Chinese overseas doctoral student narratives of intercultural adaptation

This study aims to explore how Chinese overseas doctoral students adjust to a different academic, social and cultural environment, using Giddens’ theoretical framework of self-identity (1991). The findings indicate the participants proactively used various coping strategies in meeting challenges, and adapting to new social environments. Continuity and stability of self-identity were achieved either culturally or academically through self-reflexivity, autonomy, creativity, authenticity, and reliance on an ontological identity. The result is to challenge the grand narrative of essentialised “problematic Chinese learners”.

Evaluation and revision of inferential comprehension in narrative texts: an eye movement study

We investigated the processes of how adult readers evaluate and revise their situation model during reading by monitoring their eye movements as they read narrative texts and subsequent critical sentences. In each narrative text, a short introduction primed a knowledge-based inference, followed by a target concept that was either expected (e.g., “oven”) or unexpected (e.g., “grill”) in relation to the inferred concept. Eye movements showed that readers detected a mismatch between the new unexpected information and their prior interpretation, confirming their ability to evaluate inferential information. Just below the narrative text, a critical sentence included a target word that was either congruent (e.g., “roasted”) or incongruent (e.g., “barbecued”) with the expected but not the unexpected concept. Readers spent less time reading the congruent than the incongruent target word, reflecting the facilitation of prior information. In addition, when the unexpected (but not expected) concept had been presented, participants with lower verbal (but not visuospatial) working memory span exhibited longer reading times and made more regressions (from the critical sentence to previous information) on encountering congruent information, indicating difficulty in inhibiting their initial incorrect interpretation and revising their situation model

Higher education engagement in leadership development: using autobiographical narrative to understand potential impact

The paper explores the lived experience of leadership learning and development in a single case study of an entrepreneur participating in a major leadership development programme for owner-managers of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). Based on autobiographical research, it provides a rich contextual account of the nature and underlying influences of leadership learning throughout the life-course, and as a consequence of participation in the programme. Whilst the paper should interest scholars, policy makers, and those concerned with programme development, it may also resonate with entrepreneurs and help them make sense of their experience of leadership development.

Space, authenticity and utopia in the hip-hop teen dance film

The dance film flourished in the 2000s in the form of the hip-hop teen dance film. Such films as Save the Last Dance (Thomas Carter, 2001), Honey (Billy Woodruff, 2002) and Step Up (Anne Fletcher, 2006) drew on hip-hop’s dominance of the mainstream music industry and combined the teen film’s pre-existing social problem and musical narratives. Yet various tension were created by their interweaving of representations of post-industrial city youth with the utopian sensibilities of the classical Hollywood musical. Their narratives celebrated hip-hop performance, and depicted dance’s ability to bridge cultural boundaries and bring together couples and communities. These films used hip-hop to define space and identity yet often constructed divisions within their soundscapes, limiting hip-hop’s expressive potential. This article explores the cycle’s celebration of, yet struggle with, hip-hop through examining select films’ interactions between soundscape, narrative and form. It will engage with these films’ attempts to marry the representational, narrative and aesthetic meanings of hip-hop culture with the form and ideologies of the musical genre, particularly the tensions and continuities that arise from their engagement with the genre’s utopian qualities identified by Richard Dyer (1985). Yet whilst these films illustrate the tensions and challenges of combining hip-hop culture and the musical genre, they also demonstrate an effective integration of hip-hop soundscape and the dancing body in their depiction of dance, highlighting both form’s aesthetics of layering, rupture and flow (Rose, 1994: 22).

My generation(s): cycles, branding and renewal in E4’s 'Skins'

In an era of fragmenting audience and diversified viewing platforms, youth television needs to move fast and make a lot of noise in order to capture and maintain the attention of the teenage viewer. British ensemble youth drama Skins (E4, 2007-2013) calls attention to itself with its high doses of drugs, chaotic parties and casual attitudes towards sexuality. It also moves quickly, shedding its cast every two seasons as they graduate from school, then renewing itself with a fresh generation of 16 year old characters - three cycles in total. This essay will explore the challenges of maintaining audience connections whilst resetting the narrative clock with each cycle. I suggest that the development of the Skins brand was key to the programme’s success. Branding is particularly important for an audience demographic who increasingly consume their television outside of broadcast flow and essential for a programme which renews its cast every two years. The Skins brand operate as a framework, as the central audience draw, have the strength to maintain audience connections when it ‘graduates’ those characters they identify with at the close of each cycle and starts again from scratch. This essay will explore how the Skins brand constructs a cohesive identity across its multiple generations, yet also consider how the cyclic form poses challenges for the programme’s representations and narratives. This cyclic form allows Skins to repeatedly reach out to a new audience who comes of age alongside each new generation and to reflect shifts in British youth culture. Thus Skins remains ever-youthful, seeking to maintain an at times painfully hip identity. Yet the programme has a somewhat schizophrenic identity, torn between its roots in British realist drama and surrealist comedy and an escapist aspirational glamour that shows the influence of US Teen TV. This combination results in a tendency towards a heightened melodrama at odds with Skins claims for authenticity - its much vaunted teenage advisors and young writers - with the cyclic structure serving to amplify the programme’s excessive tendencies. Each cycle wrestles with a need for continuity and familiarity - partly maintained through brand, aesthetic and setting - yet a desire for freshness and originality, to assert difference from what has gone before. I suggest that the inevitable need for each cycle to ‘top’ what has gone before results in a move away from character-based intimacy and the everyday to high-stakes drama and violence which sits uncomfortably within British youth television.

On identity reformation and local transition: a case from Poland

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and understand the process of successful introduction of total quality management (TQM) in Poland and the way in which it impacted on identity of Polish managers. Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on a combination of ethnographic research and repertory grid interviews. Findings – The process of TQM introduction and implementation is examined through the application of translation as a model incorporating cultural and socio-economical dimensions in addition to individual and organizational levels that shaped the development of TQM in Poland. It then draws on the idea of fantasy as theorized in Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to incorporate the unconscious element of translation process which is missing from Latour’s theorization and which forms an important aspect of adoption of new technology and the emergence of a new post-transition generation of managers in Poland. The paper argues that a complex combination of contextual factors, amongst them the notion of fantasy shaped the process of translation of TQM to Poland, the identity formation of Polish managers and to the emergence of a new post-transition generation of managers in Poland. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the literature on the post-command transition by illustrating this process through the fantasy of total quality management explored in a specific socio-cultural and geographical context and by combining the idea of Latour’s translation with Lacanian fantasy.

Children’s literature: sexual identity, gender and childhood

On the twenty-third of May 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. This event reversed a large part, if not all, of Ireland’s reputation for a Catholic-led conservatism concerning sexual and gender identities. I argue in this article that we can see a parallel-in-miniature to this momentous shift in something of a reversal of children’s literature’s views in this respect too, and I will concentrate on exploring what is at stake in the ways that childhood, sexual and gender identities are constructed in some recent children’s literature criticism in the light of these shifts. My interest is to consider: what is the ever-burgeoning interest in the gay, queer, cross-dressing, transsexual or transgender child precisely about? I ask this question on the grounds of not assuming that this interest in these identities arises necessarily simply out of a self-evident, progressive, liberatory impulse, and, alongside this, I also do not assume that ‘identities’ are essential, self-organised traits awaiting revelation and liberation.

Functional identity and diversity of animals predict ecosystem functioning better than species-based indices

Drastic biodiversity declines have raised concerns about the deterioration of ecosystem functions and have motivated much recent research on the relationship between species diversity and ecosystem functioning. A functional trait framework has been proposed to improve the mechanistic understanding of this relationship, but this has rarely been tested for organisms other than plants. We analysed eight datasets, including five animal groups, to examine how well a trait-based approach, compared with a more traditional taxonomic approach, predicts seven ecosystem functions below- and above-ground. Trait-based indices consistently provided greater explanatory power than species richness or abundance. The frequency distributions of single or multiple traits in the community were the best predictors of ecosystem functioning. This implies that the ecosystem functions we investigated were underpinned by the combination of trait identities (i.e. single-trait indices) and trait complementarity (i.e. multi-trait indices) in the communities. Our study provides new insights into the general mechanisms that link biodiversity to ecosystem functioning in natural animal communities and suggests that the observed responses were due to the identity and dominance patterns of the trait composition rather than the number or abundance of species per se.

”Potato seeking rice”: language, culture, and identity in gay personal ads in Hong Kong

This paper examines the relationship between language, culture, and identity in a corpus of gay personal ads collected from two publications in Hong Kong in the three years before the 1997 transition of sovereignty. Gay personal ads are seen äs an "island of discourse," whose marginal nature is reflected in the use of language and in turn reflects issues of marginalization in the larger social context. Using Fairclough's (1992, 1993) three- dimensional model for critical discourse analysis, an attempt is made to uncover the relationship between text structure and issues ofpower/ideology in the society that produces the texts. On the level of text, it was found that structural components, particularly the degree of grammatical elaboration, differ according to the stated race or cultural background of the authors and their targets. On the level of discourse practice, authors were found to appropriate a variety of "voices"from the larger culture arena, the use of which amplifies or limits the participation of particular classes of individuals. Finally, on the level of social practice, the ads were found to reflect and re-create both the racial stereotypes and heterosexist ideology found in the dominant culture.