Do values drive the plan? Investigating the nature and role of organizational values in university strategic planning

Strategic planning is a common practice at higher education institutions. Furthermore, it is assumed that identifying organizational values is an essential part of the planning process. Values are often construed as foundational elements of strategic thinking that serve to ‘drive the plan’. However, there is little conceptual or applied evidence to support the effectiveness of coupling organizational values articulation with strategic planning processes. The author reports on a study that was designed to effectively conceptualize organizational values, and foster a deeper understanding of organizational values application in higher education administration. This research involved a textual analysis of strategic planning documents pertaining to organizational values from Canadian universities. Research results offer concrete ways to conceptualize and apply organizational values within university settings. The results serve as a foundation to explore small-group-focused approaches to both policy creation and evaluation pertaining to the articulation of organizational values in university administration.

     

'She just got me’: supporting care experienced young people negotiating relationships and identities at school

In this article we examine the complex relationship between care experience, mental health and exclusion from school and how young people (YP) negotiate these different experiences and identities. The study is a secondary analysis, informed by symbolic interactionist theory, of interviews conducted with 19 care experienced YP in Scotland. Not all of the YP were excluded and not all had a formal mental health diagnosis, as such our study design allows interrogation of the contexts and relationships which not only facilitate but also disrupt pathways to exclusion. It also allows reconsideration of assumptions of vulnerability which are often applied to care experienced YP. Our findings suggest that these YP are moving beyond ‘role playing’ the identities ascribed to them and actively seek out relationships which enable them to construct alternative identities.     

Leadership and inclusion: a special school perspective

In July 2002, the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) held a 'Leading Edge' seminar focused on the contribution that leaders in special schools can make to the development of Inclusive policies and practices. The day gave colleagues working in specialist contexts an opportunity to share examples and experiences of current initiatives and to speculate about future trends and developments in inclusive education. In this article, Robin Attfield and Chris Williams, Assistant Directors in Programmes and Research respectively at the NCSL, explore the context in which the seminar took place and some of the themes and issues that emerged from discussion on the day. At the end of their paper, they summarise the key messages that the special school leaders who attended the seminar wished to communicate to a wider audience and articulate a further role for leaders in special schools in the development of inclusion.     

Expert systems: aspects of and limitations to the codifiability of knowledge

The creation of expert systems is one way in which knowledge is codified. In creating an expert system, in general there are three aspects to the codification process: creating a model of the knowledge to be codified; creating the language in which to express the model; and writing messages representing the knowledge in that language. These aspects have different relative importance in different contexts. Referring to four case studies, the paper argues further that codification through creating expert systems is not uniformly successful and part of the variation has to do with the nature of the knowledge, or intellectual process or activity being codified, and the difficulty in creating the model. Activities with fixed goals and linear processes lend themselves very well to this form of codification. Processes of categorization and analogy, such as fault detection and repair, are partially successful, tending more often to create systems for experts. Processes involving balancing conflicting goals have, to date, tended to be unsuccessfully codified. These process types involve knowledge or understanding at deeper and deeper levels of abstraction of the overall processes and overarching goals. The more abstract and less concrete the knowledge involved in the task, the more difficult it is to codify it.