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Women, management, and globalization: leadership, barriers, and opportunities
No full textThis chapter examines the complex relationship between women, management, and globalization, offering a fresh perspective on how leadership opportunities and barriers differ across regions. While globalization has created new pathways for professional advancement, it has also reinforced systemic gender inequalities, particularly in managerial roles. Women face distinct challenges depending on their geographic location, with those in the Global North often confronting the glass ceiling and work–family conflicts, while those in the Global South contend with economic marginalization, limited institutional support, and cultural constraints. By exploring gendered experiences in management across different global contexts, this chapter highlights how historical, social, and economic factors shape women’s ability to access leadership positions. A postcolonial feminist approach is employed to assess how certain groups of women experience deeper disadvantages due to intersecting factors such as class and geopolitical status. Using a qualitative multilevel framework, this chapter examines the advantages and disadvantages women face at both the individual and organizational levels. Rather than testing hypotheses or developing new theories, the discussion makes a conceptual contribution by identifying structural forces that influence women’s career progression in globalized workplaces. The chapter concludes by outlining the challenges and opportunities women encounter in management and the broader implications for leadership practices in an increasingly interconnected world
The development of the strengths and risks matching tool for adoption in the United Kingdom
Get PDFIdentifying the strengths and risks of prospective matches in adoption is crucial to adoption placement stability. With the aim to deliver a consistent and service-led approach to matching children in care with prospective adopters, a tool to identify strengths and risks related to adoption placement was developed. Using a mixed-methods approach, this tool was developed in line with the psychometric theory of test construction, from item generation using semi-structured interviews and survey methods, and exploratory factor analysis to determine the factor structure of the assessment-to-assessment of retest reliability and finalization. Comprising three main components (adopter capabilities and skills, adopter profiles and characteristics, and adoption plans, preparations, and transitions), this tool can be used by practitioners to identify strengths and risks in proposed matches at any point during the linking and matching process
Postdigital citizen science and humanities: a theoretical kaleidoscope
Get PDFThis collective article presents a theoretical kaleidoscope, the multiple lenses of which are used to examine and critique citizen science and humanities in postdigital contexts and from postdigital perspectives. It brings together 19 short theoretical and experiential contributions, organised into six loose groups which explore areas and perspectives including Indigenous and local knowledge, technology, and children and young people as citizen researchers. It suggests that this collective approach is appropriate because both postdigital and citizen research are founded on and committed to collaboration, dialogue, and co-creation, as well as challenging the tenets and approaches of traditional academic research. In particular, it suggests that postdigital transformations in contemporary societies are both changing citizen science and humanities and making it more important
On doodling and other modes of engagement in meltdown
Get PDFThis essay considers modes of engagement in contemporary times of ‘meltdown’. Written in 2022, prior to the recent escalation of Israel-Palestine-Lebanon conflict in the Middle East, it engages with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and varied threats of nuclear mobilization in this context: from damage to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power station, to launches of nuclear attack. In doing so, the lethal competitive links between fossil fuel and nuclear economies are foregrounded, reminding us of Cold War times when it was nuclear annihilation, rather than climate change, that threatened an unliveable planet. In engaging with these threatening dynamics, I also work with historical and present experiences and definitions of genocide and ‘theatres of war’, drawing on research regarding one of the first Indigenous ‘uprisings’ in Namibia – then German South West Africa; a context that also experienced one of the first modern genocides. In doing so, I raise the spectre of how it remains exceptionally difficult for legitimacy to be granted to the disruptive voices, experiences and perspectives of those beyond, and mostly written out of, the formal written historical record. Ultimately, the essay focuses on the following and increasingly pertinent questions. What transformational forces may turn around war’s worlding to mutate the experience, witnessing and haunting of terror into healing? And what practices may help us find paths of coherence amidst experiences of meltdown
Book review symposium for Juliane Jarke and Jo Bates (eds.). (2024). Dialogues in data power: shifting response-abilities in a datafied world [book review]
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Meaningful agency in participatory performance: a contextual approach
Get PDFAgency is a significant concept in participatory performance: as a participant you are able to take actions that affect the direction or outcome of (part of) the performance and this ability is a key element of the work’s meaning. Contemporary discourse on participatory performance conflates two perspectives of agency: agentive behaviour (where a participant carries out an action that looks to an observer as if they have made a decision) and the experience of agency (as articulated by the participant themselves). However, my original audience research demonstrates that the instances of observed agentive behaviour significantly outnumber the articulations of experienced agency by participants. A new and more nuanced perspective is necessary to understand how agency becomes meaningful in the context of participation. This article sets out an innovative contextual approach to agency, combining theoretical perspectives from cognitive philosophy and phenomenology with insights from original audience research to create the necessary multi-dimensional perspective. In this article, I draw on empirical audience research on 94 participants of Early Days (of a Better Nation) by Coney (2014) to illustrate this relational and contextual approach
Calorie (energy) labelling for changing selection and consumption of food or alcohol
No full textAuthors' conclusions:
Current evidence suggests that calorie labelling of food (including non‐alcoholic drinks) on menus, products, and packaging leads to small reductions in energy selected and purchased, with potentially meaningful impacts on population health when applied at scale. The evidence assessing the impact of calorie labelling of food on consumption suggests a similar effect to that observed for selection and purchasing, although there is less evidence and it is of lower certainty. There is insufficient evidence to estimate the effect of calorie labelling of alcoholic drinks, and more high‐quality studies are needed. Further research is needed to assess potential moderators of the intervention effect observed for food, particularly socioeconomic status. Wider potential effects of implementation that are not assessed by this review also merit further examination, including systemic impacts of calorie labelling on industry actions, and potential individual harms and benefits
"You can't eat salad with a spoon". What social workers say they need
Get PDFWhilst there is little doubt that social work is a rewarding career that many enter for altruistic reasons, contemporary literature clearly evidences the challenges of the role and the concerning picture of social workers leaving or thinking of leaving the profession. This issue needs to be addressed for a number of reasons, firstly the impact on social workers of workplace stress, secondly on organisations who have to employ qualified social workers, and thirdly on those in need of safety and support who may be impacted by changes of social worker. Although much is already known and understood about the challenges of the role and the factors that can impact workplace wellbeing, there is limited knowledge about what is effective in making a positive and long-lasting impact in addressing this.
This thesis sought to explore social worker wellbeing using Appreciative Inquiry as a research approach, a participatory approach with the assertion that effective change happens when rather than focusing on deficits, the focus is on what is already working well and building on this. The aim was to understand better what social workers identified they needed and creating an intervention to meet these identified needs. Data was collected through four studies: a scoping review, semi-structured interviews and two focus groups, the latter stages involving participants working in statutory social work roles, and the outcome was a co-designed intervention which provided the mechanism for a meaningful conversation about wellbeing at work.
The key findings in this thesis were that social workers reported that their wellbeing comprised of number of facets: practical working conditions, support, opportunity, personal satisfaction and making a difference and that these facets could be placed in hierarchical order. This order provided the foundation for the co-design of the intervention, a structured evidenced based discussion to optimise the opportunity for social workers to experience wellbeing at work. These findings not only make an important contribution to academic knowledge about interventions that support social worker wellbeing but, in the potential, to influence and impact social work experience and practice
'Becoming liquid': exploring the narrative pattern of an 'Implosion' in a fragmented novel
Get PDFThis study investigates the patterning of fragmented narratives, more specifically, what I will develop as the pattern of an implosion.
This thesis consists of two parts, the autobiographical novel in fragments, titled 'Becoming Liquid', and the critical component, 'Writing a fragmented novel: exploring the narrative structure of an 'implosion'.
'Becoming Liquid' is an experimental narrative that traces the journey from Germany to (post-Brexit) England and back, from being a daughter and granddaughter to being a mother. In glimpses of life, daydreams, history and art, it explores what it means to be home and to be rooted while everything changes.
The critical component 'Writing a fragmented novel: exploring the narrative structure of an 'implosion'' contextualises and investigates what I will call the 'implosive narrative pattern' of a novel in fragments, and its specific value for writing my novel.
In the first chapter of my thesis, I will outline what I mean by fragmentary writing and its historical and contemporary meaning. Using the example of Ali Smith's 'Artful', I will explore the potential of gaps in fragmentary writing and will delineate their benefits for writing about art. Further, I will investigate the openness to include other media, such as photography, in fragmentary narratives.
While writing in fragments has long been a technique used by writers for various purposes, and has been discussed in the context of Romanticism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, the patterning of the fragmented novel has been deeply investigated by Jane Alison in her recent book 'Meander, Spiral, Explode'.
In chapter two and three I will explore patterns that were important for my own novel during the writing process and how I came to the final shape of 'Becoming Liquid'.
Based on what Jane Alison calls the 'radial' pattern in narrative, I will establish the concepts of exploding and imploding novels. I will provide case studies of Maggie Nelson's 'Bluets' and Sheila Heti's 'Motherhood' in terms of their narrative pattern and compare them to my own novel. I will suggest my reasons for writing an imploding novel, rather than an exploding one. Finally, I will conclude with why I find the narrative pattern of an implosion especially fitting to write my experience of becoming a mother.
With the delineation of the implosion as a narrative pattern and the practice-based research of its use for writing about motherhood, this study contributes to new knowledge in the field of creative writing in two ways: a new categorisation of a specific narrative pattern in fragmentary writing, and the suggestion of a method for shaping a literary text in fragments