Managing the ‘hidden’ workforce: an ethnographic study of workplace cleaning and its implications for management practice.

This research attempts to contribute to the discipline of management practice by studying the behaviour of a specific group of low paid workers. Evidence has been gathered, via an ethnographic study of three groups of cleaners in three different types of organisation – clinic, school and hotel, about the employment relationships enjoyed by these cleaners and their employers; and the extent to which their psychological contracts contribute to their performance. Findings suggest that, not only do employees in each case study demonstrate diverse behaviour, but also certain facets of performance are unlikely to be obtainable from the employees studied. The research concludes that some issues facing the organisations in this study can be generalised beyond cleaning the workplace to other low-paid types of work and that using a management strategy, which ignores the present reality of such types of work and ignores the idiosyncrasy of the psychological contracts of the people to whom it is applied, could be unwise

The significance of unforeseen events in organisational ethnographic inquiry

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance for the practicing ethnographer of responding to unforeseen events that occur during periods of data collection. Analysis of four unforeseen events occurring during prolonged periods of study amongst workplace cleaners is undertaken and the changes in researcher acceptance resulting from the outcomes of these events are reported. This article shows how awareness of the possible incidence of unforeseen events and the ability to carefully yet spontaneously manage the ethnographer’s reaction to them can substantially influence the degree of acceptance achieved by the observer within the group under study. Though the need for an ethnographer to get close to the participants in a study is well documented, detailed examples as described in this article are rare. The documentation of the nature and effects of such episodes and how they unfold serves to enhance the credibility of the research

Industry needs and tertiary journalism education: Views from news editors

This research paper discusses the findings from a 2012 Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) sponsored project that canvassed the views of news editors around Australia about the job readiness of tertiary educated journalism graduates. The focus of this paper is limited to responses from news editors in Western Australia. Data was collected via face to face interviews with eleven news editors in Perth, Western Australia. The editors work in print, online, broadcast and television and all of them employ journalism graduates. The aim was to assess whether the five university based journalism programs in Perth provide graduates with the skillset prospective employers were seeking. Editors are uniquely placed as they employ journalism graduates as interns, or as full time employees when they complete their studies, and they know which attributes and skills will help journalism graduates to succeed. The editors, for the most part, agreed that there was a key role for universities in Perth to provide both an educational background and skills based training for people contemplating a career in journalism and early career journalists. There was, however, some disagreement as to what the ideal university based journalism program should consist of

Integrating the Educational Enterprise

Learning management systems are being used in today's educational climate without much thought to current pedagogies and interoperability. The Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) provides a set of Open Service Interface Definitions (OSID's) that address interoperability in the educational enterprise while remaining pedagogically flexible. Web Services are suggested as a suitable middleware to use when integrating the enterprise services using OKI. A possible integration strategy is suggested for the learning management system WebStation 3 to demonstrate OKI

Engaging Opportunities: Connecting young people with contemporary research and researchers

This is the final report for ‘Engaging Opportunities’, an RCUK-funded School-University Partnership between the Open University and the Denbigh Teaching School Alliance. Informed by action research, this four-year project was designed to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for effective school-university engagement with research. The report describes an evidence-based strategy designed to embed school-university engagement with research within the University’s strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers. Through the early stages of our partnership we noted a lack of suitable planning tools that work for researchers, teachers and students. We therefore introduced a flexible and adaptable framework of four types of activity—open lectures, open dialogues, open inquiry and open creativity—combined with an upstream approach to planning based on a set of six principles. A sub-set of these activities were evaluated through a combination of surveys, interviews and interventions. In conclusion, we argue that institutional and professional cultures can be resistant to the prospect of fully embedding school-university engagement with research in a structured, strategic and sustainable manner, and offer suggestions for how this context could and should be changed

Elective affinities of the Protestant ethic : Weber and the chemistry of capitalism

Peer reviewedPostprin

Evidence that human class Theta glutathione S-transferase T1-1 can catalyse the activation of dichloromethane, a liver and lung carcinogen in the mouse: Comparison of the tissue distribution of GST T1-1 with that of classes Alpha, Mu and Pi GST in human

The cDNA encoding human glutathione S-transferase (GST) T1 has been expressed as two recombinant forms in Escherichia coli that could be purified by affinity chromatography on either IgG-Sepharose or nickel-agarose; one form of the transferase was synthesized from the pALP 1 expression vector as a Staphylococcus aureus protein A fusion, whereas the other form was synthesized from the pET-20b expression vector as a C-terminal polyhistidine-tagged recombinant. The yields of the two purified recombinant proteins from E. coli cultures were approx. 15 mg/l for the protein A fusion and 25 mg/l for the C-terminal polyhistidine-tagged GST T1-1. The purified recombinant proteins were catalytically active, although the protein A fusion was typically only 5-30% as active as the histidine-tagged GST. Both recombinant forms could catalyse the conjugation of glutathione with the model substrates 1,2-epoxy-3-(4'-nitrophenoxy)propane,4-nitrobenzyl chloride and 4-nitrophenethyl bromide but were inactive towards 1-chloro-2,4-dinitrobenzene, ethacrynic acid and 1-menaphthyl sulphate. Recombinant human GST T1-1 was found to exhibit glutathione peroxidase activity and could catalyse the reduction of cumene hydroperoxide. In addition, recombinant human GST T1-1 was found to conjugate glutathione with dichloromethane, a pulmonary and hepatic carcinogen in the mouse. Immunoblotting with antibodies raised against different transferase isoenzymes showed that GST T1-1 is expressed in a large number of human organs in a tissue-specific fashion that differs from the pattern of expression of classes Alpha, Mu and Pi GST. Most significantly, GST T1-1 was found in only low levels in human pulmonary soluble extract of cells, suggesting that in man the lung has little capacity to activate the volatile dichloromethane