Search results

Against a British policy backdrop, which places an ever- increasing emphasis on workplace learning in pre-service professional programmes, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of the mentor to professional knowledge development in nursing, paramedicine, social work and teaching.

Taking the form of a literature review, it explores the influence of policy, professional and theoretical conceptualisations of the mentor role, and structural factors influencing the mentor’s contribution to professional knowledge.

Where there are clearly delineated policy obligations for the mentor to “teach”, mentors are more likely to make connections between theoretical and practical knowledge. When this responsibility is absent or informal, they are inclined to attend to the development of contextual knowledge with a consequent disconnect between theory and practice. In all four professions, mentors face significant challenges, especially with regard to the conflict between supporting and assessor roles, and the need to attend to heavy contractual workloads, performance targets and mentoring roles in tandem.

The authors argue first for the need for more attention to the pedagogy of mentoring, and second for structural changes to workload allocations, career progression and mentoring education. In order to develop more coherent and interconnected professional knowledge between different domains, and the reconciliation of different perspectives, it would be useful to underpin mentoring pedagogy with Bhabba’s notion of “third space”.

The paper makes a contribution to the field since it considers new obligations incumbent on mentors to assist mentees in reconciling theoretical and practical knowledge by the consequence of policy and also takes a multi-professional perspective.

Library management is struggling to improve productivity without reducing the quality of service to its users. With downsizing continuing to be a trend, the implementation of self‐checkout circulation systems may be an important technological investment for libraries to consider. In most large academic institutions, such circulation functions as checking out and renewing library materials have traditionally been performed by staff members. The climate may, however, be right to rethink the mode of service delivery systems and shift from providing full‐service to self‐service models, whereby the patron takes responsibility for checking out his or her own library materials.

During 1994, Pierian Press began experimenting with the integration of the concepts and respective strengths of both Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and MARC. These experiments were driven by pragmatism and self‐interest. Pierian Press publishes classified, analytical bibliographies—classical knowledge constructs—which the press and its authors would like to make available for loading on local library systems so that they can function as “maps” unto that subset of literature the respective bibliographies encompass.

This chapter analyzes the campaign against race norming in the 2013 National Football League (NFL) concussion settlement that caregivers of retired players designed, and it considers how their collective action throws new light on activism in sport. While there is a substantial literature on how individual athletes engage in protest, less work has focused on how families – partners, children, siblings, and parents – of athletes organize as a group to answer back to anti-Black racism in professional sport. I argue that a group of spouses used their position as caregivers to shame the NFL, the presiding judge of the settlement, Class Counsel, and even the Department of Justice into acknowledging not only individual suffering from traumatic brain injury but also of the distribution of that suffering across households. Specifically, the wives group expanded definitions of risk and damage to include not only individual illness but also family and group suffering and demanded inclusion of gendered and racialized aspects of social care. Through their campaign, the group recast what is considered protest in the world of sport and who has the ability to access an activist subjectivity.

A strategic communication system is the vehicle for creating, managing and disseminating an organization’s excellence in design, process, and human capital. We propose that organizational communication should be measured in an effort to influence the business outcomes and the behavior of shareholders, customers, and employees. An often overlooked asset is an organization’s physical environment and that which it communicates. This article presents the literature addressing the correlation between the physical environment and behaviors as well as an audit inventory that allows an organization to examine its environment from a strategic view in order to align its surroundings with its culture, image, desirable behaviors, and expected outcomes.

This chapter examines the effects of covert forms of social control on social movement participants. Current social science literature addresses the effect of surveillance on social movement organizations, but stops short of exploring the experience of surveillance for political activists. We begin by reviewing how state social control has been incorporated into paradigmatic social movement models. Drawing on examples from the FBI's counterintelligence programs and the growing literature emphasizing the emotional components of social movement mobilization processes, we then demonstrate the range of direct and indirect costs exerted by social control agents on both organizational and individual targets.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into managers' decision‐making practices when challenged by inappropriate information quality, and to test frameworks developed from research to see whether they apply to these managers.

This exploratory, multiple case study used the critical incident technique in 19 semi‐structured interviews. Responses were analyzed using framework analysis, a matrix‐based content analysis technique, and then considered with respect to the research literature on information overload, information poverty and satisficing.

The managers in this study tended to satisfice (terminate the search process and make a good enough decision, while recognizing that information gaps remain). Those challenged by too little information appear to fit descriptions of information poverty, while others described aspects of information overload.

A shortage of information behavior research on managers makes it difficult to conclude whether these results are typical of managers in general or of healthcare services managers specifically. Further research is needed to confirm initial findings and address questions suggested by this paper.

This paper suggests that existing definitions for the concepts of information poverty and information overload can be used to describe managers' experiences.

This paper contributes to what is known about information behavior in managers in general and healthcare services managers specifically. It may serve as an example of how to consider new research findings within existing frameworks.

A growing body of literature points to the importance of public service motivation (PSM) for the performance of public organizations. The purpose of this paper is to assess the method predominantly used for studying this linkage by comparing the findings it yields without and with a correction suggested by Brewer (2006), which removes the common-method bias arising from employee-specific response tendencies.

First, the authors conduct a systematic review of published empirical research on the effects of PSM on performance and show that all studies found have been conducted at the individual level. Performance indicators in all but three studies were obtained by surveying the same employees who were also asked about their PSM. Second, the authors conduct an empirical analysis. Using survey data from 240 organizational units within the Swiss federal government, the paper compares results from an individual-level analysis (comparable to existing research) to two analyses where the data are aggregated to the organizational level, one without and one with the correction for common-method bias suggested by Brewer (2006).

Looking at the Attraction to Policy-Making dimension of PSM, there is an interesting contrast: While this variable is positively correlated with performance in both the individual-level analysis and the aggregated data analysis without the correction for common-method bias, it is not statistically associated with performance in the aggregated data analysis with the correction.

The analysis is the first to assess the robustness of the performance-PSM linkage to a correction for common-method bias. The findings place the validity of at least one part of the individual-level linkage between PSM and performance into question.