Metodología y evaluación de personas adultas : II Escuela de Verano, Centro Regional de Educación de Personas Adultas, del 29 de junio al 1 de julio de 2000.

Se recogen las actas de la Segunda Escuela de Verano sobre la metodología y evaluación de la Educación de Personas Adultas. Incluye las ponencias y mesas redondas organizadas para este encuentro, los talleres, comunicaciones y experiencias. El trabajo presenta, como ideas principales, la metodología en la educación de adultos, amplia y variada, que debe permitir aplicar métodos adecuados, bien en grupo o mediante resolución de problemas u organización de talleres; y que el educador debe ser un experto en inserción social y profesional y poseer aptitudes positivas para las relaciones interpersonales. Por último, se mencionan algunas líneas de actuación para el desarrollo comunitario de estas personas y para prever las necesidades que surgirán en el futuro. Se destaca la necesidad de una permanente revisión de las demandas de educación permanente; de analizar las necesidades sociales de este grupo; y supervisar las acciones educativas para mejorar la eficacia; del trabajo en equipo, la coordinación de programas y las intervenciones multidisciplinares.

The European Union in the Arctic: A Pole Position? Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance Papers 4/2012, December 2012

With temperatures in the Arctic rising at twice the pace of anywhere else in the world, the European Union (EU) decided in 2008 to begin formulating an overall Arctic policy tackling maritime, environmental, energy and transport challenges. This attempt to draft a comprehensive policy on a topic that the EU had rarely touched upon unavoidably ran up against other existing strategies from Arctic and non-Arctic states. Against this background, this paper examines whether the EU’s current Arctic policy is conducive to framing a strategy that is both correctly targeted and flexible enough to represent Europe’s interests. It shows that the EU’s approach can serve as an effective foreign policy tool to establish the Union’s legitimacy as an Arctic player. However, the EU’s Arctic policy is still underestimating its potential to find common grounds with the strategic partners Russia and China. A properly targeted Arctic policy could help influence Russia over the EU’s interests in the Northern Sea Route and strengthen cooperation with China in an endeavour to gain recognition as relevant Arctic players.

Strategy clusters and sources of knowledge in French L2 listening comprehension

This article reports on an exploratory investigation into the listening strategies of lower-intermediate learners of French as an L2, including the sources of knowledge they employed in order to comprehend spoken French. Data from 14 learners were analysed to investigate whether employment of strategies in general and sources of knowledge in particular varied according to the underlying linguistic knowledge of the student. While low linguistic knowledge learners were less likely to deploy effectively certain strategies or strategy clusters, high linguistic knowledge levels were not always associated with effective strategy use. Similarly, while there was an association between linguistic knowledge and learners’ ability to draw on more than one source of knowledge in a facilitative manner, there was also evidence that learners tended to over-rely on linguistic knowledge where other sources, such as world knowledge, would have proved facilitative. We conclude by arguing for a fresh approach to listening pedagogy and research, including strategy instruction, bottom-up skill development and a consideration of the role of linguistic knowledge in strategy use.

Competitive strategy revisited: contested concepts and dynamic capabilities

Strategy is a contested concept. The generic literature is characterized by a diverse range of competing theories and alternative perspectives. Traditional models of the competitive strategy of construction firms have tended to focus on exogenous factors. In contrast, the resource-based view of strategic management emphasizes the importance of endogenous factors. The more recently espoused concept of dynamic capabilities extends consideration beyond static resources to focus on the ability of firms to reconfigure their operating routines to enable responses to changing environments. The relevance of the dynamics capabilities framework to the construction sector is investigated through an exploratory case study of a regional contractor. The focus on how firms continuously adapt to changing environments provides new insights into competitive strategy in the construction sector. Strong support is found for the importance of path dependency in shaping strategic choice. The case study further suggests that strategy is a collective endeavour enacted by a loosely defined group of individual actors. Dynamic capabilities are characterized by an empirical elusiveness and as such are best construed as situated practices embedded within a social and physical context.

The relative importance sector and regional factors in Italy

The benefits of sector and regional diversification have been well documented in the literature but have not previously been investigated in Italy. In addition, previous studies have used geographically defined regions, rather than economically functional areas, when performing the analysis even though most would argue that it is the economic structure of the area that will lead to differences in demand and hence property performance. This study therefore uses economically defined regions of Italy to test the relative benefits of regional diversification versus sector diversification within the Italian real estate portfolio. To examine this issue we use constrained cross-section regressions the on the sector and regional affiliation of 14 cities in Italy to extract the “pure” return effects of the different factors using annual data over the period 1989 to 2003. In contrast, to previous studies we find that regional factors effects in Italy have a much greater influence on property returns than sector-specific effects, which is probably a direct result of using the extremely diverse economic regions of Italy rather than arbitrary geographically locations. Be that as it may, the results strongly suggest that that diversification across the regions of Italy used here is likely to offer larger risk reduction benefits than a sector diversification strategy within a region. In other words, fund managers in Italy must monitor the regional composition of their portfolios more closely than its sector allocation. Additionally, the results supports that contemporary position that ‘regional areas’ based on economic function, provide greater diversification benefits rather than areas defined by geographical location.