Life histories of academics who become heads of department: socialisation, identity and career trajectory

Although the role of the academic head of department (HoD) has always been important to university management and performance, an increasing significance given to bureaucracy, academic performance and productivity, and government accountability has greatly elevated the importance of this position. Previous research and anecdotal evidence suggests that as academics move into HoD roles, usually with little or no training, they experience a problem of struggling to adequately manage key aspects of their role. It is this problem – and its manifestations – that forms the research focus of this study. Based on the research question, “What are the career trajectories of academics who become HoDs in a selected post-1992 university?” the study aimed to achieve greater understanding of why academics become HoDs, what it is like being a HoD, and how the experience influences their future career plans. The study adopts an interpretive approach, in line with social constructivism. Edited topical life history interviews were undertaken with 17 male and female HoDs, from a range of disciplines, in a post-1992 UK university. These data were analysed using coding, categorisation and theme formation techniques and developing profiles of each of the respondents. The findings from this study suggest that academics who become HoDs not only need the capacity to assume a range of personal and professional identities, but need to regularly adopt and switch between them. Whether individuals can successfully balance and manage these multiple identities, or whether they experience major conflicts and difficulties within or between them, greatly affects their experiences of being a HoD and may influence their subsequent career decisions. It is claimed that the focus, approach and analytical framework - based on the interrelationships between the concepts of socialisation, identity and career trajectory - provide a distinct and original contribution to knowledge in this area. Although the results of this study cannot be generalised, the findings may help other individuals and institutions move towards a firmer understanding of the academic who becomes HoD - in relation to theory, practice and future research.

Beyond the technical: a snapshot of energy and buildings research

The past decade has witnessed a sharp increase in published research on energy and buildings. This paper takes stock of work in this area, with a particular focus on construction research and the analysis of non-technical dimensions. While there is widespread recognition as to the importance of non-technical dimensions, research tends to be limited to individualistic studies of occupants and occupant behavior. In contrast, publications in the mainstream social science literature display a broader range of interests, including policy developments, structural constraints on the diffusion and use of new technologies and the construction process itself. The growing interest of more generalist scholars in energy and buildings provides an opportunity for construction research to engage a wider audience. This would enrich the current research agenda, helping to address unanswered problems concerning the relatively weak impact of policy mechanisms and new technologies and the seeming recalcitrance of occupants. It would also help to promote the academic status of construction research as a field. This, in turn, depends on greater engagement with interpretivist types of analysis and theory building, thereby challenging deeply ingrained views on the nature and role of academic research in construction.

Winckelmann and the invention of antiquity: history and aesthetics in the age of Altertumswissenschaft

This volume provides a new perspective on the emergence of the modern study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft, in eighteenth-century Germany through an exploration of debates that arose over the work of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann between his death in 1768 and the end of the century. This period has long been recognised as particularly formative for the development of modern classical studies, and over the past few decades has received increased attention from historians of scholarship and of ideas. Winckelmann's eloquent articulation of the cultural and aesthetic value of studying the ancient Greeks, his adumbration of a new method for studying ancient artworks, and his provision of a model of cultural-historical development in terms of a succession of period styles, influenced both the public and intra-disciplinary self-image of classics long into the twentieth century. Yet this area of Winckelmann's Nachleben has received relatively little attention compared with the proliferation of studies concerning his importance for late eighteenth-century German art and literature, for historians of sexuality, and his traditional status as a 'founder figure' within the academic disciplines of classical archaeology and the history of art. Harloe restores the figure of Winckelmann to classicists' understanding of the history of their own discipline and uses debates between important figures, such as Christian Gottlob Heyne, Friedrich August Wolf, and Johann Gottfried Herder, to cast fresh light upon the emergence of the modern paradigm of classics as Altertumswissenschaft: the multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, and historicizing study of the ancient world.

The impact of installer business models on the uptake of residential microgeneration in the UK: Evidence from a nation-wide survey

This paper arises from a doctoral thesis comparing the impact of alternative installer business models on the rate at which microgeneration is taken up in homes and installation standards across the UK. The paper presents the results of the first large-scale academic survey of businesses certified to install residential microgeneration. The aim is to systematically capture those characteristics which define the business model of each surveyed company, and relate these to the number, location and type of technologies that they install, and the quality of these installations. The methodology comprised a pilot web survey of 235 certified installer businesses, which was carried out in June last year and achieved a response rate of 30%. Following optimisation of the design, the main web survey was emailed to over 2000 businesses between October and December 2011, with 317 valid responses received. The survey is being complemented during summer 2012 by semi-structured interviews with a representative sample of installers who completed the main survey. The survey results are currently being analysed. The early results indicate an emerging and volatile market where solar PV, solar hot water and air source heat pumps are the dominant technologies. Three quarters of respondents are founders of their installer business, while only 22 businesses are owned by another company. Over half of the 317 businesses have five employees or less, while 166 businesses are no more than four years old. In addition, half of the businesses stated that 100% of their employees work on microgeneration-related activities. 85% of the surveyed companies have only one business location in the UK. A third of the businesses are based either in the South West or South East regions of England. This paper outlines the interim results of the survey combined with the outcomes from additional interviews with installers to date. The research identifies some of the business models underpinning microgeneration installers and some of the ways in which installer business models impact on the rate and standards of microgeneration uptake. A tentative conclusion is that installer business models are profoundly dependent on the levels and timing of support from the UK Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Heat Incentive.

Serving two masters: a reflective narrative of reconciling the tensions faced in designing doctoral research

This paper presents a reflective narrative of the process of designing a PhD project. Using the analogy of the play 'One Man, Two Guvnors' , this paper discusses the tensions a beginning researcher faces in reconciling her own vision for a project with the academic demands of doctoral-level study. Focusing on an ethnographic study of a reading group for visually-impaired people, the paper explores how the researcher's developing understanding of the considerations necessary when working with disabled people impacted on the research design. In particular, it focuses on the conflict faced by doctoral students when working in a paradigm that requires actively involving research participants, thereby relinquishing some control over the project. The aim of the paper is to provide an honest narrative that will resonate with other beginning researchers.

Methods to assess the effectiveness of naturally ventilated classrooms in Gauteng, South Africa

There is a tendency to reduce ventilation rates and natural or hybrid ventilation systems to ensure the conservation of energy in school buildings. However, high indoor pollutant concentration, due to natural or hybrid ventilation systems may have a significant adverse impact on the health and academic performance of pupils and students. Reviewed evidence shows that this can be detrimental to health and wellbeing in schools because of the learner density within a small area, eventually indicating that CO2 concentrations can rise to very high levels (about 4000 ppm) in classrooms during occupancy periods. In South Africa’s naturally ventilated classrooms, it is not clear whether the environmental conditions are conducive for learning. In addition, natural ventilation will be minimized given the fact that in cold, wet or windy weather, doors and windows will commonly remain closed. Evidence from literature based studies indicates that the significance of ventilation techniques is not understood satisfactorily and additional information concerning naturally ventilated schools has to be provided for better design and policy formulation. To develop a thorough understanding of the environments in classrooms, many other parameters have to be considered as well, such as outdoor air quality, CO2 concentrations, temperature and relative humidity and safety issues that may be important drawbacks for naturally ventilated schools. The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual understanding of methods that can be implemented to assess the effectiveness of naturally ventilated classrooms in Gauteng, South Africa. A theoretical concept with an embedded practical methodology have been proposed for the research programme to investigate the relationship between ventilation rates and learning in schools in Gauteng , a province in South Africa. It is important that existing and future school buildings must include adequate outdoor ventilation, control of moisture, and avoidance of indoor exposures to microbiologic and chemical substances considered likely to have adverse effects in South Africa. Adequate ventilation in classrooms is necessary to reduce and/or eradicate the transmission of indoor pollutants.

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

The later Anglo-Saxon settlement at Bishopstone. A downland manor in the making

This volume reports on the excavations from 2002 to 2005 designed to investigate this transition, with the focus on the origins of Bishopstone village. Excavations adjacent to St Andrew’s churchyard revealed a dense swathe of later Anglo-Saxon (8th- to late 10th-/early 11th-century) habitation, including a planned complex of ‘timber halls’, and a unique cellared tower. The occupation encroached upon a pre-Conquest cemetery of 43 inhumations. The report provides a comprehensive analysis, interpretation and academic contextualisation of the archaeological discoveries brought to light by these excavations, the first to sample a later Anglo-Saxon rural settlement in East Sussex on an extensive scale. The inter-disciplinary approach appraises the historical and topographical evidence alongside that recovered during the excavations.

Negotiating access into firms: obstacles and strategies

Researchers often experience difficulties with the negotiation of access into firms for the purpose of data collection. The question we explore is: What are the main obstacles associated with access negotiation into firms; and what strategies do researchers employ to increase their chances of success? Our research work on the tendering process of contractors took place between 2006 and 2008. We successfully negotiated access into four firms (two each in Ghana and the UK) to observe live examples of tender preparation The techniques we employed in negotiating access were personal contacts, contacting firms through online details and professional institutions, etc. With all of this effort, our average success rate was less than 5 per cent. The main obstacles encountered were firms’ reluctance because of commercial sensitiveness and fear that the data could eventually be divulged to their competitors or end up in the public domain. However, some firms agreed mainly because of the written assurances of confidentiality and anonymity in reporting the study; reputation of the researchers’ academic institution; gatekeepers who spoke to their colleagues on our behalf; academic purpose of the study; and a feedback report which was promised in return for access to the case studies. Although the access through personal contacts is by far the easiest, it is not always possible. Researchers can approach firms as complete strangers, especially in a foreign country, and that could make the firms more likely to assist the research.

An introduction to television studies. 3rd edition.

This is a comprehensive textbook for students of Television Studies, now updated for its third edition. The book provides students with a framework for understanding the key concepts and main approaches to Television Studies, including audience research, television history and broadcasting policy, and the analytical study of individual programmes. The book includes a glossary of key terms used in the television industry and in the academic study of television, there are suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, and chapters include suggested activities for use in class or as assignments. The case studies in the book include analysis of advertisements, approaches to news reporting, television scheduling, and challenges to television in new contexts of viewing on computers and mobile devices. The topics of individual chapters are: studying television, television histories, television cultures, television texts and narratives, television genres and formats, television production, television quality and value, television realities and representation, television censorship and regulation, television audiences, and the likely future for television.