From the journals

Summaries of five recent articles

A New Paradigm of Entrepreneurial Leadership: the mediating role of influence, vision and context

Abstract This research project explores Entrepreneurial Leadership as a new way of understanding the entrepreneur. By exploring this phenomenon, the project aims to help the field of entrepreneurship move from a position of fragmentation to consolidation. A review of the both the entrepreneurship and leadership fields will conclude that entrepreneurship focuses on the individual entrepreneur/leader whereas leadership literature explores the significance of context and followers. A hypothetical case of the sports leader who is also an entrepreneur is utilized to provide insight into the literature. From the review, the emerging themes of influence, vision and contextual boundaries were uncovered. These themes were the foundation for a case study research strategy whereby the experiences of Aqua, Wheeler and Batter were sought to understand the emerging themes. It was found that the ability to influence other people in an entrepreneurial business context was stronger then that of a sports leadership role. Secondly, the individuals believed they created their own vision while the realisation of their goals was more self-influenced in the business context. Lastly it was shown that contextual boundaries were not restricted to a leadership environment as stated in the literature, but also existed in the entrepreneurial business context. The study of Entrepreneurial Leadership is in need for further development before an indepth synthesis of the field can be established

Child Helpers: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This essay was greatly inspired by a 15 film titled Tiny Katerina, which shows glimpses of Katerina from two- to four-and-a-half years of age. She lives with her parents and older brother in Northwestern Siberia in the taiga. The Khanty-speaking people live by foraging (berries, for example), fishing and herding reindeer; they are semi-nomadic. In their camp and the vicinity, there is no evidence of electricity or any other public service. These people are very much “off the grid.” From the first, as a wobbly toddler, Katerina is shown being helpful. She carries (and drops and picks up) firewood chopped by her mother into their tent. She ladles food (spilling some) from a large pot over the fire into a tin and feeds the dog. She carries pans with bread dough to her mother to place in the baking oven. When her mother goes gathering in the forest, Katerina has her own toddler-size collecting bucket. She is out in all weather, including deep snow, keeping warm in her animal skin anorak and mittens

Unmasking Children\u27s Agency

The goal of this paper is to identify (unmask) and critique the movement to promote children’s agency as a cornerstone of research, care, education and intervention with children. The article makes a case that this movement is harmful to a scientific approach to the study of childhood, distorts or ignores key understandings of the evolution of childhood and culture. The article demonstrates that the agency movement is ethnocentric, classist and hegemonic representing the dominance of contemporary bourgeoisie child-rearing. It imposes a single, privileged ethnotheory of childhood upon the diverse societies of the world with alternative ethnotheories and practices. Lastly, the article argues that the movement is not efficacious either in advancing theory or practice

Accounting for Variability in Mother-Child Play

This paper highlights contrasting perspectives in the study of mother-child play. One contrast emerges as we look at the phenomenon using the lens offered by anthropology as opposed to the more commonly used lens of psychology. A second contrast is apparent from on-the-ground descriptions of childhood in the ethnographic record compared to observations of children in the upper strata of modern society. Psychologists and those public agents who adopt their perspective see mother-child play—from infancy—as both necessary for normal development and an unlimited good. Its self-evident value should be impressed upon those who are as yet, unenlightened. Anthropologists not only frequently note the absence of mother-child play, but, equally important, they provide culturally-nuanced explanations for why this is so. Psychologists see mother-child play as natural, anthropologists as cultural. The paper concludes with a call to cease the wholesale exportation of a culture-specific child-rearing strategy that may be quite incongruent with native belief and practice

The Chore Curriculum

The term “curriculum” in chore curriculum conveys the idea that there is a discernible regularity to the process whereby children attempt to learn, then master and finally, carry out their chores. While the academic or “core” curriculum (of Math, English, Science) found in schools is formal and imposed on students in a top–down process, the chore curriculum is informal and emerges in the interaction of children’s need to fit in and emulate those older, their developing cognitive and sensorimotor capacity, the division of labor within the family and the nature of the tasks (chores) themselves. The primary theme of this chapter is the notion of children as workers—across foraging (hunting and gathering), pastoral and farming societies. A complementary theme is the process by which children learn the trades of their particular society. In fact, children most often learn “on the job.” Nevertheless, there are distinct regularities in this process that I’ve attempted to capture in the expression “chore curriculum

Homo faber juvenalis: A Multidisciplinary Survey of Children as Tool Makers/Users

The overall goal of this paper is to derive a set of generalizations that might characterize children as tool makers/users in the earliest human societies. These generalizations will be sought from the collective wisdom of four distinct bodies of scholarship: lithic archaeology; juvenile chimps as novice tool users; recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition, focused on objects becoming tools and; the ethnographic study of children learning their community’s tool-kit. The presumption is that this collective wisdom will yield greater insight into children’s development as tool producers and users than has been available to scholars operating within narrower disciplinary limits

Why Anthropology of Childhood? A short history of an emerging discipline

The paper has four goals: to refute the claim that anthropologists have not studied childhood; to provide a cursory history of the field; to provide an organizational schema for reviewing the literature in the field and; to suggest a strategy for future scholarship in the anthropology of childhood