Children's lives, children's futures: A study of children starting secondary school

This title presents a fascinating analysis of how children in their first year of high school feel about their schools, its place in their lives and its role in their futures. This highly topical monograph focuses on how children in their first year of high school feel about school, its place in their lives and its role in their futures. The theoretical context of the study is the focus in educational studies on children's voice and children's active role in education, together with the focus in the sociology of childhood on children as active constructors of their lives and childhood as a subject of serious study. The importance of young people's life plans and the alignment between education and ambitions was recognized in the Sloan Foundation study of American teenagers. In many Western societies there is concern that children from less advantaged social backgrounds have limited aspirations, and are disproportionately unlikely to go to university. This book is highly relevant to understanding the nature of children's engagement with education, the choices and constraints they experience and the reasons some young people fail to take advantage of educational opportunities. "Continuum Studies in Educational Research" (CSER) is a major new series in the field of educational research. Written by experts and scholars for experts and scholars, this ground-breaking series focuses on research in the areas of comparative education, history, lifelong learning, philosophy, policy, post-compulsory education, psychology and sociology. Based on cutting edge research and written with lucidity and passion, the CSER series showcases only those books that really matter in education - studies that are major, that will be remembered for having made a difference.

Consumption of welfare-friendly food products in Great Britain, Italy and Sweden, and how it may be influenced by consumer attitudes to, and behaviour towards, animal welfare attributes

The interest in animal welfare and welfare-friendly food products has been increasing in Europe over the last 10 years. The media, highlighting traditional farming methods and food scares such as those related to salmonella, bovine spongiform encephalopathy/variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (BSE) and avian influenza, have brought the methods of animal farming to public attention. Concerns about farm animal welfare are reflected in the increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans and an increase in consumers wishing to purchase food which is more animal welfare-friendly. This paper considers consumers’ attitudes to animal welfare and to marketing practices, such as product labelling, welfare grading systems and food assurance marks using comparative data collected in a survey of around 1500 consumers in each of Great Britain, Italy and Sweden as part of the EU-funded Welfare Quality research project. The findings suggest a need for the provision of improved consumer information on the welfare provenance of food using appropriate product labelling and other methods.

Effect of priming cooperation or individualism on a collective and interdependent task: changeover speed in the 4 x 100-meter relay race

Priming effects of cooperation vs. individualism were investigated on changeover speed within a 4 x 100-m relay race. Ten teams of four adult beginner athletes ran two relays, a pretest race and an experimental race 3 weeks later. Just before the experimental race, athletes were primed with either cooperation or individualism through a scrambled-sentence task. Comparing to the pretest performance, cooperation priming improved baton speed in the exchange zone (+30 cm/s). Individualism priming did not impair changeover performance. The boundary conditions of priming effects applied to collective and interdependent tasks are discussed within the implicit coordination framework.

Recent trends in UK Government policy on the provision and management of leisure facilities

Since the first election victory of the Thatcher administration in 1979, Britain has witnessed a cultural transformation from the municipal socialism of the post-World War 2 Welfare State to a form of post-industrial entrepreneurialism. This has had a profound effect on all aspects of civil society, not least the redefinition of the role of active leisure from the 1950s evocation of 'Sport For All' to the market rationality of the 1980s. The transformation has signalled a shift from government support for active leisure as an element of citizen rights to the use of leisure to promote the government's interest in legitimating a new social order based not on rights but on means. Thus access to active living is no longer a societal goal for all, but a discretionary consumer good, the consumption of which signifies 'active' citizenship. It furthermore signifies differentiation from the growing mass of 'deviants' who are unwilling or unable to embrace this new construction of citizenship and are, therefore, increasingly denied access to active living and, hence, active citizenship.

Language capital and development: the case of African language publishing for children in South Africa

In recognizing 11 official languages, the 1996 South African Constitution provides a context for the management of diversity with important implications for the redistribution of wealth and power. The development and implementation of the language-in-education policies which might be expected to flow from the Constitution, however, have been slow and ineffective. One of the casualties of government procrastination has been African language publishing. In the absence of well-resourced bilingual education, most learners continue to be taught through the medium of English as a second language. Teachers are reluctant to use more innovative pedagogies without the support of adequate African language materials and publishers are cautious about producing such materials. Nonetheless, activity in this sector offers many opportunities for African language speakers. This paper explores the challenges and constraints for African language publishing for children and argues that market forces and language policy need to work in mutually reinforcing ways. Further progress is necessarily dependent on the political will to implement language-in-education policies that promote additive bilingualism and, in the process, guarantee sales for risk-averse publishers.

Pushing the boundaries of the social: private agri-food standards and the governance of Fair Trade in European public procurement

The article explores how fair trade and associated private agri-food standards are incorporated into public procurement in Europe. Procurement law is underpinned by principles of equity, non-discrimination and transparency; one consequence is that legal obstacles exist to fair trade being privileged within procurement practice. These obstacles have pragmatic dimensions, concerning whether and how procurement can be used to fulfil wider social policy objectives or to incorporate private standards; they also bring to the fore underlying issues of value. Taking an agency-based approach and incorporating the concept of governability, empirical evidence demonstrates the role played by different actors in negotiating fair trade’s passage into procurement through pre-empting and managing legal risk. This process exposes contestations that arise when contrasting values come together within sustainable procurement. This examination of fair trade in public procurement helps reveal how practices and knowledge on ethical consumption enter into a new governance arena within the global agri-food system.

Sport and re/creation: what skateboarders can teach us about learning

This paper explores the role of digital media and creativity in the processes of learning that occur in groups of urban skateboarders. In particular, it examines how the production and consumption of amateur videos contribute to both skaters’ mastery of the techniques of the sport and their integration into the culture of the sport. The data come from an ethnographic study of skateboarders in Hong Kong, which included in-depth interviews, participant observation and the collection of texts and artifacts like magazines, blog entries and amateur skating videos. Skateboarders use video in a number of ways that significantly impact their learning and integration into their communities. They use it to analyze tricks and techniques, to document the stages of their learning and socialization into the group, to set community standards, to build a sense of belonging with their ‘crews’ and to imagine ‘idealized futures’ for themselves and their communities. Understanding the value and function of such ‘semiotic mediation’ in learning and socialization into sport cultures, I suggest, can contribute to helping physical educators design tasks that integrate training in physical skills with opportunities for students to make meaning around their experiences of sport and physical education.

Myth and Society: Functions, Uses, and Abuses of Myth in Society

In this work, I will discuss the integral role that myth has in society and then, after presenting several examples of this thesis, I will examine how the integral nature of myth lends itself to certain societal abuses. These abuses often result in unjust social constructs that eventually become attributed to the myth. I would like to proceed in defense of myth; that is, that these constructs are not to be attributed to the myths themselves, rather, society has taken myth and applied it to suit its purposes, ignoring the context in which the myths originated. Hopefully this will raise society's current attitudes toward myth to a level of respect, and will also help to clear myth of its reputation as the origin of injustice and domination.

The public choice sedition: variations on the theme of scientific warfare

Given a significant element of truth in "Public Choice", a modest element must be found when a similar approach is made to the behavior of economic scientists. Harry Johnson found this in "The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution". Following him, I find more in the Public Choice "Revolution" itself. The basic visions, assumptions and methods of the latter are appraised within its time-space stream. "Variations on a theme by Buchanan" or "The B- and F-Twist" could have been suggestive subtitles for this paper -- an embrycnic Economics of Knowledge, a complement to the Sociology of Knowledge.

The role of law and public-private collaboration in promoting innovative firms in Brazil: the case of the BNDES and the “criatec fund”

This paper presents the result of a qualitative empirical research about the “Criatec Fund”, a venture capital fund, privately managed and directed to innovative firms, that was created in 2007 by the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). The paper discusses the role of law in the implementation of the Criatec Fund in three different legal dimensions: structural, regulatory and contractual. Based on interviews, this paper tries to test some hypothesis previously formulated by some scholars that studied new financial policies created by the BNDES. This study explains the institutional arrangements of this seed capital policy and the role of flexible legal instruments in the execution of this peculiar type of publicprivate partnership. It also poses some questions to the “law and development agenda” based on some insights from the economic sociology of law.

Characteristics of family nucleus as correlates of regular participation in sports among adolescents

Objectives To estimate the relationship between family nucleus and sport practice among adolescents.Methods A school-based cross-sectional study carried out with 1,752 Brazilian adolescents (812 male and 940 female), aged 11-17 years. Characteristics of the family nucleus (parental education, socioeconomic status and number of siblings) and sport practice (>= 240 min/week) were assessed by questionnaires. Adjusted prevalence ratios were estimated using Poisson regression models.Results The overall prevalence of sport practice was 14.8% (boys 21.2% and girls 9.4%, P = 0.001). Higher socioeconomic status, number of siblings and parents' educational level were associated with more sport practice.Conclusion Despite the low engagement, family nucleus plays an essential role in the sport practice of our sample of Brazilian adolescents.

Investigation of Risk Factors and Characteristics of Dance Injuries

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)