Board Of Canada Research Articles

The critical incident technique reappraised

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a reconceptualization of the critical incident technique (CIT) and affirm its utility in management and organization studies.Design/methodology/approachUtilizing a case study from a leadership context, the paper applies the CIT to explore various leadership behaviours in the context of nonprofit boards in Canada. Semi-structured critical incident interviews were used to collect behavioural data from 53 participants – board chairs, board directors, and executive directors – from 18 diverse nonprofit organizations in Alberta, Canada.FindingsWhile exploiting the benefits of a typicality of events, in some instances the authors were able to validate aspects of transformational leadership theory, in other instances the authors found that theory falls short in explaining the relationships between organizational actors. The authors argue that the CIT potentially offers the kind of “thick description” that is particularly useful in theory building in the field.Research limitations/implicationsDrawing on interview material, the authors suggest that incidents can be classified based on frequency of occurrence and their salience to organizational actors, and explore the utility of this distinction for broader theory building purposes.Practical implicationsPrincipally, the paper proposes that this method of investigation is under-utilized by organization and management researchers. Given the need for thick description in the field, the authors suggest that the approach outlined generates exceptionally rich data that can illuminate multiple organizational phenomena.Social implicationsThe role of nonprofit boards is of major importance for those organizations and the clients that they serve. This paper shed new light on the leadership dynamics at the top of these organizations and therefore can help to guide improved practice by those in board and senior management positions.Originality/valueThe CIT is a well-established technique. However, it is timely to revisit it as a core technique in qualitative research and promote its greater use by researchers. In addition, the authors offer a novel view of incidents as typical, atypical, prototypical or archetypal of organizational phenomena that extends the analytical value of the approach in new directions.

Choreographies of collaboration: social engagement in interactive documentaries

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes new opportunities for using interactive non-linear documentary as social change interventions. Through a series of in-depth conversations with socially engaged Canadian directors, producers and distribution strategists, we discuss how they are reconfiguring their production and outreach in a rapidly shifting and increasingly collaborative media environment. We focus on three recent projects produced or co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada: Here at Home, Highrise and Fort McMoney. The projects address key social issues in Canada including housing, poverty, urbanization, oil production and the environment and are each quite distinct in form as well as strategies of collaboration and engagement. This in-depth analysis of three projects has permitted us to explore interesting tensions and innovations with regard to strategic partnerships and emerging social engagement practices.

Public Attunement with More-than-Human Others: Witnessing the Life and Death of Bear 71

This analysis draws theoretical and political lessons from the experiences of Bear 71, a female grizzly bear who lived and died next to one of Canada’s flagship tourist destinations, Banff National Park. What makes this bear’s story remarkable are the ways in which her daily actions were rendered perceptible, visible, and public through a complex network of digital technologies that record, store, and transmit information. In witnessing the life and death of Bear 71 through an innovative interactive documentary created by the National Film Board of Canada, we observe transformations bound up with cultures lived increasingly through digital media and surveillance. Making sense of these transformations in part warrants an account of the role of digital technologies and the politics of (re)mediation in the practices and ethics of attunement to more than human worlds and lives. In such public environments, immediacy, proximity, and connection are increasingly achieved in and through technological mediation. At stake is a broader conjuncture wherein digital information systems augment the capacity for collective care and concern in public life while simultaneously facilitating the surveillance of and intervention into private lives.

Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography Skyler D. Gordon Primary Sources Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Clash of Colour: Indians and American Negroes.” 1936. In W. E. B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, 69–73. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind.” AME Church Review 17, no. 2 (1900): 95–110. Hunton, Addie W. and Kathryn M. Johnson. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Press, 1920. Tate, Merze. “Decadence of the Hawaiian Nation and Proposals to Import a Negro Labor Force.” The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 4 (October 1962): 248–63. ———. Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1968. ———. “Review: A Personal Report on an American Negro in India.” The Journal of Negro Education 24, no. 2 (Spring 1955): 130–32. ———. “Review: A Report on India.” The Journal of Negro Education 25, no. 4 (Autumn 1956): 412–13. ———. “Review: Imperialism in Disguise.” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 447–49. ———. “Review: Life with the Nehrus.” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 443–44. ———. “Review: Somaliland Under Italy’s Heel.” The Journal of Negro Education 21, no. 4 (Autumn 1952): 497–99. ———. “Review: The White Man’s Pan African Idea.” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 1 (Winter 1944): 76–79. ———. “Review: Who Are South Africans?” The Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 4 (Autumn 1954): 444–47. [End Page 208] ———. “Slavery and Racism as Deterrent to the Annexation of Hawaii, 1854–1855.” The Journal of Negro History 47, no. 1 (January 1962): 1–18. ———. “The War Aims of World War I and World War II and Their Relation to the Darker Peoples of the World.” The Journal of Negro Education 12, no. 3 (Summer 1943): 521–32. Tate, Merze and Fidele Fay. “Slavery and Racism in South Pacific Annexations.” The Journal of Negro History 50, no. 1 (January 1965): 1–21. Tobias, Channing H. “World Implications of Race.” Presentation at the Jubilee Meeting of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards in Canada and in the United States, Chicago, January 3–7, 1944. In Report of the Jubilee Meeting of the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards in Canada and in the United States, 187–91. New York: Foreign Missions Conference of North America, 1944. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1926. Newspapers and Periodicals The Afro-American Sentinel [Omaha, Nebraska]. 1896. The Cleveland Gazette. 1896–1914. The Colored American Magazine. 1905–1909. The Crisis. 1914–1919. The New York Age. 1909. The New York Times. 1896. The Times [London, England]. 1895–1896. The Voice of the Negro. 1905. The Washington Bee [Washington, D. C.]. 1895. Articles Adair, Zakiya. “Respectable Vamp: A Black Feminist Analysis of Florence Mills’ Career in Early Vaudville Theater.” Journal of Africa American Studies 17, no. 1 (March 2013): 7–21. Allen, Ernest, Jr. “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943.” Gateway Heritage (Fall 1995): 38–55. Allen, Ernest, Jr. “When Japan Was ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism.” The Black Scholar 24 (Winter 1994): 23–46. Angelo, Ann-Marie. “The Black Panthers in London, 1967–1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic.” Radical History Review 103 (Winter 2009): 17–35. Bair, Barbara. “Pan-Africanism as Process: Adelaide Casely Hayford, Garveyism, and the Cultural Roots of Nationalism.” In Imagining Home: [End Page 209] Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, edited by Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley. London: Verso, 1994. ———. “True Women, Real Men: Garvey, Ideology, and Social Roles in the Garvey Movement.” In Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, edited by Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, 154–66. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bayly, C. A., Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyer, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed. “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History.” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441...

Locating Biobanks in the Canadian Privacy Maze.

Although Canada has not yet enacted any biobanking-specific privacy law, guidance and oversight are provided via various federal and provincial health and privacy-related laws as well as via ethics and policy documents. The primary policy document governing health research, the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, provides the framework for the strong role of Research Ethics Boards in Canada, and limits research funding from Canada's three main federal funding agencies to those who agree to adhere to its policies. The broad consent model is gaining traction in Canada, although lack of legal and constitutional precedence for the broad consent or opt-out options makes this an evolving issue. In general, data is required to be coded; more specific security measures are outlined in guidelines that may be implemented by local policy. International sharing is allowed, and Canada meets the European Union's standards for receipt of data and samples.

Discourses of Shari‘a Law and Muslim Women: A Critical Reflection on Sharia in Canada

In 2005, the National Film Board of Canada released the documentary Sharia in Canada , which had been produced in the midst of the massive legal and public discussions following Ontario’s Islamic Institute of Civil Justice’s announcement that, under the Ontario Arbitration Act, Muslims could resolve their family disputes through faith-based arbitration. The documentary offers a remarkable case study in the intersections of imperialist and sexist discourses, in its characterizations of arranged marriages, intolerance of homosexuality, lapidation for adultery, domestic violence, and the practice of the hijab to the identity politics of multiculturalism. This article unpacks these intersections by focusing on critics of faith-based arbitration as featured in the documentary—critics who overwhelmingly self-identified as Muslims or as descendents of Muslims. Their arguments divide women into two categories: enlightened subjects, who can make informed decisions, and oppressed subjects, who need to be rescued. While such representations feed into longstanding Orientalist discourses, they also indicate a shift in those same tropes —for now it is brown women and brown men who shall save brown women from brown men. From this perspective, the article underscores the ways insiders participate in the colonial narrative and afford a powerful voice to Islamophobic and civilizational projects.

What is your ‘first’ language in bilingual Canada? A study of language background profiling at publicly funded elementary schools across three provinces

ABSTRACTCanada is a country with a complex linguistic and cultural landscape characterized by two official languages (English and French), a steady influx of immigrants, and a number of aboriginal communities. Within this rich local context, and in a broader global environment where bilingualism and multilingualism are increasingly recognized as a norm rather than an exception, I review language background profiling practices at publicly funded Canadian elementary schools. A sample of 96 school intake/registration forms was collected from school boards in Canada's three largest English-speaking provinces: Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. An analysis of the data indicates a high degree of variability in terms of the number, type and combination patterns of the language background questions asked. While school boards recognize various aspects of sequential bilingualism and multilingualism, most registration forms do not allow explicitly for the possibility of a child having more than one first/native language (simultaneous bilingualism). A discussion of what I call chronological-nativist (i.e. focused on the notion of a person's first/native/mother language) and synchronic-functional (i.e. focused on a person's current language abilities) approaches to language profiling provides further insights into some underlying assumptions held by provincial educational systems with regard to monolingual, bilingual and multilingual norms.

Corral

Released in 1954 by the National Film Board of Canada, Corral was Colin Low's debut as a director. Low later became identified with the landmark Challenge for Change films using documentary film as a catalyst for community organizing. Although local folk knowledge is frequent in discussions of documentaries made by the French branch of the NFB, it has been more common to treat the English projects of NFB as romantic evocations of place. Corral is often the exemplary case. This article uses paradigms of performance and practice to consider the embodied knowledge and traditional skills depicted in Corral. The place that Corral performs is characterized by the popular diffusion of traditional vaquero skills from California mixed with embodied practices of ranching in southwestern Alberta.

Energy Performance Monitoring and Analysis of NetZero Energy Homes (NZEHs)

Residential building operations consume a considerable amount of energy, especially in coldclimate regions. The National Energy Board of Canada (NEB) analyzed energy consumption in 2011, and found that energy use in the residential sector, including space heating/cooling, hot water heating, lighting, appliances, and other energy-using devices, accounts for 14% of the total energy consumption nationally. The concept of NetZero-energy homes (NZEHs) has emerged as a solution to reduce the energy demands of residential building operations. Following efforts to develop NZEHs, the actual energy performance of these homes needs to be examined, and sensor technology is capable of measuring this energy consumption in detail. In this research, sensor instrumentation is customized for NZEH projects developed by Landmark Group of Builders in Edmonton, Canada. Data is collected for the first month and following winter months, then the collected data is validated and cleaned and is analyzed in terms of energy consumption, energy generation, and energy balance. Based on the analysis, recommendations for the operation of NZEHs are proposed.

Calm, cool, and collected: Canadian multiculturalism (domestic globalism) through a Cold War lens

The Canadian government adopted a multicultural policy in 1971, complicating the binary of ‘two founding peoples’ by acknowledging the diversity of its settler populations. This redefinition took place against the backdrop of the Cold War in which Canada was a strategically located junior partner in the Western alliance. This article draws parallels between photographic representations of Canadian diversity and the photographic culture of the Cold War as complementary programmes of nation-building and national defence. The study focuses mainly on the activities of the Still Photography Division of the National Film Board of Canada in its coincident evolution from a government information agency to a proto-museum with a mandate to collect and circulate Canadian contemporary photography. A curious mixture of communitarian ideals, countercultural impulses, and institutional ambitions is displayed across a number of documentary projects. The power of photography as a silent language is put into question by a modest compilation of words and images that situates both global and local uncertainties in a Winnipeg grocery store.

Digital not diversity? Changing Aboriginal media policy at the National Film Board of Canada

Using Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) as a case study, this paper highlights a paradigm shift in media policy away from supporting diverse content in favor of new digital formats. Historically the NFB has supported Aboriginal media production as a hallmark of the institution’s founding commitment to representing Canada’s people and culture. However, in recent years the institution has shifted its focus to digital technologies and interactive productions. This research is rooted in both a quantitative and qualitative examination of NFB official reports and related press coverage. The examination demonstrates a decrease in emphasis on Aboriginal production and an increase in attention to new technologies.

New Vistas? Aboriginal animation and digital dreams at the National Film Board of Canada

This paper argues that Canada's National Film Board (NFB) is moving away from its commitment to Aboriginal media production to focus on its global reputation as a leader in digital media. A case study of animated short films from the 2009 ‘Vistas’ series by Aboriginal film-makers highlights the NFB's changing priorities. Made for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, this series of films is decidedly apolitical in comparison to other Aboriginal films made at the NFB. Rather than facilitating cultural regeneration or challenging national identity, as did the films of the Indian Film Crew in the 1960s, the Vistas series serves to commodify Aboriginal culture and promote Canada as a cosmopolitan destination for businesses and tourists.

Is informed consent in research sometimes optional?

Scientists often complain that the current system for regulating research via research ethics boards in Canada and institutional review boards in the United States is too burdensome, with long, tedious consent forms that don’t result in better protection for research participants. Now, leading

Not Just the Facts: Adjudicator Bias and Decisions of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (2006–2011)

The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) is Canada's largest administrative tribunal. The Refugee Protection Division (RPD) of the IRB is responsible for the adjudication of refugee claims made in Canada. In accordance with its obligations under international law, Canada grants protection to persons who have a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, nationality, religion, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. In addition, a person may request protection in Canada on the basis of his or her fear of torture, risk to life or risk of cruel and unusual treatment or punishment. Acceptance (approval) rates of claims vary widely across members of the IRB, with some granting asylum in less than 10 percent of cases, and others granting asylum in more than 90 percent of cases. Despite this fact, there is a lack of analysis exploring whether grant rates vary systematically in relationship to observed characteristics of adjudicators. This paper presents statistical analysis of over 68,000 refugee claims adjudicated by 264 members of the board from 2006 to 2011. It finds that the probability of acceptance is associated with individual members' characteristics including education, gender, and professional experience, when holding constant the claimant's country of origin, gender, and the year and regional office of adjudication. The findings suggest that the identity of the adjudicator affects whether or not an individual receives asylum.

Patrimonialization and Filiation at the National Film Board of Canada: Cinema as a Heritage1

Over the last decade, institutions such as the National Film Board—those that are, simultaneously, culturally conservative, productive, and mediatory—have seen their relationship to films of the past come to be marked by two potentially rival logics. One is a commercial logic, focused on the exploitation of footage accumulated over 50 years of existence; the other is a social logic, inscribed within approaches to creativity whose distinctive forms have been those of remakes of documentary films of the 1960s and 1970s. The key question to which this article will attempt to respond is that of the role of the digital turn in heightening the opposition between these two logics. The second question has to do more specifically with the social function of filiation, with the nature of the link that takes shape, through film, between inhabitants of the past and those of the present, across a period which, while rarely longer than two generations, has been marked nevertheless by an acceleration of history that renders acts of transmission problematic. We will see, behind these remakes and practices of reusing archival images, how the gestures of filiation seek to keep Québec's documentary films central to those dynamics through which the feeling of belonging to community is aroused.

Not Just the Facts: Adjudicator Bias and Decisions of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (2006-2011)

Not Just the Facts: Adjudicator Bias and Decisions of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (2006-2011)

Sir William Ian Axford. 2 January 1933 — 13 March 2010

William Ian Axford was born and educated in New Zealand, receiving his ME and MSc degrees from Canterbury College of the University of New Zealand in 1956. He completed his PhD at Manchester University in 1960 and spent the following year at Cambridge University before moving to the Defence Research Board of Canada. From 1963 to 1974 he held professorships at Cornell University and the University of California at San Diego. From 1974 to 2001 he directed the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Germany, with two three-year periods of leave in New Zealand in 1982–85 and 1992–95. Ian Axford was one of the greatest plasma physicists of the space age. He made fundamental contributions to a wide range of topics in the fields of space physics and astrophysics, including the dynamics of the Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetic field reconnection process, the Sun’s atmosphere and the formation and evolution of the solar wind, the interaction of the solar wind with the interstellar medium and with comets, cosmic ray propagation and modulation in the Solar System, the acceleration of cosmic rays in supernova shocks, and the use of robotic spacecraft in the exploration of the Solar System. Ian was also a remarkable science administrator, completely restructuring the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy and transforming it into one of the world’s leading space and atmospheric research institutes. He was a great advocate of international collaboration in science, and reinvigorated several flagging institutions such as the European Geophysical Society and the International Council of Scientific Unions Committee on Space Research.

Two Canadian films

Children of Soldiers – Growing Up Under the Flag, Claire Corriveau (2010), Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 52 min.<br/> This incisive portrait of the daily lives of children and teens from four military families reveals the particular circumstances of the life at an army base. Every day, each must come to grips with absence, an uncertain future and the looming prospect of death. In a world where giving expression to fear or grief is taboo, young and old alike try to find balance between loyalty to the troops and staying true to themselves. Shot over the course of an entire troop deployment to Afghanistan, this film lifts the veil on a reality shared by thousands of children whose parents are deployed. Suitable for Canadian grade levels 9–12 (ages 14–18), college/university, adult

Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and the Refugee Determination Process

Paper prepared in 2010 for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in support of a presentation made to the members of the Refugee Protection Division on sexual orientation, gender identity and the refugee determination process. The paper reviews developments and issues specific to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered refugees and the Canadian inland refugee determination process.

Copyright Board denies Crown immunity for proposed tariffs on government reproduction of certain works

The Copyright Board of Canada held that the Provincial and Territorial Governments of Canada could not invoke Crown immunity to avoid the tariffs proposed by the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.