Standards for the academic veterinary medical library.

The Standards Committee of the Veterinary Medical Libraries Section was appointed in May 2000 and charged to create standards for the ideal academic veterinary medical library, written from the perspective of veterinary medical librarians. The resulting Standards for the Academic Veterinary Medical Library were approved by members of the Veterinary Medical Libraries Section during MLA '03 in San Diego, California. The standards were approved by Section Council in April 2005 and received final approval from the Board of Directors of the Medical Library Association during MLA '04 in Washington, DC.     

Executive power and scaled-up gender subtexts in Australian entrepreneurial universities

Deputy Vice Chancellor and Pro Vice Chancellor positions have proliferated in response to the global, corporatised university landscape [Scott, G., S. Bell, H. Coates, and L. Grebennikov. 2010. “Australian Higher Education Leaders in Times of Change: The Role of Pro Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice Chancellor.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 32 (4): 401–418]. Senior leadership is the sphere where academic and management identities are negotiated and values around the role of the university are decided. This paper examines the changing and gendered nature of the senior leadership setting and its implications for diversity in and of university leadership. The analysis draws from a three-year empirical study funded by the Australian Research Council on leadership in Australian universities. It focuses on executive leaders in three universities – one which is research-intensive, the second, in a regional site, and the third, university of technology. The article argues that the university landscape and its management systems are being restructured in gendered ways. It utilises the notion of organisational gender subtexts to make explicit how gender works through structural and cultural reform.     

Level Playing Field? Feminist Observations on Global/local Articulations of the Re-Gendering and Restructuring of Educational Work

In the world of educational work since the mid 1980s there has been much talk of restructuring. This reflects postmodern thinking, which favours decentralizing decisions to those at the work face, and encouraging multi-skilled and flexible workers. This article presents a feminist analysis of how such policies are reflected at the local level in four instances: Australia, Sweden, New Zealand and Israel. These examples indicate that management practices tend to be more modernist (hierarchical, controlling and centralizing) than postmodernist, and often have highly inequitable effects for women teachers. The article asserts that gender inequities in educational work have assumed a different form but have not been eliminated. However, the author argues that such global tendencies need to be considered in the light of specific cultural, economic and geographical factors, which affect how work is structured and how education is shaped.     

Social interaction,relationships, and the development of causal discourse and conflict management

Links between the development of social understanding and social processes are considered, in the context of data on the development of causal reasoning and argument in conflict, drawn from a longitudinal study of 50 children observed in conversation with their mothers, siblings, and friends at 33 and 47 months of age. Children showed powers of causal reasoning before they were 3 years, capabilities that showed rapid developmental change; their interest in cause was particularly focussed on psychological causality and social action. The contexts of disputes were especially important. Differences were found in children’s arguments with their mothers, siblings, and friends, with more ‘other-oriented’ reasoning shown with friends. It is argued that the data support Vygotskyan ideas on the significance of social interaction in developmental advance, that the pragmatics of what children and their partners are trying to do must be taken into account in considering what children may be learning in interactions, and that ‘social competence’ should not be treated as an individual within-child trait, but that we should move towards a ‘relationships’ approach to the development of social understanding.