Breaking up is hard to do: the resilience of the rock group as an organizational form for creating music

Though there is a long tradition of band members quitting the group or taking a hiatus, the rock group as an organization to produce music continues to be both popular and economically viable. The research question addressed in this paper is whether or not it is a good idea to quit or take a hiatus from the group. We begin with a discussion of the framework for understanding why groups are formed and why they may be difficult to keep together. We then discuss differences between groups in the decade of the 1960s versus today. We argue that there is something unique about the output of the group even with the changes in the structure of contracts, compensation, and consumer focus on the artist that explain the resilience of the rock band as an organizational form within which to create music. We compare the charting success of bands that have members leave the group with the charting success of the members who left the group. We identified the groups in five representative years: 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005. We then analyzed the entire Billboard Hot 100 charting careers of those groups and the artists who quit those groups. Our main finding is that when charting success is divided equally among members, going solo pays off—there is a clear economic rationale because solo acts have greater average charting success than the original bands they started in. The other ensuing side projects: duos, collaborations, and other groups are not as lucrative as the original bands. These findings are valid for members of charting groups from each of the 5 years examined. Despite the difficulties in keeping a rock band together, there are fewer band breakups today and remaining with the group generally results in a longer and more productive charting career. Thus, the rock group remains an important organization for producing contemporary music. However, there remains a compelling incentive to go solo. Superstars may benefit from solo projects, but for the average, non-superstar group member, in many circumstances it is better for the band to stay together if the income is divided equally.     

Fertilization in flowering plants

After the pollen grain reaches the stigma through outsourced agents (pollinators), the next step before fertilization is to select the right type of pollen. Similar to a marriage in human beings, fiowering plants also have evolved elaborate screening process to select the right pollen grains and to reject the wrong ones. Even after initial screening for the right pollen, the pistil imposes a tough competition amongst them, comparable to a swayamvara of Indian mythology, to select the best available pollen. Flowering plants have evolved into a matriarchal society. The selection of the male partner is totally the prerogative of the mother (pistil); the boy (pollen grain) and the girl (ovule) has no say in this selection.     

In pursuit of becoming a senior coach: the learning culture for Australian Football League coaches

Background and Purpose: Given the turbulent and highly contested environment in which professional coaches work, a prime concern to coach developers is how coaches learn their craft. Understanding the learning and development of senior coaches (SCs) and assistant coaches (ACs) in the Australian Football League (AFL – the peak organisation for Australian Rules Football) is important to better develop the next generation of performance coaches. Hence the focus of this research was to examine the learning of SC and AC in the AFL. Fundamental to this research was an understanding that the AFL and each club within the league be regarded as learning organisations and workplaces with their own learning cultures where learning takes place. The purpose of this paper was to examine the learning culture for AFL coaches.

Method: Five SCs, 6 ACs, and 5 administrators (4 of whom were former coaches) at 11 of the 16 AFL clubs were recruited for the research project. First, demographic data were collected for each participant (e.g. age, playing and coaching experience, development and coach development activities). Second, all participants were involved in one semi-structured interview of between 45 and 90 minutes duration. An interpretative (hierarchical content) analysis of the interview data was conducted to identify key emergent themes.

Results: Learning was central to AFL coaches becoming a SC. Nevertheless, coaches reported a sense of isolation and a lack of support in developing their craft within their particular learning culture. These coaches developed a unique dynamic social network (DSN) that involved episodic contact with a number of respected confidantes often from diverse fields (used here in the Bourdieuian sense) in developing their coaching craft. Although there were some opportunities in their workplace, much of their learning was unmediated by others, underscoring the importance of their agentic engagement in limited workplace affordances.

Conclusion: The variety of people accessed for the purposes of learning (often beyond the immediate workplace) and the long time taken to establish networks of supporters meant that a new way of describing the social networks of AFL coaches was needed; DSN. However, despite the acknowledged utility of learning from others, all coaches reported some sense of isolation in their learning. The sense of isolation brought about by professional volatility in high-performance Australian Football offers an alternative view on Hodkinson, Biesta and James' attempt in overcoming dualisms in learning.     

Effects of maze geometry and experience on exploratory behavior in the rat

Rats were exposed twice in a rotated sequence to a series of six mazes, consisting of hexagonal alleys, balanced for different alley length and structural complexity. Locomotor activity increased with alley length and decreased with structural complexity of the mazes. Locomotion became less stereotyped with increased experience, showing an increasing number of turns, less constant velocity, loss of the initial preference for outward leading alleys and weakening of the forward tendency at reentry from side alleys into hexagonal alleys. In contrast to these qualitative changes of locomotion, the amount of activity remained almost unchanged throughout the experiment. The results suggest that these increases in locomotion complexity depend upon complex interactions between experience and stimulus content of the mazes.     

Identity policies of education: struggles for inclusion and exclusion in Peru and Colombia

ABSTRACT

Policy initiatives that seek to account for ethno-cultural differences in education and schooling have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. These include affirmative action measures and bilingual education models. The rationale for the implementation of these policies focuses on their potential to rectify historical discrimination by both levelling horizontal inequalities and granting equal value to different cultures and languages in the schooling process. In this framework, however, ethnic communities are often treated as discrete and static social aggregates, and social heterogeneity and spillover effects between groups are disregarded. This paper draws on empirical case studies from Colombia and Peru to show how identity policies of education can increase inter-ethnic competition, leading to protracted social conflicts. These outcomes, beyond negatively impacting local communities, raise important dilemmas surrounding the theoretical and operational foundations of these popular policy measures.