Private philanthropy or policy transfer? The transnational norms of the Open Society Institute

The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grant-making foundation that serves as the hub of the Soros Foundations Network, a group of autonomous national foundations around the world. OSI is a mechanism for the international diffusion of expertise and ‘best practices’ to post-communist countries and other democratising nations. Focusing on the ‘soft’ ideational and normative policy transfer, the article highlights the engagement in governance that comes with OSI transnational policy partnerships

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Social Life of Values

The case of the Danish “cartoon war†was a premonition of things to come: accelerated social construction of inequalities and their accelerated symbolic communication, translation and negotiation. New uses of values in organizing and managing inequalities emerge. Values lead active social life as bourgeois virtues (McCloskey, 2006), their subversive alternatives or translated “memes†of cultural history. Since social life of values went global and online, tracing their hybrid manifestations requires cross-culturally competent domestication (Magala, 2005) as if they were “memes†manipulated for further reengineering. Hopes are linked to emergent concepts of “microstorias†(Boje,2002), bottom-up, participative, open citizenship (Balibar,2004), disruption of stereotypical branding in mass-media (Sennett, 2006). However, Kuhn’s opportunistic deviation from Popperian evolutionary epistemology should fade away with other hidden injuries of Cold War, to free our agenda for the future of social sciences in general and organizational sciences in particular (Fuller, 2000, 2003).Complex Identities;Cross-Cultural Competence;Intersubjective Falsificationism;Managing Inequalities;Political Paradigms;Professional Evolution

Advertising Thinking: To investigate the use of “the story” in creative advertising in the West and analyse its possible application in China

The central aim of this study is to combine theorist Roland Barthes’ ideas on visual and textual thinking with leading contemporary approaches to Western advertising design with a view to their possible application in China. The result is a newly coined concept the present author refers to as ‘Advertising Thinking’. This new term puts forward a fresh method that goes beyond the conventional way of dealing with advertising design. At present, there are very few in-depth studies of advertising in China, making it crucial for Chinese designers, creative directors, design tutors, entrepreneurs and business people to gain a better understanding of the subject. The intention is for this understanding developed in the current study to enable China’s advertising industry and its discourse to go beyond the superficial stage it is presently at. In order to achieve this an in-depth analysis of the status quo of China’s story creative advertising history is needed. From this it can be seen that imitation, celebrity endorsement and the lack of aesthetic appeal in Chinese advertising design are issues that urgently need to be addressed. Through an in-depth study of advertising theory key concepts in advertising need to be explored. Following an introduction that outlines the key concepts in Barthes’ writing – hidden meaning, narrative, and emotion - numerous case studies are explored in the chapters that follow to demonstrate different approaches to Advertising Thinking. These case studies include: Sandy Hook ‘Even’ (USA) 2016; Stay in School (Australia) 2014; Coca Cola ‘Pool Boy’ (USA) 2017; and Black Currant Tango ‘St George’ (UK) 1996. Following this, the research analyses five Chinese advertisements. From the analysis of these case studies it can be seen that Chinese advertisers and advertising professionals need to critically explore Chinese traditional culture and apply key concepts in contemporary Western advertising theory - a number of points are made that are crucial to moving Chinese advertising design forwards so that it can realise its potential

Political Contestation in Global Production Networks

This paper develops a critical framework on international management and production that draws from the literatures on global commodity chains and global production networks (GPNs), from institutional entrepreneurship, as well as from neo-Gramscian theory in international political economy. The framework views GPNs as integrated economic, political, and discursive systems, in which market and political power are intertwined. The framework highlights the contingent stability of GPNs as well as the potential for actors to engage politically in contestation and collaboration over system governance and the distribution of benefits. The framework offers a multidimensional and multi-level approach to understanding power relations, ideology, and value appropriation in GPNs. The framework is valuable for examining the intersection of GPNs with charged political and social issues such as sweatshops and incomes for coffee growers, and the role of geography as a source of stability and tension in these networks.

Changing Landscapes

Bill Hillier's analysis of the 'hard' and 'soft' versions of modern urban landscape urge to continue the analysis to the postmodern phase, too. Therefore, Sharon Zukin's two versions of postmodern urban landscape and her idea of liminal spaces are presented as a possible starting point for further elaboration. The task of analysis remains for 'syntaxians' and 'hillerians'