5,826 research outputs found
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Production networks in the cultural and creative sector: case studies from the publishing industry
The CICERONE project investigates cultural and creative industries through case study research, with a focus on production networks. This report, part of WP2, examines the publishing industry within this framework. It aims to understand the industryâs hidden aspects, address statistical issues in measurement, and explore the industryâs transformation and integration of cultural and economic values. The report provides an overview of the production network, explores statistical challenges, and presents qualitative analyses of two case studies. It concludes by highlighting the potential of the Global Production Network (GPN) approach for analyzing, researching, policymaking, and intervening in the European publishing network.
The CICERONE projectâs case study research delves into the publishing industry, investigating its production networks and examining key aspects often unseen by the public. The report addresses statistical challenges in measuring the industry and sheds light on its ongoing transformations and integration of cultural and economic values. It presents an overview of the production network, explores statistical issues, and provides qualitative analyses of two case studies. The report emphasizes the potential of the GPN approach for analyzing and intervening in the European publishing network, ultimately contributing to research, policymaking, and understanding within the industry
Identity, Power, and Prestige in Switzerland's Multilingual Education
Switzerland is known for its multilingualism, yet not all languages are represented equally in society. The situation is exacerbated by the influx of heritage languages and English through migration and globalization processes which challenge the traditional education system. This study is the first to investigate how schools in Grisons, Fribourg, and Zurich negotiate neoliberal forces leading to a growing necessity of English, a romanticized view on national languages, and the social justice perspective of institutionalizing heritage languages. It uncovers power and legitimacy issues and showcases students' and teachers' complex identities to advocate equitable multilingual education
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
Consent and the Construction of the Volunteer: Institutional Settings of Experimental Research on Human Beings in Britain during the Cold War
This study challenges the primacy of consent in the history of human experimentation and argues that privileging the cultural frameworks adds nuance to our understanding of the construction of the volunteer in the period 1945 to 1970. Historians and bio-ethicists have argued that medical ethics codes have marked out the parameters of using people as subjects in medical scientific research and that the consent of the subjects was fundamental to their status as volunteers. However, the temporality of the creation of medical ethics codes means that they need to be understood within their historical context. That medical ethics codes arose from a specific historical context rather than a concerted and conscious determination to safeguard the well-being of subjects needs to be acknowledged. The British context of human experimentation is under-researched and there has been even less focus on the cultural frameworks within which experiments took place. This study demonstrates, through a close analysis of the Medical Research Council's Common Cold Research Unit (CCRU) and the government's military research facility, the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down (Porton), that the `volunteer' in human experiments was a subjective entity whose identity was specific to the institution which recruited and made use of the subject. By examining representations of volunteers in the British press, the rhetoric of the government's collectivist agenda becomes evident and this fed into the institutional construction of the volunteer at the CCRU. In contrast, discussions between Porton scientists, staff members, and government officials demonstrate that the use of military personnel in secret chemical warfare experiments was far more complex. Conflicting interests of the military, the government and the scientific imperative affected how the military volunteer was perceived
Changing society: pioneering women entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia.
The research examines the role of institutions influencing Saudi female entrepreneurs, and how they became enabled to be social agents and institutional entrepreneurs in a very traditional, family-orientated society - albeit facing pressures to change. In acknowledging the uniqueness of the social-cultural context in Saudi Arabia, this study adopts a qualitative design. Specifically, purposive and snowball sampling techniques were implemented to gather primary qualitative data. The data draw on 31 interviews with female entrepreneurs residing in Jeddah, capturing the practical experiences of these entrepreneurs, and their engagement with the informal and formal institutions of their immediate societal surroundings. The analysis relies on the constant-comparative method (Anderson and Jack 2015) to illicit the meanings and implications taken from context, and also how this informs the day-to-day activities of the entrepreneur (Anderson et al. 2012). This study has found that existing institutions both constrain and enable Saudi women's entrepreneurship. In particular, the obligations and responsibility of Arab families are turned into an advantage, in the form of a patient resource base or networks of knowledge development. We saw too how pioneering efforts, in conjunction with other change, have begun to modestly alter the opportunity structure in Saudi Arabia, with the entrepreneur acting as an agent of change. Saudi women's entrepreneurship is thus best characterised as a recursive process between these entrepreneurs and the social system, which is an essential resource for - and product of - situated actions. This research makes a modest contribution to the long-running discussions on women's entrepreneurship in the context of the Arab world. The findings cannot suggest that it is going to be easy or smooth for future women entrepreneurs; traditions continue and there are also vested patriarchal interests. Nonetheless, increasing numbers of Saudi women are involved in growing their businesses. These pioneers have changed society; a modest, but progressive change for the better. This study has several implications. First, the produced empirical findings have highlighted certain areas for further improvement of female entrepreneurship in Saudi Arabia, which goes in keeping with Saudi Vision 2030 and the expected role of women in the social and economic development of Saudi Arabia. Second, this study has contributed to the existing body of knowledge and understanding of what institutional barriers and challenges Saudi female entrepreneurs face and how they could be overcome at a national level
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Meaning-Making Practices of Emergent ArabicâEnglish Bilingual Kindergarten Children in Cairo
The number of British Schools in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is growing. The National Curriculum of England is used by an increasing number of such schools. As well as exporting a culturally-specific curriculum, these schools usually adopt an ideology of monolingualism, thus potentially limiting communication for emergent bilinguals and failing to acknowledge the multiple ways of meaning-making.
Current studies of translanguaging are moving the focus to multimodal forms of communication as a resource for thinking and communicating (GarcĂa and Wei 2014, Wei 2018). Building on the work of Kress (1997, 2010) I explore pre-school emergent bilingualsâ wider signifying practices and create an analytical framework, which I call MMTL (multimodal translanguaging), used as a lens to illustrate meaning-making.
Valley Hill in Cairo, Egypt is a British school which encourages âEnglish-onlyâ as the medium of instruction in the kindergarten. Using a case study methodology, this research explores the meaning-making practices of eight emergent bilingual children aged 3â4 during child-initiated play, later reduced to four in the thesis to provide a detailed multimodal analysis. The principal aim is to explore their speech, gaze, gesture, and their engagement (layout/position) with artefacts during play.
The findings of this study suggest that although there is an âEnglish-onlyâ approach, these young emergent bilingual children are meaning-making in a variety of ways. Children are translanguaging but it is never in isolation from other modes of communication. Emergent bilinguals use a range of modes to mediate their understanding and communication with others. They use gesture, gaze, and artefacts alongside translingual practices to move meaning across to more accessible modes, enabling communication and understanding. The implications for schools should be to embrace such hybrid practices and for teachers to be more responsive to young childrenâs meaning-making to enable learning
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After Creation: Intergovernmental Organizations and Member State Governments as Co-Participants in an Authority Relationship
This is a re-amalgamation of what started as one manuscript and became two when the length proved to be more than any publisher wanted to consider. The splitting consisted of removing what are now Parts 3, 4, and 5 so that the manuscript focused on the outcome-related shared beliefs holding an authority relationship together. Those parts were last worked on in 2018. The rest were last worked on in late 2021 but also remain incomplete.
The relational approach adopted in this study treats intergovernmental organizations and the governments of member states as co-participants in an authority relationship with the governments of their member states. Authority relationships link two types of actor, defined by their authority-holder or addressee role in the relationship, through a set of shared beliefs about why the relationship exists and how the participants should fulfill their respective roles. The IGO as authority holder has a role that includes a right to instruct other actors about what they should or should not do; the governments of member states as addressees are expected to comply with the instructions. Three sets of shared beliefs provide the conceptual âglueâ holding the relationship together. The first defines the goal of the collective effort, providing both the rationale for having the authority relationship and providing a lode star for assessments of the collective effortâs success or lack of success. The second set defines the shared understanding about allocation of roles and the process of interaction by establishing shared expectations about a) the selection process by which particular actors acquire authority holder roles, b) the definitions identifying one or more categories of addressees expected to follow instructions, and c) the procedures through which the authority holder issues instructions. The third set focus on the outcomes of cooperation through the relationship by defining a) the substantive areas in which the authority holder may issue instructions, b) the bases for assessing the relevance actions mandated in instructions for reaching the goal, and c) the relative efficacy of action paths chosen for reaching the goal as compared to other possible action paths.
Using an authority relationship framework for analyzing cooperation through IGOs highlights the inherently bi-directional nature of IGO-member government activity by viewing their interaction as involving a three-step process in which the IGO as authority holder decides when to issue what instruction, the member state governments as followers react to the instruction with anything from prompt and full compliance through various forms of pushback to outright rejection, and the IGO as authority holder responds to how the followers react with efforts to increase individual compliance with instructions and reinforce continuing acceptance of the authority relationship. Foregrounding the dynamics produced by the interaction of these two streams of perception and action reveals more clearly how far intergovernmental organizations acquire capacity to operate as independent actors, the dynamic ways they maintain that capacity, and how much they influence member governmentsâ beliefs and actions at different times. The approach fosters better understanding of why, when, and for how long governments choose cooperation through an IGO even in periods of rising unilateralism
Investigative Methods: An NCRM Innovation Collection
This Innovation Collection on investigative methods brings together investigators working in different domains, sectors, and on different topics of interest to help capture the breadth, scope and relevance of investigative practices over 10 substantive chapters. Each of the papers presents a different investigative method or set of methods and, through case studies, attempts to demonstrate their value. All the contributions, in different ways and for different purposes, seek to reconstruct acts, events, practices, biographies and/or milieux, to which the researchers in question lack direct access, but which they want to reconstruct via the traces those phenomena leave behind, traces themselves often produced as part of the phenomena under investigation. These include reports of methods used in investigations on: - The use of force by state actors, including into police violence, military decisions to attack civilians, the provenance of munitions used to attack civilians, and the use and abuse of tear gas; - Networks of far-right discourse, and its links to criminal attacks and state-leveraged misinformation campaigns; - Archives to establish the penal biographies of convicts and the historical practices of democratic petitioning; - Corporate structures and processes that enable tax avoidance and an avoidance of legal responsibilities to workers and the environment. A working principle of the collection is that investigative methods may be considered, alongside creative, qualitative, quantitative, digital, participatory and mixed methods, a distinct yet complementary style of research
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