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This study aims to investigate teacher perspectives on teaching handwriting to children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and collaboration with occupational therapists.

A descriptive design was applied. Purpose-designed surveys were distributed to teachers of children with ASD (aged 4-12 years) in the Republic of Ireland. A response rate of 35 per cent (N = 75) was obtained, with 25 responses analysed using descriptive statistics of closed questions and content analysis of open-ended questions.

Of 139 children with ASD, 80 (58 per cent) were reported to have difficulties with handwriting. Teachers reported specific difficulties with pencil grasp, letter formation and task concept among the children with ASD. Fourteen (56 per cent, N = 25) respondents did not give handwriting as homework. Teachers valued occupational therapy advice, individualised programmes and ongoing consultation during implementation. Interest in occupational therapy education regarding handwriting was reported.

Occupational therapy collaboration to address handwriting difficulties for children with ASD should include involvement in teacher education, coordination of teacher–parent collaboration and the need for involvement in early intervention provision within an emergent literacy framework.

Handwriting development is challenging for children with ASD. There is limited information on teaching or teacher–occupational therapy collaborative practices to address handwriting difficulties of children with ASD.

A case study methodology was applied as a major component of a mixed-methods approach to the evaluation of a mobile dementia education and support service in the Bega Valley Shire, New South Wales, Australia. In-depth interviews with people with dementia (PWD), their carers, programme staff, family members and service providers and document analysis including analysis of client case notes and client database were used.

The strengths of the case study approach included: (i) simultaneous evaluation of programme process and worth, (ii) eliciting the theory of change and addressing the problem of attribution, (iii) demonstrating the impact of the programme on earlier steps identified along the causal pathway (iv) understanding the complexity of confounding factors, (v) eliciting the critical role of the social, cultural and political context, (vi) understanding the importance of influences contributing to differences in programme impact for different participants and (vii) providing insight into how programme participants experience the value of the programme including unintended benefits.

The broader case of the collective experience of dementia and as part of this experience, the impact of a mobile programme of support and education, in a predominately rural area grew from the investigation of the programme experience of ‘individual cases’ of carers and PWD. Investigation of living conditions, relationships, service interactions through observation and increased depth of interviews with service providers and family members would have provided valuable perspectives and thicker description of the case for increased understanding of the case and strength of the evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to guide future researchers and practitioners into the process of interviewing in the Chinese context.

The methodology used is an empirical critical reflection.

The authors identified 11 major themes such as how to get an interview, antecedents of the interview, building rapport, complexity, language, interview settings, interview procedure, stages, probing and sensitive topics, selection of respondents and post-interview.

The location of the interviews.

Guide foreigner researchers and managers on how to conduct interviews in China.

The context matters, and only with a specific approach some can perform well and achieve the interview objectives. Doing so, the researcher or practitioner will not create situations that might be problematic for her/him and the interviewee. Based on the above, the authors’ research decreases potential social tensions that interview situations can create.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other researcher has studied the specificities of interviewing in China, which brings originality and value to the authors’ research.

This paper considers the relationship between pre‐ and post‐technology assisted teaching and learning (TATL) based on models of learning, the learning context, programme design and the establishment of evaluation criteria. It hypothesises that current communication management theory and practice faces an opportunity and a threat but that the subject discipline can meet the challenge of the internet through ongoing academic/professional partnerships. The purpose of this paper, in raising awareness about current research issues being debated in colleges over course planning and design, is to see where to go from here and what contributions can be offered by academics, practitioner consultants and students. The medium is not the message and delivery must be learner‐centred, allowing for reflection and adaptation at all times. The technical aspect of subject‐based criteria‐setting through benchmark design is outside the scope of this paper and can be revisited. Nevertheless, benchmarking per se is standard validation practice for all academic courses and the author's hypothesis points to the dangers of underestimating the difficulties associated with this element of distance learning for new and evolving interdisciplinary studies such as public relations, where even semantics are problematic. For example, in this post‐technological era, multinational companies are renaming their public relations departments ‘corporate communications’ or ‘corporate relations/corporate affairs’, to better reflect reality and the functional role played in terms of integration, monitoring and evaluation of and within corporate strategy. Those companies in which the dominant focus for public relations was marketing in the recession driven 1980s are finding the 1990s paradigm shift more complicated than envisaged. They are finding that meaning and message is more than a clichéd slogan or soundbite, especially where corporate policy is still driven more by customer relations than, say, employee or government relations. As a consequence of technology (medium/multimedia) and human networking (message/meaning) via the internet, the pressure of a new world order affects everyone in one form or another. The race is on for global corporate and cultural domination, what some sociologists call the ‘new imperialism’. This inevitably brings conflict, along with a range of developmental arguments about context, consensus and other issues. The implications and range of arguments surrounding the sample of models selected here are vast. The models themselves are therefore presented as concepts rather than analytical tools or techniques. However, with the subject so topical at the moment, no doubt this and other journals will see the publication of a debate in future issues around technology assisted teaching and learning for business communication and public relations and the emergence of some valuable subject specific aids to lifelong learning for students, teachers and trainers alike. Teaching is a ‘rhetorical activity … it is mediated learning, allowing students to acquire knowledge of someone else's way of experiencing the world’. The British qualification to date has been the Communication, Advertising and Marketing Diploma (CAM). Now that some of the tools of public relations are taught to marketing students under the auspices of the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing, the UK's Institute of Public Relations, in its 50th birthday year, recognises that the profession must get to grips with the changes wrought by this and the growth of the digital arts industry, although it has placed its own diploma squarely within the management discipline for purposes of future professional membership. Regardless of student background, so long as candidates meet university entry requirements and universities abide by national quality assurance criteria, professional partnership programmes in this field, delivered by distance learning mode through the medium of the internet and other techniques, will mirror the strengths and weaknesses of those in more established fields. Novices become experts through a combination of knowledge and skill in all professions and all professions are struggling with the impact of technology. Differences between theory and practice are justifiably losing their deterministic significance through mutual respect, understanding and accessibility to and from a wider reach via the internet.

Legislators continue to label Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other race-based concepts as divisive. Nevertheless, CRT, at its core, is committed to radical transformation and addressing issues of race and racism to understand how People of Color are oppressed. Through rhetoric and legislative bans, this current anti-CRT movement uses race-neutral policies and practices to limit and eliminate CRT scholars, especially faculty members, from teaching and researching critical pedagogies and other race-based topics.

Through semi-structured interviews using Critical Race Methodology (CRM), the authors sought to understand how 40 faculty members challenged the dominant narratives presented by administrators through their responses to CRT bans. Additionally, this work aimed to examine how administrators’ responses complicate how faculty make sense of CRT bans.

Findings describe three major themes: (1) how administrators failed to respond to CRT bans, which to faculty indicated their desire to present a neutral stance as the middle ground between faculty and legislators; (2) the type of rhetoric administrators engaged in exemplified authoritarian approaches that upheld status quo narratives about diversity, exposing their inability to stand against oppressive dominant narratives; and (3) institutional leaders’ refusal to address the true threats that faculty members faced reinforced the racialized harm that individuals engaging in CRT work must navigate individually.

This study is one of the few that provide empirical data on this current anti-CRT movement, including problematizing the CRT bans, and how it affects campus constituents such as faculty members.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which accountability is operationalised within the context of a South African microfinance institution (MFI). In particular, the authors consider the introduction of a tool to enhance consumer protection, the Client Protection Card (CPC), to deliver accountability within the case organisation. In contrast to prior research, the authors focus on accountability from the perspective of clients and fieldworkers.

A single in-depth case study of the introduction and implementation of a CPC in an MFI operating within South Africa was conducted. The case study and timing afforded an opportunity to gather unique data, given the MFI’s client-centred philosophy and the recent introduction of the CPC. The qualitative approach adopted for this research allowed collection of data through direct observations, interviews, a fieldwork diary and documentation. The theoretical framing for this paper views accountability as involving social practices, allowing us to foreground the existence of interdependencies among people interacting within the same organisation or system (Roberts, 1996).

The case study demonstrates that three aspects are critical to the success of the card: the design, which requires sensitivity to the local culture; the distribution, which demands for significant “sensemaking” work to be undertaken by fieldworkers; and the drivers for introducing the card, which need to be responsive to the clients’ perspective. The paper illustrates how well-intended tools of accountability can fail to deliver effectively, both for the organisation and the users, if they are not tailored appropriately to the needs of clients.

This paper differs from prior research as it explores the ways in which fieldworkers and MFI clients make sense of a tool of accountability, the CPC. Given that the CPC was designed to meet guidelines produced by international policymakers and domestic legislators, the paper provides a grassroots analysis of the effectiveness of the implementation of such tools from the perspective of clients and fieldworkers. This local focus allows the authors to examine the ways in which mounting global expectations for increased accountability of MFIs are being operationalised in practice.

This feminist standpoint study aims to make an empirical contribution to the entrepreneurial leadership and HRD fields. Women entrepreneur leaders' experiences of gender will be explored through a framework of doing gender well and doing gender differently to unsettle the gender binary.

Against a backcloth of patriarchy, a theoretical gender lens is developed and a feminist standpoint research (FSR) approach taken in this study. There are five case studies of women entrepreneur leaders operating small businesses across North East England in sectors of IT, law, construction, beauty, and childcare. In each case study a two‐stage semi‐structured interview process was implemented and the women's voices analysed through a framework of doing gender well and differently.

This paper highlights the complexities of gender experiences offering four themes of women entrepreneurs' experiences of gender within entrepreneurial leadership: struggling with entrepreneurial leadership; awareness of difference; accepting and embracing difference; and responding to difference, which are offered to challenge the gender binary and capture the complexities of how gender is experienced.

The field must begin to shift its focus from the dominant masculine discourse to foster understandings of gender experiences by using gender as an analytical category to enable the field to truly progress.

Women are still an under‐represented group within entrepreneurship and within the higher echelons of organisations. This requires greater attention.

This feminist study calls for both scholars and practitioners to analyse critically their underlying assumptions and bring a gender consciousness to their HRD research and practice to understand gender complexities within entrepreneurial leadership and organisational experiences more widely.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

Food insecurity and poor access to healthy food is known to compromise tertiary studies in university students, and food choices are linked to student perceptions of the campus food environment. The purpose of this study is to describe the prevalence, demographic and education characteristics associated with food insecurity in a sample of Australian university students and their satisfaction with on-campus food choices.

An online, cross-sectional survey conducted as part of the bi-annual sustainability themed survey was conducted at the University of Tasmania in March 2020. A single-item measure was used to assess food insecurity in addition to six demographic and education characteristics and four questions about the availability of food, affordable food, sustainable food and local food on campus.

Survey data (n = 1,858) were analysed using bivariate analyses and multivariate binary logistic regression. A total of 38% of respondents (70% female; 80% domestic student; 42% aged 18–24 years) were food insecure. Overall, 41% of students were satisfied with the food available on campus. Nearly, half (47%) of food insecure students were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the availability of affordable food on campus. A minority of students were satisfied with the availability of sustainable food (37%) and local food (33%) on campus.

These findings demonstrate a high prevalence of food insecurity and deficits in the university food environment, which can inform the development of strategies to improve the food available on campus, including affordable, sustainable and local options.

This paper aims to utilize a framework from classic sociology – Max Weber’s Typology of Rationality – to understand the motivations for social entrepreneurship in responsible tourism in India. The critical role of the social entrepreneur in effecting the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship has been largely under-recognized. The authors seek to explore, develop and enhance Weber’s theoretical arguments in the context of the tourism industry.

The authors used a constructivism paradigm and Seidman’s (2006) Three Interview Series technique to obtain the narratives of two social entrepreneurs in India. Data were analyzed using a hybrid thematic coding procedure.

Findings indicate that there exists a dynamic interplay between the formal and substantive rationalities that underlie the behavior of social entrepreneurs. The authors also discuss how entrepreneurs draw upon their formal and substantive repertoires to create their identities through the simultaneous processes of apposition (“Me”) and opposition (“Not Me”).

The findings provide an important recognition of the impact of formal and substantive rationalities on the conceptualization, implementation and manifestation of social enterprise for a variety of stakeholders.

This paper makes a significant contribution to understanding the why and the how of social entrepreneurship in responsible tourism. It provides a framework that can be widely applied to develop and enhance Weberian theory and further the understanding of the fundamental nature of human behavioral phenomena in tourism and beyond.