Patterns of engagement in workplace learning amongst employees from social sectors

Continuous learning and development has become increasingly important in the information age. However, employees with limited formal education in lower status occupations may be disadvantaged in their opportunities for development, as their jobs tend to require more limited knowledge and skills. In mature age, such workers may be subject to cumulative disadvantage with respect to work related learning and development, as well as negative stereotyping. This thesis concerns work related learning and development from a lifespan development psychology perspective. Development across the lifespan is grounded in biocultural co-constructivism. That is, the reciprocal influences of the individual and environment produce change in the individual. Existing theories and models of adaptive development attempt to explain how developmental resources are allocated across the lifespan. These included the Meta- theory of Selective Optimisation with Compensation, Dual Process Model of Self Regulation, and Developmental Regulation via Optimisation and Primary and Secondary Control. These models were integrated to create the Model of Adaptive Development for Work Related Learning. The Learning and Development Survey (LDS) was constructed to measure the hypothesised processes of adaptive development for work related learning, which were individual goal selection, individual goal engagement, individual goal disengagement, organisational opportunities (selection and engagement), and organisational constraints. Data collection was undertaken in two phases: the pilot study and the main study. The objective of the pilot study was to test the LDS on a target population of 112 employees from a local government organisation. Exploratory factor analysis reduced the pilot version of the survey to 38 items encompassing eight constructs which covered the processes of the model of adaptive development for work related learning. In the main study, the Revised Learning and Development Survey (R-LDS) was administered to another group of 137 employees from the local government organisation, as well as 110 employees from a private healthcare organisation. The purpose of the main study was to validate the R-LDS on two different groups to provide evidence of stability, and compare survey scores according to age and occupational status to determine construct validity. Findings from the main study indicated that only four constructs of the R-LDS were stable, which were organisational opportunities – selection, individual goal engagement, organisational constraints – disengagement and organisational opportunities – engagement. In addition, MANOVA studies revealed that the demographic variables affected organisational opportunities and constraints in the workplace, although individual goal engagement was not influenced by age. The findings from the pilot and main study partially supported the model of adaptive development for work related learning. Given that only four factors displayed adequate reliability in terms of internal consistency and stability, the findings suggest that individual goal selection and individual goal disengagement are less relevant to work related learning and development. Some recent research which emerged during the course of the current study has suggested that individual goal selection and individual goal disengagement are more relevant when goal achievement is impeded by biological constraints such as ageing. However, correlations between the retained factors support the model of adaptive development for work related learning, and represent the role of biocultural co-constructivism in development. Individual goal engagement was positively correlated with both opportunity factors (selection and engagement), while organisational constraints – disengagement was negatively correlated with organisational opportunities – selection. Demographic findings indicated that higher occupational status was associated with more opportunities for development. Age was associated with fewer opportunities or greater constraints for development, especially for lower status workers.

Performance Research in Rangeland Communities

In 2003, Bill Dunstone, John McCallum and Paul Makeham began a collaboration with researchers at the Centre for the Management of Arid Environments (CMAE) in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. CMAE researchers are keen to develop 'people-oriented' strategies for implementing agricultural extension initiatives in their region. Traditional hierarchies of knowledge-transfer have impeded the 'connectedness' between community and researchers that gives meaning and relevance to useful practice (Ison and Russell, 2000). Our aim is to establish a partnership between the Live Events Research Network (LERN) and CMAE, investigating ways to link creative, performance-based research and practice with the scientific methodologies associated with natural resources management. This accords with recent work undertaken by Deborah Mills and Paul Brown, showing how community cultural development strategies enhance the implementation of policy concerned with community wellbeing. Mills and Brown 'adopted a concept of wellbeing which builds on a social and environmental view of health', and considered such themes as ecological sustainability, rural economic revitalisation, community strengthening, health and wellbeing (Mills, 2003). We propose that rangeland communities can creatively manage some of the challenges confronting them through performance-based projects which: - activate the stories through which a community enacts its sense of place; - facilitate live events in which the community enacts ownership of its culture and identity; - directly involve the community in the formulation of research issues

User-Created Content and Online Social Networks

Traditional media are under assault from digital technologies. Online advertising is eroding the financial basis of newspapers and television, demarcations between different forms of media are fading, and audiences are fragmenting. We can podcast our favourite radio show, data accompanies television programs, and we catch up with newspaper stories on our laptops. Yet mainstream media remain enormously powerful. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field. Fully updated and revised to take account of recent developments, this third edition outlines the key media industries and explains how communications technologies are impacting on them. It provides a thorough overview of the main approaches taken in studying the media, and includes new chapters on social media, gaming, telecommunications, sport and cultural diversity. With contributions from some of Australia's best researchers and teachers in the field, The Media and Communications in Australia is the most comprehensive and reliable introduction to media and communications available. It is an ideal student text, and a reference for teachers of media and anyone interested in this influential industry.

In-vehicle avatars to elicit social response and change driving behaviour

Social and psychological theories have provided a plethora of evidence showing that the physical difficulty to express appropriate social interactions between drivers expresses itself in aggression, selfish driving and anti-social behaviour. Therefore there is a need to improve interactions between drivers and allow clearer collective decision making between them. Personal characteristics and the driving situations play strong roles in driver’s aggression. Our approach is centered around the driving situation as opposed to focusing on personality characteristics. It examines aggression and manipulates contextual variables such as driver’s eye contact exchanges. This paper presents a new unobtrusive in-vehicle system that aims at communicating drivers’ intentions, elicit social responses and increasing mutual awareness. It uses eye gaze as a social cue to affect collective decision making with the view to contribute to safe driving. The authors used a driving simulator to design a case control experiment in which eye gaze movements are conveyed with an avatar. Participants were asked to drive through different types of intersections. An avatar representing the head of the other driver was displayed and driver behaviour was analysed. Significant eye gaze pattern difference where observed when an avatar was displayed. Drivers cautiously refer to the avatar when information is required on the intention of others (e.g. when they do not have the right of way). The majority of participants reported the perception of “being looked at”. The number of glances and time spent gazing at the avatar did not indicate an unsafe distraction by standards of in-vehicle device ergonomic design. Avatars were visually consulted primarily in less demanding driving situations, which underlines their non-distractive nature.

Youth identities : time, space and social exclusion : exploring youth policy and practice in Sheffield, 1999-2003

The type and quality of youth identities ascribed to young people living in residual housing areas present opportunities for action as well as structural constraints. In this book three ethnographies, based on a youth work practitioner's observations, interviews and participation in local networks, identify young people's resistant identities. Through an analysis of social exclusion, youth policies and interviews with young people, youth workers and their managers, the book outlines a contingent network of relationships that hinder informal learning. Globalisation, individualisation, welfare/education reform and the rise of cultural social movements act upon youth identities and steer youth policies to subordinate the notion of informal group learning. Drawing on Castells' and Touraine's sociological models of identity, the book explores youth as a category of time and residual housing areas as a category of space, as they pertain to local dynamics of social exclusion.

How can flexible learning centres use social networking to improve their ongoing educational assessments?

Most online assessment systems now incorporate social networking features, and recent developments in social media spaces include protocols that allow the synchronisation and aggregation of data across multiple user profiles. In light of these advances and the concomitant fear of data sharing in secondary school education this papers provides important research findings about generic features of online social networking, which educators can use to make sound and efficient assessments in collaboration with their students and colleagues. This paper reports on a design experiment in flexible educational settings that challenges the dichotomous legacy of success and failure evident in many assessment activities for at-risk youth. Combining social networking practices with the sociology of education the paper proposes that assessment activities are best understood as a negotiable field of exchange. In this design experiment students, peers and educators engage in explicit, "front-end" assessment (Wyatt-Smith, 2008) to translate digital artefacts into institutional, and potentiality economic capital without continually referring to paper based pre-set criteria. This approach invites students and educators to use social networking functions to assess “work in progress” and final submissions in collaboration, and in doing so assessors refine their evaluative expertise and negotiate the value of student’s work from which new criteria can emerge. The mobile advantages of web-based technologies aggregate, externalise and democratise this transparent assessment model for most, if not all, student work that can be digitally represented.

Queensland Aborigines, multiple realities and the social sources of suffering: Psychiatry and moral regions of being (Part 1)

This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico-religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal „other‟ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio- political realities. I conclude that the residents‟ narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream „commonsense‟ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.

Social support and fires in the workplace : a preliminary investigation

Workers who experience fire in the workplace are faced with disruption to their work routine, as well as the emotional strain of the fire. In the broader occupational stress literature, researchers have suggested that social support will be most effective at reducing the negative effects of stressors on strain when the type of support matches the type of stressor being experienced (either instrumental or emotional). This study was a preliminary investigation into employee responses to less routine stressors, such as workplace fires, and the role of different sources of social support in predicting coping effectiveness. This study also was a first attempt at considering the influence of the social context (in terms of group identification) on the effectiveness of social support as a predictor of coping effectiveness. Specifically, it was predicted that social support would be more effective when it came from multiple sources within the organization, that it would be especially effective when provided from a group that workers identified more strongly with, and that simply feeling part of a group would improve adjustment. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 33 employees who had recently experienced a significant fire in their workplace. Results suggested that the type of stressors experienced and the type of support were mismatched, but despite this, coping effectiveness was generally moderate to high. There was mixed support for predictions about the effects of social support–no moderating effect of group identification on coping effectiveness was observed for measures of workplace support, although it did moderate the effects of family support on this adjustment indicator.

Demographic category membership and leadership in small groups : a social identity analysis

Developing the social identity theory of leadership (e.g., [Hogg, M. A. (2001). A social identity theory of leadership. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 184–200]), an experiment (N=257) tested the hypothesis that as group members identify more strongly with their group (salience) their evaluations of leadership effectiveness become more strongly influenced by the extent to which their demographic stereotype-based impressions of their leader match the norm of the group (prototypicality). Participants, with more or less traditional gender attitudes (orientation), were members, under high or low group salience conditions (salience), of non-interactive laboratory groups that had “instrumental” or “expressive” group norms (norm), and a male or female leader (leader gender). As predicted, these four variables interacted significantly to affect perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Reconfiguration of the eight conditions formed by orientation, norm and leader gender produced a single prototypicality variable. Irrespective of participant gender, prototypical leaders were considered more effective in high then low salience groups, and in high salience groups prototypical leaders were more effective than less prototypical leaders. Alternative explanations based on status characteristics and role incongruity theory do not account well for the findings. Implications of these results for the glass ceiling effect and for a wider social identity analysis of the impact of demographic group membership on leadership in small groups are discussed.

Navigating iScapes : Australian youth constructing identities and social relations in a network society

This paper extends Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” to delineate what we see as “iScapes”. We contend that iScapes captures the way online technologies shape interactions that invariably filter into offline contexts, giving shape and meaning to human actions and motivations. By drawing on research on high school students’ online activities we examine the flow of iScapes they inhabit in the process of constructing identities and forming social relations.

Disrupting the new orthodoxy : emergency intervention and Indigenous social policy

This article develops a critical analysis of the ideological framework that informed the Australian Federal government’s 2007 intervention into Northern Territory Indigenous communities (ostensibly to address the problem of child sexual abuse). Continued by recently elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, the NT ‘emergency response’ has aroused considerable public debate and scholarly inquiry. In addressing what amounts to a broad bi-partisan approach to Indigenous issues we highlight the way in which Indigenous communities are problematised and therefore subject to interventionist regimes that override differentiated Indigenous voices and intensify an internalised sense of rage occasioned by disempowering interventionist projects. We further argue that in rushing through the emergency legislation and suspending parts of the Racial Discrimination Act, the Howard and Rudd governments have in various ways perpetuated racialised and neo-colonial forms of intervention that override the rights of Indigenous people. Such policy approaches require critical understanding on the part of professions involved most directly in community practice, particularly when it comes to mounting effective opposition campaigns. The article offers a contribution to this end.

Comprehension as social and intellectual practice : rebuilding curriculum in low socioeconomic and cultural minority schools

This article reframes the concept of comprehension as a social and intellectual practice. It reviews current approaches to reading instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse and low socioeconomic students, noting an emphasis on comprehension as autonomous skills. The Four Resources model (Freebody & Luke, 1990) is used to make the case for the integration of comprehension instruction with an emphasis on student cultural and community knowledge, and substantive intellectual and sociocultural content in elementary school curricula. Illustrations are drawn from research underway on the teaching of literacy in primary schools in low SES communities.

Psychological predictors of young adults' use of social networking sites

Young people are increasingly using social networking sites (SNSs), like Myspace and Facebook, to engage with others. The use of SNSs can have both positive and negative effects on the individual; however, few research studies identify the types of people who frequent these Internet sites. This study sought to predict young adults’ use of SNSs and addictive tendency towards the use of SNSs from their personality characteristics and levels of self-esteem. University students (N = 201), aged 17 to 24 years, reported their use of SNSs and addictive tendencies for SNSs use, and completed the NEO Five-Factor Personality Inventory 1 and the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory.2 Multiple regression analyses revealed that, as a group, the personality and self-esteem factors significantly predicted both level of SNS use and addictive tendency but did not explain a large amount of variance in either outcome measure. The findings indicated that extraverted and unconscientious individuals reported higher levels of both SNS use and addictive tendencies. Future research should attempt to identify which other psychosocial characteristics explain young people’s level of use and propensity for addictive tendencies for these popular Internet sites.

The experience of emotional expression in the context of social relations for people diagnosed with schizophrenia : a phenomenological explication

The experience of emotional expression in the context of social relations is not well understood for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Early phenomenological research on the experience of people diagnosed with schizophrenia traditionally focussed on self experience in isolation from others, with later research explicating isolated aspects of self experience in relation to others. The current research aimed to focus on the progressive experience of emotional expression of people diagnosed with schizophrenia in relation to others over 12 months, in order to gain a broad spectrum of experience. This study involved unstructured interviews with 7 participants, an average of 4 times each, over a period of 12 months. Due to the unstructured nature of the interviews, a great breadth of experience was explicated. From the interviews there emerged 6 themes grouped together as a transition into, and 5 themes grouped together as a recovery from, symptoms associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Special significance was given to the theme of relational confusion as an experience that provides an understanding of the relationship between social stressors and personal characteristics with responses that are associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was suggested that participants experienced themselves, including their distancing and isolating responses, as a part of a social system. The breadth of experiences that emerged afforded a framework of experiences within which prior phenomenological research findings on static moments of experience have been located. A more meaningful understanding of the transitioning into and recovery from the experiences associated with a diagnosis of schizophrenia will afford advances in mental health practice.