2008 UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 7, 2008 and December 29, 2008

Identity Work in Aspiring Big 4 Accounting Practice Leaders: Narratives of Personal Reinvention

How do future Big 4 partners and managing directors (collectively referred to as “practice leaders”) develop themselves and change their identities as they progress through role transitions within the accounting firms where their careers unfold? For accountants who develop themselves into partner material, little is known about the process of identity work they engage in across their career span; even less is known about managing directors’ identity work processes. This study explores accountants’ self-transformation journey, one marked by intention and reinvention, as they become practice leaders. Their journey of agentic reinvention, though it takes place in a socially connected environment, is largely a project of the self. This qualitative narrative inquiry finds that future practice leaders utilize mental management techniques extensively to transform themselves into more adaptable, resilient professionals who overcome roadblocks. Further, they actively leverage liminal periods to accelerate their self-development and promotability. This research also highlights differences in the ways that sensemaking and legitimacy-claiming are accomplished by a partner vs. managing directors. Finally, this study documents identity struggles that accounting professionals experience after their long-awaited promotion. A key insight is that joining a Big 4 firm’s upper ranks as a practice leader – rather than marking the end of accountants’ identity journey – introduces a new, dynamic, and perhaps more challenging phase of personal reinvention, identity work, and becoming. The triumphs and tribulations experienced by practice leaders before, during, and after their promotions point to several implications for aspiring accountants and the firms who employ them

2016, UMaine News Press Releases

This is a catalog of press releases put out by the University of Maine Division of Marketing and Communications between January 4, 2016 and December 30, 2016

Beyond Recidivism: Learning with Formerly Incarcerated Men About Youth Incarceration

Too often, the truth behind a phenomenon is not sought through the perspectives of the people who lived that phenomenon—“the masters of inquiry” into their own realities, as Paulo Freire (1982, p. 29) has explained. Voice is the most powerful, reliable medium for collecting data based on lived experiences, if we are to gain genuine insight into the phenomenon (Freire, 1982). Focusing on the lived experiences of four formerly incarcerated young men of color, this study gave each participant the space to not only recall specific events and times, but to critically reflect on their lives—becoming more critically aware of their individual journeys and constructing new knowledge of the injustices that relate to the school-to-prison pipeline, including recommendations for change. This study sought to answer the following research questions through the voices of the participants: (a) Based on their collective and individual journeys through the juvenile justice system, how do formerly incarcerated youth describe their experiences? (b) What recommendations do formerly incarcerated young men have for reducing youth incarceration and recidivism rates? The participants provided rich narratives that answered each research question with the expert knowledge that can only be derived from firsthand experience. Through careful analysis of the data, several major themes emerged, tying together the experiences of each participant with the findings from the literature. Each participant spoke passionately on not only the need for change, but also specific recommendations for change. It is the power of their poignant insights that ground conclusions offered in this study

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Cultivating natures: movements in South African permaculture

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology), 2017Environmental history and anthropology are disciplines yet in their infancy in South Africa, and still leave many opportunities for further research. The global permaculture movement has emerged as one amongst an array of environmental movements in South Africa that seek alternatives to industrialised capitalist economics which have been identified by many observers as problematic and deleterious to both human and ecological ‘systems’. This research explores permaculture practice as an environmental social movement in the South African context, drawing on a wide array of theory including environmental anthropology, environmental history, social movements theory and ‘whiteness’ studies, amongst others. These bodies of theory have been used to analyse the research data drawn primarily from established anthropological methods of participant observation, narrative elicitation through deep and open-ended interviews and the observation of social and land use practices in particular detailed case studies. The research findings indicated that while permaculture ideology proposed an alternative utopian approach to human-ecological relationships associated with the trappings of neoliberal economic models for development and conservation, the actual practice of permaculture - communally-based resource management and the realisation of these ideals - while developing knowledge around localised sustainable land-use strategies, appeared to necessitate the regulation of social relations and resource access, alignment with the state’s environmental and land-use policies and were largely made possible by white privilege rooted in the country’s colonial and apartheid history. The research highlighted the need to recognise the social and historical specificity of permaculture ideology and practice within the South African context.XL201

Viet Nam Generation, Volume 6, Number 3-4

Edited by Dan Duffy and Kali Tal. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson

‘Five for fighting’: the culture and practice of legitimised violence in professional ice hockey

This research investigates the phenomenon of violence through the lens of legitimised violence in ice hockey. The study locates ice hockey violence among the boundaries of criminality, where it is managed, organised and regulated outside of the criminal justice system. Here, violence is organised through an accepted code of conduct, widely understood and acknowledged by players, spectators and regulators. Violence is organised through the culture of hockey, situated in the spectacle of entertainment, the audience often displaying a carnivalesque thirst for violence. In sport, the criminological boundaries of violence are not set and enforced by criminal justice agencies; rather they are constructed, managed and mediated through the culture of the sport and an accepted code of behaviour. Reflecting on an extended ethnography of the culture of professional hockey, this thesis considers the ever-changing cultural climate of sanctioned violence in the sport. Through ethnographic observation and extensive visually-elicited interviews; cultural and social identity, motives of violent behaviour, and situated meanings of hockey players are uncovered in a manner that has historically not been prioritised within criminological research of this area. The process of legitimisation of this physical violence is formed and shaped not only by players engaging in the sport, but by cultural factors that exist beyond the confines of the rink. Informed by broad structural themes such as power, masculinity and finance; shared interactions on the ice are a small part of the wider accepted justifications for otherwise illegal acts of violence