Voices from Kilbarchan : Two versions of "The Cruel Mother" from south-west Scotland, 1825

In what follows I shall first give an outline of the earliest extensively documented singing community in the Anglo-Scottish ballad tradition, and then present a detailed analysis of two versions of the same ballad story ("The Cruel Mother") taken down on the same day in 1825 from two singers from the same Scottish village. The fact that Motherwell's material includes alternative performances of the same ballad story from the same area allows us to get one of the earliest glimpses into ballads as a living oral tradition. We may assess at close hand the degree of variability and multiformity that is characteristic of texts in oral tradition (Foley 1998:5), and thus gain an appreciation of the ballads as a living cultural phenomenon./

Sprogvidenskab og virksomhedskommunikation

In recent years, the humanities and particularly linguistics have gained an increasing influence within the field of business communication. Business communication has traditionally been seen as a discipline within the social sciences, and for instance copy writing has conventionally been an issue for advertising agencies or advertising departments, not an area for academic research. In this article I shall demonstrate how a linguistic theory as Systemic Functional Linguistics is developing within the studies of business communication at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. I shall argue why Systemic Functional Linguistics is useful for business communication in general, and how Systemic Functional Linguistics can be used not only for copy writing but also for communication analysis, organizational culture analysis and communication and campaign planning

A New Approach to Helping the Hard to Place Unemployed:The Promise of Developing New Knowledge in an Interactive and Collaborative Process

The reforms of the social and employment services that have swept across most of the developed world since the 1990s have enormously expanded the groups of citizens receiving active employment measures. Nevertheless, up until now, most countries have only seen limited results from enhancing the labour market participation of the most vulnerable groups. We argue that the goal of including a greater share of the harder-to-place unemployed in the labour market is not likely to be achieved through the tried and tested ways of developing knowledge, policy and practice. Rather, we propose a different approach to generating and exchanging the necessary knowledge for developing active employment policy and practice. As an alternative to the evidence-based knowledge paradigm, we set up a model for knowledge production that is made through co-operation between practice and research. This model investigates the potential for integrated services and for co-production by acknowledging the importance of the experiences of frontline professionals and clients in developing employment services. </jats:p