Kultúra és teljesítmény a közigazgatásban (Culture and performance in the public administration)

A szerző dolgozatában egy közigazgatásban végzett kérdőíves vizsgálat eredményeit összegezi. A kutatás alapkérdése: a közigazgatási szervezetek körében hogyan befolyásolja a szervezeti kultúra a szervezeti teljesítményt? A kutatás e kérdést egy hat magyar minisztériumban folytatott kérdőíves vizsgálat révén kísérli meg megválaszolni. ____ In his study the author presents the results of a questionnaire survey of the Hungarian public administration. The main issue of this survey was how to influence the organizational culture the organizational performance in the public administration? This survey would try to answer this issue.

A meta -analysis of empirical research studies on resilience among students at -risk for school failure

Being at-risk is a growing problem in the U.S. because of disturbing societal trends such as unemployment, divorce, substance abuse, child abuse and neglect, and the new threat of terrorist violence. Resilience characterizes individuals who rebound from or adapt to adversities such as these, and academic resilience distinguishes at-risk students who succeed in school despite hardships. ^ The purpose of this research was to perform a meta-analysis to examine the power of resilience and to suggest ways educators might improve academic resilience, which was operationalized by satisfactory test scores and grades. In order to find all studies that were relevant to academic resilience in at-risk kindergarten through 12th-grade students, extensive electronic and hardcopy searches were conducted, and these resulted in a database of 421 articles. Two hundred eighty seven of these were rejected quickly, because they were not empirical research. Upon further examination, another 106 were rejected for not meeting study protocol criteria. Ultimately, 28 studies were coded for study level descriptors and effect size variables. ^ Protective factors for resilience were found to originate in physical, psychological, and behavioral domains on proximal/intraindividual, transitional/intrafamilial, or distal/extrafamilial levels. Effect sizes (ESs) for these were weighted and the means for each level or category were interpreted by commonly accepted benchmarks. Mean effect sizes for proximal (M = .27) and for transitional (M = .15) were small but significant. The mean effect size for the distal level was insignificant. This supported the hypotheses that the proximal level was the source of most protective factors for academic resilience in at-risk students followed by the transitional level. The distal effect size warranted further research particularly in light of the small number of studies (n = 11) contributing effect sizes to that category. A homogeneity test indicated a search for moderators, i.e., study variables affecting outcomes, was justified. “Category” was the largest moderator. Graphs of weighted mean effect sizes in the physical, psychological, and behavioral domains were plotted for each level to better illustrate the findings of the meta-analysis. Suggestions were made for combining resilience development with aspects of positive psychology to promote resilience in the schools. ^

The Politics of Culture and the Space for Islam : Soviet and Post-Soviet Imaginaries in Uzbekistan

Peer reviewed

The Politics of Culture and the Space for Islam : Soviet and Post-Soviet Imaginaries in Uzbekistan

Peer reviewed

The Politics of Culture and the Space for Islam : Soviet and Post-Soviet Imaginaries in Uzbekistan

Peer reviewed

Young people, online gaming culture, and education

The capacity of video games to engage and challenge players through increasingly complex and demanding stages and the range of cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural practices generated by games and game play have led to increased interest in the use and study of video games in schools. Views of digital games as “hard fun” or “serious play” have important implications for education, problematizing assumptions about what students can and might be asked to do, about teaching and learning, and about the ways in which curriculum is resourced and organized. To fully capitalize on games’ potential to enrich learning, the nature of play, the kinds of play entailed in playing games of varying genres, the experience of game play in and out of school, and the relationship between them all need to be carefully considered and explored.

‘It’s almost like a White school now’: racialised complexities, Indigenous representation and school leadership

Drawing on a broader study that focused on examining principal leadership for equity and diversity, this paper presents the leadership experiences of ‘Jane’, a White, middle-class principal of a rural Indigenous school. The paper highlights how Jane's leadership is inextricably shaped by her assumptions about race and the political dynamics and historical specificities of her school community. A central focus is on Jane's tendency to deploy culturally reductionist understandings of Indigeneity that position it as incompatible or incommensurable with White culture/western schooling. The paper argues the central imperative of a leadership that rejects these understandings and engages in a critical situational analysis of Indigenous politics, relations and experience. Such an analysis is presented as imperative to supporting representative justice in that it moves beyond merely according a voice to Indigenous people to a focus on better understanding, problematising and remedying the racial relations that contribute to Indigenous oppression.

An intervention program for children with school failure problems.

School failure is a chronic problem in many developing countries and in some developed as Portugal due to factors like cognitive deficiencies of children, an inadequate family environment, low SES and bad teaching methods or school organization. It is important to develop effective and simple intervention strategies able to cope with the problem at an individual level independently of the cause. The general objective of the following study is to develop behavioral training techniques to help children with problems of school failure. 6 - 12 years old children attending ISCED 1, with academic difficulties because of family problems, social exclusion (living in poverty or belonging to an ethnic minority) or poor schooling were trained. Cognitive-behavioral techniques that have been widely used to train persons with intellectual, sensorial, physical or social deficiencies were applied. Results are evaluated in terms of % of attained objectives, time, and (subjective) teacher satisfaction. Some results of individual children are shown. Training programs seem to be successful independently of the (mostly unknown) cause of failure of the trained subject.

The Dyad School Success/Failure in the Academic Development of the Working Class Women from Mendoza

The notion of academic performance renders account of the results achieved by the students during their school education.  Internally, there are two opposed phenomena:  school success and school failure.  Sociology of education has contributed to the discussion of both notions revealing their social nature closely related to the institutional and socio-cultural contexts in which education is developed.  This paper is the result of a research project conducted for our doctoral thesis.  Its purpose is to contribute to enlighten the scopes of this discussion, by analyzing the school development of a group of working class women from Mendoza. We were interested, in the first place, in knowing the reasons why they quit school when they were young girls or adolescents.  Subsequently, we have approached the opportunities they had to access the system again during their adulthood, the obstacles they had to face and the resources to be able to complete the medium level.

Documenting reproduction and inequality : revisiting Jean Anyon’s “Social class and school knowledge”

Jean Anyon’s (1981) “Social class and school knowledge” was a landmark work in North American educational research. It provided a richly detailed qualitative description of differential, social-class-based constructions of knowledge and epistemological stance. This essay situates Anyon’s work in two parallel traditions of critical educational research: the sociology of the curriculum and classroom interaction and discourse analysis. It argues for the renewed importance of both quantitative and qualitative research on social reproduction and equity in the current policy context.

A Proposed Framework for Understanding Information Security Culture and Practices in the Saudi Context

An examination of Information Security (IS) and Information Security Management (ISM) research in Saudi Arabia has shown the need for more rigorous studies focusing on the implementation and adoption processes involved with IS culture and practices. Overall, there is a lack of academic and professional literature about ISM and more specifically IS culture in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the overall aim of this paper is to identify issues and factors that assist the implementation and the adoption of IS culture and practices within the Saudi environment. The goal of this paper is to identify the important conditions for creating an information security culture in Saudi Arabian organizations. We plan to use this framework to investigate whether security culture has emerged into practices in Saudi Arabian organizations.

Art, popular culture and cultural policy: variations on a theme of John Carey

The article presents a criticism of the accounts of John Carey in his book entitled "The Intellectuals and the Masses." The author focuses on Carey's argument that the art is not an eternal category but an invention of the late eighteenth century and it no longer has any intellectual legitimacy other than that of provoking feelings which are no more and no less valuable than those provoked by any other form of entertainment or physical activity