Accounting for a sociological life: influences and experiences on the road from welfarism to neoliberalism

This is an attempt to review what I am now. To give some coherence to an incoherent academic life, written against the background of profound changes is what it means to be an academic. The paper begins in a welfare state primary school and ends in a global neoliberal university.     

The global middle class and school choice: a cosmopolitan sociology

In this paper we suggest the need for research which addresses school choice as a global phenomenon. That is, a form of choice which extends beyond local politics and policymaking. We consider here the educational choices and choice making contexts of a burgeoning, mobile, post-national middle class who operate on a global scale. We also sketch the educational market within which these choices are considered and realised but the main focus is on demand side issues. The paper seeks to open a space for further research, in which to ask some old and some new questions about social class and social reproduction through schooling, and to make the case for choice researchers to attend more carefully to choice in a framework of mobility, globalisation and related new kinds of social class identities and interests.     

中国优秀青少年乒乓球运动员身体素质训练水平综合评价研究

对1997年中国现役乒乓球运动员831人的身体素质测试数据进行主成份分析，结合专家调查筛选出3000m、引体向上、侧滑步为全国青少年比赛的身体素质测试指标。该指标经1998～2002年全国比赛使用及调整，最后确定的3000m、侧滑步、握力3项测试指标和测试方法，在方法学上是可靠的、可行的，能反映出我国优秀青少年乒乓球运动员的身体素质水平。     

Expanding the dialogue on culture as a critical component when assessing writing

This article reports on the findings of a study that illustrates the value of including the voices of teachers from diverse backgrounds in discussions concerning writing assessment. The inclusion of such voices can help, not only to inform, but to re-shape current assessment practices, research priorities, and policy debates that focus on finding solutions to problems of assessment, particularly as they relate to diverse populations. In Part one of the article, I review the findings of an investigation in which four European-American teachers assess students' written texts. These teachers rated essays written by ethnically diverse fifth- and sixth-grade students using an array of rhetorical and linguistic measures—including overall quality, coherence, sentence-level mechanics, and use of an organizational structure. In Part two, I describe a replication of this investigation in which four African-American teachers assessed the writings of the same students' written essays using the same rhetorical and linguistic measures. Findings suggest that European-American and African-American teachers hold some consistently different views about the assessment of diverse students' written texts. Motivated by these observed differences and a desire to expand the dialogue on culture as a critical component in assessing writing, I present in the third and final section of the article the voices of the African-American teachers who participated in this study. Through candid and reflective comments, these teachers share deep felt concerns and specific suggestions concerning writing assessment. In this section, I also discuss how the voices of teachers from diverse backgrounds can be useful for broadening debates about the reform of writing assessment in general, and the assessment of writing for culturally and linguistically diverse students in particular.     

Situating workplace surveillance: Ethics and computer based performance monitoring

This paper examines the study of computer basedperformance monitoring (CBPM) in the workplaceas an issue dominated by questions of ethics.Its central contention paper is that anyinvestigation of ethical monitoring practice isinadequate if it simply applies best practiceguidelines to any one context to indicate,whether practice is, on balance, ethical or not. The broader social dynamics of access toprocedural and distributive justice examinedthrough a fine grained approach to the study ofworkplace social relations, and workplaceidentity construction, are also important here. This has three implications, which are examinedin the paper, and are as follows: First, thatit is vital for any empirical investigation ofthe ethics of CBPM practice to take intoaccount not only its compliance withpreexisting best practice guidelines, butalso the social relations which pervade thecontext of its application. Second, that thisnecessitates a particular epistemologicaltreatment of CBPM as something whose effectsare measurable and identifiable, as well assomething which has a socially constructedmeaning and is tropic in nature. Third, thatexisting debates against which this argument isset, which regard contrasting epistemologiesand ontologies as incompatible, should beaddressed, and an alternative introduced. Introducing situated knowledges (Haraway 1991)and material semiotic ontologies as such analternative, the paper proceeds to analyse theethics of a particular case of monitoringpractice, Norco. Drawing on Marx (1998) thepaper concludes that a fine grain analysis ofthe social is vital if we are to understandfully the ethics of monitoring in theworkplace.     

Phonological,visual and temporal processing in adults with and without reading disability

The primary goal of this study was to comparethree theoretical accounts of readingdisability (RD) by simultaneously studyingphonological, visual, and temporal processingskills. Adults with and without RD werecompared on measures of phonological processingwith the Auditory Analysis Test (AAT) and theWoodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT-R) WordAttack subtest. Visual processing was assessedwith the Useful Field of View test (UFOV®)and the Frequency Doubling Technology Perimeter(FDT). The Repetition Test was used toevaluate temporal processing skills. Adultswith RD evidenced poorer phonological andtemporal processing skills than did adultswithout RD, but no significant differencesbetween the groups were found in visualprocessing. Future research is needed toclarify the relations among phonological,visual, and temporal skills and the roles theyplay in RD. The trajectory and co-existence ofdeficits throughout development, as well as howspecifically such impairments affect reading,warrant further investigation.