Progress through partnership

The National Literacy Strategy Framework (DfEE, 1998) requires primary children to, 'become increasingly conscious of the writer's intentions' (p.7) and The National Curriculum for English (1999) states that children should, ‘use and adapt the features of a form of writing, drawing on their reading’ (p.28). Developing a process approach to writing, where children are supported as they draft and redraft texts, was the aim of a university funded school-partnership project between Sycamore Junior School, in the City of Nottingham, and Nottingham Trent University. The article describes how Years 3 and 4 children developed an understanding of narrative structure and became reflective writers, as they responded to each other’s work, during writing workshops

The writing skills course as an introduction to critical practice for larger business undergraduate classes

Calls for greater levels of critical thought in business and management education increased in the wake of the global financial crisis. Many business educators articulated a need to develop students who engage with theory at the deepest level in order to cultivate more socially engaged managers and management thinkers. These calls surfaced at a time when or organisations voiced concerns about the quality of the basic literacy and numeracy skills of graduates. It is often difficult to introduce students to critical practice at the undergraduate level due to larger class sizes, with the result that deeper theoretical engagement is often postponed until postgraduate stages of business education. This paper discusses the findings from an action research project conducted on a critical writing skills project which aimed to introduce a group of 95 first-year business students to the concept of critical practice through their written assignments. The research unearthed some opportunities, challenges and possible pitfalls associated with deploying a critical writing skills module paper, with the aim of informing practice and signposting future research needs

Researching Workplace Spiritualization through Auto/ethnography

Studying the spiritual in workplace settings presents a significant challenge to the organizational ethnographer. Spirituality is such a fluid and deeply subjective concept that is often understood and practiced in ways that are implicit to individuals and attempts to study it in the workplace risk producing accounts that reductive and inaccurate. In an effort to craft a rigorous and representative account of the deployment of a Spiritual Management Development (SMD) initiative in large services organization, I experimented with a form of autoethnography, referred to as ‘auto/ethnography’ in this paper, which attempted to produce a rounded and holistic account of reactions to the initiative. The generic elements of this method are presented with a view to demonstrating the possibilities and difficulties associated with adopting this research approach to the study of workplace spirituality. I experimented with a form of autoethnography, referred to as ‘auto/ ethnography’ in this article, which attempted to produce a rounded and holistic account of reactions to the initiative. The generic elements of this method are presented with a view to demonstrating the possibilities and difficulties associated with adopting this research approach to the study of workplace spirituality

Indexing sustainability-oriented employment opportunities in the Irish recruitment market: Technical note (1st February 2014)

For the last number of years, the National University of Ireland Maynooth has run a programme known as ‘SPUR’ (Summer Programme for Undergraduate Researchers). SPUR participants work on research projects relevant to academic units within the university, and gain experience of scholarly research. The programme is usually very competitive, and in Summer 2013 I was fortunate to mentor a very talented undergraduate student, Frances Bell, who collected data for a project on the relationship between recruitment markets and sustainability ‐ oriented management education in Ireland. As part of her work on this project, Frances had utilized a ‘top ten’ listing of online recruitment sites (Fawcett, 2013) and found 62 job postings for positions which had ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustain’ advertised in the Republic of Ireland. The sites which had identified the most ‘hits’ over the six ‐ week time period that she had collected data are listed in the Method section below, and these have been employed as part of this projec

Designing Large Class Teaching for Inclusiveness: Introducing Universal Instructional Design to teaching Strategies, Learning Resources and Student Resources

Abstract included in text

Are Schwartz & Carroll’s 5 Business & Society Frameworks Still Dominant?

In 2008, Business & Society published Schwartz and Carroll's description of five central frameworks that had come to dominate the field of Business & Society. Although frequently cited, there has been no empirical analysis or verification of these frameworks or inter-relationships between them. This research note aims to address this by providing bibliometric data on peer-reviewed research outputs conducted on these frameworks since this article first appeared. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and ‘Stakeholder Management Theory’ are clearly the most researched frameworks, and ‘Sustainability’ has demonstrated significant growth over the ten years since the article was first published. ‘Business Ethics’ and (to a greater extent) ‘Corporate Citizenship’ appear to have grown less as research fields, but there may be some evidence of areas of ‘cross-over’ between fields. The limitations of this research are discussed alongside avenues and opportunities for developing deeper understanding of these business & society frameworks

Beliefs about work and beliefs about groupwork: Exploring the relationship

Smrt & Karau’s (2011) finding that the Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) influences individual behaviour towards groups, emphasized that individuals who have a stronger PWE are less likely to socially loaf. This note aims to contribute to this research by exploring the influence which a key component of the PWE, the vocation, has on individual beliefs about groupwork. An online questionnaire based on Wrzesniewski et al.’s (1997) research on personal relationships to work and Karau & Elsaid’s (2009) research on beliefs about groupwork was deployed amongst a cohort of business undergraduates at an Irish university. It was hypothesized that students who sought a ‘vocational’ relationship to their work would harbour more positive dispositions to groupwork than students who sought ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’. The results refuted this hypothesis. Possible explanations for this are considered, limitations of the study are discussed and avenues for future research are signposted