Niklas Humble and Peter Mozelius
The conducted examination of programming affordances and constraints had the purpose of adding knowledge and value that facilitate the on-going national curricula revision;…
Abstract
Purpose
The conducted examination of programming affordances and constraints had the purpose of adding knowledge and value that facilitate the on-going national curricula revision; knowledge that also could be of general interest outside the Swedish K-12 context.
Design/methodology/approach
With a qualitative approach, the study was conducted as a document analysis where submitted lesson plans were the base for a directed content analysis.
Findings
This study presents findings on how the involvement of programming in mathematics and technology have potential to foster engagement and motivation among students. Findings also indicate that the implementation of programming can develop important general skills that go beyond the boundaries of mathematics and technology. Moreover, the identified constraints could be valuable to improve the on-going curriculum development for K-12 mathematics and technology.
Research limitations/implications
This qualitative study was conducted on a relatively small number of teachers where the majority has taken the courses on a voluntary basis. An important complement would be to conduct a larger quantitative study with data from a more general sample of K-12 teachers.
Practical implications
Results and discussions provide guidance for K-12 teachers and other stakeholders who want to introduce programming as a complementary tool in teaching and learning activities.
Social implications
The study has a contribution to the on-going implementation of the Swedish national curricula for K-12 mathematics and technology.
Originality/value
During the last years, many studies have been published on teacher training in programming, and how the training can be improved. This study goes beyond the actual teacher training and examine aspects teachers translate to theirs daily work after completing the training.
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Niklas Humble, Peter Mozelius and Lisa Sällvin
The purpose of this study is to analyse and discuss K-12 mathematics and technology teachers' perceptions on integrating programming in their teaching and learning activities, and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to analyse and discuss K-12 mathematics and technology teachers' perceptions on integrating programming in their teaching and learning activities, and perceptions on different programming tools.
Design/methodology/approach
The approach of a case study was used, with data collected from three instances of a professional development programming course for K-12 teachers in mathematics and technology.
Findings
The findings show that there are perceived challenges and opportunities with learning and integrating programming, and with different programming tools. Many teachers perceive programming as fun, but lack the time to learn and implement it, and view different programming tools as both complementary to each other and with individual opportunities and challenges.
Practical implications
The practical implication of the research is that it can provide guidance for teachers and other stakeholders that are in the process of integrating programming in K-12 education. Further, the research provides useful information on teachers' experiences on working with different programming tools.
Social implications
The social implication of the research is that the overall aim of the nation-wide integration process might not succeed if the challenges identified in this study are not addressed, which could have negative effects on the development of students' digital competence.
Originality/value
The value of the research is that it identifies important challenges and opportunities for the integration of programming. That is, that many teachers perceive the different programming tools available as complimentary to each other, but are hesitating about what is expected of the integration. Findings could also be valuable for future course design of the teacher professional development.
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Malin Sundström, Klas Håkan Alm, Niklas Larsson and Oskar Dahlin
This paper aims to identify content strategies on social media that influence engagement and to analyze those operations to describe important features for co-creation and trust.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to identify content strategies on social media that influence engagement and to analyze those operations to describe important features for co-creation and trust.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper addresses the question of how social media content can influence engagement by using a medium-sized Swedish company for an empirical case study. This empirical study is based on a participatory action research methodology. By using the company account on LinkedIn, the authors experimented with relational content to understand the effects on customer-perceived value and trust.
Findings
Results reveal that action-oriented messages had a more significant impact on engagement than product-oriented messages and value-based messages.
Originality/value
This paper builds on the existing literature in two ways: drawing upon business-to-business relationships and perceived value and using recent advances in the use of social networking sites to understand the value of co-creation through a participatory culture.
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The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts.
Findings
The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code.
Social implications
In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail.
Originality/value
To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.
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A surface view of monotheistic or “Western” religions might lead some to infer a singularity to truth that is inconsistent with paradoxical thinking. The author explores a key…
Abstract
A surface view of monotheistic or “Western” religions might lead some to infer a singularity to truth that is inconsistent with paradoxical thinking. The author explores a key Biblical narrative common to both Judaism and Christianity – the story of origins that unfolds in the Garden of Eden. The author posits that the foundations of those belief systems, and particularly those of Christian theology, are paradoxical as evidenced in their historic texts (i.e., the Old and New Testaments of the Bible). A foundational paradox of an “ought versus is” (ideal vs. actual) tension that underlies or intertwines in knot-like fashion with other paradoxes is identified in ways that account for a current world view marked by temporality (in tension with eternality) and becoming (in tension with being). These tensions are made salient as humans continually work toward ideals that seem always just out of reach. Paradox conceptualization is also expanded to propose the notion of mutual embeddedness rather than mutual exclusivity of opposites. Implications for organizational paradoxes are explicated, along with directions for future research based on novel insights provided by the juxtaposition of religion and paradox.
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Taking issue with the predominance of reviews of James March’s writings that focus on his technical contributions to organizational studies, this study aims to emphasize the…
Abstract
Purpose
Taking issue with the predominance of reviews of James March’s writings that focus on his technical contributions to organizational studies, this study aims to emphasize the central significance and contemporary relevance of his critical reflections on the meaning of life and work in modern organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a novel framework illustrated by extensive original quotations for capturing and making more accessible March’s profound contribution to organization studies. His work on organizational behaviour and decision-making is viewed as identifying and grappling with three key paradoxes of modernity: of rationality, performance and meaning. His prescriptions on how to handle and address these paradoxes are explored through a focus on his reflections on the poetry of leadership.
Findings
Whilst March himself emphasized that not all of his insights can be captured in an article level overview, March, his collaborator Olsen and others who worked with and studied under him have confirmed the accuracy of the review and the value of the enterprise.
Practical implications
Capturing March’s advocacy of sensible foolishness and playful seriousness in the face of ambiguity, uncertainty and contestation hopefully contribute to enhancing practitioners’ “lightness of being” in coping with and finding meaning in challenging environments.
Originality/value
Through the range of ideas covered, the framework used and the extensive use of March’s own worlds, the study, hopefully, communicates the depth and richness of March’s humanitarian enterprise and the “playfully serious spirit” that he advocates and exemplifies – in a way that is often omitted from narrower, more technical and somewhat dry treatments of his work.
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Couched within the author’s memories and correspondence with Kathy Charmaz, this chapter considers the philosophical nature of Constructivist, or Charmazian Grounded Theory, and…
Abstract
Couched within the author’s memories and correspondence with Kathy Charmaz, this chapter considers the philosophical nature of Constructivist, or Charmazian Grounded Theory, and contrasts it with the philosophical underpinnings of Critical Grounded Theory. Using an autopoietic framework, this chapter sees Charmazian and Critical Grounded Theory as interconnected, complementary, but distinct in the way they each approach research participants and interpret social processes. The chapter ends with reflections on Kathy Charmaz's contribution to critical grounded theory and where she had hoped the next generation of grounded theorists might expand the methodology.
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Roger Friedland and Diane-Laure Arjaliès
On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in…
Abstract
On Justification: Economies of Worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006) was a synthetic and comprehensive parsing of common goods, goods that could and had to be justified in public. In response to Bourdieu’s critical sociology, they rather provided a robust and disciplined sociology of critique, the situated requirements of justification. They refused power and violence as integral to the operability of justification. They emphasized the ways in which conventions of worth afforded coordination, not their constitution of or by domination. They refused to make either capitalism, or the state, into primary motors of social order. Indeed, they refused social sphere, structure, or group as the ground of the good. They emphasized the cognitive capacities of agents. There was no passion, no desire, no bodily affect in these justified worlds. There wasn’t even any account of production of value, of children, or of money. And while they recognized the metaphysical aspect of the good and even used Christianity as a template for one of their cités, they rigorously excluded religion. The theory was designed to analyze moments of controversy, not quiescence or quietude. In his subsequent work, Boltanski aimed to address these absences. In this essay, we examine how Boltanski sought to restore love, violence, religion, production, and institution across five texts: Love and Justice as Competences (1990/2012), The New Spirit of Capitalism, co-authored with Eve Chiapello (1999/2007), The Foetal Condition: A Sociology of Engendering and Abortion (2004/2013), On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009/2011), and La «Collection», Une Forme Neuve du Capitalisme – La Mise en Valeur Economique du Passé et ses Effets (2014) co-authored with Arnaud Esquerre.