(Un)doing gender : ways of being in an age of uncertainty

Children’s literature has conventionally and historically been concerned with identity and the often tortuous journey to becoming a subject who is generally older and wiser, a journey typically characterised by mishap, adventure, and detours. Narrative closure in children’s and young adult novels and films typically provides a point of self-realisation or self-actualisation, whereby the struggles of finding one’s “true” identity have been overcome. In this familiar coming-of-age narrative, there is often an underlying premise of an essential self that will emerge or be uncovered. This kind of narrative resolution provides readers with a reassurance that things will work for the best in the end, which is an enduring feature of children’s literature, and part of liberal-humanism’s project of harmonious individuality. However, uncertainty is a constant that has always characterised the ways lives are lived, regardless of best-laid plans. Children’s literature provides a field of narrative knowledge whereby readers gain impressions of childhood and adolescence, or more specifically, knowledge of ways of being at a time in life, which is marked by uncertainty. Despite the prevalence of children’s texts which continue to offer normative ways of being, in particular, normative forms of gender behaviour, there are texts which resist the pull for characters to be “like everyone else” by exploring alternative subjectivities. Fiction, however, cannot be regarded as a source of evidence about the material realities of life, as its strength lies in its affective and imaginative dimensions, which nevertheless can offer readers moments of reflection, recognition, or, in some cases, reality lessons. As a form of cultural production, contemporary children’s literature is highly responsive to social change and political debates, and is crucially implicated in shaping the values, attitudes and behaviours of children and young people.

The relationship between organizational and professional commitment in the case of project workers : implications for project management

The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between organizational and professional commitment of project workers. We first present (1) role-conflict theory and exchange theory to establish the multiple dimensions of commitment (affective, continuance, and normative) and (2) social identity theory to support our argument for different foci of commitment—organization and profession. Building on these theoretical lenses, we present the literature review that compares organizational and professional commitment of project workers with respect to the three dimensions of commitment. Adopting a positivist approach and a sample of 141 project workers, we use Pearson’s correlation to identify the relationship between affective organizational and affective professional, continuance organizational and continuance professional, and normative organizational and normative professional commitment. We report significant correlation between affective organizational commitment and affective professional commitment of project workers. The correlations between continuance organizational commitment and continuance professional commitment and normative organizational commitment and normative professional commitment are moderate. We then discuss the implications of these findings for the project management profession.

The relation between organizational and professional commitment in case of project workers : implications for the project management

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between organizational and professional commitment of project workers. We first present (i) role–conflict theory, and exchange theory to establish the multiple dimensions of commitment—affective, continuance, and normative; and (ii). social–identity theory to support our argument for different foci of commitment—organization and profession. Building on these theoretical lenses, we present the literature review that compares organizational and professional commitment of project workers with respect to the 3 dimensions of commitment. Adopting a positivist approach and a sample of 141 project workers, we use Pearson’s correlation to identify the relationship between affective organizational and affective professional, continuance organizational and continuance professional, and normative organizational and normative professional commitment. We report significant correlation between affective organizational commitment and affective professional commitment of project workers. The correlations between continuance organizational commitment, and continuance professional commitment; and normative organizational commitment, and normative professional commitment are moderate. We then discuss the implications of these findings for the project management profession.

Work motivation as a determinant of organizational and professional commitment in case of temporary organizations : theoretical perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to investigate the relationship between work motivation, organizational commitment, and professional commitment in temporary organizations. Through a review of theory, we contend that work motivation has two major patterns- internal motivation (that includes intrinsic, need-based, and self-deterministic theories), and external motivation (that includes cognitive or process-based theories of motivation) through which it has been investigated. We also subsume the nature of employee commitment to be of three types- affective, continuance, and normative. This commitment may either be towards organization or profession. A literature review reveals that the characteristics of the temporary organization - specifically tenure, and task - regulate the relationship between work motivation, and organizational commitment, and professional commitment. Relevant propositions are presented.

Improved facial expression recognition via uni-hyperplane classification

Large margin learning approaches, such as support vector machines (SVM), have been successfully applied to numerous classification tasks, especially for automatic facial expression recognition. The risk of such approaches however, is their sensitivity to large margin losses due to the influence from noisy training examples and outliers which is a common problem in the area of affective computing (i.e., manual coding at the frame level is tedious so coarse labels are normally assigned). In this paper, we leverage the relaxation of the parallel-hyperplanes constraint and propose the use of modified correlation filters (MCF). The MCF is similar in spirit to SVMs and correlation filters, but with the key difference of optimizing only a single hyperplane. We demonstrate the superiority of MCF over current techniques on a battery of experiments.

Living with strangers: Urban space and the ethics of civility

Urban regeneration is occuring in cities across the world, as cities increase in scale and complexity. This chapter argues that in planning public spaces, greater consideration should be paid to sociability through consideration of the affective dimension of urban life.

Perceiving and pursuing novelty : a grounded theory of adolescent creativity

Creativity plays an increasingly important role in our personal, social, educational, and community lives. For adolescents, creativity can enable self-expression, be a means of pushing boundaries, and assist learning, achievement, and completion of everyday tasks. Moreover, adolescents who demonstrate creativity can potentially enhance their capacity to face unknown future challenges, address mounting social and ecological issues in our global society, and improve their career opportunities and contribution to the economy. For these reasons, creativity is an essential capacity for young people in their present and future, and is highlighted as a priority in current educational policy nationally and internationally. Despite growing recognition of creativity’s importance and attention to creativity in research, the creative experience from the perspectives of the creators themselves and the creativity of adolescents are neglected fields of study. Hence, this research investigated adolescents’ self-reported experiences of creativity to improve understandings of their creative processes and manifestations, and how these can be supported or inhibited. Although some aspects of creativity have been extensively researched, there were no comprehensive, multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks of adolescent creativity to provide a foundation for this study. Therefore, a grounded theory methodology was adopted for the purpose of constructing a new theory to describe and explain adolescents’ creativity in a range of domains. The study’s constructivist-interpretivist perspective viewed the data and findings as interpretations of adolescents’ creative experiences, co-constructed by the participants and the researcher. The research was conducted in two academically selective high schools in Australia: one arts school, and one science, mathematics, and technology school. Twenty adolescent participants (10 from each school) were selected using theoretical sampling. Data were collected via focus groups, individual interviews, an online discussion forum, and email communications. Grounded theory methods informed a process of concurrent data collection and analysis; each iteration of analysis informed subsequent data collection. Findings portray creativity as it was perceived and experienced by participants, presented in a Grounded Theory of Adolescent Creativity. The Grounded Theory of Adolescent Creativity comprises a core category, Perceiving and Pursuing Novelty: Not the Norm, which linked all findings in the study. This core category explains how creativity involved adolescents perceiving stimuli and experiences differently, approaching tasks or life unconventionally, and pursuing novel ideas to create outcomes that are not the norm when compared with outcomes by peers. Elaboration of the core category is provided by the major categories of findings. That is, adolescent creativity entailed utilising a network of Sub-Processes of Creativity, using strategies for Managing Constraints and Challenges, and drawing on different Approaches to Creativity – adaptation, transfer, synthesis, and genesis – to apply the sub-processes and produce creative outcomes. Potentially, there were Effects of Creativity on Creators and Audiences, depending on the adolescent and the task. Three Types of Creativity were identified as the manifestations of the creative process: creative personal expression, creative boundary pushing, and creative task achievement. Interactions among adolescents’ dispositions and environments were influential in their creativity. Patterns and variations of these interactions revealed a framework of four Contexts for Creativity that offered different levels of support for creativity: high creative disposition–supportive environment; high creative disposition–inhibiting environment; low creative disposition–supportive environment; and low creative disposition–inhibiting environment. These contexts represent dimensional ranges of how dispositions and environments supported or inhibited creativity, and reveal that the optimal context for creativity differed depending on the adolescent, task, domain, and environment. This study makes four main contributions, which have methodological and theoretical implications for researchers, as well as practical implications for adolescents, parents, teachers, policy and curriculum developers, and other interested stakeholders who aim to foster the creativity of adolescents. First, this study contributes methodologically through its constructivist-interpretivist grounded theory methodology combining the grounded theory approaches of Corbin and Strauss (2008) and Charmaz (2006). Innovative data collection was also demonstrated through integration of data from online and face-to-face interactions with adolescents, within the grounded theory design. These methodological contributions have broad applicability to researchers examining complex constructs and processes, and with populations who integrate multimedia as a natural form of communication. Second, applicable to creativity in diverse domains, the Grounded Theory of Adolescent Creativity supports a hybrid view of creativity as both domain-general and domain-specific. A third major contribution was identification of a new form of creativity, educational creativity (ed-c), which categorises creativity for learning or achievement within the constraints of formal educational contexts. These theoretical contributions inform further research about creativity in different domains or multidisciplinary areas, and with populations engaged in formal education. However, the key contribution of this research is that it presents an original Theory and Model of Adolescent Creativity to explain the complex, multifaceted phenomenon of adolescents’ creative experiences.

From ethnocentrism to transculturalism : a film studies pedagogical journey

This study reviews the exploratory implementation of an ‘internationalising the curriculum’ policy in relation to a cultural studies unit within a Creative Industries Faculty at an Australian university. Charting certain pedagogical practices in the delivery of transnational film studies, this case study involves a critical, contextual examination of student feedback as well as current theories about transcultural curricula in general and film studies curricula in particular. The study shows that tertiary students can be provided with an extraordinarily rich range of differing, sometimes conflicting, but always engaging transcultural insights and understandings. It is further argued that transnational competencies may be developed and enabled through the innovative realisation of a type of ‘border crossing’ pedagogical model, largely by foregrounding transcultural ‘affective’ issues around social justice.

The Cyndi Lauper affect: Bodies, girlhood and popular culture through the collective biography process

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies & Gannon, 2009), this paper analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture.

Learning in and beyond small business advisory programmes

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how participants learn in small business advisory programmes and to explore the impact of these learning programmes on the development of reflective learning dispositions in participants. The research involves two case studies of small business advisory programmes in Queensland, a state of Australia. One involves training in the use of GPS/GIS technology amongst rural SMEs and the other seeks to develop improved management and operational capabilities in regional and metropolitan manufacturing SMEs. Face to face semi-structured interviews were conducted throughout rural, regional and metropolitan Queensland with participants, trainers and senior executives in the administering organisations that ran the programmes. Learning in these programmes occurs through a combination of interaction with others and the adoption of practice-based and learner-centred processes. The impact of the programmes on participants includes the development of reflective learning dispositions, improved confidence in learning and appreciation of the value of new knowledge to their business. The research suggests that small business training programmes have the potential to affect the development of critical reflective learning dispositions in participants which is of fundamental importance to the development of a learning or knowledge economy.

Theorizing Police Response to Domestic Violence in Singapore: Police Subculture Revisited

This article focuses on the well documented, yet potentially contested concept of rank-and-file policesubculture to conceptualize policeresponse to situations of domesticviolence in Singapore. It argues that the utility of the concept to explaining police behavior is often undermined by an all-powerful, homogenous, and deterministic conception of it that fails to take into account the value of agency in police decision-making and the range of differentiated policeresponse in situations of domesticviolence. Through reviewing the literature on policeresponse to domesticviolence, this study called for the need to rework the concept of policesubculture by treating it as having a relationship with, and response to, the structural conditions of policing, while retaining a conception of the active role played by street-level officers in instituting a situational practice. Using Pierre Bourdieu's relational concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ designating the cultural dispositions of policesubculture and structural conditions of policing respectively, the study attempted to reconceptualize the problem of policing domesticviolence with reference to the Singaporean context.

Regulating Prostitution: Controlling Women's Lives'

The chapter argues that the women who compose the majority of street prostitutes in Great Britain are currently subject to an interlocking system of regulation that variously defines them as criminal offenders, threats to public health, victims of child abuse, and vulnerable women who must be compelled under the threat of punishment to seek welfare help. Each label or approach to the street prostitute involves a set of interventions aimed at changing or working with different aspects of the women's lives. This produces an interlocking system of regulation, because the interventions are not mutually exclusive. A street prostitute can be defined as both a victim and an offender and as both a patient in need of medical help and a threat to public health. This comprehensive system of regulation means that a street prostitute faces not only a wide range of criminal justice dispositions, but also mandatory participation in programs in which her relationships and the choices she makes in her life outside of prostitution are subject to scrutiny and intervention. Given that street prostitutes are mostly poor women seeking economic survival in a profession that makes them vulnerable to victimization, the current regulatory system is an attempt to control a small group of poor women regarding their choices and relationships as they struggle to survive poverty. Whereas in the 1980s in Great Britain, a woman involved in street prostitution may have faced only a fine, now she is subject to a more extensive range of criminal justice actions accompanied by various government interventions designed to remake her life.

The silence of objects : forming the unsayable

The silence of objects phenomenologically explores the experience and memory of trauma through object-based artwork. It springs from a desire to map difficult psychological terrain and does so by tracking the process of a coming into 'expression' to communicate notions of loss, detachment and powerlessness. It maps a journey from silence to a forming 'voice' that gives shape to the unsayable. This practice-led research is multifaceted. Whilst the creative element uses transformed objects as material metaphors to tap into the sensory and affective operations of art, the written component blends reflection with theory and is informed by art theorists Jill Bennett and Mignon Nixon. By establishing a dialogue between theoretical constructs and creative works I consider how giving form to deep consciousness can counter the effects of trauma manifest as silence and invisibility.

Investigating the dynamics of the psychological contract : how and why individuals' contract beliefs change

The overall objective of this thesis is to explore how and why the content of individuals' psychological contracts changes over time. The contract is generally understood as "individual beliefs, shaped by the organisation, regarding the terms of an exchange agreement between individuals and their organisation" (Rousseau, 1995, p. 9). With an overall study sampling frame of 320 graduate organisational newcomers, a mixed method longitudinal research design comprised of three sequential, inter-related studies is employed in order to capture the change process. From the 15 semi-structured interviews conducted in Study 1, the key findings included identifying a relatively high degree of mutuality between employees' and their managers' reciprocal contract beliefs around the time of organisational entry. Also, at this time, individuals had developed specific components of their contract content through a mix of social network information (regarding broader employment expectations) and perceptions of various elements of their particular organisation's reputation (for more firm-specific expectations). Study 2 utilised a four-wave survey approach (available to the full sampling frame) over the 14 months following organisational entry to explore the 'shape' of individuals' contract change trajectories and the role of four theorised change predictors in driving these trajectories. The predictors represented an organisational-level informational cue (perceptions of corporate reputation), a dyadic-level informational cue (perceptions of manager-employee relationship quality) and two individual difference variables (affect and hardiness). Through the use of individual growth modelling, the findings showed differences in the general change patterns across contract content components of perceived employer (exhibiting generally quadratic change patterns) and employee (exhibiting generally no-change patterns) obligations. Further, individuals differentially used the predictor variables to construct beliefs about specific contract content. While both organisational- and dyadic-level cues were focused upon to construct employer obligation beliefs, organisational-level cues and individual difference variables were focused upon to construct employee obligation beliefs. Through undertaking 26 semi-structured interviews, Study 3 focused upon gaining a richer understanding of why participants' contracts changed, or otherwise, over the study period, with a particular focus upon the roles of breach and violation. Breach refers to an employee's perception that an employer obligation has not been met and violation refers to the negative and affective employee reactions which may ensue following a breach. The main contribution of these findings was identifying that subsequent to a breach or violation event a range of 'remediation effects' could be activated by employees which, depending upon their effectiveness, served to instigate either breach or contract repair or both. These effects mostly instigated broader contract repair and were generally cognitive strategies enacted by an individual to re-evaluate the breach situation and re-focus upon other positive aspects of the employment relationship. As such, the findings offered new evidence for a clear distinction between remedial effects which serve to only repair the breach (and thus the contract) and effects which only repair the contract more broadly; however, when effective, both resulted in individuals again viewing their employment relationships positively. Overall, in response to the overarching research question of this thesis, how and why individuals' psychological contract beliefs change, individuals do indeed draw upon various information sources, particularly at the organisational-level, as cues or guides in shaping their contract content. Further, the 'shapes' of the changes in beliefs about employer and employee obligations generally follow different, and not necessarily linear, trajectories over time. Finally, both breach and violation and also remedial actions, which address these occurrences either by remedying the breach itself (and thus the contract) or the contract only, play central roles in guiding individuals' contract changes to greater or lesser degrees. The findings from the thesis provide both academics and practitioners with greater insights into how employees construct their contract beliefs over time, the salient informational cues used to do this and how the effects of breach and violation can be mitigated through creating an environment which facilitates the use of effective remediation strategies.

Suicide rates in Shandong, China, 1991–2010 : rapid decrease in rural rates and steady increase in male–female ratio

Background China has one of the highest suicide rates in the world; however, the recent trends in suicide have not been adequately studied. This study aimed to examine the potential changes in the rates and characteristics in a Chinese population. Methods Data on suicide deaths in 1991–2010 were extracted from the Shandong Disease Surveillance Point (DSP) mortality dataset based on ICD-10 codes. The temporal trend in age-adjusted suicide rates for each subpopulation was tested using log-linear Poisson regression analysis. Results From 1991 to 2010, there was a marked decrease in the overall suicide rate in Shandong, with an average reduction of 8% per year. The decrease trend was stronger in rural than in urban areas and more evident in females than in males. Similar decreases were observed for all age groups. Pesticide ingestion and hanging remained the top two methods for suicide. Limitations There are likely quality concerns in the morality data, such as underreporting and misclassification, as well as low accuracy in determining the underlying causes of deaths. The representativeness of the DSP system may also be problematic due to the rapid changes in economy and demography. Conclusions Completed suicides in Shandong have sharply declined over the past 20 years. Higher rates in females versus males and in rural versus urban areas, which were previously considered to be distinguishing features of suicide in China, are becoming less pronounced.