Designing policy: collaborative policy development within the context of the European capital of culture bid process

ABSTRACT

How do ideas become policies? What route do they take from inception to implementation and what criteria are used to evaluate one set of proposals against another? This paper examines the development of the Creative Work Fellowship policy proposal in Limerick, tracing the origins of the idea, itself a contended and negotiated object, from discussions between academics and policy-makers through to scoping, pitching and scaling the policy to its eventual users. This policy idea was designed during the Intelligence Unit (IU) commissioned by Limerick2020 as part of the city’s bid to become European Capital of Culture in 2020. The IU took the form of a policy think-tank, tasked with generating insights, ideas and policy proposals into the place of culture within Limerick city and region. The IU structure created a set of actors and an epistemic community capable of both generating and using ideas effectively, chiefly through two mechanisms. The first involved a robust critique and rebuilding process that every element of the policy was exposed to; the second involved feedback from interested parties at specific stages in the process. This created a series of “policy entrepreneurs” capable of taking a fully costed and modelled policy suggestion to government. The findings presented in the paper include an analysis of the collaborative nature of this policy development process, Based on this framework, we also consider the role of the European City of Culture bid process as catalyst for policy development in a regional context, and present findings on this subject.     

An analysis of the value of multiple mentors in formalised elite coach mentoring programmes

Background: Within the context of sports coaching and coach education, formalised mentoring relationships are often depicted as a mentor–mentee dyad. Thus, mentoring within sports coaching is typically conceptualised as a one-dimensional relationship, where the mentor is seen as the powerful member of the dyad, with greater age and/or experience [Colley, H. (2003). Mentoring for Social Inclusion. London: Routledge].

Aim: The aim of this study was to explore the concept of a multiple mentor system in an attempt to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of sports coach mentoring. In doing so, this paper builds upon the suggestion of Jones, Harris, and Miles [(2009). “Mentoring in Sports Coaching: A Review of the Literature.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 14 (3): 267–284] who highlight the importance of generating empirical research to explore current mentoring approaches in sport, which in turn can inform meaningful formal coach education enhancement. The significance of this work therefore lies in opening up both a practical and a theoretical space for dialogue within sports coach education in order to challenge the traditional dyadic conceptualisation of mentoring and move towards an understanding of ‘mentoring in practice’.

Method: Drawing upon Kram’s [(1985). Mentoring at Work: Developmental Relationships in Organisational Life. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman] foundational mentoring theory to underpin a multiple mentoring support system, 15 elite coach mentors across a range of sports were interviewed in an attempt to explore their mentoring experiences. Subsequently, an inductive thematic analysis endeavoured to further investigate the realities and practicalities of employing a multiple mentoring system in the context of elite coach development.

Results: The participants advocated support for the utilisation of a multiple mentor system to address some of the inherent problems and complexities within elite sports coaching mentoring. Specifically, the results suggested that mentees sourced different mentors for specific knowledge acquisition, skills and attributes. For example, within a multiple mentor approach, mentors recommended that mentees use a variety of mentors, including cross-sports and non-sport mentors.

Conclusion: Tentative recommendations for the future employment of a multiple mentoring framework were considered, with particular reference to cross-sports or non-sport mentoring experiences.     

Theory for incompressible fluid turbulence

The functional integral representation for the space-time Hopf characteristic functional associated with boundary-free incompressible fluid turbulence is evaluated accurately to order R^-2, where R is the dimensionless Reynolds number in the theory. This work extends the results obtained previously for C-dominant turbulence to the regime of experimentally accessible large Reynolds numbers. We obtain a characteristic functional of non-Gaussian form as an asymptotically exact solution to the theory for large values of R. Two-point and three-point velocity correlation tensors of physical interest are derived from the characteristic functional.     

The self-concept level of black adolescents with and without African names

The self-concept level of Black adolescents with African names was explored. Black males with and without African names were first identified. All participants and their parents were then administered the Terrell and Taylor Black Ideology Scale and the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory. Differences between groups on the self-concept measures were then examined using a one way MANOVA with parents' scores on the self-concept measures serving as covariates. Significant differences were found between groups. Supplemental analyses revealed no differences between groups on the Coopersmith. However, adolescents with African names had significantly higher scores on the Black self-concept scales than did those without African names.