Description:
Neoliberalism emerged as a dominant doctrine of political and economic practice in the US and Australia during the late 1970s. Its influence over the last three or four decades on economic and social policy in both western developed economies and in developing economies has been widely analysed, but its influence on business-level industrial relations strategy is less wellknown. Despite this limited understanding, its influence over management strategies cannot be ignored. Therefore, this chapter aims to explore what might be regarded as neoliberal management strategies and practices, particularly in an industrial relations framework. While this is a very broad canvas, the focus will be specifically on management industrial relations strategies and practices in the US and Australian meat processing industries, as a case example of how neoliberalism has affected the world of work.
Description:
Our goal in this chapter is to pose, and respond to, a deceptively simple question: How do learners learn a landscape? But of course it is, naturally, a deep and profound question that speaks to how humans relate to the landscapes in which they live. Crucially, the question also anticipates how teachers and learners relate to one another. In our role as outdoor educators of pre-service teachers we often find ourselves working in a range of localities using particu-lar activities such as bushwalking, sea kayaking, snorkelling and surfing. It is all too easy to treat the landscapes within which these activities occur as value-neutral venues, as simply a means to achieve personal, social and environmental educational outcomes (Wattchow and Brown 2011). These activities and the landscapes in which they are practised become ahis-torical, rather than activities and locations with long and fascinating cultural histories (Miles and Wattchow 2015). There can be a tendency to abstract learning outcomes and inoculate learners against the influence of the particularities and peculiarities of local places and the activities being undertaken. While this may be done with good intentions, like teaching for generalisable knowledge that can be applied anywhere, our concern is that the essence of doing, knowing and learning gets lost when it becomes disconnected from the land upon which it occurs
Description:
The literature on innovation spaces stresses the importance of knowledge spill-overs, particularly local forms that explain the geographic agglomeration of clusters. Local knowledge spillovers are knowledge externalities bounded by geographic region, which foster the flow of information (Ko and Liu, 2015). This enables firms in a region access to knowledge sources and depositories, which may have unintended consequences. Knowledge is often seen as a non-rival production asset so the geographic position of firms can help create positive externalities and lead to economic gain (Zahra, 2015). More importantly, local knowledge spillovers can facilitate further innovation efforts to induce market change. This is evident in countries like Australia, which, despite its large land mass, has the majority of its major regional and urban cities clustered along the eastern coastline.In his seminal contribution to innovation policy debates in Australia, West (2001) examined how successful national innovation systems are built. He argued that Australia’s national innovation system had developed critical gaps since Fed-eration, which occurred on 1 January1901, in particular. ‘...in its ability to mobilize resources, its system for allocating investment to innovation, and– most significantly– its institutions for managing the risk of science-based innovation’ (West, 2001, p.42). His conclusion was that the nation was not in a good posi-tion to build a knowledge-based economy. From the perspective of an economist this may seem to be an incisive analysis. However, we suggest that from the knowledge spillover theory of management and organisation, it overlooks not only the historical dimension of why the Australian economy has developed in the way that it has, but also the political and symbolic dimensions that shapes how it will develop into the future. In this chapter, we seek to put the ‘political’ back into the ‘economy’, and in so doing pursue a perspective which hitherto has been poorly developed in the study of innovation and its management.We argue that innovation and associated government policy is essentially politi-cal in so far as the actors so engaged ‘exert control, influence, or power over each other’ (Lindblom, 1980, p.28) in order to pursue interests and achieve desired ends. "From introduction"
Description:
When athletes fail to perform at an expected level during an important moment, it is implied the athletes have experienced “choking“ (sudden decline in performance) under pressure.”. Researchers have reported that persistent left-hemispheric activation patterns occur when an athlete experiences considerable performance deteriorations under pressure. Researchers have also observed differences in brain activation patterns between left- and right-handed people on a variety of physical and cognitive tests, with the left-hemispheric activation more pronounced in right-handed participants. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether athletes’ handedness may be linked to choking susceptibility (i.e., likelihood to experience performance decline under pressure). Method: Twenty right-handed and 13 left-handed experienced Australian football players completed 15 shot attempts, in both a low-pressure and a high-pressure condition. Both groups displayed equal state anxiety increases due to the pressure manipulation, indicating similar increases in anxiety in both handedness groups. Results: Differences were indicated in performance between the left- and right-handed groups during the high-pressure condition, with the left-handed group maintaining, and the right-handed participants declining, performance. Conclusion: Future electroencephalogram (EEG) research investigating this link may clarify the effect between handedness and choking.
Description:
When athletes fail to perform at an expected level during an important moment, it is implied the athletes have experienced “choking“ (sudden decline in performance) under pressure.”. Researchers have reported that persistent left-hemispheric activation patterns occur when an athlete experiences considerable performance deteriorations under pressure. Researchers have also observed differences in brain activation patterns between left- and right-handed people on a variety of physical and cognitive tests, with the left-hemispheric activation more pronounced in right-handed participants. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether athletes’ handedness may be linked to choking susceptibility (i.e., likelihood to experience performance decline under pressure). Method: Twenty right-handed and 13 left-handed experienced Australian football players completed 15 shot attempts, in both a low-pressure and a high-pressure condition. Both groups displayed equal state anxiety increases due to the pressure manipulation, indicating similar increases in anxiety in both handedness groups. Results: Differences were indicated in performance between the left- and right-handed groups during the high-pressure condition, with the left-handed group maintaining, and the right-handed participants declining, performance. Conclusion: Future electroencephalogram (EEG) research investigating this link may clarify the effect between handedness and choking.
Description:
This chapter presents a synopsis of existing knowledge about transfer in sport, with the view that such a synopsis might generate ideas for further scientific inquiry, and helping to guide coach and player development. Transfer is discussed in terms of the following discriminators of expert performance in sport: anticipation pattern recall pattern recognition and decision making. The chapter discusses empirical evidence of transfer within sports relative to performance and learning, encompassing video simulation, virtual reality, or in situ methodologies. It examines empirical evidence of transfer between sports and in regard to the sampling of sports. The chapter describes theories of transfer and studies that have attempted to test theoretical predictions. It suggests that practical applications for practitioners based upon theory and empirical findings. The chapter outlines future research directions that require focused investigation to advance understanding of transfer, which can help advance what is known in the field of sport expertise and skill learning.
Description:
In Epistemologies of the South, Boaventura Sousa Santos argues that the most important struggle of our time is the struggle against ‘epistemicide’ and to break free from the epistemological poverty resulting from the dominance of neoliberal ideology that has become the hallmark of the early 21st century. In this chapter, we are arguing that social imaginaries are shaped and reshaped in the margins of the direct sphere of influence of the state, giving rise to ground-breaking experiments that can challenge the epistemological closure that often takes place within institutional spaces. Drawing on three Brazilian case studies, we illustrate the following: how Indigenous people appropriate a segment of the tourist industry commodifying a part of their culture in order to translate the economic capital derived from it into new Indigenous cultural capital to be used in a larger struggle against colonisation how Afro-Brazilian activists built community organisations in order to generate a pathway for disenfranchised Black Brazilians into higher education and how a Black Brazilian pastor managed to survive in a staunchly conservative and often racist Pentecostal church to ensure access to quality education and welfare for slum dwellers. In this chapter, we argue that this informal activist social work is central to the struggle for social alternatives and for social justice. This chapter focuses on some examples of how social work practice is being re-defined from the margins of the profession. The case studies exemplify how community initiatives are often decolonising key aspects of Brazilian society by approaching social issues from a grassroots perspective. The chapter provides inspiring and rich examples of localised action which reposition and reinvigorate epistemologies of the ‘south’, illustrating the liberating potential sourced in the margins. It presents a brief summary of emergent epistemological alternatives in everyday life in the southern Bahia, a state in the northeast of Brazil. Brazilian social work emerged during the first decades of the 20th century at the interstice of two powers that sought to extend their sphere of influence: the post-colonial state and the Catholic church. The underpinning epistemicide of global-scale coloniality is a compelling reason why social work in the margins should be more wholly embraced.