Researching the lives of disabled children and young people

Why a Special Issue of Children & Society dedicated to disabled children and young people? The simple answer to that question is ‘because disabled children are children first and foremost’. The vast majority of disabled children and young people in the western world live at home with their families, most attending mainstream schools, and disabled children and young people worldwide have rights to inclusion and equal treatment enshrined in national legislation and international conventions. Yet they often remain left out – from generic children’s research, from policy-making about children’s services and, in their everyday lives, from inclusion in friendship groups and social and sporting activities

The Psy-Security-Curriculum ensemble: British Values curriculum policy in English schools

Framed as being in response to terrorist attacks and concerns about religious bias in some English schools, ‘British Values’ (BV) curriculum policy forms part of the British Government’s Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, 2015. This includes a Duty on teachers in England to actively promote British Values to deter students from radicalisation. This paper, first, traces the history of Britishness in the curriculum to reveal a prevalence of nationalistic, colonial values. Next, an ensemble of recent policies and speeches focusing on British Values is analysed, using a psycho-political approach informed by anti-colonial scholarship. Finally, we interrogate two key critiques of the British Values curriculum discourse: the universality of British Values globally, and concerns over the securitisation of education. Findings indicate that the constitution of white British supremacist subjectivities operate through curriculum as a defence mechanism against perceived threats to white privilege, by normalising a racialised state-controlled social order. The focus is on ‘British’ values, but the analytic framework and findings have wider global significance

Deepening democracy within Ireland's social partnership

Ireland's social partnership process, now under attack from a number of quarters, has repeatedly been charged with being 'undemocratic' in that it undermines the sovereign position of elected political representatives, with key policy formulation and decision-making taking place in fora outside the institutions of representative democracy. These critiques echo those against new forms of networked governance more globally. A key question therefore is how (and if) democracy may be deepened within social partnership or its potential successor(s). This article addresses this question by employing a post-liberal democratic framework to examine social partnership in practice, and by drawing lessons from another partnership process, Malawi's PRSP. Drawing from Malawi's experience, it is argued that democracy can be deepened within social partnership when governance deliberations and negotiations are conducted under conditions of vibrant public debate and genuine perspective-based representation, and when the communicative and discursive norms are widened to allow for such representation

Federation views as a basis for querying and updating database federations

This paper addresses the problem of how to query and update so-called database federations. A database federation provides for tight coupling of a collection of heterogeneous component databases into a global integrated system. This problem of querying and updating a database federation is tackled by describing a logical architecture and a general semantic framework for precise specification of such database federations, with the aim to provide a basis for implementing a federation by means of relational database views. Our approach to database federations is based on the UML/OCL data model, and aims at the integration of the underlying database schemas of the component legacy systems to a separate, newly defined integrated database schema. One of the central notions in database modelling and in constraint specifications is the notion of a database view, which closely corresponds to the notion of derived class in UML. We will employ OCL (version 2.0) and the notion of derived class as a means to treat (inter-)database constraints and database views in a federated context. Our approach to coupling component databases into a global, integrated system is based on mediation. The first objective of our paper is to demonstrate that our particular mediating system integrates component schemas without loss of constraint information. The second objective is to show that the concept of relational database view provides a sound basis for actual implementation of database federations, both for querying and updating purposes.

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Economic alternatives and childhood poverty

Current national and international economic policies are exerting ever more direct pressures on children's lives and futures. This paper reviews key concerns and contradictions in neoliberal economic policies' effects on childhood. Alternative feminist and green economics and critical theory critiques of neoliberalism are summarised and their implications for childhood poverty are considered. In conclusion there are suggestions about sustainable green economics for childhood to take account of the problems of advocating perpetual economic growth in a finite planet. Copyright © 2008, Inderscience Publishers

Continuing professional development (CPD) policy and the discourse of teacher professionalism in Scotland

The dynamic nature and multiple interpretations of professionalism make any analysis of it as a static, homogenous concept somewhat difficult. Much of the existing body of literature, which explores professionalism from a traditional sociological perspective, is now being challenged by developing concepts of professionalism that support particular political agendas. Contemporary writers prominent in the field of teacher professionalism appear to be highlighting two contrasting models. While these are defined slightly differently and attributed different names according to particular writers, broadly speaking they equate to a managerial perspective and a democratic perspective. In this paper an analysis of contemporary conceptions of professionalism from literature is presented, and then used in interpreting the discourse evident through a range of public documents on CPD for teachers in Scotland. The paper suggests that the democratic, transformative view of professionalism promoted in much of the recent literature, while reflected in some of the rhetoric surrounding Scottish CPD policy, is not as apparent in real terms. In conclusion it is suggested that there is a need for all stakeholders to interrogate CPD policy more rigorously in order that the underlying conceptions of professionalism can be made explicit

Cross-border Market Co-creation, Dynamic Capabilities and the Entrepreneurial Theory of the Multinational Enterprise

The concepts of asset co-specialization and dynamic capabilities have been instrumental in furthering the organization and strategy scholarship agenda, but have so far had limited impact to the theory of the MNE and FDI. In addition, the role of entrepreneurial management in orchestrating system-wide value creation through market and eco-system creation and co-creation, in order to advance private appropriation, has been all but ignored. We claim that these ideas can help explicate the nature of the MNE in the knowledge-based, semi-globalized economy. The nature of the MNE in its turn should not be seen as separable from either the objectives of the agents (entrepreneurs) who set them up or its essence – the employment of strategy to capture co-created value.Asset Co-specialisation; Dynamic Capabilities; Cross-border Market and Ecosystem Co-creation; Theory of MNE and FDI; Entrepreneurial Theory

A Review and Characterization of Progressive Visual Analytics

Progressive Visual Analytics (PVA) has gained increasing attention over the past years. It brings the user into the loop during otherwise long-running and non-transparent computations by producing intermediate partial results. These partial results can be shown to the user for early and continuous interaction with the emerging end result even while it is still being computed. Yet as clear-cut as this fundamental idea seems, the existing body of literature puts forth various interpretations and instantiations that have created a research domain of competing terms, various definitions, as well as long lists of practical requirements and design guidelines spread across different scientific communities. This makes it more and more difficult to get a succinct understanding of PVA’s principal concepts, let alone an overview of this increasingly diverging field. The review and discussion of PVA presented in this paper address these issues and provide (1) a literature collection on this topic, (2) a conceptual characterization of PVA, as well as (3) a consolidated set of practical recommendations for implementing and using PVA-based visual analytics solutions