Classification of sixth form and further education institutions

"Ninety Three Sixth Form College Corporations, created from 1 April 2010 following the passage of the Apprentice, Skills Children and Learning Act 2009, have been classified as Local Government entities for the purposes of the National Accounts. In the course of the reaching this decision, ONS reviewed the existing classification of other further education institutions in England and Wales using Eurostat’s Manual on Government Deficit and Debt, which has been published since the original classification decision was taken in the late 1990s. ONS has decided that Further Education (FE) Corporations in England and Wales should be reclassified, from Non-Profit Institutions Serving Households (NPISH) to Central Government, from their inception in April 1993. NPISH is often known as the 'third sector'; in National Accounts, NPISH is part of the private sector." - Page 3

Public Intimacy in Neighbour Relationships and Complaints

This paper examines neighbour relationships as an example of non-familial intimacy. It focuses on the way disputes between neighbours often hinge on notions of obtrusive public intimacy, in which the sights and sounds of normatively private domestic lives become sources of complaint. The analyses are based on approximately 150 hours of naturally-occurring interaction with neighbours including telephone calls to mediation centres, environmental health departments and anti-social behaviour units, neighbour mediation interviews, police-suspect interrogations in neighbour crime, and neighbour issues broadcast on television and radio. It was found that while the neighbours maintain good relations at the edges of private spaces, the physical arrangements of domestic properties, with their shared boundaries, means that personal information can be transmitted and observed as a routine matter of course. Disputes often have their basis in the illegitimate breach of boundaries, and in the unwanted and unavoidable receipt of the sights and sounds of other people\'s intimate lives.Neighbour Relationships, Intimacy, Complaints, Disputes, Ethnomethodology

Skyrmion and other extended solutions of non-linear σ-models in 2 and (2+1) dimensions

Low dimensional models are generally regarded to be a convenient theoretical laboratory for studying various aspects of elementary particle theory. In this thesis, the extended solutions of one particular class of such models, namely the ₵p(^n-1) non-linear a-models in 2 dimensions, are discussed. Special attention is paid to the shape of these extended structures and their dependence on the parameters of the solutions. Time dependence is introduced into the models, and properties of the moving objects in these (2 + l)-dimensional theories are explored. In particular, the Hopf terms of the theories are investigated, and their relation to the spin of the extended solutions is discussed. Also the classical dynamics of these moving objects, and their explanation in terms of the geodesic motions on certain Hermitian and Kāhler manifolds is considered. Finally the embedding of the (₵p(^n-1) solutions into the 2-dimensional U(n) chiral models is studied, paying particular attention to the stability of these embedded solutions in the larger group space, and to the number of independent negative modes of the fluctuation operator around these solutions

In business, as in government, direct democracy is not possible

Workplace democracy is about appointing people to ‘manage’ on our behalf, writes Philip Stoko

The Exemplary Career of EO Hoppé: Photography, Modernism and Modernity.

This article critically examines the landscape and cityscape photography of EO Hoppe. In Picturesque Great Britain (1926), Hoppe presented a vision of the nation refracted through the prism of an older, Pictorialist aesthetic, whereas his later works, Romantic America (1927) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930) demonstrated a more enthusiastic response to the urban industrial world. This article analyses the cultural, commercial and ideological forces that helped shape Hoppe's work in Britain, Germany and the United States

Applying findings and creating impact from conversation-analytic studies of gender and communication

Studies of workplaces frequently focus on gender, investigating and challenging inequality. In that many studies start with ‘gender’ as a taken-for-granted category, measuring gender differences in organizational life, or interviewing participants to elicit accounts of their employment experiences, they exaggerate and even create stereotypical ‘common knowledge’ about gender. In contrast, this paper illustrates a conversation analytic approach which can show if, when, and how, gender becomes consequentially relevant within any given communicative encounter. Drawing on a large corpus of institutional interaction, the paper demonstrates two things: that (1) robust claims about the gendering of social life can be made once those claims are grounded in what people actually do; and (2) systematic patterns in people’s endogenous orientations to gender can be found in communication. Finally, the paper showcases a real-world application of conversation analytic work, demonstrating the impact and relevance of such research programmes for understanding everyday gendered social life

'I'm not gonna hit a lady': conversation analysis, membership categorization and men's denials of violence towards women

This article examines the way male suspects deny accusations of assaulting women in interrogations by police officers. It draws on a large corpus of British police interrogation materials, and uses conversation analysis to shed light on the location and design of, and responses to, suspects’ ‘category-based denials’ that they are not ‘the kind of men who hit women’. Two sections of analysis identify how, first, such denials routinely follow police officers’ direct questions about violent behaviour, and, second, how they become embedded in extended narratives that are not directly describing violence. In contrast to other discourse-analytic studies of men’s accounts of violence towards women, the article unpacks the component features that comprise what others might label grossly as the ‘discourse of gendered violence’. Rather than see how such ‘discourses’ operate in interview contexts, it shows how suspects construct, in a high-stakes setting for a particular purpose, different categories of men, claiming membership in one (who do not hit women) by recruiting the notion of the other (who do). Thus, in addition to its contribution to the study of gender and violence, the article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization and conversation analysis, showcasing a type of systematic sequential analysis that can be done with membership categories

"Have you been married, or ...?": Eliciting and accounting for relationship histories in speed-dating interaction

Studies of personal relationships have often been conducted in the laboratory, on the self-report questionnaire, or in the interview. In contrast, this article studies relationships via a corpus of 30 British speed-dating encounters between 30–45-year-old heterosexual couples, in which talk about previous relationships was pervasively relevant. The analysis examines how talk about prior relationships, and current relationship status, was occasioned and accounted for. The first section shows that, in the overall structure of the date, talk about relationship histories was located after talk about other matters (e.g., occupation, place of residence). Second, relationship history questions contained design features for managing the delicacy of answering them (e.g., trail-off “or” turn endings), as well as paired categorial items (e.g., a question about children was answered in terms of one's marital status and vice versa). In the final section, the analysis shows that and how participants treat some relationship histories as more accountable than others (e.g., being never married). The analysis revealed a more general set of accountabilities: of being single, of being previously unsuccessful in relationships, of being unable to meet people in natural settings, and, therefore, for attending speed-dating events. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of examining the richly detailed brief encounters of social life, in order to better understand people's understandings of, troubles with, and goals for their personal relationships