Gender equality and religion:a multi-faith exploration of young adults’ narratives

This paper presents findings from research on young adults in the UK from diverse religious backgrounds. Utilizing questionnaires, interviews, and video diaries it assesses how religious young adults understood and managed the tensions in popular discourse between gender equality as an enshrined value and aspirational narrative, and religion as purportedly instituting gender inequality. We show that, despite varied understandings, and the ambivalence and tension in managing ideal and practice, participants of different religious traditions and genders were committed to gender equality. Thus, they viewed gender-unequal practices within their religious cultures as an aberration from the essence of religion. In this way, they firmly rejected the dominant discourse that religion is inherently antithetical to gender equality.

Solid intentions:an archival ethnography of corporate architecture and organizational remembering

Research on organizational spaces has not considered the importance of collective memory for the process of investing meaning in corporate architecture. Employing an archival ethnography approach, practices of organizational remembering emerge as a way to shape the meanings associated with architectural designs. While the role of monuments and museums are well established in studies of collective memory, this research extends the concept of spatiality to the practices of organizational remembering that focus on a wider selection of corporate architecture. By analyzing the historical shift from colonial to modernist architecture for banks and retailers in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s on the basis of documents and photographs from three different companies, this article shows how archival sources can be used to untangle the ways in which companies seek to ascribe meaning to their architectural output. Buildings allude to the past and the future in a range of complex ways that can be interpreted more fully by reference to the archival sources and the historical context of their creation. Social remembering has the potential to explain why and how buildings have meaning, while archival ethnography offers a new research approach to investigate changing organizational practices.

A cloud-based farm management system:architecture and implementation

Recent technological advances have paved the way for developing and offering advanced services for the stakeholders in the agricultural sector. A paradigm shift is underway from proprietary and monolithic tools to Internet-based, cloud hosted, open systems that will enable more effective collaboration between stakeholders. This new paradigm includes the technological support of application developers to create specialized services that will seamlessly interoperate, thus creating a sophisticated and customisable working environment for the end users. We present the implementation of an open architecture that instantiates such an approach, based on a set of domain independent software tools called "generic enablers" that have been developed in the context of the FI-WARE project. The implementation is used to validate a number of innovative concepts for the agricultural sector such as the notion of a services' market place and the system's adaptation to network failures. During the design and implementation phase, the system has been evaluated by end users, offering us valuable feedback. The results of the evaluation process validate the acceptance of such a system and the need of farmers to have access to sophisticated services at affordable prices. A summary of this evaluation process is also presented in this paper. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

A process framework for selecting supply system architecture in manufacturing supply chains and networks

The process framework comprises three phases, as follows: scope the supply chain/network; identify the options for supply system architecture and select supply system architecture. It facilitates a structured approach that analyses the supply chain/network contextual characteristics, in order to ensure alignment with the appropriate supply system architecture. The process framework was derived from comprehensive literature review and archival case study analysis. The review led to the classification of supply system architectures according to their orientation, whether integrated; partially integrated; co-ordinated or independent. The classification was combined with the characteristics that influence the selection of supply system architecture to encapsulate the conceptual framework. It builds upon existing frameworks and methodologies by focusing on structured procedure; supporting project management; facilitating participation and clarifying point of entry. The process framework was initially tested in three case study applications from the food, automobile and hand tool industries. A variety of industrial settings was chosen to illustrate transferability. The case study applications indicate that the process framework is a valid approach to the problem; however, further testing is required. In particular, the use of group support system technologies to support the process and the steps involving the participation of software vendors need further testing. However, the process framework can be followed due to the clarity of its presentation. It considers the issue of timing by including alternative decision-making techniques, dependent on the constraints. It is useful for ensuring a sound business case is developed, with supporting documentation and analysis that identifies the strategic and functional requirements of supply system architecture.

The global audit profession and the international financial architecture:understanding regulatory relationships at a time of financial crisis

This paper explores how regulatory relationships in the global audit arena are being affected by the current financial crisis. Key policy initiatives and debates are analyzed, along with institutional interactions, in particular between the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), international regulators and the large audit firms. The events are placed in the context of the new international financial architecture which has developed over the last decade. Using the illustrative lens of bank auditing, questions are asked of the nature and status of audit practice and the regulatory arrangements governing such practice. The paper shows the active nature of the regulatory responses to the crisis and the shifting and competing influences among key regulatory and professional participants in the global audit arena. Emphasis is placed on the need for audit researchers to be sensitive to the developing global financial architecture, and its potential implications for the study of audit practice in different national and international contexts.

A social role for churches and cultural demarcation:how German MEPs represent religion in the European Parliament

This study deals with the question of how German members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent the German model of religion–state relations at the European level. Based on a survey and interviews with German MEPs as well as a content-analysis of German MEPs’ speeches, motions and parliamentary questions during the seventh term of the European Parliament (EP), our study demonstrates that this model is represented in three dimensions. First, German MEPs reflect the close cooperation between the churches and the state in Germany, primarily on social issues, through largely church- and religion-friendly attitudes and relatively frequent contacts with religious interest-groups. Second, by referring to religious freedoms and minorities primarily outside the EU and by placing Islam in considerably more critical contexts than Christianity, German MEPs create a cultural demarcation line between Islam and Christianity through their parliamentary activities, which is similar to, though less politicised than, cultural boundaries often produced in public debates in Germany. Third, our study illustrates similar patterns of religious affiliation and subjective religiosity among German parliamentarians in both the EP and the national Parliament, which to some degree also reflect societal trends in Germany. Yet our data also suggest that European political elites are more religious than the average German population. If the presence of religion in terms of religious interest-groups and arguments is included, the EP appears to be more secularist than the German Parliament.

The unhappy marriage of religion and politics:problems and pitfalls for gender equality

This article explores how religion as a political force shapes and deflects the struggle for gender equality in contexts marked by different histories of nation building and challenges of ethnic diversity, different state–society relations (from the more authoritarian to the more democratic), and different relations between state power and religion (especially in the domain of marriage, family and personal laws). It shows how ‘private’ issues, related to the family, sexuality and reproduction, have become sites of intense public contestation between conservative religious actors wishing to regulate them based on some transcendent moral principle, and feminist and other human rights advocates basing their claims on pluralist and time- and context-specific solutions. Not only are claims of ‘divine truth’ justifying discriminatory practices against women hard to challenge, but the struggle for gender equality is further complicated by the manner in which it is closely tied up with, and inseparable from, struggles for social and economic justice, ethnic/racial recognition, and national self-determination vis-à-vis imperial/global domination.