Leading integrated schools: a study of the multicultural perspectives of Northern Irish principals

This article is concerned with the sustained peace education initiative of integrated schooling and in particular with leadership responses to cultural diversity. Using a case study group of principals of integrated (mixed Catholic, Protestant and other) schools in Northern Ireland, the author explores how principals perceive and lead their visions of integrated education. A combined framework of multicultural and school leadership theory is employed to analyse the findings. The perceptions of the principals reported are consistent with liberal interpretations of multiculturalism, although there is also evidence of a more pluralist perspective. Core liberal values appear to be central to the leadership style of these principals, in line with values-led contingency models of leadership. The article suggests that a sole emphasis on common humanity is an inadequate approach to peace education. It tentatively suggests a relationship between leadership styles and approaches to multiculturalism, and argues that a synthesis of multicultural and leadership theory can usefully guide the development of peace education leadership.

The Kremlin's Scholar. A Memoir of Soviet Politics under Stalin and Khrushchev

The memoirs are dominated by two grand figures of Soviet history, Stalin and Khrushchev. The account of Stalin is riddled with ambiguities. There is an undoubted personal admiration for Stalin, his intellectual and political capacity (Stalin allegedly read 300 pages per day), his simplicity in daily life seen in "an old tunic, patched-up socks, almost constant isolation" (p. 190). At the same time, Shepilov acknowledged the paranoid aspects of Stalin's personality, especially towards the end of his life. Stalin's mechanisms of power are illustrated by Shepilov's account of work on a new book on political economy. Stalin personally chose key people for important tasks and controlled them at key junctures to ensure the desired outcome. In this light, Shepilov's claims that the Great Purges of the late 1930s could have been outside of Stalin's immediate control seem implausible, to say the least (p. 41).

All Stalin's deficiencies, however, pale in comparison with those of Khrushchev, the bête noire of Shepilov's memoirs. There is plenty of criticism of Khrushchev's policies, particularly in agriculture and foreign affairs. What comes across most pungently is, however, Shepilov's disdain of Khrushchev's personality and leadership style. In this respect, the book is unashamedly biased and remarkable for its omissions as much as for its revelations.

Deconstructing national leadership: Politicians’ accounts of electoral success and failure in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the ‘settled will’
of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the ‘settled will’ repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose.

BSP -Style Computation: A Semantic Investigation

A BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallelism) computation is characterized by the generation of asynchronous messages in packages during independent execution of a number of processes and their subsequent delivery at synchronization points. Bundling messages together represents a significant departure from the traditional ‘one communication at a time’ approach. In this paper the semantic consequences of communication packaging are explored. In particular, the BSP communication structure is identified with a general form of substitution—predicate substitution. Predicate substitution provides a means of reasoning about the synchronized delivery of asynchronous communications when the immediate programming context does not explicitly refer to the variables that are to be updated (unlike traditional operations, such as the assignment $x := e$, where the names of the updated variables can be extracted from the context). Proofs of implementations of Newton's root finding method and prefix sum are used to illustrate the practical application of the proposed approach.