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1 – 10 of 612Functional appraisal of records is an idea which has been around for a long time but it is only relatively recently that it has actually been implemented in various organisations…
Abstract
Functional appraisal of records is an idea which has been around for a long time but it is only relatively recently that it has actually been implemented in various organisations and countries. The aim is to ensure that archives capture the right records but avoid the huge workloads and backlogs of the past by identifying these records before they arrive in the archives, so that only archival records arrive there. This can be done by appraising functions instead of appraising documents, because records exist to document functions, so if a function is archival, then the records which support it will also be archival. Retention schedules can then be developed based on those functions, and classification schemes based on the schedules so that there is a seamless system governing the records from creation to final disposition.
Julie McLeod and Catherine Hare
The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the history of Records Management Journal on its 20th anniversary; it aims to review and analyse its evolution and its…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the history of Records Management Journal on its 20th anniversary; it aims to review and analyse its evolution and its contribution in the context of the development of the profession and the discipline of records management. The paper seeks to provide the context and justification for the selection of eight articles previously published in the journal to be reprinted in this issue.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper utilises the contents of Records Management Journal (1989 to date) to present a thematic analysis of topics covered and their development over time, and statistical data (from 2002 to date) provided by the current publisher to assess quantitatively the use and impact of the journal worldwide. The paper then compares this with a series of key turning points in the records management profession.
Findings
There is evidence that the initial aspiration for the journal to make an important and long‐lasting impact on the field of records management in the UK has been exceeded because its readers and contributors are global. The volume of downloads has continued to increase year‐on‐year and the journal appears to be the only peer‐reviewed journal in the world in the records management discipline. The journal has responded to and kept abreast of the records management agenda.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis is based on the work of the current and immediate past Editor and did not seek the views of its Editorial Board members, readers or contributors to the journal.
Practical implications
Looking to the future, the journal must seek to widen its impact on other key stakeholders in managing information and records – managers, information systems designers, information creators and users – as well as records professionals. It must also continue to develop the scope of its content, whilst maintaining its focus on managing records, and must keep pace with technology developments. It should try to influence the professional agenda, be controversial, stimulate debate and encourage change. And it should remain a quality resource.
Originality/value
The paper provides a unique critical analysis of the journal, its history and contribution to the development of records management, on its 20th anniversary of publication.
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Piers MacLean and Bernard Scott
The purpose of this paper is to describe research into the requirements, practice and prospects for the field of learning design and provide the findings of this study to date…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe research into the requirements, practice and prospects for the field of learning design and provide the findings of this study to date alongside early recommendations for furthering the profession in the UK.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper describes the findings of a review of the literature on learning design and the study's research methodology, which comprises focus groups, an online questionnaire deployed for use in the UK, North America, Australia, telephone interviews, and surveys of higher education programmes.
Findings
Initial analysis of the data indicates that learning design professionalisation and training in the UK are behind those found in other areas of the world.
Research limitations/implications
The research was of an exploratory nature and thus limited. However, it shows that additional research into distinct aspects of learning design is required to explore further phenomena described in this paper.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that more and appropriate training opportunities are required for UK learning designers. This could be supplemented by further professionalisation of the field.
Originality/value
Key aspects are revealed in the paper of the learning design field in the UK where development is required in order to place learning design on a par with the field in other countries. These findings should be of interest to learning designers, the institutions that train them, their employers and those that use their services.
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Starting from the hypothesis of an ordinary/extraordinary tension that drives the link between tourist places and non-tourist places, this paper discusses the issue of tourist…
Abstract
Purpose
Starting from the hypothesis of an ordinary/extraordinary tension that drives the link between tourist places and non-tourist places, this paper discusses the issue of tourist spatial delimitations. Rather than take such an issue for granted, the paper argues that the author needs to understand how the different actors within the tourism system create specific delimitations and how tourists deal with these delimitations. To pinpoint these tourist spatial delimitations, this paper considers three types of discourses: the discourse of local promoters, the discourse of guidebooks and the discourse of tourists. The purpose of this paper is to explain not only the tourist delimitations established by these actors but also the concordance between the guidebooks’ prescriptions, the public actors’ strategies and the tourists’ practices. In this empirical investigation, the author uses the case of Los Angeles and focuses more specifically on the two main tourist places within the agglomeration: Hollywood and Santa Monica. The argument supports the idea that political actors tend to develop what the author could consider a tourist secession, as the author tends to precisely delimit the designated area for the sake of efficiency. Guidebooks, which the author must consider because they are true and strong prescribers of tourist practices, draw their own tourist neighbourhoods. Finally, most tourists in Los Angeles conform to these delimitations and do not venture off the beaten track.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper examines three types of discourses: the discourse of local tourism promoters, the discourse of tourist guidebooks and the discourse of tourists. The purpose of the study is to explain not only the tourist delimitations established by these actors but also the concordance between the guidebooks’ prescriptions, the public actors’ strategies and the tourists’ practices. To conduct this analysis, this paper relied on an empirical survey (Lucas, 2014b) whose methodology used a range of different techniques. First, interviews with Convention and Visitors Bureau managers were performed to understand the delimitations established by the institutional actors directly in charge of the tourist development of those places. Second, the second kind of discourse considered here is that in guidebooks. Los Angeles is often included in guidebooks about California in general, albeit with a much shorter number of pages. Although all guidebooks were considered, the study mostly focused on those specifically dedicated to Los Angeles (Time Out, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet) to conduct a thick analysis of their discourses and to note the spatial delimitations that they established. The author must regard guidebooks as the prescribers of practices because they represent a source of information for tourists. The aim is to determine how tourists follow – or do not follow – the recommendations of guidebooks. Third, to understand these practices, the paper considers numerous interviews (approximately seventy) conducted with tourists.
Findings
Thus, in these two examples, the author has distinguished powerful delimitations of the tourist places created by promoters through their discourse, which provides information on how they promote the place through urban planning. This tourist staging, and all the specific processing of the place, contributes to a clear distinction between these places and the rest of the urban environment, allowing a very precise definition. The distinction is made from one street to another. However, these delimitations are mainly defined by the practices of the tourists: they have a very selective way of dealing with the public space of the two places concerned. They validate, update and thus make relevant the limits established by the institutional operators, sometimes performing even stricter operations of delimitation. This way of dealing with space is observed in the urban planning and in the discourses on the tourist places expressed in the guidebooks. There are no tactics to bypass, divert and subvert the spatial configuration settled by local authorities and guidebooks; tourists do not attempt to discover new places or to go off the beaten track (Maitland and Newman, 2009). Yet, this is not the only explanation for the way in which tourists occupy a place. Although the guidebooks perform the operations of delimitation and rank places (insisting on one place over another and highlighting what should be seen, where to go, etc.), they also exhaustively present the practices that one can perform, and how tourists deal with space either hints at their disregard of these tools or at individuals’ selection based on the information given. In Hollywood, as in Santa Monica, while the guidebooks exhaustively enumerate the numerous sites that might be interesting for tourist practices, the author observes a very important and discriminating concentration of these tourist practices within a precisely delimited perimeter, respectively, the Walk of Fame and the Ocean Front Walk: tourists walk from one street to another and from a full to an empty space. Thus, the author can support the idea that how tourists cope with space are temporary, delimited by highly targeted practices and restricted only to a few tourist places.
Originality/value
What about the ordinary/extraordinary dialectic? Most tourists do not look for something ordinary; yet, the entirety of what could be considered as “extraordinary” in one metropolis is not included in its tourism space. On the contrary, tourist places can also be seen as “ordinary.” Nevertheless, there is clearly a distinction observed through the discourses, but also in the practices, between an “inside” and an “outside” and between something extraordinary and one’s ordinary environment. One can interpret this result as an actual confirmation of the classic combination (tourist/sight/marker) that constitutes a “tourist attraction” (MacCannell, 1976, p. 44), which concerns a very specific way of dealing with space in Los Angeles. Tourists do not practice Los Angeles as the author might assume that they would typically practice other metropolises, e.g. strolling down the streets randomly. The two places examined in this paper are open to that kind of practice. One can consider that these places have a higher degree of urbanity than the average area of Los Angeles precisely because there are tourists. The density in terms of buildings is (relatively) more important and accompanied by a narrative construction of the urban space (the historic dimension of the buildings), and the public space has undergone specific urban planning and given special consideration, at least greater consideration than elsewhere. In these places, the author finds a concentration of population – the metropolitan crowd – that is otherwise very rare in Los Angeles. However, the tourists seem to have a limited interest in these attractions. These classic characteristics of urbanity do not seem to be regarded positively by a certain number of tourists and are not taken into consideration by tourists. This observation contrasts somewhat with the idea that dwelling touristically in a metropolis primarily entails the discovery of its urbanity (Equipe MIT, 2005). Discovering Los Angeles does not consist of experiencing the local society and of exploring the urban space but, rather, of performing specific practices in Los Angeles (seeing the Hollywood sign and the Stars and walking along the famous beaches). Two approaches can help us understand this gap: considering Los Angeles as a specific case or considering that the spatial configuration of Los Angeles enables us to bring out the logic at work in other metropolises but that would be too complex to distinguish here. Perhaps, the author finds both elements, and this reflection must invite the author to continue the discussion on the logic of tourists’ practice of metropolises: are they really looking for a maximal urbanity during their metropolitan experiences?
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Bill Dimovski, Rebecca Ratcliffe, Christopher Ratcliffe, Monica Keneley and Scott Salzman
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the accuracy of Australian Real Estate Investment Trust (A-REIT) initial public offering (IPO) dividend forecasts between 1994 and 2016.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the accuracy of Australian Real Estate Investment Trust (A-REIT) initial public offering (IPO) dividend forecasts between 1994 and 2016.
Design/methodology/approach
This study compares the dividend forecasts of A-REIT IPOs for the first dividend forecast period in the prospectus, with the actual dividend declared for that forecast period. As well as simple descriptive summary measures, this study also employs an exact logistic regression approach to examine the factors that might influence the IPOs achieving or exceeding the dividend forecast.
Findings
The study identifies that the dividends declared, on average, were greater than the dividend forecast and that more than nine out of ten of the IPOs listed after 1999 achieved or exceeded their prospectus forecast. In addition the authors observe positive mean forecast errors, suggesting dividend forecasts in A-REIT IPOs, are cautiously biased. This is in contrast to the industrial company data reported in Brown et al. (2000) which suggest dividend forecasts are optimistically biased. The study also finds the A-REIT IPOs that did not forecast a dividend, generally did not pay a dividend.
Practical implications
The results will inform dividend seeking institutional and retail investors of the investment opportunities in A-REIT IPOs.
Originality/value
This paper adds to the discussion of the relative predictability of dividends of A-REIT IPOs compared to industrial company IPOs.
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Samantha Vlcek, Monica Cuskelly, Michelle Somerton and Scott Pedersen
The present study explored the extent to which home–school interactions for students with disability are addressed within Australian Federal, and State and Territory government…
Abstract
Purpose
The present study explored the extent to which home–school interactions for students with disability are addressed within Australian Federal, and State and Territory government and Catholic education department policies and guidelines.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilising a framework adapted from Trezona et al.’s (2018a, b) Organisational Health Literacy Responsiveness self-assessment tool, a document analysis of pertinent policies and guidelines provided an opportunity to understand the prominence of home–school interactions within these guiding documents, the prioritisation of home–school interactions, as well as stipulated actions, implementation resources and monitoring processes.
Findings
The findings of this analysis indicate that there are varying approaches to identifying and articulating home–school interactions and associated processes, as well as the roles and responsibilities assigned to stakeholders across the education system(s). Recommendations for increasing in-school and in-classroom translation of documented priorities and objectives are presented.
Originality/value
The article concludes with a broad conceptualisation of home–school interactions for students with disability as established within the analysed documents, as well as considerations for policymakers and researchers involved in policy and guideline development and implementation.
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Purpose: Being the victim of sexual violence can lead to long-term health consequences. In response, rape crisis centers provide support to survivors of sexual violence including…
Abstract
Purpose: Being the victim of sexual violence can lead to long-term health consequences. In response, rape crisis centers provide support to survivors of sexual violence including medical and mental health treatment or referrals to treatment. A history of exclusion and provision of service by cisgenderist binary categories limit the ability of rape crisis centers to serve transgender survivors of sexual violence. Can gender be a way to provide safe, inclusive healthcare or is it necessarily a way to enact gender oppression? How can rape crisis centers and other healthcare organizations become more inclusive of transgender people?
Methods: In addition to fieldwork at a rape crisis center that had a trans inclusion project, interviews were conducted with staff and volunteers at the rape crisis center.
Findings: I found that gender-based service provision is problematic, especially when based on an understanding of gender conflated with sex category. Even organizations aiming to challenge gender oppression can reproduce it.
Practical Implications: Options for health organizations to become more trans inclusive are presented.
Originality: Research on the transgender experience, particularly at rape crisis centers and other healthcare organizations that provide gender-segregated service, is limited That literature often presents those organizing women-only space as monolithic and struggles around the inclusion of trans people oversimplified. My research illuminates how gender inequality is reproduced in an organization aimed at challenging that inequality. My research shows the logics of those engaged within an organization reproducing oppression despite individuals' desires to challenge oppression.
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Sheeba Asirvatham and Maria Humphries-Kil
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on career aspirations and experiences explored with senior women organizational scholars employed in neoliberally driven public…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on career aspirations and experiences explored with senior women organizational scholars employed in neoliberally driven public universities in Aotearoa (New Zealand) legally mandated to serve as a critic and conscience of society.
Design/methodology/approach
Over the 18 months period, three sequential research conversations were conducted with each of 12 participants known for their commitment to social justice and planetary well-being. The conversational approach allowed for spontaneous participant-lead development of ideas. Sequencing of conversations allowed for reflection on matters raised in previous conversations.
Findings
Vitality and creativity deemed essential to scholarly careers were reportedly under pressure. Career concepts in use indicate a protean commitment to self-direction but also recognized constraints of institutionally driven neoliberal output regimes. Detrimental impacts of neoliberal values permeating their employing institutions were offered spontaneously often in radical feminist terms but paradoxically given liberal feminist remedies.
Research limitations/implications
The 12 diverse transcripts of participant conversations generated remarkable similarities that indicate the influence of career articulations on the social construction of reality. The implications of this interpretation invite further reflection on the consequences of normalization of career metaphors and their implication in the intensification of institutional control, the weakening of professional autonomy and the system preserving restriction of career-related responsibilities.
Practical implications
Highlighting constraints to creativity and vitality necessary for scholarly work can inform further research into professional influences on justice and environmental matters in and beyond the Academy.
Social implications
In this paper a short review of Aotearoa (New Zealand) as in vanguard of neoliberal intensification globally, the implication of this doctrine in neoliberally driven universities and the impacts on career opportunities, degradations and responsibilities of scholars are explored.
Originality/value
The conversational research process contrasts with more tightly framed empirical research methods by generating spontaneous participant-led articulations of career-related dynamics explored and expanded over subsequent conversations.
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Marion Crowley‐Henry and David Weir
Using narratives from four women following international careers in France, this paper seeks to offer an insight into the depth and complexity of career issues for women working…
Abstract
Purpose
Using narratives from four women following international careers in France, this paper seeks to offer an insight into the depth and complexity of career issues for women working in a foreign country.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a qualitative hermeneutic inductive research undertaking on international protean careers, using in‐depth interview data together with contextual information regarding the specificity of the location in question.
Findings
The concept of the protean career is highlighted in the findings. This concept is described as “having an ability to reform oneself” also referred to as “morphing”. The findings in this study demonstrate how the women in the sample had the proven capability of morphing their professional role over time due to circumstance.
Research limitations/implications
The findings are limited as they cannot be generalised to a wider population due to the small sample size. However, the aim was not to generalise, but to share an in‐depth collection of real‐life stories from women.
Practical implications
Careers are complex, even more so on an international level. Individual choices regarding career pathways require more individualised career management approaches within organisations.
Originality/value
This research adds to the limited extant European research on women and international careers from a qualitative perspective.
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Harriette Bettis-Outland and Monica D. Guillory
This paper aims to illustrate the interface between emotional intelligence (EI), trust and organizational learning in the context of a trade show environment.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to illustrate the interface between emotional intelligence (EI), trust and organizational learning in the context of a trade show environment.
Design/methodology/approach
Theoretical underpinnings of this conceptual study include appraisal theory of emotions. Propositions are presented that suggest positive relationships between antecedent variables, EI and trust, contrasted with the dependent variable, organizational learning.
Findings
Organizational learning is generally considered to be a benign activity, created by the acquisition and dissemination of new information. The outcome of organizational learning is the development of new knowledge that ultimately results in a shared interpretation among members of the organization. This paper suggests that a lack of EI, defined as “the ability to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in the self and others” (Mayer et al., 2000, p. 396), casts doubt on the motives of newly acquired information. Consequently, low levels of EI can inhibit the acceptance of new information, leading to a reduction of learning by the organization.
Originality/value
This paper extends the concept of organizational learning by incorporating EI and trust as antecedents of organizational learning. Previous research suggests a direct relationship between information acquisition, dissemination and organizational learning. This study implies that other factors can intervene after information is acquired, thereby affecting whether newly acquired information is fully incorporated into the organizational learning process.
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