Current Societal Developments Research Articles

Research on the Delineation Method of Urban Community Living Circle Based on Transportation Network Analysis in Yuanping, China

In the context of accelerating global urbanization and the demands for high-quality and sustainable development, the exploration of an urban community living area delineation method based on traffic network analysis offers a fresh perspective for defining urban living areas. This paper employs a traffic network analysis method rooted in objective analysis. It leverages open-source big data on Points of Interest (POI) from public facilities and road network data obtained from relevant urban planning to construct a comprehensive road network dataset for the central urban area. Following the construction of the road network dataset, the paper conducts a service area and accessibility analysis of public facilities, which serves as an initial step in outlining the boundaries of the urban community living area. Subsequently, the delineation is further refined by considering factors such as development boundaries, as well as natural and man-made constraints such as rivers, railways, and major roads. The boundaries of the urban community living area undergo further adjustments, taking into account the scope of the development boundary and various constraining elements such as rivers, railways, and main roads. A final revision is made by considering subjective factors, where the boundaries of the ten-minute urban community living area are ultimately determined through extensive communication and coordination with various stakeholders. This approach is aimed at meeting the current societal development needs, which include breaking down segregation, fostering social interactions, strengthening neighbourly relationships, enhancing overall quality of life, promoting sustainable development, and creating a more humane and sustainable city. Its ultimate goal is to enable residents to feel a sense of belonging and happiness within the bustling urban environment.

Optimal Administration and Human Resource Management in Public Secondary schools in Balyesa State

The central focus of this article is on the management of human resources and the streamlined management of public secondary schools in Bayelsa State. The study involved 5,400 instructors from 75 public schools in Bayelsa State. Using the" Yaro Yamane" method, 334 teachers and 38 princtpals were selected as participants, totaling 372 individuals. Data were collected through a questionnaire named the Optimal Administration and Human Resource Management in Public Secondary Schools (OAHRMPSSQ), which is developed specifically for this research. The instrument's accuracy was verified by the human resources department of Niger Delia University, and its reliability was confirmed through a test-retest procedure yielding a reliability coefficient of 0.5. The study's findings indicate a significant influence on the impact of managing human resource on administrative efficiency in Bayelsa State's public secondary schools. Recommendations stemming from the study advocate for the implementation of human resource management policies across all public secondary schools and the timely revision of educational policies to align with the current societal development trends.

Среднее образование за рубежом в контексте современных вызовов обществу

The article demonstrates that in the twenty-first century, education encounters a lot of challenges as a result of current societal development tendencies such as globalization, digitization, and integration. According to the author, education faces new social difficulties as a result of continually changing opportunities and the appearance of new threats. The researcher emphasizes that such hazards have grown serious in light of the changing societal development conditions. The article explains how challenges to society and education have transcended state lines, taken on a global character, and begun to restructure the society, resulting in massive changes in education. The author examines how scientists, international organizations, and entire nations seek innovative approaches to education and create instruments for transforming educational systems. In this article, you will also find the characteristics of contemporary education goals, paradigms, and trends, as well as revised approaches to humanization of education that necessitate the development and application of the competence approach and the theory of the four foundations of curriculum.

Cybercrime during the COVID-19 pandemic: Prevalence, nature and impact of cybercrime for citizens and SME owners in the Netherlands

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in December 2019 and the restrictive measures that were implemented to slow down the spread of the virus have had a significant impact on our way of life. The sudden shift from offline to online activities and work may have resulted in new cybersecurity risks. The present study therefore examined changes in the prevalence, nature and impact of cybercrime among Dutch citizens and SME owners, during the pandemic. Qualitative interviews with ten experts working at various public and private organizations in the Netherlands that have insights into cybercrime victimization and data from victim surveys administrated in 2019 and 2021 were analyzed. The results show that there was only a small, non-statistically significant increase in the prevalence of cybercrime during the pandemic among citizens and SME owners. Nevertheless, the COVID-19 pandemic did have an impact on the modus operandi of cybercriminals: victims indicated that a considerable proportion of the offenses was related to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the case of online fraud. Moreover, the use of new applications and programs for work was associated with an increased risk of cybercrime victimization during the COVID-19 crisis. These results suggest that increases in rates of registered cybercrime that were found in previous studies might be the consequence of a reporting effect and that cybercriminals adapt their modus operandi to current societal developments.

Managing multilingualism in a tourist area during the COVID-19 pandemic

Intense mobility of people and languages driven by tourism, which propels “cultural transformation of places” (Urry, 1995:2) across the world, is manifested in their linguistic landscapes through varying regimes of multilingualism. Linguistic landscapes, which render themselves for “visual consumption” (Urry, 2005), emerge from the sedimentation and synchronization of diachronic semiotic processes which index current societal developments. The recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a noticeable impact on linguistic landscapes globally through the emergence of a noticeable and coherent layer of pandemic regulatory signage. In a longitudinal study covering the period between the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020 to its decline in August 2022, we trace the implementation of regulatory measures in a highly frequented tourist region in Slovakia whereby the actors involved in the tourist industry implemented the official pandemic legislature aimed at preventing the spread of the disease. Our overall goal is to explore the management of “pandemic regulatory discourse”, i.e., how producers of regulatory signage manage multimodal resources to convey their authority and stance towards regulations, to legitimize regulatory measures, and to ensure compliance with them. The study is grounded in the theoretical-methodological approaches of ethnographic linguistic landscape studies, geosemiotics, sociolinguistics of globalization, sociopragmatics, and language management theory.

Working from the heart – cultivating feminist care ethics through care farming in Sweden

In this paper we explore why and how women and men farmers carry out care farming, paying attention to farming being gendered. We engage in geographical research on feminist care ethics to understand care farming by considering the people-place relationships cultivated. We draw on post-structural feminist understandings of gendered farm subjectivities, thereby exploring the emergence of new gender subjectivities. The paper fills research gaps on farmers providing care, and on the gendered nature of care farming. To the feminist geographic theorisations on feminist care ethics, we contribute a post-structural feminist approach. Empirically, the study builds on farm visits and 20 semi-structured interviews with women and men engaged in care farming on 12 farms in rural Sweden. We conclude that care farmers cultivate feminist care ethics as an ontology of connections, by working from the heart. This has meant care farmers are developing people-place and people-people connections. Feminist care ethics is, on the one hand a way of expressing criticism of current societal developments such as productivist agriculture and efficiency orientated welfare provisioning and, on the other, a way of making a difference. Feminist care ethics also includes the development of new gender subjectivities for both women and men farmers. We suggest that care farming implies farming otherwise, which shifts the farms to places of care, instead of food production. Altogether, we argue that care farmers nurturing feminist care ethics challenge the very conceptualisation of agriculture – from cultivating animals and plants to cultivating connections.

A plea for responsible and inclusive knowledge management at the world level

Purpose This essay aims to draw attention to the idea of a new research approach to knowledge management (KM) labelled responsible KM (rKM) as a possible answer to not only address the consequences of the pandemic but also other present and upcoming societal challenges. Design/methodology/approach This essay has been prepared by a KM researcher who shares their own personal views and opinion regarding past and current societal developments and based on that offers a potentially new KM direction. Findings Switching the focus to rKM may help address current and upcoming social challenges that can only be addressed jointly by the global community and which would also involve a new consideration of the “knowledge” resource. Originality/value The essay proposes a new alternative approach to KM called rKM that is based on ideas that to the author’s knowledge have not been discussed in this way in the contemporary literature on KM.

How wide is the gap? Comparing geography graduates’ labor market success with that of peers from business and computer science

ABSTRACT With growing numbers of university graduates, the choice of academic programs has gained in importance to enter the labor market successfully. Simultaneously, the link between the field of study and actual professional career is becoming increasingly blurry. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of these relations and to position geography in this wide spectrum. We develop a conceptual framework to systematically categorize the relations between academic programs and their associated labor markets. We employ this framework in a most-different-case design to quantitatively analyze the influence of the field on the graduates’ career prospects, using student records of several German universities linked with administrative biographical data from social security records. We find evidence that the influence of the field of study on full-time employment and wage is substantial, controlling for various factors. Geographers do face difficulties on the labor market, but the demand for their core competencies – interdisciplinary, spatially specific and sustainability-related thinking – is rising through current societal developments. Moreover, we find some indication that those performance gaps are not an exceptional phenomenon of geographers but also apply to graduates of different fields of study with multidimensional and indirect links to the associated labor markets.

Family Law Trends in Ukraine

Abstract The paper provides the results of the analysis of the current state of legal regulation of family relations in Ukraine, and summarises the main problems of the legislation that establishes general principles of regulation of family relations. Particular attention is devoted to the research into the basic principles of family law, and how they are reflected in the Constitution of Ukraine and the Family Code of Ukraine. To assess the compliance of the Family Code of Ukraine with current societal developments, a careful comparison of its provisions with the principles developed by the Commission on European Family Law (cefl) is needed. The family legislation of Ukraine requires detailed monitoring, factoring in the provisions of a questionnaire developed by the Commission. There is a need to introduce a system of national planning, development and adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of the concept of national legal policy.

An insight to band-bending mechanism of polypyrrole sensitized B-rGO/ZnFe2O4 p-n heterostructure with dynamic charge transfer for photocatalytic applications

Developing a highly desirable multicomponent photocatalytic system for environmental remediation and water splitting is needed for current societal development. A visible active B-rGO/ZnFe2O4 photocatalyst was synthesized through the hydrothermal process, further magnify its electronic properties, the binary hybrid is modified with polypyrrole. The designed ternary hybrid utilizes the combining benefits of photo-sensitizer and interfacial charge transfer mechanism that ultimately boost its photocatalytic efficiency. The establishment of interfacial p-n heterojunction via band-bending mechanism between B-rGO (BG) nanosheets and ZnFe2O4 (ZnF) nanoparticles was validated from photo-density in the opposite direction and upturned V-shaped Mott-Schottky plots. It was observed that 2BG/ZnF@20PPY exhibits the best activity i.e., 100% reduction of 50 ppm Cr (VI) in 45 min and H2-production of 598 μmolh−1. Effective charge separation in 2BG/ZnF@20PPY is well supported by PL, TRPL, EIS, transient-photocurrent, and donor density calculations. The strong contact among the constituents in 2BG/ZnF@20PPY is well-correlated with XPS and Raman characterization.

Gibt es Fortschritte in der Gruppenpsychotherapie und Gruppenanalyse? „The facts are friendly“ – Klinische, wissenschaftliche und Ausbildungsperspektiven

Summary Any progress in Group Psychotherapy and Group Analysis? “The Facts are Friendly” – Clinical, Research and Training Perspectives This article answers questions related to the progress of group psychotherapy from the perspective of a researcher and clinician in a moment when group treatments seem to boom in a training context, related to health political decisions as well as supported by positive research results. Besides remarks on some developments related to group therapeutic approaches, the author suggests a reflection of integrative concepts and a focus on the results of social psychology. Current societal developments, primarily the Covid-19 pandemic, indicate the importance of group psychological issues in the present time. An improvement of the image of group psychotherapy still needs joint efforts on a political, scientific and practical level, and intensifying group psychotherapy training.

The Normative Justification of Integrative Stakeholder Engagement: A Habermasian View on Responsible Leadership

ABSTRACT:The transition from modern to postmodern society leads to changing expectations about the purpose and responsibility of leadership. Habermas’s social theory provides a useful analytical tool for understanding current societal transition processes and exploring their implications for the responsibility of business vis-à-vis society. We argue that integrative responsible leadership, in particular, can contribute to the reconciliation of business with societal goals. Integrative responsible leadership understood in a Habermasian way is not only a strategic endeavor but also a communicative endeavor. An essential part of integrative responsible leadership in light of the current societal transformation processes is the facilitation of discourses about a shared base of norms and values. This is exemplified alongside current societal developments like the European migration crisis or the emerging nationalist and fundamentalist movements in some countries. We specify how and when leadership should resort to communicative action and discuss the implications for leadership.

Relevance of Gadaa Values and Practices in Current Development

Despite their advancement and intensiveness, existing scientific studies did not pay adequate attention to the relevance of Indigenous social values and customary practices in the current societal development context. Yet several studies agree that the implementation of modern science and technology increases the sustainability of development, while studies on the relevance of indigenous developmental values and practices are largely missing. The same scenario is observed in studying the relevance of Gada values and practices in multifaceted developments. However, empirical studies have shown that Indigenous knowledge remains important in many societies and that its importance has been increasing since the beginning of the post modernism ideas. This study dedicates to investigate the Gada values and practices associated with socio-economic wellbeing, identifying Gada values and practices that mostly concern environmental protection and to examine the relevance of Gada values and practices in current societal development. The paper employs qualitative research method to investigate indigenous knowledge importance in general and the relevance of Gada values and practices in the current societal development context in particular. Gada values and practices can have relevance in cultural development, social development, economic development and environmental protection and any other development. Even though modern elements brought opportunities in given society; it also has posed several inconveniences. Modern elements can influence society in certain desirable direction but it lacks effectiveness and sustainability. The development that ignores local indigenous knowledge may be ineffective and not satisfactory. This study indicates that indigenous developmental values and practices create profound potential that can help developmental effort so as to accelerate and sustain development and build solid ground for the societal prosperity. Furthermore, it was found that members of the society have preferences for their indigenous Gada values and practices owing to their familiarity and sense of ownership. This confirms that any development effort or project that can be launched in the area will be more viable and beneficial if appropriately exploit these opportunities.

Entropy and Society: Can the Physical/Mathematical Notions of Entropy Be Usefully Imported into the Social Sphere?

The notion of entropy was first introduced in the 1850's by Rudolf Clausius in the context of thermodynamics. Focusing on the meaning that an increase of entropy means an increase of disorder, dissipation and decay, subsequent generations of authors have imported the notion into practically every area of intellectual discussion. This paper will mention numerous definitions of entropy and consider the virtues and ambiguities of the concept of entropy. It will pass judgement on some old and new interpretations of certain current societal developments that have been made along entropic lines and that conflict with the current Western social ethos.

Autonomous Learning and the Acquisition of Intercultural Communicative Competence: Some Implications for Course Development

Apart from teaching communicative language competence, foreign-language educationists also consider it a natural pedagogical aim to encourage learners to have an interest in, knowledge about and an opening towards foreign cultures, peoples and countries. This paper outlines some of the key terms and complexities that surround the advocacy of teaching foreign languages for intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It examines some of the issues involved in reconceptualising courses that were originally designed to teach communicative competence in a foreign language, to courses promoting the acquisition of ICC. It discusses criteria for selecting cultural contents and culture-and-language learning tasks, as well as ways to scaffold the ICC learning process. It takes issue with traditional culture-teaching approaches and explains why current societal developments compel us to move away from a teacher-led language-and-culture pedagogy to a student-centred autonomous learning approach.