Engineers' professional learning: a practice-theory perspective

With the increasing challenges facing professional engineers working in more complex, global and interdisciplinary contexts, different approaches to understanding how engineers practice and learn are necessary. This paper draws on recent research in the social sciences from the field of workplace learning, to suggest that a practice-theory perspective on engineers' professional learning is fruitful. It shifts the focus from the attributes of the individual learner (knowledge, skills and attitudes) to the attributes of the practice (interactions, materiality, opportunities and challenges). Learning is thus more than the technical acquisition and transfer of knowledge, but a complex bundle of activities, that is, social, material, embodied and emerging. The paper is illustrated with examples from a research study of the learning of experienced engineers in the construction industry to demonstrate common practices – site walks and design review meetings – in which learning takes place.

Family day care educators’ knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing: baseline data from Thrive

THIS PAPER PRESENTS BASELINE data from Thrive, a capacity-building program for family day care educators. Educators completed a self-report survey assessing knowledge and confidence in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. An in-home observation was used to assess care quality. Twenty-four educators responded to the survey (40 per cent response rate). They had an average of nine years’ experience and 82 percent held childcare qualifications. Educators reported knowledge of, on average, three early signs of social and emotional problems in children, three risk factors and two protective factors. Using a scale from 0-10, mean educator confidence levels ranged from an average of 6.69 to 7.25. Quality of care ratings were moderate. Although educators had a good understanding of children’s social and emotional wellbeing, the study identified opportunities for significant changes in the quality of the educators’ interactions with children in their care and their professional development.

Financial cooperatives and the development of social capital.

 Financial Cooperatives and the Development of Social Capital thesis examines the generation of social capital within locally owned and managed financial cooperatives and their communities in Cambodia, Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands and contrasts factors which affect the development of social capital and the associated impacts on the institution.

The impact of employee perceptions of organizational corporate social responsibility practices on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior: evidence from the Chinese private sector

This paper examines the impact of employee perceptions of organizational corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on their job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Hierarchical regression analysis on two-wave data from 184 supervisor/subordinate dyads from three organizations located in Zhejiang Province, South-East China, revealed that employee perceptions of CSR toward social and non-social stakeholders strongly influenced their OCB. However, employee perceptions of CSR toward employees, customers and government influenced neither their job performance nor OCB.

Firm compliance with social insurance obligations where there is a weak surveillance and enforcement mechanism: empirical evidence from Shanghai

This article examines why firms in Shanghai comply or over-comply with social insurance obligations in a regulatory environment where the expected punishment for non-compliance is low. Our first finding is that firms found to be in non-compliance in the first audit in 2001 were moved into a separate violation category and the probability of being reaudited in 2002 was significantly higher if the firm was in that category. Our second main result is that, across the board, firms which were reaudited continued to underpay in 2002 but the extent of underpayment was significantly reduced. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Migration and the right to social security: perceptions of off-farm migrants' rights to social insurance in China's Jiangsu Province

In 2001 China ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. By so doing the national government became legally bound, "to the maximum of its available resources", to achieve "progressively" full realization of the rights specified in the Covenant. Included amongst these entitlements is the "right of everyone to social security, including social insurance". This paper uses data from Jiangsu to examine the extent to which urbanites agree that previously disenfranchised migrants have the same right to social insurance as the urban population. Many urbanites fear that their existing entitlements to social protection will be diluted if social insurance coverage is extended to include new populations. Accordingly, state agencies and the media have sought to promote acceptance of a more positive view of migrant workers than has traditionally prevailed within towns and cities. We find that younger urban residents, urban residents who already have social insurance and urban residents working in the state-owned sector are more likely to agree that migrants have the same right to social insurance as the urban population. © 2007 Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

New tools for understanding the local asymptotic power of panel unit root tests

Abstract Motivated by the previously documented discrepancy between actual and predicted power, the present paper provides new tools for analyzing the local asymptotic power of panel unit root tests. These tools are appropriate in general when considering panel data with a dominant autoregressive root of the form ^ρi=1+^ciN-^κT-^τ, where i=1,...,N indexes the cross-sectional units, T is the number of time periods and ^ci is a random local-to-unity parameter. A limit theory for the sample moments of such panel data is developed and is shown to involve infinite-order series expansions in the moments of ^ci, in which existing theories can be seen as mere first-order approximations. The new theory is applied to study the asymptotic local power functions of some known test statistics for a unit root. These functions can be expressed in terms of the expansions in the moments of ^ci, and include existing local power functions as special cases. Monte Carlo evidence is provided to suggest that the new results go a long way toward bridging the gap between actual and predicted power.

Cross-sectional averages versus principal components

In spite of the increased use of factor-augmented regressions in recent years, little is known regarding the relative merits of the two main approaches to estimation and inference, namely, the cross-sectional average and principal component estimators. By providing a formal comparison of the approaches, the current paper fills this gap in the literature.

Nonparametric rank tests for non-stationary panels

We develop a set of nonparametric rank tests for non-stationary panels based on multivariate variance ratios which use untruncated kernels. As such, the tests do not require the choice of tuning parameters associated with bandwidth or lag length and also do not require choices with respect to numbers of common factors. The tests allow for unrestricted cross-sectional dependence and dynamic heterogeneity among the units of the panel, provided simply that a joint functional central limit theorem holds for the panel of differenced series. We provide a discussion of the relationships between our setting and the settings for which first- and second generation panel unit root tests are designed. In Monte Carlo simulations we illustrate the small-sample performance of our tests when they are used as panel unit root tests under the more restrictive DGPs for which panel unit root tests are typically designed, and for more general DGPs we also compare the small-sample performance of our nonparametric tests to parametric rank tests. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration by testing for income convergence among countries.

The effect of recursive detrending on panel unit root tests

This paper analyzes the properties of panel unit root tests based on recursively detrended data. The analysis is conducted while allowing for a (potentially) non-linear trend function, which represents a more general consideration than the current state of affairs with (at most) a linear trend. A new test statistic is proposed whose asymptotic behavior under the unit root null hypothesis, and the simplifying assumptions of a polynomial trend and iid errors are shown to be surprisingly simple. Indeed, the test statistic is not only asymptotically independent of the true trend polynomial, but also is in fact unique in that it is independent also of the degree of the fitted polynomial. However, this invariance property does not carry over to the local alternative, under which it is shown that local power is a decreasing function of the trend degree. But while power does decrease, the rate of shrinking of the local alternative is generally constant in the trend degree, which goes against the common belief that the rate of shrinking should be decreasing in the trend degree. The above results are based on simplifying assumptions. To compensate for this lack of generality, a second, robust, test statistic is proposed, whose validity does not require that the trend function is a polynomial or that the errors are iid.