Stakeholder influence strategies in bidding for a professional sport franchise license

This paper examines an application for a franchise license in Australia's professional rugby league competition, the National Rugby League (NRL). Frooman's (1999) typology of stakeholder influence strategies is used to analyse the negotiation of resource relationships between a Gold Coast franchise bid team and its key stakeholders. Primary data came from 12 interviews with nine key actors in the bid process; these were buttressed by secondary data. Frooman's typology provided a useful heuristic, but did not fully account for the critical role of firm legitimacy in stakeholders’ choice of influence strategies. The bid team negotiated stakeholders’ initial direct withholding strategies by creating access to the intangible resource of legitimacy. This subsequently provided access to material resources such as finance, a new stadium, and, ultimately, a franchise license. The findings are of note to practitioners and scholars interested professional sport and stakeholder theory.     

A Unified Measure of Media Brand Personality: Developing A Media Brand Personality Scale for Multiple Media

The macro versus micro debate in the brand personality literature has yielded a variety of micro approach brand personality scales for different media, with both differences and parallels in personality dimensions uncovered. The observed parallels in media brand personality dimensions and the varying media contexts under which empirical tests of selective exposure theories have been conducted suggest some common ground in the way that media product brands of different formats are perceived by individuals prior to selection and that the optimal method of measuring brand personality for media products may be neither broad macro inventories nor highly context-specific micro measures but somewhere in between. This article discusses the construction of a unified scale of media brand personality that can measure the personality of movie, TV show, pop song, news, and video game brands. The results of a two-step study consisting of free-association task (N = 1,440) and factor structure formation survey of selected items (N = 4,967) suggest a three-factor structure consisting of aggression, heroism, and warmth. Communication, media management, and marketing ramifications of this scale and potential directions of future research are discussed.     

寻觅知音

从前,有一位老师和他的一个学生。一天,他们躺在一大片草地旁的一棵大树下。忽然,学生问老师:"老师,我很困惑,我们怎样才能找到知音?您能告诉我吗?"老师沉默了片刻,然后回答:"嗯,这是个既难又简单的问题。"     

Testing the validity of value‐added measures of educational progress with genetic data

Value‐added measures of educational progress have been used by education researchers and policy‐makers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, contributing to performance‐related pay and position in school league tables. They are designed to control for all underlying differences between pupils and should therefore provide unbiased measures of school and teacher influence on pupil progress, however, their effectiveness has been questioned. We exploit genetic data from a UK birth cohort to investigate how successfully value‐added measures control for genetic differences between pupils. We use raw value‐added, contextual value‐added (which additionally controls for background characteristics) and teacher‐reported value‐added measures built from data at ages 11, 14 and 16. Sample sizes for analyses range from 4,600 to 6,518. Our findings demonstrate that genetic differences between pupils explain little variation in raw value‐added measures but explain up to 20% of the variation in contextual value‐added measures (95% CI = 6.06% to 35.71%). Value‐added measures built from teacher‐rated ability have a greater proportion of variance explained by genetic differences between pupils, with 36.3% of their cross‐sectional variation being statistically accounted for by genetics (95% CI = 22.8% to 49.8%). By contrast, a far greater proportion of variance is explained by genetic differences for raw test scores at each age of at least 47.3% (95% CI: 35.9 to 58.7). These findings provide evidence that value‐added measures of educational progress can be influenced by genetic differences between pupils, and therefore may provide a biased measure of school and teacher performance. We include a glossary of genetic terms for educational researchers interested in the use of genetic data in educational research.     

Narrative autoethnography and the promotion of spiritual well‐being in teacher research and practice

This article demonstrates through an example the usefulness of autoethnography as a mechanism for teachers acquiring clarity about their spiritual experiences, which has the potential to contribute to facilitating pupils’ spiritual growth. I begin by examining the role of the spiritual dimension in the promotion of a holistic model of education. The purposes and ethical implications of autoethnographic research and its benefits for teacher development are addressed. A story about illness, neurosurgery and rehabilitation is presented, written according to introspective and autoethnographic techniques. The narrative reflects aspects of the writer’s spiritual growth and highlights the need among teachers to explore their own spiritual well‐being as much as the spiritual well‐being of their pupils. Suggestions are made about the diverse use of narrative to promote spiritual learning experiences in the classroom. This is an important part of the work carried out by teachers in the delivery of a curriculum that prepares learners to fulfil their potential in life and work.     

Reflections on the emancipatory potential of vocational education and training practices: Freire and Rancière in dialogue

This paper focuses on the issue of emancipation in education practices in general and in vocational education and training (VET) in particular. The principal aim is to contribute to the discussion of particular traditions of emancipation in education in connection with VET practices. The exploration of ongoing educational debates on VET policy-making and the issue of emancipation in VET reveals that, ultimately, emancipation in VET is understood as a specific function for socio-economic integration. The paper discusses this functionalist orientation and contrasts it with a vision on emancipation as a feature of an educational process rather than an educational outcome. Freire's and Rancière's core concepts of emancipation guide the discussion regarding the latter interpretation of emancipation in VET practices.     

Adult education and critical identity development: from a deficiency orientation towards a competency orientation

The translation of this paper has been made possible with the financial help of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences)

In this paper the authors criticise the growing tendency to conceive of adult education as a qualification oriented field of practice. Especially with respect to disadvantaged groups in society this orientation could have a stigmatizing effect. Various agents of education consider them as deficient and hence describe their identity in negative terms. Contrary to this, the authors develop a more positive orientation towards identity development and outline a new understanding of adult education. Their approach is inspired by insights developed in an area of cultural studies.