School violence, school differences and school discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violenceresilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of wellconnected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. We suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept

Europeanising advisory expertise: The role of 'independent, objective and transparent' scientific advice in agri-biotech regulation

Since various crises of food safety in the European Union (EU), institutional reforms have been designed to regain public confidence in regulatory decisions and their expert basis. By Europeanising advisory expertise, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was also meant to help harmonise 'science-based regulation' and thus facilitate EU decisions. In evaluating agri-biotech products during 2003-2005, however, the EFSA procedure extended previous expert disagreements rather than overcome them. EFSA was designed to demonstrate that expert advice would be 'independent, objective and transparent�; yet tensions arose between expert experience versus independence, between transparency versus objectivity, and between harmonisation versus precaution. These conflicts have been shaped by the dominant problem-diagnosis, which favours a narrow expert consensus within a specific policy view. Alternative problem-diagnoses suggest that expertise should instead be pluralised, so that norms and uncertainties become more explicit. Pressure for EU reform manifests tensions between the dominant and alternative problem-diagnoses

An intervention framework for collaboration

This paper provides an intervention framework for collaboration to improve services. When collaboration is an intervention, its development and effectiveness depend on intervention logic. Intervention logic requires a precise conceptualization of collaboration. This conceptualization emphasizes its vital and unique components. It includes a developmental progression in which collaboration is contrasted with companion concepts. It also includes progress benchmarks, outcome measures, and logic models. These models depict relations among the benchmarks and outcomes, and they identify the mediating and moderating variables that account for collaboration's development and effectiveness. These models are designed to improve planning, evaluation, and their relations. This intervention framework for collaboration contrasts sharply with other conceptualizations and strategies. Although its aim is to unify and improve collaboration policy and practice, its inherent selectivity is an obvious limitation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT

Creativity out of chaos

Creativity is said to be highly desired in post-modern and post-industrial organizations Creativity and anarchy on the one hand, and managerialism, on the other, can be seen as different forms of knowledge, two opposed ideals. In many organizational as well as societal reforms we currently observe it is the managerialist ideal that wins over the anarchic. In this paper, we wonder if people fear anarchy? We reflect on the possible reasons for the fear, and we also try to explain why we believe that anarchic organizing should not be avoided or feared

POSIWID and determinism in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Services Research GroupWhen designing to influence behaviour for social or environmental benefit, does designers' intent matter? Or are the effects on behaviour more important, regardless of the intent involved? This brief paper explores -- in the context of design for behaviour change -- some treatments of design, intentionality, purpose and responsibility from a variety of fields, including Stafford Beer's "The purpose of a system is what it does" and Maurice Broady's perspective on determinism. The paper attempts to extract useful implications for designers working on behaviour-related problems, in terms of analytical or reflective questions to ask during the design process

Revans reversed: focusing on the positive for a change

The classical principles of action learning, based on the work of Revans, usually include working with problems as the core. This article aims, by contrast, to show how a recent project of change has incorporated principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) based on social constructionism and positive psychology into an action learning process involving a wide range of participants. The concern for problems is considered showing that the process of diagnosing a problem can reinforce a deficit orientation. The key ideas of AI are presented, highlighting the purpose of finding out what is going on in terms of what is working well, and in doing so, it becomes possible to build a picture of the strengths and virtues of what is happening at work. Based on findings from a recent project of culture shift in a design and production company, a process of positive action learning is considered

Attributing scientific and technical progress: the case of holography

Holography, the three-dimensional imaging technology, was portrayed widely as a paradigm of progress during its decade of explosive expansion 1964–73, and during its subsequent consolidation for commercial and artistic uses up to the mid 1980s. An unusually seductive and prolific subject, holography successively spawned scientific insights, putative applications and new constituencies of practitioners and consumers. Waves of forecasts, associated with different sponsors and user communities, cast holography as a field on the verge of success—but with the dimensions of success repeatedly refashioned. This retargeting of the subject represented a degree of cynical marketeering, but was underpinned by implicit confidence in philosophical positivism and faith in technological progressivism. Each of its communities defined success in terms of expansion, and anticipated continual progressive increase. This paper discusses the contrasting definitions of progress in holography, and how they were fashioned in changing contexts. Focusing equally on reputed ‘failures’ of some aspects of the subject, it explores the varied attributes by which success and failure were linked with progress by different technical communities. This important case illuminates the peculiar post-World War II environment that melded the military, commercial and popular engagement with scientific and technological subjects, and the competing criteria by which they assessed the products of science

Critical political economy, free movement and Brexit: Beyond the progressive’s dilemma

The progressive’s dilemma suggests that a trade-off exists between, on the one hand, labour and welfare rights underpinned by solidarity and shared identity and, on the other hand, open immigration regimes. With reference to debates on free movement in the UK, it is argued: (1) that a progressive European critical political economy literature of the Left has a tendency to accept this dilemma and resolve it in favour of a the former; (2) that it does so because it erroneously conflates the free movement of people with the (increasingly neoliberal) free movement of goods, capital and services; and (3) that it could and should treat human mobility as qualitatively different and, consequently, need not accept the terms of the progressive’s dilemma. The argument has important implications for a progressive politics in general and for the Left’s (particularly the Labour Party’s) position in the UK on free movement (and, by extension, on Brexit)

Self-organization in the olfactory system: one shot odor recognition in insects

We show in a model of spiking neurons that synaptic plasticity in the mushroom bodies in combination with the general fan-in, fan-out properties of the early processing layers of the olfactory system might be sufficient to account for its efficient recognition of odors. For a large variety of initial conditions the model system consistently finds a working solution without any fine-tuning, and is, therefore, inherently robust. We demonstrate that gain control through the known feedforward inhibition of lateral horn interneurons increases the capacity of the system but is not essential for its general function. We also predict an upper limit for the number of odor classes Drosophila can discriminate based on the number and connectivity of its olfactory neurons