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Over the past 30 years, China has made dramatic changes and improvements in various educational areas, including the educational technology field. These changes have been supported by policies initiated by the country's central government. This chapter reviews the historical development of China's educational technology policies, paying particular attention to the evolutionary process, and examining policy features that have influenced Chinese educational development. The Chinese education technology framework encourages the use of educational technology to address more ambitious goals for economic and social development and thus serves as an important catalyst for advancing Chinese education.

Focusing on gender as an aspect of diversity, the purpose of this paper is to review social studies research on technology, and suggest a new direction, with gender redefined from a gap to be eliminated to a difference to be explored.

This paper is a literature review of research on gender, technology, and social studies from 1987 to 2007.

Previously, men had more access and used more types of technology than women, but a shift to web‐based computing eliminates some gender gaps. Women dominate online communication. Although “male” technology culture interferes with girls' self‐efficacy in schools and potential computer careers, the new Web 2.0 “participatory culture” holds promise because it relies on collaboration and networking, two well documented female strengths.

The gap notion of gender is questionable because: technology culture has been constructed as male; and social studies education, where women greatly out number men, pays little attention to gender. Evidence suggests that girls and women use technology well when it serves their interests, which may not be the same as men's. Defining gender as difference helps researchers answer calls to integrate “21st century literacies” into future studies and put gender equity at the center of future technology policy.

Very little has been written about gender as a facet of multicultural social studies education in its relation to social studies.

Tingting Qi's chapter titled, “Moving toward Decentralization? Changing Education Governance in China After 1985,” provides the historical and policy context for the volume. This chapter integrates the post-1978 Chinese educational reforms into the socioeconomic context of China. The special contribution of this chapter is that it explores the complexity of educational decentralization in China through an in-depth analysis of changes in education finance, administration, and curriculum. Qi reviews prior studies, government documents, laws, and regulations related to Chinese education reform since 1978 within the context of education decentralization in China. Qi also demonstrates that China's educational policy reforms are moving China toward “centralized decentralization” because decentralization is driven by a common, centralized national goal of economic modernization. The chapter presents evidence that “centralized decentralization” is a strategic maneuver that maintains centralized control while providing the reform legitimacy of decentralization. By focusing on decentralization as the core of Chinese educational policy reforms, this chapter situates the following chapters within the social, cultural, and political context of post-1978 China.

Chentong Chen is an undergraduate at Nanjing Normal University studying law and English. She has research interests in education policy, education assessment and evaluation, and child development. She is currently working on two research projects: policy issues related to the college entrance exam in China, and theories and practice of preschool assessment in the U.S.

We investigate how mindfulness can help women leaders manage the work–home conflict using boundary theory. In this daily diary study, we examine daily levels of mindfulness as an antecedent to daily self-control and perceptions of work–home conflict. We propose that higher levels of daily mindfulness act as a personal resource that fosters self-control capacity, and this leads to a greater ability to manage work–home conflict.

A total of 86 women enrolled in a 30-day online mindfulness training program and completed daily surveys after each daily mindfulness training session. Data was analysed using the multilevel structural equation modelling.

Results demonstrate that higher levels of daily mindfulness predict lower levels of daily work–home interference, and this relationship is mediated by self-control. This research supports the role of mindfulness through self-control on work–home conflict for women in leadership. Given the relatively high workforce participation among women with caregiving responsibilities, identifying resources that can be cultivated in order to enable more women to stay engaged in the workforce shows promise.

This study adds to the nascent literature of gendered mental health and well-being in leadership. Notably, women leaders often play a supportive role for employees and co-workers. Our findings suggest mindfulness training can be a useful tool to increase self-control resources in times of crises to mitigate the work–home conflict.

This study aims to investigate the relationships between various frontline management (FLM) styles, human resource management system (HRM) system strength and employees' helping behaviours as a form of organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). The research also examines the moderating role of workgroup loyalty in the association between HRM system strength and employees' helping behaviours.

The research uses survey data collected from 315 government workers in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the hypothesised relationships.

Two FLM styles, “policy enactor” and “employee coach,” positively predict employees' helping behaviour. However, the “organisational leader” FLM style did not significantly lead to employees' helping behaviour. HRM system strength significantly mediates the relationship between the three FLM styles and employee helping behaviours. Finally, workgroup loyalty significantly moderates the relationship between HRM system strength and employees’ helping behaviours as OCB.

With a wealth of literature demonstrating the importance of FLMs in the implementation of HRM and a growing body of literature demonstrating the robust nature of the “system strength” argument, human resource (HR) practitioners are increasingly able to focus their attention on the way the system and FLMs contribute to employee outcomes and organisational performance. Our results indicate that HRM system strength does indeed enhance the impact of FLM styles on employee helping behaviours.

The originality of this paper is that it acknowledges and empirically examines the heterogenous nature of FLM styles, through signalling theory in enacting HRM policies and links the growing FLM literature to the HRM system strength research. These concepts have also been tested for the first time in a Malaysian context.

This research explores the role of political ideology in local policy formation by assessing the impact of the city manager's ideology on local expenditures. While previous studies have identified nuanced and overlapping roles between administration and politics, here we extend those investigations by positing that ideology may influence a manager's role in the policy formation of the budget. Although some conceptualizations of city managers assume them to be largely apolitical in a partisan sense, we find a significant effect of ideology on local expenditures among city managers. This adds to the literature that suggests that city managers may not merely passively implement policies created by elected officials; rather city managers may influence policy in multifaceted ways, thereby driving a need to further investigate individual influences upon policy formation.

Aligned appraisal systems explicitly hold employees accountable for contributing to the accomplishment of organizational goals. Furthermore, appraisal alignment is consistent with both core bureaucratic expectations and New Public Management control regimes, but the efficacy of the policy and its substantive impact have yet to be considered in detail. Over the last decade, federal agencies were encouraged to revise appraisal systems and include alignment. Using the bureaucratic policy adoption literature, an empirical model assesses why agencies choose to adopt and/or implement alignment. The empirical analyses reveal that not all agencies adopting alignment in their appraisal systems fully implemented it for employees and managers. Organizational resources and ideology of political appointees influence adoption, while the strength of strategic program management efforts exhibits a weak association with implementation.