Personal Life, Pragmatism and Bricolage

Individualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to 'patch' or 'piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that 'do the thinking'. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a 're-serving' of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family.Bricolage, Agency, Individualisation, Families, Pragmatism

Pivoting makes the ZX-calculus complete for real stabilizers

We show that pivoting property of graph states cannot be derived from the axioms of the ZX-calculus, and that pivoting does not imply local complementation of graph states. Therefore the ZX-calculus augmented with pivoting is strictly weaker than the calculus augmented with the Euler decomposition of the Hadamard gate. We derive an angle-free version of the ZX-calculus and show that it is complete for real stabilizer quantum mechanics.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2013, arXiv:1412.791

What's the problem with teenage parents? And what's the problem with policy?

NoPublic discourse in Britain sees teenage motherhood as a pernicious social problem where mothers, their children and society generally will all suffer. Fathers are seen as feckless. This is reflected in New Labour's teenage pregnancy strategy, which understands teenage parents as victims of ignorance, mis-information, and low expectations. But a review of the research evidence finds that the age at which pregnancy occurs has little effect on social outcomes. Many teenage mothers describe how motherhood makes them feel stronger, and marks a change for the better. Many fathers seek to remain connected with their children. For both, parenting seems to provide an impetus to take up education, training and employment. Teenage parenting may be more of an opportunity than a catastrophe, and often makes sense in the life worlds inhabited by young mothers. The paper ends by asking how we can explain this yawning gulf between the experience of teenage parenting and policy, and concludes that this largely rests on assumptions of rational choice, in turn creating a `rationality mistake'

Personal life, pragmatism and bricolage.

yesIndividualisation theory misrepresents and romanticises the nature of agency as a primarily discursive and reflexive process where people freely create their personal lives in an open social world divorced from tradition. But empirically we find that people usually make decisions about their personal lives pragmatically, bounded by circumstances and in connection with other people, not only relationally but also institutionally. This pragmatism is often non-reflexive, habitual and routinised, even unconscious. Agents draw on existing traditions - styles of thinking, sanctioned social relationships, institutions, the presumptions of particular social groups and places, lived law and social norms - to ¿patch¿ or ¿piece together' responses to changing situations. Often it is institutions that ¿do the thinking¿. People try to both conserve social energy and seek social legitimation in this adaption process, a process which can lead to a ¿re-serving¿ of tradition even as institutional leakage transfers meanings from past to present, and vice versa. But this process of bricolage will always be socially contested and socially uneven. In this way bricolage describes how people actually link structure and agency through their actions, and can provide a framework for empirical research on doing family.ESR

The adaptation of cognitive behavioural therapy for adult Maori clients with depression: A pilot study

A semistructured cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) programme for depression was adapted for use with Maori adult clients with depression. Adaptations were developed in consultation with an advisory group consisting of Maori clinical psychologists and kaumatua with experience working in mental health services. The programme was piloted with 2 participants who were clients of a Maori mental health service. The programme builds on a more traditional CBT treatment programme by integrating concepts such as whakatauki, whanaungatanga, whanau involvement, and whakapapa into the therapeutic context. Despite limitations the results demonstrate considerable promise. Depressive symptoms increased substantially in both cases and both clients reflected positively on the adaptations incorporated into therapy

The rhizome underneath: Promoting the disruption of established practice and the innovation of online teaching, by improving the design of globally disseminated online professional development artefacts.

This thesis exemplifies, through the exploration of a specific case study, how the design of an online professional development resource is capable of penetrating, disrupting, and fostering innovation in online teaching practices within a wide range of existing professional education networks. Following its release in 2009, the ‘Learning to Teach Online’ (LTTO) project spread rapidly around the world via conduits such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, institutional links and word of mouth — throughout K-12, vocational, higher education and private consultancies across 146 countries and territories. This thesis investigates how the design of LTTO facilitated its discovery, dissemination and integration in a range of educational contexts. There was a large volume of data collected from Web 2.0 activity surrounding LTTO. Using data visualisation techniques, patterns and hidden relationships between individuals sharing and using the resources were revealed, that provided insight into previously invisible relationships between individuals within vastly different established professional networks all over the world. The concept of the rhizome is at the core of this thesis, inspired by the observation of the growing patterns of connection between seemingly disparate educational communities globally, in a manner that was neither precisely controlled nor predictable. Key outcomes include a detailed analysis of the design of an online professional development resource that was effective across a range of disciplines and education sectors; the determination of an effective method of researching the spread and use of similar initiatives; and observations and strategies that can help others to improve the design process for future online professional development resources

Technology and change in the hotel industry : the case of the hotel receptionist.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D89388 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

New families? Tradition and change in partnering and relationships

NoThe family as a social institution is often said to be undergoing rapid change or even crisis. Commentary in the media and by policy-makers sometimes claims a `breakdown¿ of the family, asserting that intimate ties of loving and caring are becoming more individualised and self-centred, even selfish. Some scholars see this as part of a broader process whereby traditional social ties such as class, religion and family are fading away. Instead, they argue, people are `compelled to choose their own biographies¿ and personal relationships are being individually and actively chosen from a diverse range of possibilities. Statistically speaking, marriage is decreasing in popularity, whilst living alone, cohabitation and births outside marriage are increasing. But what do trends like this mean? Does this mean `family breakdown¿ or, as much in-depth family research has argued, just that the outward form of families is changing but the inner core - the value people attach to their family relationships ¿ remains central? This project tried to answer this question by examining the British public¿s attitude to different family relationships and parenting arrangements. It looked particularly at cohabitation and marriage, partnering, divorce, solo living, living apart together, same sex relationships and friends

People who live apart together (LATs) - how different are they?

Yes‘Living apart together’ – that is being in an intimate relationship with a partner who lives somewhere else – is increasingly recognised and accepted as a specific way of being in a couple. On the face of it, this is a far cry from the ‘traditional’ version of couple relationships, where co-residence in marriage was placed at the centre and where living apart from one's partner would be regarded as abnormal, and understandable only as a reaction to severe external constraints. Some commentators regard living apart together as a historically new family form where LATs can pursue a ‘both/and’ solution to partnership – they can experience both the intimacy of being in a couple, and at the same time continue with pre-existing commitments. LATs may even de-prioritize couple relationships and place more importance on friendship. Alternatively, others see LAT as just a ‘stage’ on the way to cohabitation and marriage, where LATs are not radical pioneers moving beyond the family, but are cautious and conservative, and simply show a lack of commitment. Behind these rival interpretations lies the increasingly tarnished spectre of individualisation theory. Is LAT some sort of index for a developing individualisation in practice? In this paper we take this debate further by using information from the 2006 British Social Attitudes Survey. We find that LATs have quite diverse origins and motivations, and while as a category LATs are often among the more liberal in family matters, as a whole they do not show any marked ‘pioneer’ attitudinal position in the sense of leading a radical new way, especially if age is taken into account.ESR