Search results

In our societal context, the neoliberal competitive and knowledge-oriented culture still exerts a stranglehold on teachers' sense of professional autonomy giving rise to a deficit image of them as ‘excessively entitled’. The purpose of this chapter is to eschew this deficit view of teachers by bringing their agentive side to the fore. First, it explores the concept of ‘excessive teacher entitlement’ in terms of the prevalent characteristics of the culture of teaching in schools and the nature of authority wielded by teachers in this culture and its negative consequence on student learning using an excerpt from an English as Second Language (ESL) classroom in India where this study is set. This episode helps expose the teacher's unawareness of the gaps between their intention and action, a hallmark of excessive entitlement. Second, it juxtaposes an alternative image of ‘teacher as researcher’ to foreground teachers' ‘transformative activist stance’ which revolves around their ideological becoming in agentively striving to realise their ‘best-loved self’. Framed within Vygotskian Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the principle of ‘double stimulation’ provides a powerful analytical lens to unpack the complex discursive dynamics of their practice nested within historically developing contradictions. These contradictions work tacitly to drive a wedge between teachers' intentions and action making them feel excessively entitled to passively acquiesce with the existing order of things. This study provides some signposts for teacher education about creating an environment where teachers can reclaim their transformative agency freeing themselves from the ‘excessive entitlement’ that binds their practice to the status quo and diminishes their relationships with students.

This chapter describes the possibilities for fusing ethnography and evaluation to transform educational inquiry and educational entities (programs, systems, and policies). The central question explored is, how do we best pursue work connecting evaluation and ethnography to fulfill our commitments to diversity, justice, and cultural responsiveness in educational spaces, to make tangible transformative change? With 40 years of literature on ethnography-evaluation connections as a foundation, this chapter describes three coalescing themes: transformative, intersectional, and comparative. These themes are proposed as valuable for guiding contemporary educational inquiry that serves social justice. The transformative theme denotes educational inquiry in which the researcher or evaluator ethically collects data, makes defensible interpretations, and facilitates social change in collaboration with others. Doing transformative work that meaningfully fuses ethnography and evaluation rests on essential factors like time, values engagement, collaboration, and self-work. The intersectional theme describes intersectionality as an evolving analytical framework that promotes social problem-solving and learning via investigating the significance of intersecting social identities in (a) how people's lives are shaped, (b) their access to power across circumstances, and (c) their everyday experiences of subordination and discrimination. Finally, the comparative theme refers to sensibilities and practices gleaned from the interdisciplinary and transnational field of comparative education, including developing comparative cultural understanding and analyzing complex systems in one's inquiry projects. Across themes, this chapter emphasizes positionality, responsibility, and theory-bridging to make sense of the uses of ethnographic concepts and practices in transformative evaluation work in educational spaces.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into higher education (HE) represents a transformative shift in the way academic institutions operate and engage with students. This chapter explores the multifaceted impact of AI on HE, touching upon key themes that encapsulate this transformation. First, the chapter outlines the developments of AI in education. It discusses how adaptive learning systems make use of AI to personalise educational content to individual students and optimise their learning experiences. The discourse also explores AI-driven assessment tools that provide educators with data-driven insights into student performance, offering a more personalised and efficient approach to grading and feedback. Second, the chapter extends the discussion to AI in teacher administration, demonstrating how AI technologies streamline administrative tasks in HE. The text will examine the use of AI for enrolment and registration processes, reducing bottlenecks and enhancing efficiency, and AI’s role in student support services, where AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants offer timely and personalised guidance to students, improving their overall experience.

The literature on the vocabularies of motive and associated concepts of accounts, neutralizations, and aligning actions has been exceptionally productive in documenting how actors mitigate the threat of stigmatization in a variety of circumstances. This paper reviews this literature that has been published since the last major reviews of this literature. It identifies two recent developments in the study of vocabularies of motive: account giving in situations of cultural ambiguity and in times of conflict. Taken together, this work yields several insights into how actors use motives to advance their goals. Finally, the chapter argues that the insights from this burgeoning body of work should be applied to the study of the culture wars. Such scholarship would help to further establish the importance of interactionist thought by correcting some of the limitations in current approaches to the study of cultural conflict that provides reified and overdetermined explanations.

Growth optimism, which describes the expected future growth of a firm, is an important but underexplored construct in strategy. This paper aims to assess the planning antecedents of such growth optimism by using a large Australian sample of small enterprises.

The authors use a secondary data set, gathered among Australian small to medium enterprises (SMEs), by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The analysis adopts a regression approach including a mediated and a non-mediated path to explore the direct and indirect effects of strategic planning and budgetary planning and management on expected future revenues.

This paper assesses the implications of concurrent strategic planning and financial management dynamic capabilities on anticipated future revenue growth, an important predisposition dynamic capability. The authors note that this configuration of actions and predisposition aligns closely with the necessary requirements for growth. The findings suggest that firms that use strategic planning and robust budget planning and monitoring processes exhibit higher optimism about future sales growth and firms that effectively configure these planning activities with market development tend to exhibit higher growth and more growth optimism.

In terms of theoretical contributions, the paper strongly supports the formality view in the formal/informal debates associated with effectuation strategies. The authors suggest that appropriate strategic and budgetary planning and control systems act as a counterbalance to organisational confusion and managerial capriciousness, leading to improved confidence among managers and their employees regarding future resource commitments and plans.

The findings of the paper are potentially important for both managers and policy makers. For managers seeking to grow their future sales, planning is shown to be an important antecedent activity. The presence of financial and strategic planning may predispose firms to make important investment decisions that drive future growth. Also, a better understanding of the firm’s current and future strategic and financial position may be evidence of effective firm management, a situation that, in turn, drives growth.

In terms of social and policy implications, the data gathered for the survey by the ABS forms a valuable collection of information in relation to business practices. Australian firms are required by law to regularly report budget plans and outcomes. The research suggests that this data can inform policy initiatives, particularly in relation to programmes that may assist small and young firms to undertake prospective strategic and budgetary planning.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate the particular configuration of strategic and financial planning and anticipated sales growth in the SME context.