Context-resonant systems perspectives in career theory

"The focus of this chapter is on context-resonant systems perspectives in career theory and their implications for practice in diverse cultural and contextual settings. For over two decades, the potential of systems theory to offer a context-resonant approach to career development has been acknowledged. Career development theory and practice, however, have been dominated for most of their history by more narrowly defined theories informed by a trait-and-factor tradition of matching the characteristics of individuals to occupations. In contrast, systems theory challenges this parts-in-isolation approach and offers a response that can accommodate the complexity of both the lives of individuals and the world of the 21st century by taking a more holistic approach that considers individuals in context. These differences in theory and practice may be attributed to the underlying philosophies that inform them. For example, the philosophy informing the trait-and-factor theoretical position, logical positivism, places value on: studying individuals in isolation from their environments; content over process; facts over feelings; objectivity over subjectivity; and views individual behavior as observable, measurable, and linear. In practice, this theory base manifests in expert-driven practices founded on the assessment of personal traits such as interests, personality, values, or beliefs which may be matched to particular occupations. The philosophy informing more recent theoretical positions, constructivism, places value on: studying individuals in their contexts; making meaning of experience through the use of subjective narrative accounts; and a belief in the capacity of individuals known as agency. In practice, this theory base manifests in practices founded on collaborative relationships with clients, narrative approaches, and a reduced emphasis on expert-driven linear processes. Thus, the tenets of constructivism which inform the systems perspectives in career theory are context-resonant. Systems theory stresses holism where the interconnectedness of all elements of a system is considered. Systems may be open or closed. Closed systems have no relationship with their external environment whereas open systems interact with their external environment and are open to external influence which is necessary for regeneration. Congruent with general systems theory, the systems perspectives emerging within career theory are based on open systems. Such systems are complex and dynamic and comprise many elements and subsystems which recursively interact with each other as well as with influences from the surrounding environment. As elements of a system should not be considered in isolation, a systems approach is holistic. Patterns of behavior are found in the relationships between the elements of dynamic systems. Because of the multiplicity of relationships within and between elements of subsystems, the possibility of linear causal explanations is reduced. Story is the mechanism through which the relationships and patterns within systems are recounted by individuals. Thus the career guidance practices emanating from theories informed by systems perspectives are inherently narrative in orientation. Narrative career counseling encourages career development to be understood from the subjective perspective of clients. The application of systemic thinking in practice takes greater account of context. In so doing, practices informed by systems theory may facilitate relevance to a diverse client group in diverse settings. In a world that has become increasingly global and diverse it seems that context-resonant systems perspectives in career theory are essential to ensure the future of career development. Translating context-resonant systems perspectives into practice offers important possibilities for methods and approaches that are respectful of diversity."--publisher website

Primary schools and the delivery of relationships and sexuality education : the experience of Queensland teachers

Primary school provides an appropriate opportunity for children to commence comprehensive relationships and sexuality education (RSE), yet many primary school teachers avoid teaching this subject area. In the absence of teacher confidence and competence, schools have often relied on health promotion professionals, external agencies and/or one-off issue related presentations rather than cohesive, systematic and meaningful health education. This study examines the implementation of a ten-lesson pilot RSE unit of work and accompanying assessment task in two primary schools in South-East Queensland, Australia. Drawing predominantly from qualitative data, this research explores the experiences of primary school teachers as they engage with RSE curriculum resources and content delivery. The results show that the provision of a high quality RSE curriculum resource grounded in contemporary educational principles and practices enables teachers to feel more confident to deliver RSE and minimises potential barriers such as parental objections and fear of mishandling sensitive content.

Defence industry projects : investigating the impact of major project manager attributes on stakeholder relationships and project success

This thesis identifies attributes, skills and behaviours that major project managers require for stakeholder relationships competence and project success within a major project environment. It develops valid and reliable measures of internal and external stakeholder relationships competence, tests a complex conceptual model and explores the effectiveness of the QUT Executive Masters of Complex Project Management and Strategic Procurement in developing major project managers' stakeholder relationships competence. Implications of this thesis are for government and industry in identifying factors associated with major project success, as this will lead to better major project outcomes potentially resulting in time and monetary savings of years and billions of dollars.

Relationships between safety climate and safety performance of building repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition (RMAA) works

The importance of repair, maintenance, minor alteration, and addition (RMAA) works is increasing in many built societies. When the volume of RMAA works increases, the occurrence of RMAA accidents also increases. Safety of RMAA works deserves more attention; however, research in this important topic remains limited. Safety climate is considered a key factor that influences safety performance. The present study aims to determine the relationships between safety climate and safety performance of RMAA works, thereby offering recommendations on improving RMAA safety. Questionnaires were dispatched to private property management companies, maintenance sections of quasi-government developers and their subcontractors, RMAA sections of general contractors, small RMAA contractors, building services contractors and trade unions in Hong Kong. In total, data from 396 questionnaires were collected from RMAA workers. The sample was divided into two equal-sized sub-samples. On the first sub-sample SEM was used to test the model, which was validated on the second sub-sample. The model revealed a significant negative relationship between RMAA safety climate and incidence of self-reported near misses and injuries, and significant positive relationships between RMAA safety climate and safety participation and safety compliance respectively. Higher RMAA safety climate was positively associated with a lower incidence of self-reported near misses and injuries and higher levels of safety participation and safety compliance.

Lessons from a face-to-face meeting on embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives : ‘A contract of intimacy’

This paper presents the findings from a conversation between an Aboriginal educator and a non-Indigenous pre-service educator about the importance and complexities of building productive partnerships. Although the participants focused on the challenges and benefits of building relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators and non-Indigenous educators in Australian early years settings, the more significant outcome of the meeting was the personal connection two young women were able to make when a friendship began to develop. The project was intended to enable an opportunity for the participants ‘to engage in reflexivity on their pedagogic work’, something Mills (2012) understands as crucial to the support of social justice and transformation in the classroom.

Medium and mode : relationships between visual experience and perception in an installation arts practice

Working primarily within the natural landscape, this practice-led research project explored connections between the artist's visual and perceptual experience of a journey or place while simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for digital media to create a perceptual dissonance. By exploring concepts of time, viewpoint, duration of sequences and the manipulation of traditional constructs of stop-frame animation, the practical work created a cognitive awareness of the elements of the journey through optical sensations. The work allowed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of visual experience and its mediation through images. The project recontextualized the selected mediums of still photography, animation and projection within contemporary display modes of multiple screen installations by analysing relationships between the experienced and the perceived. The resulting works added to current discourse on the interstices between still and moving imagery in a digital world.

ÉLET [LIFE]

Élet [pronounced air-let] is the Hungarian word for Life. The work is informed by the lyrics of six songs performed by French cover band Nouvelle Vague. Whilst Élet [Life] is created to be absorbed and interpreted openly by each individual, at the core of the choreography lies a desire to move forwards, to communicate – to be seen and heard. The work embraces aspects such as loneliness, joy and tension that we experience in our lives and relationships. As the movement opens out from these ideas, the physical shapes of our personal moments are infused with the elements of sound, colour and rhythm. A rich translation of personal movements through life.

Why trust the head? Key practices for transformational school leaders to build a purposeful relationship of trust

Trust is widely recognized as one of the key qualities that a successful leader needs to bring about change within his/her organization. Literature has also shown that trust plays a pivotal role in effective school leadership. However, little research has been undertaken to identify specific actions of a transformational school leader enabling him/her to develop purposeful relationships of trust with his/her staff and Chair of the school’s governing body. Using a theoretical framework of transformational leadership in the context of the independent schooling sector in Australia, a multicase study of four highly trusted, transformational school leaders revealed 10 key trust building practices in the Head–staff dyad and three practices in the Head–Chair dyad. These practices were independent of the leader’s personal attributes. The study also revealed an inextricable link between trust and transformational leadership.

Symbiotic relationships : saviour siblings, family rights and biomedicine

It is now possible to combine the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and tissue matching to select an IVF embryo that will, after birth, be a compatible tissue donor for an existing individual. This article analyses the ethical issues and the regulatory frameworks that intersect around the creation of tissue compatible children.

Genetics and the transformation of the personal

The shared nature of genetic information presents new challenges for legal understandings of the self. Within traditional legal discourses the individual is conceptualised as separate and autonomous. In contrast, the genetic individual is understood as inherently relational. This paper analyses the transformation of our understandings of the personal. The transformative processes are assessed through discussion of the changing meanings of privacy in the context of genetic information within families; changing views over access to information about biological parentage by children conceived through assisted reproductive technology; preimplantation genetic diagnosis and the changing context of reproductive decisionmaking.

Personal media and wireless cities : towards an urban spatial analysis

For the past decade, at least, varieties of small, hand held networked instruments have appeared on the global scene, selling in record numbers, and being utilized by all manner of persons from the old to the young; children, women, men, the wealthy and the poor and in all countries. Their presences bespeak a radical shift in telecommunications infrastructure and the future of communications. They are particularly visible in urban areas where mobile transmission network infrastructure (3G, 4G, cellular and Wi-Fi) is more established and substantial, options more plentiful, and density of populations more dramatic. These end user products—I phones, cell phones, Blackberries, DSi, DS, IPads, Zooms, and others – of the mobile communications industry are the latest, hottest globalized commodities. At the same time, wirelessness, or the state of being wireless, and therefore capable of taking along one's networks, communicating from unlikely spaces, and navigating with GPS, is a complex social, political and economic communications phenomenon of early 21st century life. This thesis examines the specter of being wireless in cities. It lends the entire idea an experimentally envisioned, historical and planned context wherein personalization of media tools is seen both as a design development of corporate, artistic, and military imagination, as well as a profound social phenomenon enabling new forms of sharing, belonging, and urban community. In doing that it asserts the parameters of a new mobile space which, aside from clear benefits to humankind by way of mobility, has reinscribed numerous categories including gender. Moreover, it posits the recognition of other, more nuanced theoretical spaces for complex readings of gender and gendered use, including some instantiation of the notion of 'network' itself as a cyborgian and gendered social form. Additionally, cities are studied as places where technology is not only quickly popularized, but is connected to larger political interests, such as the reading of data, tracking of information, and the new security culture. In so doing the work has been undertaken as an urban spatial analysis and experimental ethnography, utilizing architectural, feminist, techno-utopian, industrial and theoretical literatures as discursive underpinnings from whence understandings and interpretations of mobile space, the mobile office, networked mobility, and personal media have come, linking the space of cities to specific, pioneering urban public art projects in which voice, texting and MMS have been utilized in expressions of ubiquitous networks and urban history. Through numerous examples of techno art, the thesis discusses the 'wireless city' as an emerging cultural, socially constructed economic and spatial entity, both conceived and formed through historic processes of urbanization.

Correlates of adults' participation in physical activity : review and update

Purpose To review and update the evidence relating to the personal, social, and environmental factors associated with physical activity (PA) in adults. Methods Systematic review of the peer-reviewed literature to identify papers published between 1998 and 2000 with PA (and including exercise and exercise adherence). Qualitative reports or case studies were not included. Results Thirty-eight new studies were located. Most confirmed the existence of factors already known to be correlates of PA. Changes in status were noted in relation to the influence of marital status, obesity, smoking, lack of time, past exercise behavior, and eight environmental variables. New studies were located which focused on previously understudied population groups such as minorities, middle and older aged adults, and the disabled. Conclusion The newly reported studies tend to take a broader “ecological” approach to understanding the correlates of PA and are more focused on environmental factors. There remains a need to better understand environmental influences and the factors that influence different types of PA. As most of the work in this field still relies on cross-sectional studies, longitudinal and intervention studies will be required if causal relationships are to be inferred.

Team change climate : a group-level analysis of the relationships among change information and change participation, role stressors, and well-being

We explored whether teams develop shared perceptions regarding the quantity and quality of information and the extent of participation in decision making provided in an environment of continuous change. In addition, we examined whether change climate strength moderated relationships between change climate level and team outcomes. We examined relationships among aggregated change information and change participation and aggregated team outcomes, including two role stressors (i.e., role ambiguity and role overload) and two indicators of well-being (i.e., quality of worklife and distress). Questionnaires were distributed in an Australian law enforcement agency and data were used from 178 teams. Structural equation modelling analyses, controlling for a marker variable, were conducted to examine the main effects of aggregated change information and aggregated change participation on aggregated team outcomes. Results provided support for a model that included method effects due to a marker variable. In this model, change information climate was significantly negatively associated with role ambiguity, role overload, and distress, and significantly positively associated with quality of worklife. Change participation climate was significantly positively associated with quality of worklife. Change climate strength did not moderate relationships among change climate level and team outcomes.

Practice & procedure : Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002

The decision of Atkinson J in Watkins v State of Queensland [2007] QSC 057 on an application for disclosure of documents under s27 of the Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002 (Qld) required determination of a range of issues relating to the disclosure of documents and legal professional privilege.

Disclosure obligations - Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002

In Huag v Jupiters Limited [2007] QSC 068, Lyons J considered the extent of the obligations imposed upon a respondent under the Personal Injuries Proceedings Act 2002 to disclose documents and information.