Making sense of leadership development: Developing a community of education leaders

In education literature there is a distinct lack of scholarly work on issues of leadership other than on functional leadership at lower levels or high-level individual leadership activity which dominates existing studies. This empirical research is based on the result of a merger of education providers within the North East of England. A crucial aspiration of the newly merged organisation was to provide an overarching innovative leadership structure to facilitate integrated leadership. The specific focus of this article is participants of a bespoke postgraduate learning intervention. The authors apply sense-making theory to identify how student-leaders undertaking a leadership development intervention developed to become a community of education leaders. The reflective accounts of the student-leaders indicated a combined approach of distributed, shared and collaborative leadership. Whilst the study was conducted in the UK, the concepts and ideas are likely to have international application

The Social Time of Organizational Payment Systems

This article explores the relationships between time use and the social construction of meaning surrounding the operation of wage payment systems in three chemical industry organizations. It explores some of the ways that organizational time is subdivided and prioritized, and focuses on the way that patterns of payment for time contribute towards the formation of managerial and shop floor identities. These ideas are developed through the analysis of ethnographic research data, which supports the view that there are multiple kinds of social time in work organizations. It is suggested that much of the management literature concerned with the subject of payment systems treats time as finite, exhaustible and irreversible and this has implications for the way that payment systems are understood by practising managers. Managerial time codes reflect a closely scheduled time culture and reinforce a discourse of progress, whereas employees continue to see work time as something for which they should be compensated

Recovery of phytase produced by solid-state fermentation on citrus peel

The extraction of phytase produced by solid-state fermentation of citrus peel was studied employing a multistage leaching process. It was observed that the extracts containing EDTA retained over 90% of phytase activity at room temperature after 24 h after the leaching. A fractional design 2² (with 4 replicates at the central point) was carried out for testing the pH and agitation as process independent factors. Only the interaction between the pH and agitation showed a significant influence. These factors were optimized with a central composite design. Agitation at 300 rpm and pH at 5.0 were the best conditions to extract the enzyme from solid matrix. The modeling of the process indicated that diffusivity of the enzyme in the solvent was the controlling mechanism. The corresponding kinetic constant and saturation concentration in this process were 0.89 min-1 and 4.0 IU/mL, respectively. The multistage process indicated that after two steps, it was possible to recover 85% of total enzyme produced.<br>A extração de fitases produzidas por fermentação em estado sólido de polpa cítrica foi estudada utilizando um processo de extração sólido-líquido em varias etapas. A adição de EDTA permite manter durante 24 horas a temperatura ambiente 90% da atividade inicial do caldo com a enzima extraída. Um planejamento fatorial 2², com 4 replicas no ponto central, foi desenvolvido para testar os valores de ph e agitação convenientes para a extração das enzimas. A interação entre ambos os fatores foi estadisticamente significativa. A atividade da enzima foi otimizada nos valores onde o pH (5.0) e a agitação (350 rpm) resultaram ser as melhores condições para extrair a enzima da matriz sólida. O ajuste do modelo matemático obtido mostra que é possível considerar a difusividade como o mecanismo que controla o processo de transferência de massa. A constante cinética que descreve este processo e a concentração de saturação foram 0.039 min-1 e 4.01 IU/mL respectivamente. A extração em varias etapas mostrou que nas duas primeiras etapas é possível recuperar 85% da fitase produzida