Teachers' professional development in a community

The goal of this article was to study teachers' professional development related to web-based learning in the context of the teacher community. The object was to learn in what kind of networks teachers share the knowledge of web-based learning and what are the factors in the community that support or challenge teachers professional development of web-based learning. The findings of the study revealed that there are teachers who are especially active, called the central actors in this study, in the teacher community who collaborate and share knowledge of web-based learning. These central actors share both technical and pedagogical knowledge of web-based learning in networks that include both internal and external relations in the community and involve people, artefacts and a variety of media. Furthermore, the central actors appear to bridge different fields of teaching expertise in their community. According to the central actors' experiences the important factors that support teachers' professional development of web-based learning in the community are; the possibility to learn from colleagues and from everyday working practices, an emotionally safe atmosphere, the leader's personal support and community-level commitment. Also, the flexibility in work planning, challenging pupils, shared lessons with colleagues, training events in an authentic work environment and colleagues' professionalism are considered meaningful for professional development. As challenges, the knowledge sharing of web-based learning in the community needs mutual interests, transactive memory, time and facilities, peer support, a safe atmosphere and meaningful pedagogical practices. On the basis of the findings of the study it is suggested that by intensive collaboration related to web-based learning it may be possible to break the boundaries of individual teachership and create such sociocultural activities which support collaborative professional development in the teacher community. Teachers' in-service training programs should be more sensitive to the culture of teacher communities and teachers' reciprocal relations. Further, teacher trainers should design teachers' in-service training of web-based learning in co-evolution with supporting networks which include the media and artefacts as well as people.

Exceptional or just well connected? Political entrepreneurs and brokers in policy making

Policy brokers and policy entrepreneurs are assumed to have a decisive impact on policy outcomes. Their access to social and political resources is contingent on their influence on other agents. In social network analysis (SNA), entrepreneurs are often closely associated with brokers, because both are agents presumed to benefit from bridging structural holes; for example, gaining advantage through occupying a strategic position in relational space. Our aim here is twofold. First, to conceptually and operationally differentiate policy brokers from policy entrepreneurs premised on assumptions in the policy-process literature; and second, via SNA, to use the output of core algorithms in a cross-sectional analysis of political brokerage and political entrepreneurship. We attempt to simplify the use of graph algebra in answering questions relevant to policy analysis by placing each algorithm within its theoretical context. In the methodology employed, we first identify actors and graph their relations of influence within a specific policy event; then we select the most central actors; and compare their rank in a series of statistics that capture different aspects of their network advantage. We examine betweenness centrality, positive and negative Bonacich power, Burt’s effective size and constraint and honest brokerage as paradigmatic. We employ two case studies to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of each algorithm for differentiating between brokers and entrepreneurs: one on Swiss climate policy and one on EU competition and transport policy.

La intervención de las empresas en los dispositivos de inclusión sociolaboral de jóvenes en la Ciudad de Resistencia

Las prácticas laborales en empresas y pasantías configuran, en las últimas décadas, una de las estrategias promovidas desde los programas sociolaborales para mejorar el acceso de los jóvenes a ocupaciones dentro del sector formal de la economía. En este trabajo realizamos una discusión sobre el alcance y las particularidades de este tipo de intervenciones, focalizando el análisis en las características que asume la participación del sector empresarial. En el texto, luego de una breve revisión del estado del arte sobre el tema, presentamos los avances de un estudio en el que analizamos los primeros resultados de un programa que actualmente se implementa en la Ciudad de Resistencia (Provincia del Chaco) e incluye este tipo de acciones. Además de identificar los ejes teóricos-conceptuales que orientan la propuesta y sus principales componentes, intentamos caracterizar el perfil de aquellas organizaciones que se sumaron a la propuesta, los motivos que orientaron esta decisión y algunas de sus prácticas, como uno de los actores centrales del programa

La intervención de las empresas en los dispositivos de inclusión sociolaboral de jóvenes en la Ciudad de Resistencia

Las prácticas laborales en empresas y pasantías configuran, en las últimas décadas, una de las estrategias promovidas desde los programas sociolaborales para mejorar el acceso de los jóvenes a ocupaciones dentro del sector formal de la economía. En este trabajo realizamos una discusión sobre el alcance y las particularidades de este tipo de intervenciones, focalizando el análisis en las características que asume la participación del sector empresarial. En el texto, luego de una breve revisión del estado del arte sobre el tema, presentamos los avances de un estudio en el que analizamos los primeros resultados de un programa que actualmente se implementa en la Ciudad de Resistencia (Provincia del Chaco) e incluye este tipo de acciones. Además de identificar los ejes teóricos-conceptuales que orientan la propuesta y sus principales componentes, intentamos caracterizar el perfil de aquellas organizaciones que se sumaron a la propuesta, los motivos que orientaron esta decisión y algunas de sus prácticas, como uno de los actores centrales del programa

La intervención de las empresas en los dispositivos de inclusión sociolaboral de jóvenes en la Ciudad de Resistencia

Las prácticas laborales en empresas y pasantías configuran, en las últimas décadas, una de las estrategias promovidas desde los programas sociolaborales para mejorar el acceso de los jóvenes a ocupaciones dentro del sector formal de la economía. En este trabajo realizamos una discusión sobre el alcance y las particularidades de este tipo de intervenciones, focalizando el análisis en las características que asume la participación del sector empresarial. En el texto, luego de una breve revisión del estado del arte sobre el tema, presentamos los avances de un estudio en el que analizamos los primeros resultados de un programa que actualmente se implementa en la Ciudad de Resistencia (Provincia del Chaco) e incluye este tipo de acciones. Además de identificar los ejes teóricos-conceptuales que orientan la propuesta y sus principales componentes, intentamos caracterizar el perfil de aquellas organizaciones que se sumaron a la propuesta, los motivos que orientaron esta decisión y algunas de sus prácticas, como uno de los actores centrales del programa

No more free beer tomorrow? Economic policy and outcomes in Australia and New Zealand since 1984

There are no controlled experiments in macroeconomic policy, nor in systematic programs of microeconomic reform, but a comparison between New Zealand and Australia over the period since 1984 provides as close an approach to such an experiment as is ever likely to be possible. From quite similar starting points the two countries pursued liberal reform programs that differed sharply, mainly as a result of exogenous differences in constitutional structures and the personal styles of the central actors. Australia followed a more cautious, piecemeal, consensus-based approach, whereas New Zealand, in contrast, adopted a radical, rapid, 'purist' platform. The NZ reform package was generally seen by contemporary commentators as representing a 'textbook' model for best practice reform. However, Australia since 1984 has performed much better than New Zealand, whose per capita GDP growth indeed ranked at or near the bottom of the OECD. In this paper, we assess a variety of explanations for the divergences in policies and outcomes.

Ink Under the Fingernails: Making Print in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

Structural and agentic analysis of supply-chains: a social network analysis approach

This research adds to a body of work exploring the role of Social Network Analysis (SNA) in the study of both relational and structural characteristics of supply chain networks. Two contrasting network cases (food enterprises and digital-based enterprises) are chosen in order to elicit structural differences in business networks subject to divergences in local embeddedness and the relative materiality of the goods and services produced. Our analysis and findings draw out differences in network structure as evidenced by metrics of network centralization and cohesion, the presence of components and other sub-groupings, and the position of central actors. We relate these structural features both to the nature of the networks and to the (qualitative) experiences of the actors themselves. We find, in particular, the role of customers as co-creators of knowledge (for the Food network), the central role of infrastructure and services (for the Digital network), the importance of ICT as a source of codified knowledge inputs, along with the continuing importance of geographical proximity for the development and transfer of tacit knowledge and for incremental learning.

(N)um lugar ao sol: contributos do turismo para as dinâmicas criativas e para a atração da classe criativa no Algarve

Tese de Doutoramento, Turismo, Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Algarve, 2016

The Limits of Rational Choice: New Institutionalism in the Test Bed of Central Banking Politics in Australia

This paper tests the explanatory capacities of different versions of new institutionalism by examining the Australian case of a general transition in central banking practice and monetary politics: namely, the increased emphasis on low inflation and central bank independence. Standard versions of rational choice institutionalism largely dominate the literature on the politics of central banking, but this approach (here termed RC1) fails to account for Australian empirics. RC1 has a tendency to establish actor preferences exogenously to the analysis; actors' motives are also assumed a priori; actor's preferences are depicted in relatively static, ahistorical terms. And there is the tendency, even a methodological requirement, to assume relatively simple motives and preference sets among actors, in part because of the game theoretic nature of RC1 reasoning. It is possible to build a more accurate rational choice model by re-specifying and essentially updating the context, incentives and choice sets that have driven rational choice in this case. Enter RC2. However, this move subtly introduces methodological shifts and new theoretical challenges. By contrast, historical institutionalism uses an inductive methodology. Compared with deduction, it is arguably better able to deal with complexity and nuance. It also utilises a dynamic, historical approach, and specifies (dynamically) endogenous preference formation by interpretive actors. Historical institutionalism is also able to more easily incorporate a wider set of key explanatory variables and incorporate wider social aggregates. Hence, it is argued that historical institutionalism is the preferred explanatory theory and methodology in this case.

Estudo da qualidade organizacional da unidade de rastreio da retinopatia diabética do Alentejo central: projecto de intervenção comunitária em saúde

Mestrado em Intervenção Sócio-Organizacional na Saúde - Área de especialização: Políticas de Gestão e Administração dos Serviços de Saúde.

ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems

A foundational model of concurrency is developed in this thesis. We examine issues in the design of parallel systems and show why the actor model is suitable for exploiting large-scale parallelism. Concurrency in actors is constrained only by the availability of hardware resources and by the logical dependence inherent in the computation. Unlike dataflow and functional programming, however, actors are dynamically reconfigurable and can model shared resources with changing local state. Concurrency is spawned in actors using asynchronous message-passing, pipelining, and the dynamic creation of actors. This thesis deals with some central issues in distributed computing. Specifically, problems of divergence and deadlock are addressed. For example, actors permit dynamic deadlock detection and removal. The problem of divergence is contained because independent transactions can execute concurrently and potentially infinite processes are nevertheless available for interaction.

La negociación política del Tratado de Libre Comercio entre Estados Unidos y los países andinos (Tema Central)

El artículo presenta algunos elementos que permiten constatar que la negociación para la firma de un Tratado de Libre Comercio va más allá del tema comercial y se inscribe, tarrlbién, en una esfera política. Para esto la autora analiza lo que han sido las negociaciones para la firma del TLC entre Estados Unidos y los países andinos, señalando que en esta otra "negociación política" se ven involucrados diversos actores como empresas, ONG's, organizaciones de trabajadores, entre otros.

Elementos para una política exterior ambiental (Tema Central)

La necesidad de una política exterior ecuatoriana en lo ambiental surge de la naturaleza global del medio ambiente, de la responsabilidad del Ecuador como país privilegiado por su megadiversidad, de la vinculación inevitable entre la pobreza que le aqueja y la degradación del ambiente y de los compromisos internacionales por él adquiridos. Una política exterior ambiental debe resultar de un proceso de diseño en que participen todos los actores de la temática ambiental, aunque su ejecución debe estar centralizada en un órgano gubernamental. Se sugieren algunos temas específicos que deberían formar parte de una agenda internacional del Ecuador en lo ambiental.

Inserción del Ecuador a la Cuenca del Pacífico. ¿Qué debemos esperar del nuevo gobierno? (Tema Central)

La autora sostiene que, a diferencia de los actores asiáticos que se mueven dentro de las políticas definidas por los organismos regionales, los organismos multilaterales latinoamericanos no son tan eficientes para cumplir su rol de interlocutores con el Asia Pacífico. Al diseñar sus políticas exteriores hacia los países asiáticos, Ecuador no debe obnubilarse por la extensión geográfica, la magnitud de su población o las economías de escala. Las oportunidades están en la posibilidad de ofrecer un mercado ampliado hacia la región andina.