Alessandra Citti, Angela Politi, Fulvia Sabattini and Chiara Semenzato
The academic libraries of the University of Bologna situated in Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna and Rimini carried out two surveys about users' satisfaction, in order to improve services…
Abstract
Purpose
The academic libraries of the University of Bologna situated in Cesena, Forlì, Ravenna and Rimini carried out two surveys about users' satisfaction, in order to improve services. This paper aims to present the results of these surveys.
Design/methodology/approach
Two surveys were carried out: in 2007 and in 2010. The second one aimed to verify whether the actions adopted following the 2007 questionnaire had been appreciated. The 2007 survey adopted the interviewer‐assisted administration technique, the 2010 was online.
Findings
The 2010 questionnaire gave information about users' expectations and actions to be taken: the number of students unaware of advanced services is high. Librarians will work to broaden the use of them.
Research limitations/implications
The online questionnaire was adopted because in 2007 many professors could not come to the library during the two‐weeks survey. The result was that a higher number of professors answered the questionnaire, but fewer students. That was probably due to the fact that most students do not use the institutional e‐address. The authors aim to move to a double questionnaire giving in 2013: interviewer‐assisted administration and online.
Practical implications
The number of students unaware of advanced services is high; librarians need to work to broaden the use of them.
Social implications
The survey was an opportunity to focus on the importance of the collaboration between faculty and librarians. The best results are achieved by working together: they share the same mission. If they join their different competencies, they can be integrated.
Originality/value
The paper has a double approach: quantitative and qualitative. Moreover, during the same week of the survey a focus group is carried out, to focus on the critical areas of the questionnaire and offer support for actions.
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This chapter will focus on the Netflix television series The Exorcist (2016–) starring Gina Davis as Angela Rance/Regan MacNeill and Ben Daniels as Father Marcus. The Rances are a…
Abstract
This chapter will focus on the Netflix television series The Exorcist (2016–) starring Gina Davis as Angela Rance/Regan MacNeill and Ben Daniels as Father Marcus. The Rances are a well-off urban family in Chicago, with Angela, a successful and powerful professional woman. The Exorcist allows Angela Rance, a woman in midlife, to be central to the narrative, despite the paucity of positive, central roles for women over 50.
The chapter will also examine the depiction of gender through the themes of families and homes. Homes are sanctuaries but can also be a site of violence. The Rance home is the first clue that all is not well, when Angela hears noises in the walls. Families, homes, faith and betrayal are everywhere in The Exorcist, including the Rances, the Church, the priesthood, the Friars of Ascension and the homeless settlement. Traditionally, families and homes are where women can achieve creativity and some kind of agency, as well as being contained.
The third approach of this chapter will be to compare gender representations in the television series and the film The Exorcist (1973). In theory, the intervening 44 years could have seen gains for women and feminism, but 2017 has seen women’s rights eroded yet again. The film was made at the height of the women’s liberation movement and second-wave feminism, and at the start of the era of ‘video nasties’ and explicitly gory slasher and cannibal films, so I will use the historical context to frame a discussion about the two different versions.
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Vivianna Fang He and Gregor Krähenmann
The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about…
Abstract
The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.
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Sovereignty retains considerable currency today insofar as it fuses ordinary understandings of the state, the nation, and democracy. Against widespread expectations, however, the…
Abstract
Sovereignty retains considerable currency today insofar as it fuses ordinary understandings of the state, the nation, and democracy. Against widespread expectations, however, the European Union has increasingly harnessed sovereignty as a source of vitality. We are thus witnessing a mainstreaming of populist politics, as the rhetoric of sovereignty no longer disqualifies new EU institutions and policies. This can be better understood if we consider sovereignty, from a constructivist perspective, as an evolving set of practices. First, sovereignty evolves within political and administrative circles, as European officials act to modify longstanding practices of state sovereignty. Second, sovereignty evolves in an increasingly politicized context, as political leaders dramatize EU crises in order to mobilize coalitions around new practices of popular sovereignty. This dual dynamic of state sovereignty and popular sovereignty is demonstrated in the case of the Eurozone and then extrapolated to the current trajectory of the EU polity against the benchmark of US federalism after the Civil War. An open question is whether sovereignty practices in the European Union will continue to evolve without compromising the Union's cosmopolitan and liberal objectives.
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Jane Wilkinson and Annemaree Lloyd-Zantiotis
Recent figures show that half the world’s refugees are children, with young people now representing more than 50 percent of victims of global armed conflict and displaced persons…
Abstract
Recent figures show that half the world’s refugees are children, with young people now representing more than 50 percent of victims of global armed conflict and displaced persons. Increasing numbers of refugee youth are entering their host nations’ compulsory and postcompulsory educational systems having experienced frequent resettlements and disrupted education, which in turn, pose major barriers for educational and future employment. The consequences of these experiences raise pressing equity implications for educators and educational systems. However, the picture is not uniformly bleak. Employing Bourdieu’s thinking tools of habitus, field and capital, Yosso’s concepts of community cultural wealth and photovoice methods, this chapter draws on studies of refugee youth of both genders from diverse ethnic and faith backgrounds, conducted in regional Australia. It examines how everyday spaces for learning, for example, church, faith-based and sporting groups and family can play a crucial role in enabling young people to build powerful forms of social and cultural capital necessary to successfully access and negotiate formal education and training settings. Its findings suggest first that everyday spaces can act as rich sites of informal learning, which young refugee people draw upon to advance their life chances, employability, and social inclusion. Second, they suggest that how one’s gender and “race” intersect may have important implications for how refugee youth access social and cultural capital in these everyday spaces as they navigate between informal learning and formal educational settings.
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Angela Kachuyevski and Ronnie Olesker
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conflict analysis framework that better captures the complexity of conflicts in divided societies by including the differing perceptions…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop a conflict analysis framework that better captures the complexity of conflicts in divided societies by including the differing perceptions of identity boundaries between ethnic majorities and minorities in divided societies.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis draws on the social boundaries and societal security literatures to develop a typology representing four dyads of perceived identity boundaries that illustrate the different dynamics of ethnic relations in divided societies.
Findings
The exploratory cases illustrate how the perceptions of identity boundaries have implications for conflict dynamics that call for different conflict management strategies.
Research limitations/implications
The empirical cases serve to illustrate the application of the theoretical framework. Policy makers devising conflict management strategies in these deeply divided societies are likely to err if differing perceptions of social boundaries are not taken into consideration. Thus, the authors provide explicit policy recommendations for conflict management in each of the dyads presented in the typology.
Practical implications
Using the framework that incorporates differing perceptions of identity allows analysts to account for the impact of external actors in shaping and maintaining identity boundaries and allows for a consideration of the possible differing interpretations of the boundary held by different groups as well as the implications this has for conflict analysis and management.
Originality/value
The authors develop a model that accounts for the perceptions of both the majority and the minority of the identity boundaries that separate divided societies. They account for the implications for conflict dynamics and thus for conflict management strategies of differing perceptions of identity boundaries, which provides a perspective that is both theoretically significant and policy relevant, as most policy makers assume that ethnic minorities and majorities see the social boundary between them in similar terms.
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Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making…
Abstract
Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.
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Angela Dy and Adaku Jennifer Agwunobi
This conceptual paper has two central aims: to critically analyse the potential of intersectionality theory as a means by which to understand aspects of context in…
Abstract
Purpose
This conceptual paper has two central aims: to critically analyse the potential of intersectionality theory as a means by which to understand aspects of context in entrepreneurship studies, and advocate for the value of a realist perspective and mixed methods approaches to produce better intersectional research on entrepreneurship. This paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
Highlighting context as an emerging topic within entrepreneurship literature, the paper examines how drawing upon notions of intersectionality and positionality can help to explain the social context for entrepreneurial activity and outcomes, particularly in terms of agency and resources.
Findings
The paper complements and extends existing intersectional approaches to entrepreneurship studies by introducing Archer’s critical realist philosophical perspective on agency and Anthias’ positional perspective on resource access, considering the usefulness of realism and mixed methods approaches for such work, and outlining a methodologically informed potential research agenda for the area.
Originality/value
The paper offers a theoretical foundation for researchers to begin systematically exploring social entrepreneurial context by accounting for the effects of overarching intersecting structures such as gender, race, and socio-economic class (amongst others), presents empirical methods through which these social-structural influences, and the degree of their impact, can be identified and analysed, and suggests a philosophically robust means of conceptualising how, in combination with agency, they influence essential aspects of entrepreneurial activity.
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Angela Genova, Alice Scavarda and Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny
Welfare policies for persons with disabilities have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this introductory chapter provides the theoretical background to the book…
Abstract
Welfare policies for persons with disabilities have been strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this introductory chapter provides the theoretical background to the book. Definition, data and main European policies about disabilities are outlined. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) is the key pillar of disability policies in European countries. In line with a Disability Studies perspective, COVID-19 health surveillance regime has been a challenge in the implementation process of the UNCRPD, highlighting the role of lay knowledge and community of practices in managing everyday challenges for persons with disabilities and their families, and therefore their potential role in becoming part of epistemic communities to support the policy making and implementation process of the UNCRPD.
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The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the predominance of austerity policies in Europe based on distinct crisis narratives and their underlying market metaphors…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanation of the predominance of austerity policies in Europe based on distinct crisis narratives and their underlying market metaphors in public speeches and addresses of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a broader audience of economic decision-makers.
Design/methodology/approach
The author uses discourse and metaphor analysis of speeches and addresses of Angela Merkel in the aftermath of the crisis applying cognitive metaphor theory in combination with a corpus linguistic approach.
Findings
Dominant conceptual metaphors in Merkel’s crisis narrative subordinate policy-making to superior “market mechanisms”, which are attributed with human and natural characteristics. Moral focus of crisis narrative of “living-beyond-ones-means” forces austerity policies.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis is restricted to public speeches of Merkel, whereas the impact on public discourses was not analyzed.
Social implications
The paper offers an explanation for the prevalence of neoliberal policies in the Eurozone and the uneven balances of political power in public economic discourses.
Originality/value
Study of the role of “market metaphors” in crisis narratives of influential political leaders as well as an analysis of the impact of discursive manifestations and conceptual market metaphors for economic crisis policies.