The Commonwealth, gender and peacekeeping

Reflecting on the strategic commitment outlined in the Plan of Action for Gender Equality (2005-2015) and the priority issues of the Commonwealth Women’s Forum, this article assesses the extent to which the Commonwealth as an institution is supporting troop and police-contributing member states in addressing the gender imbalance in peacekeeping operations. Drawing on desk-based research, interviews with international policymakers and a statistical analysis of the International Peace Institute Peacekeeping Database, the article first outlines the Commonwealth’s gender and security policy perspective before examining data sets to determine the success of Commonwealth member states in integrating women into uniformed peacekeeping contingencies between 2009 and 2015. The article observes that, in spite of a renewed optimism and drive to propel women into leadership positions in politics, the judiciary, public bodies and private companies, security sector reform and the implementation of pillar one of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, is notably absent from the Commonwealth’s gender agenda. It is argued that this policy gap suggests that national and international security architecture is regarded as an accepted domain of masculine privilege. A lack of political will among Commonwealth Heads of Government to mainstream gender equality and facilitate structural transformation of national security organs, and a chronically under resourced Commonwealth Secretariat limits the influence of the institution to that of arms-length promoter of international norms on women, peace and security.

Strategisk utveckling och ekonomistyrning : Ett livscykelperspektiv

This dissertation synthesizes previous research and develops a model for the study of strategic development, strategic congruence and management control. The model is used to analyze a longitudinal case study of the Swedish engineering company Atlas Copco. Employing contingency theory, the study confirms that long-term survival of a company requires adaption to contingencies. Three levels of strategy are examined: corporate, business and functional. Previous research suggests that consistency between these levels (strategic congruence) is necessary for a company to be competitive. The dissertation challenges this proposition by using a life-cycle perspective and analyzes strategic congruence in the different phases of a life cycle. It also studies management control from a life-cycle perspective. In this context, two types of management control are examined: formal and informal. From a longitudinal perspective, the study further discusses how these types interact during organizational life cycles. The dissertation shows that strategic development is more complex than previous studies have indicated. It is a long, complex and non-linear process, the results of which cannot always be predicted. Previous models for strategy and management control are based on simple relationships and rarely take into account the fact that companies often go through different phases of strategic development. The case study shows that strategic incongruence may occur at times during organizational life cycles. Furthermore, the use of management control varies over time. In the maturity phase, formal control is in focus, while the use of informal control has a bigger role in both the introduction and decline phases. Research on strategy and management control has intensified in recent years. Still there is a gap regarding the coordination of complex corporate structures. The present study contributes with further knowledge on how companies manage long-term strategic development. Few studies deal with more than two levels of strategy. Moreover, the present study addresses the need to understand strategic congruence from a life-cycle perspective. This is particularly relevant in practice, when management in large companies face difficult issues for which they expect business research to assist them in the decision-making process.

The 'nature' of environmental education research from a feminist poststructuralist viewpoint

For a generation or more, environmental education discourses have been constructed around persistent Cartesian dualisms of modernist thought that divide an "othered" category of being from that of a constituted homogeneous human identity. During the same period, both feminist and poststructuralist theorizing has acted to destabilize the constitution of identities, revealing knowledge, including environmental knowledge, to be multiple, subjective, contingent, and intimately tied in with embodied experiences of place. We explore some of the contingencies of environmental knowledge as revealed through a poststructuralist feminist research methodology and the place for such understandings within an early twenty-first century vision for environmental education research and practice.

The impact of management style on the employment relations of different sized organisations

Purpose of the research/paper: The views and values of managers are typically noted as being wedded to unitarist or pluralist ideals. This paper disaggregates these views and values by looking at the impact of various managerial styles on employment relations in different sized organisations.
Methodology: Conceptual with applied support from the secondary literature.
Findings: The paper concludes that large organisations confront conditions and contingencies which allow them to make certain choices about employment relations in ways that are not always available to small to medium sized organisations.

The application of the psychological contract to workplace safety

Introduction: Psychological contracts of safety are conceptualized as the beliefs of individuals about reciprocal safety obligations inferred from implicit or explicit promises. Although the literature on psychological contracts is growing, the existence of psychological contracts in relation to safety has not been established. The research sought to identify psychological contracts in the conversations of employees about safety, by demonstrating reciprocity in relation to employer and employee safety obligations. The identified safety obligations were used to develop a measure of psychological contracts of safety. Method: The participants were 131 employees attending safety training sessions in retail and manufacturing organizations. Non-participant observation was used to collect the data during safety training sessions. Content analysis was used to analyze the data. Categories for coding were established through identification of language markers that demonstrated contingencies or other implied obligations. Results: Direct evidence of reciprocity between employer safety obligations and employee safety obligations was found in statements from the participants demonstrating psychological contracts. A comprehensive list of perceived employer and employee safety obligations was compiled and developed into a measure of psychological contracts of safety. A small sample of 33 safety personnel was used to validate the safety obligations. Conclusions and impact on industry: Implications of these findings for safety and psychological contract research are discussed.

Rawls and Health Care

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

Continuous product innovation : a comparison of key elements across different contingency sets

This paper discusses results from an international study of continuous improvement in product innovation. The empirical research is based upon a theoretical model of continuous product innovation (CPI) that identifies contingencies, behaviours, levers and performances relevant to improving product innovation processes. As successful knowledge management is widely recognised as a key capability for firms to successfully develop CPI, companies have been classified according to identified contingencies and the impact of these contingencies on key knowledge management criteria. Comparative analysis of the identified groups of companies has demonstrated important differences between the learning behaviours found present in the two groups thus identified, and in the levers used to develop and support these behaviours. The selection of performance measures by the two groups has highlighted further significant differences in the way the two groups understand and measure their CPI processes. Finally, the paper includes a discussion of appropriate mechanisms for firms with similar contingency sets to improve their approaches to organisational learning and product innovation.

Continuous product innovation : learning behaviours and knowledge management

The research reported in this paper considers Product Innovation from a broader perspective than that of the isolated NPD (New Product Development) project commonly discussed in the literature. In this perspective, Product Innovation is a continuous and cross-functional process involving the sharing and transfer of knowledge within the many steps of the innovation process, and the integration of a growing number of different competencies inside and outside the organisational boundaries. This paper examines two in-depth case studies that were carried out to establish if and how learning occurred within companies developing new products. Based on a model developed as part of a joint Euro-Australian research project, the way in which the selected companies share and transfer knowledge and learning experiences during their product innovation processes have been examined and analysed. This model uses a number of interrelated variables including performance, behaviours and levers to stimulate improvement, contingencies, and learning/innovation capabilities to describe the learning and knowledge transfer in product innovation processes within the case studies. This paper discusses some of the skills the research has identified that managers need to enable their companies to gain a competitive advantage through improved product innovation. The ongoing research has developed, tested and disseminated a computer-based methodology to assess organisational knowledge capture and transfer in the new product development process. The research is part of the Euro-Australian co-operation project known as CIMA (Continuous Improvement and Product Innovation Management).

Complexity and learning behaviours in product innovation

Successful product innovation and the ability of companies to continuously improve their innovation processes are rapidly becoming essential requirements for competitive advantage and long-term growth in both manufacturing and service industries. It is now recognized that companies must develop innovation capabilities across all stages of the product development, manufacture, and distribution cycle. These Continuous Product Innovation (CPI) capabilities are closely associated with a company’s knowledge management systems and processes. Companies must develop mechanisms to continuously improve these capabilities over time.  Using results of an international survey on CPI practices, sets of companies are identified by similarities in specific contingencies related to their complexity of product, process, technological, and customer interface. Differences between the learning behaviors found present in the company groups and in the levers used to develop and support these behaviors are identified and discussed. This paper also discusses appropriate mechanisms for firms with similar complexities, and some approaches they can use to improve their organizational learning and product innovation.

Knowledge management in continuous product innovation : a contingent approach

There is a growing interest in new organisational forms and integrated managerial and technological approaches supporting companies in continuously innovating their products and processes to survive in a turbulent environment. Successful product innovation will more and more depend upon a company's ability to manage knowledge and integrate a growing number of competencies within and outside the organisational boundaries. These abilities require a complex set of interrelated managerial, technological and organisational conditions that must be designed according to the individual firm's characteristics. This paper aims to identify and analyse the relation between individual firms' contingent variables and managerial approaches to foster knowledge management in product innovation. Evidence is based on a survey of 70 companies, including European and Australian firms, developed within the Euro-Australian cooperation project entitled CIMA (Continuous Improvement for global innovation management).

Power, influence and intranet implementation : a safari of South African organizations

Intranets hold great promise as ``organizational Internets'' to allow information sharing and collaboration across departments, functions and different information systems within an organization. Yet not much is known about how to implement intranets. We adapt a taxonomy based on institutional theory and distinguish six broad diffusion drivers that might be considered to sustain the implementation process. An exploratory field study of four intranet implementations was conducted to analyze which drivers were used and the results that were yielded. We draw several conclusions. First, all six drivers were deployed in the analyzed cases. Second, the choice of drivers varied with the level of the intranet (corporate or unit), the implementation stage, and existing organizational practices and contingencies. Third, it seems that the critical drivers are knowledge building, subsidy and mobilization in the early stages of implementation. In the later stages knowledge deployment, subsidy and innovation directives were most commonly used.

Reflexive antiracism : a novel approach to diversity training

This article introduces the concept of reflexive antiracism as a response to two major critiques of antiracism theory and praxis: the dangers of essentialism and the elicitation of counter-productive emotional reactions. The article explores these critiques as they apply to two broad approaches to diversity training: cultural awareness and antiracism. Reflexive antiracism offers an alternative to existing approaches through a focus on racialisation and the formation and maintenance of racialised identities in particular. An emphasis on the paradoxes of racialisation and the contingencies of minority and white antiracist identities can promote a realistic and productive understanding of diversity training that may avoid the pitfalls of existing approaches. To conclude, an outline of factors that contribute to reflexive antiracism praxis are presented, drawing on examples from an existing diversity training course.

The silent witness: art as a mode of representation of voices and visions of how,as a woman, I build borders and bridges in enacting my identit(ies)

Feminist theorists unveil how women negotiate their identities within complex entanglements of social constructs such as race, ethnicity, religious belief and practices, cultural tradition, and values. Feminist artists use subjective experiences that shape representation and performativity in empowering women to have a ‘voice’. In this paper, I focus on ‘breaking silences’ through series of my artworks (as part of my PhD research) that represent self-narratives as subjectivities of life experiences, contingencies, and cultural shifts through migration transitions as new ways of figuration and reflection on such issues. I look through discourses of gender differences, nomadic subjectivity, and new ways of figurations (Braidotti 2011, 10) and the affect theory (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), and the concept of giving ‘voice’ (Berlant 2011). Such discourses frame how I interrogate and represent my gendered identities.

International comparisons of mathematics classrooms and curricula: the validity-comparability compromise

The pursuit of commensurability in international comparative research by imposing general classificatory frameworks can misrepresent valued performances, school knowledge and classroom practice as these are actually conceived by each community and sacrifice validity in the interest of comparability. The “validity-comparability compromise” is proposed as a theoretical concern with significant implications for international cross-cultural research. We draw on current international research to illustrate a variety of aspects of the issue and its consequences for the manner in which international research is conducted and its results interpreted. The effects extend to data generation and analysis and constitute essential contingencies on the interpretation and application of international comparative research.

Disease burden evaluation of fall-related events in the elderly due to hypoglycemia and other diabetic complications: a clinical review

A hypoglycemia-induced fall is common in older persons with diabetes. The etiology of falls in this population is usually multifactorial, and includes microvascular and macrovascular complications and age-related comorbidities, with hypoglycemia being one of the major precipitating causes. In this review, we systematically searched the literature that was available up to March 31, 2014 from MEDLINE/PubMed, Embase, and Google Scholar using the following terms: hypoglycemia; insulin; diabetic complications; and falls in elderly. Hypoglycemia, defined as blood glucose <4.0 mmol/L (70 mg/dL) requiring external assistance, occurs in one-third of elderly diabetics on glucose-lowering therapies. It represents a major barrier to the treatment of diabetes, particularly in the elderly population. Patients who experience hypoglycemia are at a high risk for adverse outcomes, including falls leading to bone fracture, seizures, cognitive dysfunction, and prolonged hospital stays. An increase in mortality has been observed in patients who experience any one of these events. Paradoxically, rational insulin therapy, dosed according to a patient's clinical status and the results of home blood glucose monitoring, so as to achieve and maintain recommended glycemic goals, can be an effective method for the prevention of hypoglycemia and falls in the elderly. Contingencies, such as clinician-directed hypoglycemia treatment protocols that guide the immediate treatment of hypoglycemia, help to limit both the duration and severity of the event. Older diabetic patients with or without underlying renal insufficiency or other severe illnesses represent groups that are at high risk for hypoglycemia-induced falls and, therefore, require lower insulin dosages. In this review, the risk factors of falls associated with hypoglycemia in elderly diabetics were highlighted and management plans were suggested. A target hemoglobin A1c level between 7% and 8% seems to be more appropriate for this population. In addition, the first-choice drugs should have good safety profiles and have the lowest probability of causing hypoglycemia - such as metformin (in the absence of significant renal impairment) and incretin enhancers - while other therapies that may cause more frequent hypoglycemia should be avoided.