Developing specialist leaders of education: a research engagement approach

There has been little research to date on the continuing professional development needs of the several thousand Specialist Leaders of Education (SLE) now designated by the National College for Teaching and Leadership in England to work across schools as consultants on school-to-school support. This case study reports on the second and third stages of a four-stage research process designed to address these needs. The fi rst stage reported on the creation of a professional devel- opment framework for SLE ’ s using consultancy research. These middle stages test out this framework with a stakeholder group of SLEs, head- teachers and broker in a Teaching Schools Alliance. The fourth stage will track the implementation of professional development activities arising from these fi ndings. Apart from the speci fi c needs of SLE, this study will have wider relevance for all practitioners and researchers working in and with schools on leadership development using Research Engagement strategies and Joint Practice Development approaches in a so-called ‘ self- improving ’ school system

Antecedentes da confiança do empregado na organização Antecedents of the employee confidence in the organization

O estudo da confiança do empregado na organização contribui para a compreensão da formação de vínculos com a organização empregadora. Baseando-se nessa premissa, este estudo apresenta os resultados de uma investigação sobre um modelo teórico que contemplou como variáveis preditoras: percepção de suporte organizacional, afeto e resiliência, em relação à confiança do empregado na organização. A amostra foi composta por160 trabalhadores que responderam aos instrumentos válidos e confiáveis. Para a análise dos dados utilizaram-se estatísticas descritivas, cálculo da confiabilidade das medidas e análise de regressão múltipla stepwise. Os resultados indicaram que o principal preditor da confiança do empregado é a percepção de suporte organizacional, a qual explicou o maior percentual de variância das variáveis - critério. Afeto foi eliminado de todos os modelos, enquanto que resiliência explica pequeno percentual de confiança nos padrões éticos. Os resultados são discutidos à luz da literatura e uma agenda de pesquisa é proposta.<br>The study of employee confidence in the organization contributes to understanding the entailment formation with the employing organization. Therefore, this study shows the results of an investigation about a theorical model that includes the following preditors variables: perception of organizational support, affects and resilience, with respect to the employee confidence in the organization. The sample consisted of 160 employees who answered to the valid and reliable instruments. For data analysis we used descriptive statistics, reliability calculation of the measurements and stepwise regression analysis. The results indicated that the main predictor of employee confidence is the perception of organizational support which explained the highest percentage of variance in the criterion variables. Affection was eliminated from all models, while resilience explains a small percentage of confidence in ethical standards. These results are discussed from the perspective of the literature and a research agenda is proposed

Competitividade e Isomorfismo: análise do perfil estrutural e financeiro-contábil de grandes cooperativas agropecuárias brasileiras

Due to changes in agribusiness, agricultural cooperatives, guided by local operations, and with low added value, have been looking for new ways of structuring. We aimed to identify the forms of structuration and financial-accounting peculiarities of agricultural cooperatives with higher volume of sales in the Brazilian context under the point of view of noncooperatives in the same segment. The work started with a documentary analysis and an accounting technique, named vertical analysis; in the next step, we used Mann-Whitney test to compare the formative lines of DRE of the a set of 15 cooperatives and 14 non-cooperative companies discriminated as belonging to organizations with higher sales in agricultural production in 2013. The results confirm the extent of the cooperatives structure in relation to the business portfolio, given the remarkable activities in concentric and conglomerate diversification. We observed the competitive parity between the business segments analyzed, mainly because there were no differences in the final rates of “profitability” when we compare the two cases. In addition, we can apparently refute the idea that this competitive parity is given by an orientation excessively directed to the market, at the expense of a social orientation, given the differentiating points externalized