Search results

This paper aims to highlight interventions that promote female (and male) faculty’s ability to balance work-family issues at a specific academic institution, in response to a demand in the literature that examines the intersection between research and implementation of organizational policies within a university setting.

Using a case study framework, the researchers present qualitative experiences and quantitative data to evaluate the successful application of a work-family balance and organizational climate improvement initiative within an academic setting.

By highlighting specific examples of work-family and climate initiatives at the individual, organization, and community levels, this case study presents several ways in which academic institutions specifically, and organizations generally, can implement policies that make a difference.

Successful implementation of work-family balance and family-friendly organizational policies can positively impact employees.

Our goal is to highlight and provide data showing a specific example of how female (and male) faculty members’ experiences can be (and have been) improved in a prototype institution.

Mentoring of junior faculty members (i.e. professors) in higher education has been documented to be critical to their academic success which most often takes the form of receiving tenure and/or promotion to higher academic ranks at universities in the USA. A “junior faculty member” would be defined as someone who has not yet been tenured or promoted and is usually within the first five years of their academic appointment. However, mentoring relationships can sometimes be difficult to build and momentum for continuous mentoring throughout the pre-tenure period can be a challenge to maintain. One of the concerns identified by mentees is the importance of regular meetings with mentors and the concomitant difficulty of knowing what to address in these meetings so as to make them productive and helpful. Mentors, most often senior faculty members, note that they do not always know the most relevant issues to discuss with junior faculty during mentoring meetings. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In an effort to address these issues, the authors describe here the development of using creative technology to support a new mentoring system that provides structured prompts and reminders to both mentors and mentees and uses tools to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the mentoring relationship.

This paper highlights a pilot program, describing the rationale for and stages in the development of an e-mail-based and mobile-based program to improve the quality of mentoring for junior faculty at one higher education institution. Focus group data provided by stakeholders (e.g. faculty, department chairs, and associate deans) are provided.

Professional development and academic success for junior faculty members may be strengthened by greater attention to formal mentoring strategies such as the one described here.

BUSINESS leaders recur again and again in their public utterances to the difficulty of obtaining enough recruits of suitable calibre. What they have in mind, as Mr. David Barran, chairman of Shell Transport, implied recently, is university graduates. ‘What I am really pleading for,’ he said, ‘is a stronger bridge between education and industry, starting as far back as the sixth form and extending across the student years at university, helping the graduate to choose a career that will employ his potential to the best advantage.’

This study aims to foster work-family balance goals by evaluating the utility of two types of video-based realistic job previews on creating accurate expectations among future academics.

The first realistic job preview divulged information specific to jobs in academia. The second divulged work-family balance information specific to academia. Participants viewed one of the two realistic job preview conditions or a third control condition in which they did not watch a realistic job preview. Participants then indicated their knowledge about job and work-family characteristics in academia and their changing expectations.

Results supported both types of realistic job previews as a way to communicate information about academia, and individuals also expressed changing their own expectations as a result of viewing the realistic job previews.

This study implemented a classic tool – the realistic job preview – to communicate work-family balance information in a new and dynamic way.

Among the top management issues covered in this section are: leadership to promote change; issues of corporate culture; effective international strategy; environmental leadership; investment in Eastern Europe; and developing “world‐class” manufacturing strategy.

AT this time of the year it is customary to look back over past achievements. We are in no mood to do this. 1976 is no year to remember with any kind of nostalgia. In many industries it had a history of almost never‐ending strife. No sooner was one dispute ended than another began. So often, too, a small handful of men have rendered a whole workforce — or a proportion of it far larger than their own numbers would seem possible — out of action.

The value of allowing children to experience frequently the sheer pleasure of good children's literature has long been acknowledged. For at least the past twenty‐five years, educational researchers and faculty members in schools of education and library science have advocated the use of children's literature in the elementary school curriculum.

This chapter adopts a reflective approach exploring and setting out the contrasting factors that led to the establishment of the subdiscipline in both countries. The factors included the role of key individuals and their respective academic backgrounds and specialisations within each country’s higher education system. Furthermore, attention is given to the particular circumstances in a case analysis comparison of the oldest programs in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia. This sheds light upon the factors linked to the disproportionate success profile for the sociology of sport in Aotearoa/New Zealand. An analysis of scholars and programs within each country reveals important differences aligned with the politics of funding and the variety and extent of systematic structures. Additionally, scholars’ specialisations and preferences reveal a broad offering but are primarily linked to globalisation, gender relations, indigeneity and race relations, social policy, and media studies. This work has been undertaken variously via the critical tradition including Birmingham School cultural studies, ethnographic and qualitative approaches and, more recently by some, a postmodern poststructuralist trend. Lastly, along with a brief discussion of current issues, future challenges are set out.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate Etienne Wenger's theory of social learning in a community of practice by modeling two simultaneous aspects of teachers’ collaborative learning: their engagement in close-knit internal groupings and engagement with colleagues that work externally to the core group. These two learning processes are related to two social-cognitive outcomes: teachers’ organizational commitment and their sense of impact.

The study investigated a field sample of 246 individual teachers from ten Finnish primary schools. Hypotheses were developed and tested by using multiple regression and structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that local engagement supports teachers’ organizational commitment. However, this form of collaborative learning behavior did not support their sense of impact. Moreover, external engagement with trusted colleagues supported sense of impact but not organizational commitment.

The study reinforces the importance of teachers’ engagement in communities of practice. Specifically, the results suggest two specific social-cognitive outcomes related to two different learning processes situated in teachers’ community of practice. It would be highly valuable to replicate this study in various multi-level settings.

The study highlights teachers’ engagement in communities of practice as a source of their motivational basis and their commitment. Findings recommend school leaders to facilitate internal and external learning communities.

The study provides empirical evidence regarding the partial relationships between teachers’ local and external learning engagement and the social-cognitive outcomes of these forms of learning behaviors.