Four years on: a longitudinal study assessing the impact of a virtual community of practice

This paper explores the long term impact of a virtual learning community (VLC) from the perspective of community members and their employing organization. It argues that membership potentially has a significant impact on individual identities and careers, and that managed communities provide an important means for strategic workforce development. The study evaluates the impact of membership of a VLC over a four year period within the context of the theoretical frameworks of communities of practice and identity theory. The concept of boundary crossing is also explored in relation to VLCs. The paper considers the benefits to host organisations in supporting structured VLCs as a means of enabling workforce development and supporting change and innovation.

Impact of the financial crisis on cross-border mergers and acquisitions and concentration in the global banking industry

The global banking industry has seen dramatic changes in the past 40 years. Most recently, the financial liberalization of emerging markets and the global financial crisis have significantly impacted the market share of banks worldwide. This article investigates the impact of the 2007–2008 financial crisis on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the banking sector and emphasizes the role of emerging-market banks in the postcrisis consolidation trend. Using M&A data and concentration data over the period 2000–2013, our analysis indicates that the financial crisis had a significant impact on worldwide M&As, especially on the direction of the transactions. Emerging-market banks appear to be major acquirers in the postcrisis period, targeting both neighboring countries and developed economies in Europe. We also observe an increase in bank concentration in developed markets most hit by the financial crisis, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, whereas bank concentration decreased in emerging markets.

Developing a Technoself System to Improve Lifelong Learning Engagement

Lifelong learning exists today in the context of a cultural and societal shift to a knowledge-based, technology-enhanced, and rapidly-changing economy. It has a significant impact on people’s lives and has become of vital importance with the emergence of new technologies that change how people communicate, collect information, and collaborate with others. The emerging technologies, such as social networking, interactive media and game technology, have expanded a new dimension of self – ‘technoself’ driven by socio-technical innovations and taken an important step forward in lifelong learning through the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The TEL encourages learners as producers to embed personalized knowledge and collective experience on individualized learning within professional practice. It becomes more personal and social than traditional lifelong learning, especially about the ‘learning as socially grounded’ aspects. This paper studies the development of technoself system during lifelong learning and introduces technoself enhanced learning as a novel sociological framework of lifelong learning to couple the educational dimension with social dimension in order to enhance learner engagement by shaping personal learning focus and setting. We examine how people construct their own inquiry and learn from others, how people shift and adapt in these technoself-enhanced learning environments, and how learner engagement is improving as the involvement of learners as producers in lifelong learning. We further discuss the barriers and the positive and negative unintended consequences of using technology for lifelong learning.

Sustainable Chemical Regulation in a Global Environment

The globalisation and unintended impacts of chemicals sets substantial challenges for sustainable development and the protection of natural resources such as land and water. Currently, there are three key chemical Conventions, the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal which came into force in 1992, the 1993 Rotterdam Convention on Trade in Dangerous Chemicals and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) (2004). These Conventions have as common features a mechanism for assessment of chemical safety, a process for the addition of new chemicals to a list of controlled substances and capacity building in developed countries. However, they only cover a small fraction of the chemicals manufactured and traded across the world. Defining effective regulation of chemicals is an on-going debate that has the potential to have a significant impact on vested commercial and political interests. A sustainable chemical industry should take account of evidence-based standards and through legal mechanisms adopt long-term precautionary evaluations rather than short-term market driven decisions. It is argued in this paper that effective international chemical regulation in the future will come from the adoption of sound chemical management and corporate social responsibility, but it recognised that this will face the challenge of economic disparity between countries and the potential export of regulatory risk from big chemical conglomerates to poorly regulated jurisdictions.

Assessing the influence of the Responsibility to Protect on the UN Security Council during the Arab Spring

This article challenges those perspectives which assert first, that the Security Council’s engagement with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) during the Arab Spring evidences a generally positive trend, and second, that the response to the Arab Spring, particularly Syria, highlights the need for veto restraint. With respect to the first point, the evidence presented in this article suggests that the manner in which R2P has been employed by the Security Council during this period evidences three key trends: first, a willingness to invoke R2P only in the context of Pillar I; second, a pronounced lack of consensus surrounding Pillar III; and third, the persistent prioritisation of national interests over humanitarian concerns. With respect to veto restraint, this article argues that there is no evidence that this idea will have any significant impact on decision-making at the Security Council; the Council’s response to the Arab Spring suggests that national interests continue to trump humanitarian need.

Student Satisfaction Negates Pedagogic Rights, Theirs and Ours!

This article outlines how the potential for students to be co-participants, via a critical education, risks being further co-opted through the marketization of higher education by constructing students as consumers with power over academics to make judgments on pedagogic quality through student satisfaction ratings. We start by outlining the relevant components of marketization processes, and their associated practices of financialization and managerialism that have developed in response to the “legitimation crisis” in HE and argue that these have profoundly altered the university landscape with a significant impact on our working practices. Student engagement is increasingly being appropriated as a quantifiable measurement of “student satisfaction”, which then profoundly alters the teaching and learning experience with different understandings of what acquiring knowledge requires and what it feels like. We draw on our experience of working in the post 1992 sector to describe how we are increasingly working under conditions of “reified exchange” and how this affects our relationships with students, other academics and management, eroding our pedagogic rights and theirs in the process. Specifically, we conclude that marketization is likely to further reduce the institutional space and opportunities for both lecturers and students to exercise their “pedagogic rights” to personal enhancement, social inclusion and civic participation through education.