Playing with tension: national charisma and disgrace at Euro 2012

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – players, officials, media or fans – is able to disregard entirely the field capabilities of the ‘best minority of 11’ in the serious game of exemplifying the group charisma of nations.     

Thanks,but no-thanks for the feedback

Feedback is an emotional business in which personal disposition influences what is attended to, encoded, consolidated and eventually retrieved. Here, we examine the extent to which students’ perceptions of feedback and their personal dispositions can be used to predict whether they appreciate, engage with and act on the feedback that they receive. The study is framed in psychological theories of mindset, defensive behaviours and new psychometric measures of the psychological integration of assessment feedback. Results suggest that, in this university population, growth mindset students were in the minority. Generally, students are fostering self-defensive behaviours that fail to nurture remediation following feedback. Recommendations explore the implications for students who engage in self-deception, and the ways in which psychologists and academics may intercede to help students progress academically by increasing their self-awareness.     

Dealing with ‘fragile identities’: resistance and refiguring in women mathematics students

Many learners may be successful in mathematics but nevertheless see themselves as existing only on the margins of the practice, or as lacking stability in it – in this sense, they have what can be called a fragile identity. Although this kind of relationship with mathematics is not limited to girls and women, they do appear to express such fragile identities more often or more readily. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from undergraduates in three English universities, this paper presents an analysis of the way in which university mathematics is differentially experienced by men and women, and of the part this may play in women’s ongoing narratives of self as mathematicians. It is suggested that some women resist traditional positionings in the mathematics world, drawing on local resources which enable a sense of agency as successful students and a refiguring of their relationships with mathematics.     

Comparison of teacher talk directed to boys and girls and its relationship to their behaviour in secondary and primary schools

There have been a number of earlier investigations, using differing methodologies, into the extent to which teachers in the secondary school interact with boys and girls and the results have suggested an imbalance in the teachers’ verbal behaviour towards the genders that is quite similar to the imbalance found in teachers’ behaviour in the primary school. The main aim of this study was to devise an investigation using the same methodology as that used in a recent primary school investigation in order to be able to make a fair comparison between the two levels. The results showed considerable differences in the teachers’ verbal behaviour towards the genders in the secondary school from that of teachers in the primary school. Where the primary school data showed teachers interacting more with the boys than the girls and the boys being less on‐task than the girls, the secondary school data showed no such differences.     

The funding-productivity-gender nexus in science,a multistage analysis

This paper contributes to the literature on the observed research funding and scientific productivity gender gap in science. On the basis of very detailed information for a sample of 276 academics at the University of Turin over a ten year period, we develop a robust new model that takes into account the three main stages of the funding-productivity nexus: applying for a grant, successful fund raising and conducting the research, to investigate at which stage the gender gap emerges. In the model, we control for differences – not previously examined together - in the time allocated to teaching, administration and child care, which might moderate the gender effect. Using a Two-Stage Least Square (2SLS) model we control, for selection into funding, endogeneity of career progress and endogeneity of funding success, and find, first, that researchers who apply for grants are active in teaching and administration and show persistent funding application behaviour, but find no evidence of a significant gender bias; second, when we control for application selection, the negative gender correlation with funding acquisition becomes stronger, while teaching is negatively correlated to the amount of funding raised; and, third, controlling for selection and reverse causality, we find that funding is not associated to higher research productivity. At all stages of the funding-productivity nexus we find negative, albeit insignificant, secondary gender effects associated with administrative tasks, but less so with teaching. In the research impact-quality estimations we provide evidence of a ‘motherhood penalty’ for female academics with young children who did not apply for funding (including evidence of a causal effect). In line with the literature, we find that, after controlling for children, female researchers are less productive in terms of publications, but not in terms of research quality or impact.