Culture and Classroom Communication: A Pilot Study in the Post-Soviet Republic of Armenia

Using participant observations and informal interviews, the study examined whether and how classroom communication in Armenia reflects Armenian culture and history, including the Soviet influence for close to seven decades and Armenia’s transition from one socio-politico-economic system to another, followed by internationalization of education and globalization. Findings of the study revealed three major themes that have impacted the classroom communication style: courtesy, immediacy, solidarity. While consistent in some ways with Soviet communism, these themes may have also been influenced by Armenia’s traditional and family-centered culture and history which predate Soviet communism, as well as by internationalization of education and globalization.     

Using dissertation projects to facilitate transitions to university and employment: an exploratory case study

The transition between school or college and higher education can be a challenging time for a student. Schools, colleges and universities work together in a number of ways in order to try and ease this process. However, many students still find their first-year experience difficult to adjust to, which can impact on their own development and achievement. This article documents critical reflections on a case study of a teaching, learning and research partnership currently being undertaken between a secondary school where students are taught AS and A Level psychology and a department of psychology in a post-1992 university in England. Drawing upon a social constructivist framework together with Healey’s model of the link between research and teaching, the aims of this study were to explore how undergraduate dissertation students can work with AS and A Level students on their dissertation projects. The study showed that the AS and A Level students found it an enjoyable practical experience, which they felt enhanced their understanding of university studies. The dissertation students found that the experience might be useful for postgraduate studies and future employment. This article highlights the benefits of the process but also the challenges for those involved, particularly if it was to be conducted on a larger scale.     

Potential for teacher collaboration in post-Soviet Ukraine

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to analyze the potential for collaborative relationships in schools in Ukraine. In this paper, I examine the nature of teacher collaboration in schools within a framework of postmodernism as a constructive social theory. To better grasp the deep meaning of collaborative interactions in schools, I use cultural and micropolitical perspective. Further, I turn to the discussion of the potential for collaboration in Ukrainian schools, utilizing the notion of a collective that prevailed in Soviet society and system of education. Implications for establishing collaborative school cultures in Ukraine conclude the paper.     

Libraries in Georgia in 2004-2015

This article presents a report of libraries and librarianship in Georgia during the recent decade. Consideration is given to a variety of libraries, numerous programs and services, Open Source, library science education, and changes from Post-Soviet to contemporary library systems. The insights about this decade of change in this report resonate with many other libraries across the globe. The in-depth look at libraries in Georgia increases awareness of the recent past, current, and immediate future environments for libraries and librarianship.     

Activity theory for understanding and managing system innovations

This study aims to show how activity theory in the socio-technical systems paradigm can assist in understanding and managing system innovation. We conceptualize socio-technical systems to address societal needs as activity systems and system innovations as transformations of such systems. Transformations result from resolving contradictions that develop due to technical and social change within and between the activities carried out by various agencies to fulfill societal needs. Along this line, the explanation of system innovations focuses on identifying emerging contradictions, resolution initiatives, and their outcomes, whereas the governance of system innovations can be carried out by interactively developing policies through successive interventions to resolve contradictions. We demonstrate the employment of activity theory to understand the transformation of the recorded music socio-technical system towards streaming, as well as to facilitate the management of the transition of the olive oil-producing sector at the regional level towards a circular economy through the adoption of innovative waste-processing technology.     

Innovation policy for system-wide transformation: The case of strategic innovation programmes (SIPs) in Sweden

The orientation towards grand societal challenges can be seen as a new wave or paradigm for innovation policy. Such policy aims at system-wide transformation and is often referred to as system innovation policy. While insights from transition studies have provided novel and useful rationales for innovation policy targeting system-wide transformation, it remains unclear how to design, implement and evaluate such policies. The contribution of this paper is to translate and concretize the challenges of system innovation policy towards scope for policy action and analysis. Building on insights from transition studies we group the challenges into four domains: directionality, experimentation, demand articulation, and policy coordination and learning. We relate challenges within the four domains to three generic features of innovation systems: interests and capabilities of actors, networks, and institutions. The derived framework is applied in a case study on the strategic innovation programmes, a recent policy initiative by Vinnova, Sweden’s Innovation Agency, targeting system innovation.     

Studying transitions: Past,present, and future

The domain of transition studies has been drawing more and more scholarly attention and, as a result, its body of knowledge is rapidly growing. This raises new challenges as well as opportunities, not the least regarding the methodological and philosophical underpinnings of research in this domain. In this respect, transition research, as a relatively young field of inquiry, has been little concerned with methodological investigation and reflection. We propose a framework that enables this reflection: the so-called ‘transition research onion’. Subsequently, we utilize this framework to systematically assess 217 peer-reviewed papers in the field of transition studies, to distill key methodological patterns and trends of the field. The findings suggest that the methodology of transition studies, in terms of depth and diversity, is underdeveloped. These insights serve to guide future research on transition processes.