Development communication expectations in occupational contexts: A Comparison of U.S. and foreign graduate students

This study focuses on the communication approaches used by experts in development. In line with recent “paradigm shift” issues, this study asks whether foreign and U.S. graduate students have inculcated alternative communication approaches instead of, or in addition to, the predominant “top to bottom” communication approach in their occupational communication roles. A total of 24 foreign and 23 U.S. graduate students from various departments at the University of Washington were asked to describe their expected communication with contact groups above, at the same and at lower status levels. All graduate students showed a marked tendency to exhibit “top to bottom” approaches with contacts of lower status and alternative communication approaches (i.e., bottom to top or interactive) only with peers. Few differences were found between U.S. and foreign, but those that were found were attributed to differing societal and occupational structures. Discussion focused on the lack of a coherent communication approach showing inculcation of more user oriented approaches suggested by the “paradigm shift.”     

Kazzies,DBTs and Tryhards: categorisations of style in adolescent girls’ talk

One aspect of the work that adolescent girls do in creating and maintaining friendship networks with each other, the process of including some girls and excluding others, is explored using an ethnomethodological framework of analysis. Three adolescent schoolgirls in Australia talk about themselves and the other girls in their school. A close examination of this talk reveals a hierarchy of style categorisations which resonate with the socio‐economic and ethnic composition of the three main feeder areas to the school. The girls rank their own ‘original’ style, which is avant‐garde and eclectic, over the mass‐produced, imitative fashions‐of‐the‐moment displayed by members of other style groups.

By social closure Weber means the process by which social collectivities seek to maximise rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of eligibles. This entails the singling out of certain social or physical attributes as the justificatory basis of exclusion. (Parkin, 1979, p. 44)     

Balancing Economic and other Discourses in the Internationalization of Higher Education in South Africa

Since the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, “internationalization” of higher education has been a popular theme as the country takes its place as a regional leader in education and research in sub-Saharan Africa. However, competing discourses of internationalization have produced economic and moral dilemmas rather than the realization of philanthropic academic aims. The process of internationalizing higher education in South Africa has been greatly compromised by under-funding and over-crowding of post-secondary education institutions in the country.     

Exclusion,Inclusion and Moral Ordering in Two Girls’ Friendship Groups

This article makes use of informal interview talk data gathered during a longitudinal study of adolescent girls’ friendship groups. Two group‐produced narratives involving categorisation, moral ordering, inclusion and exclusion are examined with the aim of discerning patterns of girls’ friendship networks. Through a detailed examination of the girls’ talk about themselves, their friends, their enemies, the minor breaking‐ups and making‐ups, the declarations of loyalty, the aspersions cast and the motives attributed, it is possible to discern a significant moral and social order which underlies girls’ friendships. This article represents an attempt to view friendship between girls, not in terms of a pre‐determined model of pervasive, yet invisible patriarchal constraints, but in terms of lived moments of interaction between and with girls who are actually getting on with the business of being friends with each other as they are collaboratively describing events in their friendship networks.     

Career quandaries of activist environmental engineering graduates in Indonesia

Abstract

This article reports on a study that aimed to investigate how young Indonesians might become environmentalists, and what happens when they do. It uses a Bourdieusian framework to analyse interviews with six Indonesian environmental engineering students who took an active role in environmental conservation campaigns while studying at the prestigious University of Technology Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia. In 2014, they were pondering the challenge of negotiating an environmentally defensible career after graduation from their degree. Four years later, in 2018 follow-up contact, it was evident that while they still operated a moral responsibility of conservation and care for the natural world, not all of them had found the dream jobs they imagined as earnest undergraduates keen to protect the natural environment. Yet most had maintained their ‘ecological habitus’ even as they sought to make good on the institutionalised cultural capital invested in their undergraduate degree in environmental engineering. This article examines that journey.     

The ‘spirit of education’ in Indonesian Pesantren

This paper employs Foucauldian theory to consider Islamic boarding school experiences in Indonesia. For some pupils ‘the spirit of education’ – a dimension of pleasure – comes to be highly valued, creating a lifelong passion for the pursuit of knowledge. Two school principals (both pesantren [Islamic boarding school] graduates themselves) articulated strong commitment to the ‘spirit of education’. Yet their respective boarding schools were very poor, not only by western standards but compared with Indonesian public schools, and conditions were austere. The embodiment of pesantren discourse as high academic achievement is illustrated by the example of Khadija – a young female pesantren graduate now studying at doctoral level in the United Kingdom. Explaining the embodied production of the ‘spirit of education’ demands looking at charismatic pedagogy, strict rules, austere conditions and sparse provision of learning resources as regimes of truth and power–knowledge relations that inhere in pesantren as lived experiences of pupils.     

Indigenous Fijian female pupils and career choice: explaining generational gender reproduction

This paper examines aspects of the school-to-work transition process for high-achieving indigenous Fijian young women using selective data from a wider study of school-to-work transitions conducted in 2005. It appears that traditional and colonial understandings of the role of Fijian women still shape even high-achieving girls' career and life options; these are expressed through their subject choices at school and their narrow career aspirations. While the social reproduction mechanisms of schools are evident, families and communities are also implicated. High-achieving girls still tend to emulate the career choices of older women in their families and communities, even in the current context of a marked lessening of labour market opportunities for the time-honoured “white-collar” occupations of teaching, nursing and public service work. Some provisional interpretations, looking towards productive interventions at school, community and church level, of this phenomenon are offered.     

A re-examination of relevance: toward a dynamic, situational definition*

Although relevance judgments are fundamental to the design and evaluation of all information retrieval systems, information scientists have not reached a consensus in defining the central concept of relevance. In this paper we ask two questions: What is the meaning of relevance? and What role does relevance play in information behavior? We attempt to address these questions by reviewing literature over the last 30 years that presents various views of relevance as topical, user-oriented, multidimensional, cognitive, and dynamic. We then discuss traditional assumptions on which most research in the field has been based and begin building a case for an approach to the problem of definition based on alternative assumptions. The dynamic, situational approach we suggest views the user — regardless of system — as the central and active determinant of the dimensions of relevance. We believe that relevance is a multidimensional concept; that it is dependent on both internal (cognitive) and external (situational) factors; that it is based on a dynamic human judgment process; and that it is a complex but systematic and measurable phenomenon.