Agents for change and changed agents:the micro-politics of change and feminism in the academy

This article explores gender politics and processes in the academy and investigates change from the perspectives of feminist academics. In particular, it explores the experiences of women academics attempting to effect change to the gendered status quo of their own institutions. Focusing on micro-politics, the feminist movement is empirically explored in localized spaces of resistance and in the small but significant individual efforts at making changes in academic institutions. The analysis is based on interviews with female academics working in business and management schools and focuses on the challenges for change and how change attempts affect their personal and professional identities. The article explores the range of change strategies that participants use as they try to progress in their academic career while staying true to their feminist values and priorities through both resisting and incorporating dominant discourses of academic work. The analysis highlights such tensions and focuses on a contextualized, bottom-up perspective on change that, unlike more totalizing theorization, takes into account mundane and lived experiences at the level of the individual. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The United Kingdom between Mars and Venus:bridge or Bermuda triangle?

The concept of the United Kingdom acting as a bridge between Europe and the United States has been a key element in British foreign policy for six decades. Under the second Blair Premiership it reached both its apogee and its nadir. This paper analyses these developments focusing both on the transatlantic and European ends. Particular attention is paid to the failure of the Blair government either to establish a secure place for Britain as a co-leader or to make the British people more comfortable in their European skins. This failure occurred at a period when the EU is characterised by leadership transition and confusion. New leaderships will emerge in the EU over the next two years but it seems unlikely that Britain, characterised by a continuing disconnect between a Euro-sceptic public discourse and deep involvement at a governmental level will develop a European policy narrative that is regarded as convincing at either the EU or domestic level. This weakness is compounded by a failure to develop new thinking about the rise of new powers such as China and India.

CEO power, government monitoring, and bank dividends

We investigate the role of CEO power and government monitoring on bank dividend policy for a sample of 109 European listed banks for the period 2005-2013. We employ three main proxies for CEO power: CEO ownership, CEO tenure, and unforced CEO turnover. We show that CEO power has a negative impact on dividend payout ratios and on performance, suggesting that entrenched CEOs do not have the incentive to increase payout ratios to discourage monitoring from minority shareholders. Stronger internal monitoring by board of directors, as proxied by larger ownership stakes of the board members, increases performance but decreases payout ratios. These findings are contrary to those from the entrenchment literature for non-financial firms. Government ownership and the presence of a government official on the board of directors of the bank, also reduces payout ratios, in line with the view that government is incentivized to favor the interest of bank creditors before the interest of minority shareholders. These results show that government regulators are mainly concerned about bank safety and this allows powerful CEOs to distribute low payouts at the expense of minority shareholders.

Firm-level productivity growth in Northern Ireland:the impact of exporting, innovation and public financial assistance

Motivated by the historically poor productivity performance of Northern Ireland firms and the longstanding productivity gap with the UK, the aim of this thesis is to examine, through the use of firm-level data, how exporting, innovation and public financial assistance impact on firm productivity growth. These particular activities are investigated due to the continued policy focus on their link to productivity growth and the theoretical claims of a direct positive relationship. In order to undertake these analyses a newly constructed dataset is used which links together cross-sectional and longitudinal data over the 1998-2008 period from the Annual Business Survey, the Manufacturing Sales and Export Survey; the Community Innovation Survey and Invest NI Selective Financial Assistance (SFA) payment data. Econometric methodologies are employed to estimate each of the relationships with regards to productivity growth, making use in particular of Heckman selection techniques and propensity score matching to take account of critical issues of endogeneity and selection bias. The results show that more productive firms self-select into exporting but there is no resulting productivity effect from starting to export; contesting the argument for learning-by-exporting. Product innovation is also found to have no impact on productivity growth over a four year period but there is evidence of a negative process innovation impact, likely to reflect temporary learning effects. Finally SFA assistance, including the amount of the payment, is found to have no short term impact on productivity growth suggesting substantial deadweight effects and/or targeting of inefficient firms. The results provide partial evidence as to why Northern Ireland has failed to narrow the productivity gap with the rest of the UK. The analyses further highlight the need for access to comprehensive firm-level data for research purposes, not least to underpin robust evidence-based policymaking.

The American politics of a Jewish Judea and Samaria

This dissertation poses a set of six questions about one of the Israel Lobby's particular components, a Potential Christian Jewish coalition (PCJc) within American politics that advocates for Israeli sovereignty over "Judea and Samaria" ("the West Bank"). The study addresses: the profiles of the individuals of the PCJc; its policy positions, the issues that have divided it, and what has prevented, and continues to prevent, the coalition from being absorbed into one or more of the more formally organized components of the Israel Lobby; the resources and methods this coalition has used to attempt to influence U.S. policy on (a) the Middle East, and (b) the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular; the successes or failures of this coalition's advocacy and why it has not organized; and what this case reveals about interest group politics and social movements in the United States. This dissertation follows the descriptive-analytic case-study tradition that comprises a detailed analysis of a specific interest group and one policy issue, which conforms to my interest in the potential Christian Jewish coalition that supports a Jewish Judea and Samaria. I have employed participant observation, interviewing, content analysis and documentary research. The findings suggest: The PCJc consists of Christian Zionists and mostly Jews of the center religious denominations. Orthodox Jewish traditions of separation from Christians inhibit like-minded Christians and Jews from organizing. The PCJc opposes an Arab state in Judea and Samaria, and is not absorbed into more formally organized interest groups that support that policy. The PCJc's resources consist of support and funding from conservatives. Methods include use of education, debates and media. Members of the PCJc are successful because they persist in their support for a Jewish Judea and Samaria and meet through other organizations around Judeo-Christian values. The PCJc is deterred from advocacy and organization by a mobilization of bias from a subgovernment in Washington, D.C. comprising Congress, the Executive branch and lobby organizations. The study's results raise questions about interest group politics in America and the degree to which the U.S. political system is pluralistic, suggesting that executive power constrains the agenda to "safe" positions it favors.

Resistance Performances: (Re)constructing Spaces of Resistance and Contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico Student Movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists’ use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists’ resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media’s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration’s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists’ collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists’ collective identities. As such, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.

Ethnonationalism and Attitudes Towards Gay and Lesbian Rights in Northern Ireland

Peer reviewed

Should weight loss and maintenance programmes be designed differently for men? : A systematic review of long-term randomised controlled trials presenting data for men and women: The ROMEO project

Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements This review is one of a series of systematic reviews for the ROMEO project (Review Of MEn and Obesity), funded by the National Institute for Health Research, Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR HTA Project 09/127/01; Systematic reviews and integrated report on the quantitative and qualitative evidence base for the management of obesity in men http://www.hta.ac.uk/2545). The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Health. HERU, HSRU and NMAHP are funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The authors accept full responsibility for this publication. We would also like to thank the Men's Health Forums of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales: Tim Street, Paula Carroll, Colin Fowler and David Wilkins. We also thank Kate Jolly for further information about the Lighten Up trial.

Ethnonationalism and Attitudes Towards Gay and Lesbian Rights in Northern Ireland

Peer reviewed

Should weight loss and maintenance programmes be designed differently for men? : A systematic review of long-term randomised controlled trials presenting data for men and women: The ROMEO project

Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements This review is one of a series of systematic reviews for the ROMEO project (Review Of MEn and Obesity), funded by the National Institute for Health Research, Health Technology Assessment Programme (NIHR HTA Project 09/127/01; Systematic reviews and integrated report on the quantitative and qualitative evidence base for the management of obesity in men http://www.hta.ac.uk/2545). The views and opinions expressed therein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Health. HERU, HSRU and NMAHP are funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. The authors accept full responsibility for this publication. We would also like to thank the Men's Health Forums of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales: Tim Street, Paula Carroll, Colin Fowler and David Wilkins. We also thank Kate Jolly for further information about the Lighten Up trial.

To what extent does the Health Professions Admission Test-Ireland predict performance in early undergraduate tests of communication and clinical skills? – An observational cohort study

Background: Internationally, tests of general mental ability are used in the selection of medical students. Examples include the Medical College Admission Test, Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test and the UK Clinical Aptitude Test. The most widely used measure of their efficacy is predictive validity.A new tool, the Health Professions Admission Test- Ireland (HPAT-Ireland), was introduced in 2009. Traditionally, selection to Irish undergraduate medical schools relied on academic achievement. Since 2009, Irish and EU applicants are selected on a combination of their secondary school academic record (measured predominately by the Leaving Certificate Examination) and HPAT-Ireland score. This is the first study to report on the predictive validity of the HPAT-Ireland for early undergraduate assessments of communication and clinical skills. Method. Students enrolled at two Irish medical schools in 2009 were followed up for two years. Data collected were gender, HPAT-Ireland total and subsection scores; Leaving Certificate Examination plus HPAT-Ireland combined score, Year 1 Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) scores (Total score, communication and clinical subtest scores), Year 1 Multiple Choice Questions and Year 2 OSCE and subset scores. We report descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficients and Multiple linear regression models. Results: Data were available for 312 students. In Year 1 none of the selection criteria were significantly related to student OSCE performance. The Leaving Certificate Examination and Leaving Certificate plus HPAT-Ireland combined scores correlated with MCQ marks.In Year 2 a series of significant correlations emerged between the HPAT-Ireland and subsections thereof with OSCE Communication Z-scores; OSCE Clinical Z-scores; and Total OSCE Z-scores. However on multiple regression only the relationship between Total OSCE Score and the Total HPAT-Ireland score remained significant; albeit the predictive power was modest. Conclusion: We found that none of our selection criteria strongly predict clinical and communication skills. The HPAT- Ireland appears to measures ability in domains different to those assessed by the Leaving Certificate Examination. While some significant associations did emerge in Year 2 between HPAT Ireland and total OSCE scores further evaluation is required to establish if this pattern continues during the senior years of the medical course.

Ireland and the global economic crisis: one island, two different experiences

In this chapter, Ó hAdhmaill argues that responses to the global economic crisis which emerged in 2008 reflected a dominant ideological discourse, with ‘austerity’ being a tool in a wider agenda to reassert neoliberalist thinking in the global economy and welfare provision in the richer countries. In Ireland, North and South, however, the experience of, and responses to, the crisis and ‘austerity’ were different, reflecting different social, economic, and political contexts and influences, as well as different levels of democratic control. Ó hAdhmaill outlines some of these differences and argues that, while democratic control in smaller jurisdictions may be limited by the ‘real rulers’ of the world, global capital, people still have ‘agency’ and do not have to be mere passive observers of unfolding events.

Investigative journalism in Mexico: between ideals and realities. The case of Morelia

The aim of this paper is to analyse the state of the investigative journalism in Mexico, especially the one that is practiced at the local level in the provinces. That is, this research is based upon a case study conducted in Morelia, the capital city of the state of Michoacán. The empirical evidence will show that there is an evident divergence regarding the practice of the investigative journalism: on the one hand, journalists are aware of what this concept involves and they consider that they practice it on a regular basis; but, on the other, the content analysis prove otherwise. In other words, the account of what is actually printed significantly differs from the news workers’ perceptions, because the former shows a poorly developed journalistic investigation practice.

Between "uxor", "mater" and "concubina". Profile and identity of the Emperor Constantine in Late Roman legislation

We aspire to shape the Constantine’s personality in particular by analyzing his loving relationship, first with Minervina and then with Fausta, and not forgetting the bond with his mother Helena, hence the reference to uxor, mater and concubina in our title. We will analyze if these women exercised any influence on the composition of his production rules and, if so, to what extent they were able to determine the historical development of the following decades. From this point of view we must consider in general the emperor had to combine their political claims and government with these relationships, showing great skill in handling times and ways, always putting the first to the second.