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Creativity – a transversal skill for lifelong learning. An overview of existing concepts and practices.: Literature review report,
No full textIn the past several decades, in Europe and across the world there have been significant changes. The main trends include: - The increasing complexity of problems such as climate change, global migration and growing resistance to life-saving drugs; - The ubiquity of data; - The proliferation of knowledge sources from the Internet and wider digital world; - The increasing interconnectedness and global nature of our relationships; - The potential of automation via Artificial Intelligence and its impact, often contested, on life and work; - Increased self-employment; - Global population growth; - Economic and social inequities; - Growing recognition of the importance of lifelong learning; - An ageing society. To this list can be added the likelihood of further global pandemics and their implications for society. Such challenges have heightened the need for all individuals to develop capabilities, competences and dispositions that go beyond foundational skills such as literacy and numeracy. Hence, in public and academic discourse, the focus has shifted towards problem solving, critical thinking, ability to cooperate, creativity, computational thinking, self-regulation, adaptability, communication and learning to learn. Among other skills, creativity is widely acknowledged as vital for progress in knowledge societies and innovation-driven economies. It is also increasingly valued in relation to individual and collective identity, mobility, and well-being. At the individual level, creativity is thought to embrace curiosity and intellectual restlessness, a tolerance for uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity, and the capacity to be adaptable and flexible. These dispositions facilitate higher learning, long-term employability, and upward social mobility. Creativity can also benefit physical fitness, emotional resilience, mental health, confidence, agency, and engender a sense of empowerment. At the collective level, creativity helps to promote social engagement, community identity and cohesion, stimulates economic growth and supports the good functioning of democratic societies. Given growing evidence of the many benefits of creativity, it is hardly surprising that, across continents, it is central to the discourse on the key competences and core life skills needed today. This report presents a review of how creativity has been framed, conceptualised, and defined providing an overview of existing concepts and practices. It also reflects on the links between creativity and key competences for lifelong learning
Characteristics of organizational culture in stimulating service innovation and performance
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of four organizational culture traits, consistency, cooperativeness, effectiveness and innovativeness, on radical and incremental type of service innovations, which leads to new service market performance (NSMP). Design/methodology/approach: The data are collected through a cross-sectional survey of 171 bank managers in Bangladesh and analyzed through structural equation modelling using SmartPLS software. Findings: The results reveal no impact of “consistency” as a cultural trait on “radical” and “incremental” service innovations. “Cooperativeness” and “innovativeness” impact incremental and radical service innovations positively. “Effectiveness” impacts radical service innovations positively. Radical and incremental service innovations impact NSMP significantly. Practical implications: These findings add to the knowledge in terms of how organizational culture can make service innovations happen in the growing banking industry in a developing market. Originality/value: The model links organizational culture traits (internal/external and flexibility/control focussed) with radical and incremental service innovation.</p
The Listening Guide: Voice-Centred-Relational Analysis of Private Subjectivities
Get PDFPurpose - This paper focuses on the analytical importance of voice and the value of listening and representing voices in private contexts. It highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in family research. The paper introduces the Listening Guide as a unique analytical approach to sharpen researchers’ understanding of private experiences and articulations.Design/methodology/approach - This is a conceptual and technical paper. It problematises voice, authority and analytical representation in the private location of family and examines how relational dynamics interact with the subtleties of voice in research. It also provides a practical illustration of the Listening Guide detailing how researchers can utilise this analytical approach. Findings – The paper illustrates how the Listening Guide works as an analytical method, structured around four stages and applied to interview transcript excerpts.Practical implications – The Listening Guide bridges private and public knowledge making, identifies competing voices and recognises relations of power in family research. It provides qualitative market researchers with an analytical tool to hear changes and continuities in participants’ sense of self over time.Social implications – The paper highlights how peripheral voices and silence can be analytically surfaced in private domains. A variety of studies and data can be explored with this approach however research questions involving vulnerable or marginal experiences are particularly suitable.Originality/value – The paper presents the Listening Guide as a novel analytic method for researching family life – one which recovers the importance of voice and serves as a means to address the lack of debate on voice and authority in qualitative market research. It also highlights the under-theorised position of relationality in tracing the multiple subjectivities of research participants. It interrupts conventional qualitative analysis methods, directing attention away from conventional coding and towards listening as an alternative route to knowledge.<br/
After the rural idyll: representations of the British countryside as a non-idyllic environment
Get PDFThis paper explores a somewhat overlooked tradition of non-idyllic representations of the British countryside, particularly characteristic of the post-World War Two period. It considers the collective significance of these representations and what they tell us of the place of the rural within contemporary British culture. The paper takes a broad survey approach, highlighting the representation of rural landscapes, rural communities and rural life, and the rural economy and rural labour, across a range of non-idyllic representations. It argues that it is no longer plausible to sustain the argument that the overwhelming imagination of British rural space is idyllic. These non-idyllic representations afford spaces to explore the imprints of modernity and globalisation on the British countryside, whilst the special place of the rural within British national identity now seems less secure
