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This study examines five national public policy areas where states and local governments received grants-in-aid from the federal government; these grants approximate a fifth of their yearly revenue budgets. Knowing the historical trends and concentrations can minimize expectation errors of practitioners and policy makers and facilitate future revenue planning. The grants examined between 1940 and 2010 include income security, health, education and training, economic and regional development, and transportation. The study uses agency theory to rationalize relationships among the governments, and applies statistical modeling, multiple means comparisons and discriminant analyses to test whether there are distinct policy concentrations and differences among policy regimes. Our findings show transfers were continuous, physically important and unaffected significantly by adjustments due to size and prices. The study found concentrations and differences among policy regimes.

This article considers the recent emphasis on the importance and value of citizen participation, involvement, and engagement in local government and how active participation extends to public budgeting. The inclusion of citizen participation in local government budget processes challenges the traditional budget discourse between managers and representatives. Active citizen participation provides valuable comments and insight as well as complexity and challenges to administrative processes. This article discusses the themes, opportunities, techniques and strategies developed in this symposium to expand citizen participation in public budgeting. Continued discussion and innovation in active citizen participation in budgeting is encouraged.

The purpose of this paper is to define immigrant knowledge workers (IKWs) as a vulnerable population in the urban emergency management context, and explored how to provide public safety services to IKWs. Due to nomadic features such as high mobility, spatio-temporality, and preferred autonomy, IKWs have difficulties in building required social ties with long-term residents in the urban emergency management system (UEMS). As such, IKWs are easily isolated and become vulnerable to disasters.

This study introduced possible types of network structure, compared each structure’s weaknesses and strengths in terms of risk communication, and suggested the strategic use of brokers for effective risk communication with application of network analysis perspective.

This study argued that the current space-based model causes tension in protecting NKWs and suggested the strategic use of brokers for the facilitated risk communication and for the protection of UKWs in more effective ways. The brokers in UEMS should pursue the core values of partnership, participation, and consultation in building mutual supportive channels within UEMS and the brokers should have sufficient cognitive capacity to avoid system fragmentation and collapse.

Due to the limitations as conceptual paper, sometimes it lacks empirical data to support the main arguments of this paper. To address this, the authors put that part as a suggestion for future studies.

With the strategic use of brokers, UEMS would be more resilient and accountable in providing public safety services to its citizens.

The purpose of this research is to support responsible decision-making in Higher Education (HE) settings by understanding what type of learning journey satisfies students most in their HE experience and what they want from the learning.

This paper analyses the key tool used to assess satisfaction factors for UK students, the National Student Survey (NSS). It adopts peculiar regression statistical tests to identify the NSS items that influence “overall student satisfaction” by reviewing responses over 9 years from accountancy students at business schools located in England.

The findings of the study provide evidence that students are most satisfied with a learning journey where they are part of a course that is “well organised and running smoothly”, which provides “intellectual stimulation” that helps in developing their ability to “present themselves with confidence” and provides “academic advice and support”. The findings of the paper show that students are not satisfied so much by utilitarian aspects of learning but rather those that relate to who they are and where they are in their learning journey, the level of intellectual stimulation they have experienced, the self-confidence they have developed and the supportive relationship they have developed with academics. A factor that did not relate highly was “assessment and feedback” which has been the focus of much university resource. Results show the factors that impacted overall satisfaction are most related to students wanting to develop personal responsibility. These findings shape the key principles of responsible design and management of HE programmes and influence strategic decision-making.

Focussing on helping students experience, the type of learning journey that develops the virtue of responsibility emergent from the analysis will not only satisfy the student but will also have a knock-on effect of improving NSS scores, university league table ranking and accreditation under the Teaching Excellence Framework. The improved reputation aspects would then feed back into increased student satisfaction (Dean and Gibbs, 2015). The findings will also help HE managers and leaders to evaluate their decisions through three lenses: responsibility, students’ experience and students overall learning journey.

Much of the information published on the NSS have been predominantly descriptive and has resulted in decisions being made for students based on uninformed analysis of the survey’s results. This study uses advanced statistical modelling to evidence the relationship between factors of the NSS and overall student satisfaction providing key information regarding students’ importance to the type of learning journey they value and that this relates to a desire in wanting to develop responsibility. This study shows the link between factors of the NSS to provide useful lenses for HE managers and leaders to use to support responsible decision-making processes.

Since 2004, Turkish cinema has been witnessing an emergence of horror genre, now flooded with stories of possession by malevolent jinn, as transgressive, volatile figures of abjection. These female-centred narratives rely both on Islamic cosmology and myths and folktales of pre-Islamic Anatolian oral culture. The chapter will first explore the reasons horror has been neglected in the century-long history of cinema in Turkey and move on to highlight the socio-economic, cultural, and political contexts that were catalysts for the horror genre’s emergence. Then, the chapter will discuss the codes and conventions of the genre and explore the unique place of Alper Mestçi’s 2007 film Haunted (Musallat), among its contemporaries in terms of the ways in which the film challenges these established codes and conventions. In analysing Haunted, the chapter will use the theoretical framework of Barbara Creed, Carol J. Clover and Julia Kristeva to discuss the monstrous-feminine and masculinity as abjection.

This paper aims to provide an exposition of the constructive research approach (CRA) to show the potential utility of CRA in transcending or mitigating the methodological and practical issues involved in researching organisations.

The paper is a literature review, and resulting thematic discussion of methodological and practical issues involves in action research (AR) in organisations through the lens of the CRA approach.

The paper identifies that CRA has benefits in orientation to a practical outcome grounded in a theoretical domain but with leeway to facilitate creativity, which can also potentially improve the quality of the collaborative relationships. The centrality of the construction within the method provides a “vantage point” to manage the emic (inside) and etic (outside) positionality concerns of action researchers working within organisational settings.

CRA has multiple practical benefits for action researchers and their collaborators in terms of time, risk and collaborative commitment.

The paper develops a useful tactical framework for discussing the practical and methodological issues when considering AR in organisations and highlights how CRA can be used in wider organisational scholarship outside its roots in management accounting.

Grave (English title: Raw), the 2016 feature film debut from French writer/director Julia Ducournau, is a body horror that explores cannibalism in a contemporary setting. A vegetarian student, Justine, develops cannibalistic desires after she is forced to eat rabbit kidneys in a hazing ritual at a veterinarian school.

This film portrays the female cannibal as having lost control of her bodily impulses. Justine displays a loss of cognition that results in involuntary actions when confronted with raw flesh. One can observe parallels in this portrayal and that featured in earlier films Dans ma peau (In my Skin, 2002, dir. Marina de Van) and Trouble Every Day (2001, dir. Claire Denis). These two films are identified with the early twenty-first-century French ‘cinema of the body’ trend, which involves disturbing and horrific portrayals of alienated protagonists, sexual debasement and transgressive urges.

In my exploration of the mind/body divide featured in Grave, I’ll argue that the film moves away from portrayals of the cannibal in the two earlier films, as we now observe a female protagonist who is actively engaged in meaningful relationships with others. As such, Justine seeks connection rather than disconnection from those around her, with varying levels of success.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact competency frameworks as standardisation can have on the employee engagement of academic staff within higher education (HE) through their employment as managerial tools.

A literature review is conducted from which the conditions for effective competency frameworks are evaluated and the influence of changes in the HE environment in the form of political agendas and tight resources are explored.

This paper provides insights into the dynamics of public service modernisation and the tensions between the dominant discourse of managerialism and the degree of agency afforded to professional academics. It highlights the relevance of informal peer relationships in setting the climate to generate collegial bonding and professional engagement that underpin successful teacher fellowship accreditations. It further highlights the key role managers play in this process and provides a conceptual framework highlighting the dynamics and combined effect of employee engagement and competency frameworks set within complex HE environment.

This paper brings together the prerequisites for effective implementation of competency frameworks to implement successful employee engagement strategies set within the complexities of the HE context, which has not been studied to date. Armed with such insights, Human Resource Development (HRD) departments and universities can implement competency assessments that generate greater staff engagement.

The paper provides a critical approach in reviewing the impact of Continued Professional Development and its link to professional status and thus helps British Universities and others to understand how the mechanisms at work affect engagement levels of academic staff. Armed with this depth of understanding of how the change initiative works, with whom and under what circumstances, universities will be better able to meet target UK Professional Standards Framework membership levels required by the higher education academy (HEA) and, subsequently, the HEA to meet their targets for the government.

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.