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1 – 10 of over 1000Robert Griffiths, Jay Probert and Brendan Cropley
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a foundation degree programme, delivered via a flipped university approach, on student learning, development and…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a foundation degree programme, delivered via a flipped university approach, on student learning, development and employability in the sector of football coaching and development.
Design/methodology/approach
A mixed-method design was adopted, whereby current (n=106) and graduate (n=41) students from the programme completed an online course evaluation questionnaire and then follow-up interviews were conducted with 12 of the initial sample to explore the impact of the programme in more detail.
Findings
Participants reported significant benefits of the flipped university approach on their career development, improvement in their inter- and intra-personal skills (e.g. communication, reflection, confidence) and the acquisition of industry relevant knowledge. Recommendations include a greater provision of tailored study support for individuals and broadening the coaching portfolio of students to help address the diversification in Football Community Trust remits.
Research limitations/implications
This study has indicated that new approaches to student learning and development are better suited to preparing young people for the industry in which they seek to gain employment post-education. Sampling a wider range of student perspectives qualitatively would have provided a more thorough insight into their experiences. However, this provides an avenue for future research that seeks to explore the mechanisms through which such approaches to learning facilitate development.
Originality/value
The novel flipped university concept is one that should be considered as a way of better educating and preparing students for employment in the sports industry. It is an approach that could be explored by a wide range of sectors as an alternative to both campus-based higher education and degree apprenticeships.
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Robert J. Bianchi, Michael E. Drew and Adam N. Walk
This study seeks to measure the level of responsible investment (RI) disclosure of the world's largest pension funds.
Abstract
Purpose
This study seeks to measure the level of responsible investment (RI) disclosure of the world's largest pension funds.
Design/methodology/approach
The public disclosure of environmental, social and governance factors by the world's largest pension funds reflect their genuine commitment to this new investment paradigm. The UNPRI criterion is employed to measure the level of public disclosure. One hour was allocated to every asset owner's web site to search and collect public information.
Findings
Overall, the level of public disclosure of RI activities is not prolific. The study is negatively influenced by North American pension funds who dominate this sample. Public disclosure practices are positive for European funds. The size of funds under management positively influences the public disclosure and reflects their leadership role in the industry.
Research limitations/implications
Limitations include: the largest pension funds are dominated by North American funds and reflect the impact of fund size. The results are from the largest pension funds and may not be representative of the entire industry; the positive findings from European funds reflect a material subset of the global asset owners; and, we do not engage directly with the funds in question. Measurements are sourced from public disclosure.
Originality/value
The lack of public disclosure of RI by North American funds suggests that these institutions do not believe that it is important to investors. It suggests that these asset owners have not yet been exposed to the same influences as European funds. Given that North American funds together own substantial interests in listed corporations, they are much more important to influence than corporations.
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Craig R. Brown and Drew B. Winters
The State of Delaware recently passed a new banking law that allows banks and bank affiliates chartered in Delaware to sell and underwrite insurance nationwide. The new laws…
Abstract
The State of Delaware recently passed a new banking law that allows banks and bank affiliates chartered in Delaware to sell and underwrite insurance nationwide. The new laws provide two potential benefits to banks; (1) increased profits from selling insurance and (2) reduced interest rate risk exposure from underwriting insurance. We find support for increased profit potential to banks from the law, but we fail to find a reduction in the interest rate risk exposure of the banks.
The following are portions of a paper, bearing the title as above, which was read before the Royal Society of Arts on April 18th, 1945, by Sir Edward V. Appleton, LL.D., F.R.S.…
Abstract
The following are portions of a paper, bearing the title as above, which was read before the Royal Society of Arts on April 18th, 1945, by Sir Edward V. Appleton, LL.D., F.R.S., the Secretary of the Department; Sir Henry Dale, P.R.S., presiding.
Philip Baron, Ranulph Glanville, David Griffiths and Ben Sweeting
Robert Funnell and Hien Chi Dao
This paper aims to outline some of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in which four of only seven women who have become rectors of public universities in…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to outline some of the social, cultural, political and economic conditions in which four of only seven women who have become rectors of public universities in Vietnam. Their experiences are described with a focus on the context of Vietnam in order to focus more clearly on non‐western starting points for theory about career development in higher education in Vietnam and other non‐western settings.
Design/methodology/approach
A combination of historical and personal accounts is used to situate the points of view of Vietnamese women and to argue for the processes of becoming a rector as an important and significant point for understanding how women gain entry to high‐status and previously all‐male domains.
Findings
Findings demonstrate that while family/career relationships are crucial in reporting these women's experiences, too much emphasis on these aspects can divert attention away from the conditions historically blocking the initial journey into high‐status parts of an organisation. These processes in which this is initiated cannot be fully contained within western theory and literature.
Research limitations/implications
The sample size of four is a limitation and the interviews do not extend to colleagues and family members, but the four women represent over half of the total population of Vietnamese women rectors. On balance though, the research contains implicit material that would be of interest to others in the area to build on with further case studies either in Vietnam or other Asian countries.
Practical implications
The experiences of the women rectors could provide examples lacking in Vietnamese society and in literature there. The experiences could be a role model for other women's pursuits of careers in Vietnam.
Social implications
The paper contributes in identifying processes of becoming and their reliance on social conditions from the personal powers can be generated. For this framework to be effective, factors such as management style adopted when women are “at the top” must be separated from conditions that have made the “journeys to the top” possible in the first place.
Originality/value
The paper is the first of its type on women's careers in Vietnam and contributes to the development of further studies into individual women, for women's groups and academic debate in Vietnamese society. The paper could provide some discussion on where strategies might be most appropriately devised and implemented to counter loss of small gains made in women's careers and within the values in Vietnamese society.
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Recently, American social behavior during the 1980s has been compared, both favorably and unfavorably, with the attitudes and culture of the United States during the years…
Abstract
Recently, American social behavior during the 1980s has been compared, both favorably and unfavorably, with the attitudes and culture of the United States during the years 1950–1959. The past two decades of rebellion, student protest, liberal sexual practices, radical politics, and strong civil and women's rights movements have all passed.
Twenty‐three years ago the most frequently met among many slogans was “ Food Will Win the War.” To‐day our food problems are fully as important to our defence; but they present…
Abstract
Twenty‐three years ago the most frequently met among many slogans was “ Food Will Win the War.” To‐day our food problems are fully as important to our defence; but they present many new aspects. Then our prime duty was to save food : now it is to consume food in the way most conducive to fitness. Our knowledge of nutrition has advanced so rapidly that much of it is too new to have been assimilated into our everyday thought and practice. Yet it is precisely as guidance to everyday use of our familiar foods that the newest knowledge of nutrition can be of most benefit: of benefit both to the one‐third of our people who are officially declared “ ill‐nourished,” and to the great majority of the rest of us as well. For while finding that much of our previously baffling disease and frustration is due to shortage of certain nutritional factors in the food supply, research has also shown that a more scientifically guided use of our everyday foods constitutes a sort of superior chemical engineering of our own mechanisms which can increase the vitality and efficiency even of those people who are already healthy and efficient. The relations of nutrition to the functioning of the mind are, of course, more difficult of controlled investigation and not yet as objectively demonstrable as to the effects of food upon bodily functions and length of life. But careful research is now showing that even within the range of fully normal conditions, our daily food choices have much more important effects than science ever previously supposed upon that internal chemistry that directly environs and conditions all our life processes. The blood is the great mediator of this internal environment, and the same blood circulates through the brain as through all the other organs of the body, bringing its help or its hindrance to both mental and muscular activities. True there is much which remains to be clarified by further research; but the already established findings, of recent and current nutritional investigation, need only to be more widely known and used in order to make our people much stronger for the defence of our civilisation, and for its permanent advancement when the emergency has passed. In our “ intellectual climate ” of the moment there is still a good deal of inertia because the newest knowledge is not yet sufficiently understood, while at the same time the new view is perhaps being over‐coloured by some writers. This paper therefore does not seek to add more assertions; but rather to review objectively the evidence on what the Council of National Defence has announced as one of our present‐day needs, “ to make the American people nutrition‐conscious in terms of the nutritional science of to‐day.” Nutrition presents three major aspects : (1) that in which food serves as fuel to supply energy for the activities of the bodily machine; (2) that of the assimilation of certain food constituents into structural material first for the growth and later for the upkeep of the body tissues; and (3) the utilisation of food substances either directly or indirectly to serve the body in those self‐regulatory processes by which it maintains its relatively “ steady states ” or essential internal environment. It is in its energy aspect that nutrition has most fully arrived at the status of an exact science. Expert opinion is well agreed on the fundamental principles of the energy transformations in the body, on the values of the foodstuffs as sources of energy, and on at least the broad lines of theory as to the influence of different bodily conditions in determining the energy need. On the latter points, especially, many laboratories are actively engaged in increasing the precision of present knowledge, and at least three well‐endowed nutrition laboratories—those of the Carnegie Institution, of the Russell Sage Institute, and of the Rochester University Department of Vital Economics—are devoting their resources especially to the perfection of the energy aspects of nutritional knowledge. The protein aspect of nutritional research has also reached a relatively mature status with well‐defined objectives. Among many other laboratories working in this field, that of the United States Department of Agriculture is giving special attention to the purification and description of the proteins themselves; and the laboratory of physiological chemistry of the University of Illinois is very actively investigating the nutritional relationships of the individual amino acids, with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation. We may look forward with confidence and great gratification to a presumably fairly near future in which this aspect of nutritional need can be stated quantitatively in terms of ten individually indispensable amino acids. The catalysts which make the chemical processes in the body go fast enough to support life overlap and in a measure integrate the subject matter divisions of the chemistry of nutrition. They function in the energy aspect; and in their own chemical constitutions they are derivatives of proteins (or their amino acids), mineral elements, and vitamins. This very active field of research is quite as frequently classified with general biochemistry as with nutrition. Until its current era of “ newer knowledge,” the chemistry of food and nutrition had for several decades faced the dilemma that foods could be analysed as elaborately, and their composition accounted for with as close an approach to one hundred per cent., as other natural materials; and yet nutrition could not be sustained with pure mixtures of the substances that the analyses revealed. Seeking deeper insights, chemists broadened their research methods to include the systematic use of feeding experiments with laboratory animals, carried on with as careful attention to accuracy of controls as in other experimental researches in the exact sciences. This extension of method in chemical research has been rewarded with a rapid series of discoveries of substances which are essential to our nutrition, but whose very existence was, until recent years, either entirely unknown or only vaguely apprehended. Neither in chemical nature nor in nutritional function do these substances have much in common with each other. That they came to be called by the group name vitamins was not the result of their being naturally related, but rather of the two circumstances, (1) that they were all discovered through the use of the same development of research method, and (2) that the discoveries of their existence and importance followed each other too rapidly for physical isolation and chemical identification and nomenclature to keep pace. The latter, however, are steadily catching up, and in several cases new names, which are individually distinctive of either the chemical structures or the historic associations of the substances, have been coined and are coming into general use.
A number of scholars have explored the US Government’s postwar efforts, often in collaboration with the business community, to “sell America” to Americans themselves; others have…
Abstract
Purpose
A number of scholars have explored the US Government’s postwar efforts, often in collaboration with the business community, to “sell America” to Americans themselves; others have documented the means through which such information was aimed at audiences behind the Iron Curtain. Few scholars have explored the use of the US “propaganda” to secure political loyalty and financial markets among Western allies, and fewer still have studied the government’s use of commercial marketing methods for this purpose. Attempting to fill a void, this paper aims to explore the US State Department’s postwar collaboration with the Advertising Council, a non-profit organization funded and organized by American business, to “sell” the 16 countries that were receiving aid under the Marshall Plan on “the American way of life”.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing primarily from archival sources, the underlying research here is heavily based on various State Department collections housed at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and College Park, Maryland, as well as documents from the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and the Advertising Council Archives at the University of Illinois.
Findings
In contrast to its many successes during the Second World War, the Advertising Council’s first international project was plagued by erroneous assumptions and unforeseen problems, making the “Overseas Information” campaign far less successful than its previous projects. Thus, the case study holds lessons for the US Government in any future attempts to use the assistance of commercial advertisers in attaining its “soft power” objectives.
Research limitations/implications
The study explores the “Overseas Information” campaign from an institutional perspective only. Future research should focus on public perceptions of the campaign and possibly a rhetorical analysis of the actual advertisements.
Practical implications
The case study holds lessons for the US Government in any future attempts to use the assistance of commercial advertisers in attaining its “soft power” objectives.
Social implications
The study reveals interesting, and heretofore, unrevealed information about collaborations between the government and US business in the postwar era.
Originality/value
Up till this point, the Advertising Council’s “Overseas Information” has received very scant scholarly attention and few, if any, have recognized its importance in the ongoing quest for government “soft power” in the postwar era.
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