1,721,065 research outputs found
Observations on the imposition of New Public Management in the New Zealand state education system.
No full textThe enactment of the Education Act 1989 set in motion a reform agenda designed to restructure the New Zealand state school system. School-based management and decision-making lay at the heart of the reformed system. Responsibility for the administration of schools, previously held by the Department of Education and Regional Education Boards, was decentralised to boards of trustees of individual schools. The Act established a model of governance whereby the elected board of trustees were given responsibility for the management of their individual schools with “complete discretion to control the management of the school as it thinks fit” (s.75). Further, principals, as chief executives, were charged with managing the day-to-day administration of their schools. \ud
\ud
The philosophy of these reforms was consistent with the general thrust of restructuring and policy change that was occurring, at the time, within the wider public sector (Dale, 1994). Indeed, it was evident that the educational reforms had more to do with issues of performance, in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, than issues of curricula and pedagogy. Whilst the reforms undertaken in the wider sector were unprecedented they were, nonetheless, universally recognised for their conceptual rigour and intellectual coherence (Boston, et al., 1996). A notable feature was the theoretical underpinnings of the reforms providing an “analytical framework grounded in public choice, managerialism and new economics of organizations, most notably agency theory and transaction cost analysis” (Boston, 1992, p.2). Arguable, managerialism, or what is more commonly referred to as ‘new public management’ (NPM) (Hood, 1990), has had the most visible influence upon the restructuring of the public sector.\ud
\ud
According to Hood (1995), NPM has seen the ‘… lessening or removing differences between the public and private sectors and shifting the emphasis from process accountability towards a greater element of accountability in terms of results” (p.94). For Martin (1994, p.57), NPM represented the ‘debureaucratisation’ of the public service whereby bureaucratic control gives way to managerial responsibility. Hood (1991) noted seven characteristics, or what he terms ‘doctrinal components’, of the NPM approach: (1) financial devolution to service providers, (2) explicit standards and measures of performance, (3) clear differentiation between inputs, outputs and outcomes, (4) increased accountability of service providers, (5) private sector styles of management practice, (6) increased competition and contracting between service providers, and (7) greater stress on efficiency, economy and effectiveness of resource usage.\ud
\ud
Using Hood’s (1991) seven ‘doctrinal components’ of NPM it is possible to conclude that the educational reforms undertaken in New Zealand are an expression, albeit incompletely, of NPM thinking (Painter, 1988; Self, 1993). The key feature of the reforms was the devolution of financial resources to the school site. In the process it has strengthened the position of the central funding agency and hence accountability. Further, the delegated budget enables a shift in emphasis from input to output (results) accountability. Competition between schools is encouraged through the removal of school zoning restrictions (open admissions). Scarcity of resources has seen schools enter into contracts for the provision of inter-school services and facilities (sporting, technology etc.). Less evident is the enforcement of performance standards. Although Statements of Service Performance are statutorily required, the design and measurement of performance standards is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, external agencies such as the Education Review Office do monitor and appraise the performance of schools with publicly released reports.\u
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
- …
