Affective Attunement: Emotion and Collaboration: A Study of Ireland’s Voluntary Secondary School Principals

This research project, carried out between 2011 and 2015 by Dr Michael Redmond, JMB Director of Research and Development, reports on the first nationwide investigation of emotionality in second-level principalship ever undertaken in Ireland. The aim has been to identify the key emotional capacities employed by principals in building collaboration in their schools and to discover what lessons may be learned from their experience

Irish Principals’ Emotional Competencies and Affectively-Attuned Change-Management

The purpose of this study is to characterise the emotional competencies of principals in the Irish voluntary secondary school sector, determining what level of association these have with collaboratively-mediated change management and identifying professional development potential arising from the findings. Emotions act as heuristics-of-value which influence school leaders’ behaviour and an improved qualitative understanding of their emotional competencies can support an enhancement of principals’ action, complementing cognitive/rational approaches in their management of collaboratively-mediated change. A pragmatic methodological perspective is adopted and this is supported by a mixed methods approach. Overall coherence is achieved by undertaking data analysis and conceptual development within a grounded theory framework. The initial study, a focus group, provided rich data from which themed extracts were used to frame a large-scale survey questionnaire distributed electronically to the entire cohort of 380 secondary school principals in Ireland. Findings from this survey and from three subsequent semi-structured interviews were analysed and supported the development of a conceptualisation called ‘affectively-attuned change-management’. This theory argues that in seeking to bridge the gap between having a vision for improvement and the achievement of transformational change, a school leader will require to incorporate attunement to emotion, both intrapersonal and interpersonal, in the establishment of a moral and ethical basis for change (‘Foundations’); the deployment of one’s affective acumen and capacity to sustain (‘Agency’); the activation of a climate of authentic collegiality (‘Connection’) and, ultimately, the mobilisation of energy and empowerment for collaboratively-mediated change (‘Synergy’). This conceptualisation thus presents a synthesis of four overarching processes, each of which is examined in detail, grounded in the numerical and narrative data and linked to the literature. The conceptualisation is then examined for applicability and an actionable heuristic developed, integrating both cognitive and affective considerations into the school leader’s transformational efforts. Implications of the findings for professional development are then explored

B.S.

This is a novel about a hack of a novelist who guides a fraud of a novelist around an allegorical version of the United States of America. It tests the limits of its readers’ patience with irony and metafiction. Themes that are explored, mocked, and then explored again include belief, identity, reality, geography, the intersections of the aforementioned, and the comical futility of such exploration. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

AN INITIAL EVALUATION OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INTREO ACTIVATION REFORMS. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 81 MARCH 2019

This report presents results from an initial evaluation that the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has undertaken of the effectiveness of the most recent set of activation reforms that have been made to Ireland’s public employment services (PES). The modifications, which are known as the Intreo activation process reforms, were first introduced in 2012 for all newly unemployed Jobseeker’s Allowance (JA) and Jobseeker’s Benefit (JB) recipients only. The reforms have focused on making changes to how benefit and employment services are delivered to jobseekers as opposed to what types of employment services are delivered (i.e., job search assistance, training, education courses, etc.)

Identifying Alternative Stops for First and Last Mile Urban Travel Planning

As we move into an increasingly connected world for urban travel planning, we need to expand our concept of itinerary planning to meet the multimodal and diverse needs of today\u27s traveler. Often, urban itinerary planning applications seek to minimize route travel time between two specific places at a certain time. Our approach provides travelers with a set of optimal nearby stops that presents a number of traveler preferences in an easily comprehensible and quickly calculable manner. We display first and last mile stops that fall on a Pareto front based on multiple criteria such as travel time, number of transfers, and frequency of service. Our algorithm combines stop and routebased information to quickly present the traveler with numerous nearby quality options for their itinerary decision-making. We expand this algorithm to include multimodal itineraries with the incorporation of free-floating scooters to investigate the change in stop and itinerary characteristics. We then analyze the results on the star-shaped urban transit network of Göttingen, Germany, to show what advantages stops on the Pareto front have as well as demonstrate the increased effect on frequency and service lines when incorporating a broadened multimodal approach

Editorial: Volume 34, Issue 4. How international is AJET?

While carrying ‘Australasia’ in its name, our journal aims to achieve a strong global presence in the English-speaking world. In this editorial we examine data collected by our journal management software OJS to ascertain the outreach of AJET beyond its Australasian borders. We look at data concerning AJET’s readership, submissions, authors, and reviewers for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 (to mid-August)

Editorial: AJET bibliometrics and licensing

In this editorial we present the bibliometric data and explain the new Creative Commons license being adopted from Volume 36. The bibliometrics include the journal’s publication, review and article access statistics, the articles attracting the most interest over the past year and the citation performance of the journal

Roles for Local Planners in Industrial Recruitment

The economy of North Carolina has undergone many changes in the last 20 years. The large increases in employment and population are well known. The exodus of displaced farm workers to the North has ceased and many of the new jobs entering the state are higher paying than those in the traditional manufacturing base of textiles and apparel. Although North Carolina still ranks near the bottom in average manufacturing wages, state officials are optimistic about the future because of many economists' predictions of continued expansion of higher wage jobs. Officials are also encouraged by indications that new industry is locating in the poorer areas of the state, and that convergence of wages and income seems to be occurring among the different regions of the state. Despite this outlook, some areas of the state will probably continue to lag in income growth, new employment, and other aspects of economic development. In part this will be due to limitations in the state's industrial recruitment, the dominant economic development policy operating in North Carolina. This article considers the weakness of industrial recruitment and suggests ways in which it could be improved. These suggestions will involve new roles for local planners in the economic development process