, role identity
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