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Owing to business uncertainty, it is prudent for organizations to rely on temporary employees to achieve numerical flexibility. This paper investigates the effect of perceived investment in temporary employee development (PITED) on organizational performance (OP) through the mediation process of organizational identification (OI), work engagement (WE) and the moderation process of perceived human resource policies (PHRP). A conceptual framework was built on social exchange theory and job demands-resource theory.

Data was collected from skilled temporary employees deputed at client organizations in the information technology business process management (IT-BPM) industry. Analysis was done using the partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method using SmartPLS 3.0 software.

The study established a significant association between PITED, OI and OP, in which OI acts as a partial mediator. In contrast, the mediating relationship of WE between PITED and OP was insignificant. PHRP moderated the relationship between PITED and OP.

This research suggests to top management and human resource leaders that PITED makes temporary employees identify with client organizations, resulting in increased OP.

This research builds on theoretical assumptions to adopt a temporary employee perspective on organizational initiatives and performance in the IT-BPM industry, which is uncommon.

In this chapter we detail our understandings of inclusive pedagogical practices that enable all students to assemble complex literate repertoires. We discuss generative concepts from international related literature (e.g. Au, Dyson, Janks, Luke, McNaughton, Moll, Thomson). We then present descriptions of two lessons as examples of how inclusive pedagogical practices might look in primary and secondary classrooms. The focus will be on how texts work to represent the world in particular ways and not others – and the implications of this for the inclusion of diverse student cohorts in developing complex literate repertoires.

In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered – no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry. In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research, we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the post-human subject and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. In the introduction, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the this book.

Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students enrolled in a Masters program at an Australian university are often invisible or less visible in class; however, what is visible is their academic practice, which is often viewed as a deficit. Instead of comprehending how CALD students can become productive members of a community, research regularly examines ways to upgrade their academic literacy practices. This study contends that these students have much to offer, and if these students are to be considered valuable members of the higher education context, the learning community needs to perceive their difference as positive. This implies going beyond the institutional assessment of their academic practice as a deficit and examining spaces of learning as rhizomatic. Drawing on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, this study highlights how the process of becoming for the students and the teacher teaching them is never static, but is one constituted of deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorialization, resulting in the rhizomatic principle of variegated subjectivity. Data collected over two years illustrated how, for the researcher/teacher, molecular level difference was possible within the molar level academic expectations. Themes of being and becoming and rhizomatic reimaginations demonstrated the desire of the students to achieve as a positive attempt to celebrate their difference and, for the researcher, her academic positionality as a fluid, ongoing process where the molar and the molecular interact to illustrate teaching as a productive venture.

Education reform aimed at achieving improved student learning is a demanding challenge for leaders and managers at all levels of education across the globe. In 2010, the position of Assistant Regional Directors, School Performance (ARD-SP), was established to positively impact upon student learning across public schools in Queensland, Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of the role and leadership understandings of ARDs in Queensland in order to understand more fully the tensions and opportunities they face within this reasonably newly created position.

This qualitative study is based on interviews with 18 ARDs and two of their supervisors to gauge a better understanding of the nature of the role as it relates to leadership and management in the Queensland context.

Interview data revealed three key themes pertaining to the nature of the role and these were performance, supervision, and professional challenges. A key finding was that the notion of supervision was experienced as problematic for ARDs-SP.

This study has limitations and these include a sample that focused on ARDs within one State of Australia and one schooling system (i.e. public education); and interviews were the primary data collection source.

Although there have been studies of supervisors of principals (referred to as superintendents, directors) in other countries and other systems, this study is a first to explore the tensions and opportunities faced by executive leaders in Queensland.