Search results

This study retrospectively investigates the parenting experiences of mothers of two-year-old children who expressed concerns that their child may have autism up to when they were 4.5 years old. This study aims to identify early parenting challenges and joys and explore whether certain challenges are associated with a subsequent autism diagnosis.

Using a longitudinal design, this study draws from a cohort of 6,853 children, focusing on 103 mothers who reported concerns that their child may have autism when they were between 2 and 4.5 years old, compared to a demographically matched control group. It also tracks whether children initially flagged for autism concerns at 2 to 4.5 years had received a formal diagnosis by age eight.

Mothers of autistic children were more likely to mention early challenges with their child’s psychosocial development and family cohesion. However, the nature of the challenges discussed within these categories were similar across the two groups, suggesting that these two challenges, while important, are not definitive indicators of autism on their own. Many mothers highlighted their love and joy in watching their child develop. By age eight, 56% of the children who were flagged with autism concerns at aged 4.5 had an autism diagnosis, underscoring the importance of early concerns.

This novel research leverages a large, diverse longitudinal cohort to retrospectively explore mothers’ views on raising two-year-old children who were subsequently recognised as being autistic. It uniquely balances the exploration of parenting challenges with the highlights, offering a more holistic view of parenting a child who may later be diagnosed with autism, and considers the link between early parental concerns and challenges and subsequent autism diagnosis.

This paper aims to discuss the scholarship over the past 30 years on what used to be called Melanesian warfare or “tribal fighting” and is termed in this paper “intergroup conflict” in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The paper categorises the drivers of intergroup conflict that make up the landscape for conflict in the Highlands. It starts with cultural factors and the understandings about conflict that have long been used to explain such violence, then adds newer factors. It argues that while the individual existence of each driver is important, far more important is the way in which they interact with each other in reinforcing feedback loops that propel the actors involved towards violence.

The paper is based on a thorough review of the scholarly and grey literature on the topic, drawing from the fields of anthropology, criminology, political science, law, justice and peacebuilding.

The overall finding of the paper is that the nature of intergroup conflict, its scale and dynamics, has changed considerably over the past 30 years, most prominently in the entanglement of the state with local-level conflicts. This has significantly affected the nature of intergroup conflict today, deepening the attractors towards violence and conflict, while weakening the ability of existing state and non-state systems to prevent it. The picture that emerges is one in which the interconnectivity of factors promoting violence has intensified, the rate of change is accelerating and levels of violence are amplified.

This paper is an original work.

The author aims to walk beside the singular privileged class of White women’s suffrage feminist origin story to (re)construct plausible feminist fragmented threads as antenarratives in the context of business management education. To accomplish this (re)assembling of threads, the author examined two North American business trade publications created and used within two business schools, Harvard University’s Harvard Business Review (HBR), established in 1922, and Western University’s The Quarterly Review of Commerce (The Quarterly), established in 1933.

The author carefully reviewed almost 4,000 articles from HBR and The Quarterly, focusing on 308 articles that addressed the experiences of complex women. With this subset of collected articles, the author highlighted overlooked details, accidents and errors, generating interest and curiosity about the emergence of these fragmented and paradoxical origins that align with Foucault's histories of errors. By grouping these narrative fragments into themes and conducting a critical discourse analysis that incorporated influences from the external environment, the author reconstructed plural feminist origins antenarratives.

The themes discovered, including women as consumers, explicit working women concerns, women as authors/coauthors, diversity and social justice initiatives, and women in higher education/training, are not merely descriptive observations. They are the building blocks for identifying and analyzing the power relations circulating among feminist origins antenarratives within management education circles. These antenarratives include shedding light on women working in capitalist contexts, the educational needs of business women, and men and naming (but not breaking) the “mythologies” of women at work. These findings are transformative to the understanding of plural feminist origins.

The uniqueness of this work lies in its threefold contributions: moving away from the notion of a singular feminist origin story and instead embracing the complexity of multiple, paradoxical and incomplete origins; shedding light on the spectrum of power relations – ranging from productive to oppressive – that shaped the experiences of women in two management educational circles during the first half of the 20th century; and introducing the concept of inflection points, which underscores the fluidity of knowledge.

Research regarding life in rural coastal communities in England has been limited, while the experience of families further marginalised by disability has been unresearched. To address this topic, a qualitative study was undertaken to explore the lives of families living with autism in rural coastal England. Twenty-two families from Cornwall and West Norfolk were interviewed in early 2019, including young people on the autism spectrum, their siblings, parents (some of whom were themselves also on the spectrum) and grandparents.

Perceived benefits of living in a rural coastal space were identified. These included the location, the sense of community and the sense of ‘going back in time’ as a positive experience. However, families also spoke of barriers and challenges associated with negative aspects of the location, the experience of stigma and intersectionality in relation to autism and rural coastal spaces. Difficulties concerning education, health and social care support were worsened by poor local infrastructure and the impact of a decade of austerity.

The qualitative methodology involving collaboration with families with autism in developing the research tools, participant recruitment and stakeholder validation is considered.

This research explored the intersecting impacts of rurality, coastality and disability to provide a novel and more nuanced understanding of such families' experiences. As such, it contributes to our understanding of those living ‘on the edge’ – regarding physical location, societal and educational marginalisation.

This paper aims to synthesise the literature addressing opportunities for intervention and peacemaking in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It shows that peacebuilding in PNG is actively practised in a variety of different forms and by a range of actors. It relies heavily on local champions and coalitions working together with “bits of the state” in inventive but, ultimately, highly vulnerable ways. It argues that the way forward is to better understand how the multiple resources in and beyond the state can be networked more effectively to engineer peace at many different levels, from the clan to the nation state.

The paper is based on a thorough review of the scholarly and grey literature concerning peacebuilding and conflict resolution in PNG over the past 30 years.

The key insight is that peacemaking and non-violence interventions in PNG need to be understood as requiring three different categories of treatment: quick, short interventions; ongoing, slow peacebuilding; and development of community wellness to preventatively stave off violence through increased community cohesion.

The paper is the basis of original research.

Human and artificial intelligence has often been examined through competitive and oppositional lenses, which may no longer suffice in modern digital and knowledge-based societies. This paper advocates for a holistic perspective by integrating human and artificial intelligence within the conceptual framework of intellectual capital (IC).

Employing a deductive approach rooted in systems theory, this study reinterprets established dimensions of IC for the era of artificial intelligence.

Drawing inspiration from the Information Variety Model and the 4C Curve Model, both developed within the research framework of the Viable Systems Approach, a conceptual framework is proposed to transcend fragmented perspectives. It aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of human–artificial intelligence relations within the realm of IC.

This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the potential evolution of IC in the era of artificial intelligence by presenting a multidisciplinary framework that challenges reductionist perspectives. It underscores the importance of systems thinking in reframing, analyzing and discussing key dimensions of IC in the context of the artificial intelligence era.

Taking an organizational perspective, this paper aims to understand how organizations respond to such strong and concurrent societal effects, and to answer the question, “How should researchers conceptualize the symbiotic relationship between society and business during a catastrophic societal event?”

The authors highlight through numerous examples, the impact of COVID-19 on society is well-evidenced in the research. They also draw on such evidence of the effects of catastrophic societal events like COVID-19 to support the appropriateness of this conceptualization.

The authors found that organizations that use both short- and long-term activities concurrently are better able to tackle the concurrent short- and long-term effects of catastrophic events like COVID-19.

The authors use ambidexterity theory, supported by evidence derived from organizational responses to COVID-19, to offer a new and more comprehensive conceptualization that frames the concurrent and interrelated short-term and long-term organizational response to a catastrophic societal event. Further, they highlight the importance of studying such organizational responses in the context of the organization’s referent groups.

The purpose of this paper is to compare how the various sectors among the largest companies in Ghana have incorporated sustainability into their mission, vision and value statements.

The mission, vision and value statements of the 100 largest corporations in Ghana, known as Ghana Club 100 (GC100), were extracted from the firms’ official websites. These firms were grouped into nine sectors, and the sustainability components in the mission, vision and value statements were subjected to cross tabulation and thematic contents analysis to establish the sectoral variations.

In formulating their mission, vision and value statements, GC100 firms were more than six times likely to include economic sustainability themes than environmental sustainability themes. Even though three out of every five GC100 firms are financial institutions, the manufacturing and the extractive sectors and firms ranked 1st−20th are three times likely to incorporate all the sustainability dimensions (i.e. economic, social and environmental) into their mission, vision and value statements. Firms in the financial sector and those ranked 80th−100th were more likely not to publish either a mission, vision or value statements online.

This study reveals the magnitude of the strategic pronouncements such as mission, vision and value statements of large firms in emerging economies and how they are aligned with sustainability. This could serve as a basis for formulating guidelines to reinforce efforts that contribute to corporate sustainability.

Research on how large firms align sustainability into their mission, vision and value statements is not a new agenda, but fragmented in the context of the emerging economies. The novelty is that this study addresses this gap and contributes to this topic from a sectoral comparative perspective of largest organization in Ghana, an emerging economy.