Strands Of Research Research Articles

Taking Action towards an Inclusive Career Counselling for Asylum Seekers and Refugees-A Literature Review Based on the PRISMA Model.

Over the past decade, scholarly attention has increasingly focused on what is known as the 'refugee gap', which refers to the great difficulty asylum seekers and refugees face in entering the labour market in the host country. This poses a grave threat of social and occupational marginalisation for this group and highlights the role of systemic factors in facilitating resilience outcomes. By adopting a systemic perspective, this research aims to provide a critical reflection on the key features that should be considered when designing and implementing effective career counselling interventions for asylum seekers and refugees. To this end, a systematic review of the international applied research published by October 2022 has been carried out, using the PRISMA model. The 20 selected publications are grouped according to three main career research strands that reflect the core aspects to be addressed within career interventions in order to assist asylum seekers and refugees in their life and career transition in the host country, namely (i) psychosocial resources, (ii) identity transformation processes, and (iii) lived experiences and meaning-making processes. The main findings of the studies are discussed by looking into common themes that emerge from the literature, namely challenges related to migration contexts, self-regulating personal resources and skills, and sense of self and identity in career transitions, as well as considerations on the design aspects of career counselling and research targeting As&R. Finally, some guidelines and directions for action are provided for the purpose of developing inclusive career counselling interventions for As&R.

Options in the (Semi-)Periphery: A Review of Multilingual Scholars’ Choices of Topics, Methodologies, and Theories in Research and Publishing

In most global contexts, academic publishing plays an essential part of scholars’ professional lives. For multilingual scholars, who may use multiple languages and publish for different communities, publishing can entail making a range of important choices. To date, while there has been a substantial amount of research on multilingual scholars’ choices of language and genre, little has focused on their choices of topics, methodologies, and theories, which are also important aspects of their research and publishing practices. In this review article, I explore specifically what the extant research has found about why multilingual scholars make particular choices of topics, methodologies, and theories outside of Anglophone contexts. Reviewing research published between 2004 and 2023, I found that overall, scholars’ choices in such aspects are motivated by their desire for professional success and their aims of making academic and social contributions. Also, their choices can be further complicated by various sociopolitical factors. I argue that the current strand of research mainly focuses on the neoliberal contexts of publishing and the effects of Anglophone academia on global knowledge production, whereas the practices of multilingual scholars outside the Anglosphere can be also affected by many other factors that have received less attention.

Studying parenting in adolescence from a dynamic perspective: the case of autonomy-supportive and controlling parenting

ABSTRACT During the past two decades, developmental research has intensively addressed the role of autonomy-supportive and controlling parenting in adolescents’ psychosocial adjustment, thereby increasingly adopting a dynamic approach. This paper provides an overview of this emerging approach, discussing three ways in which autonomy-relevant parenting is dynamically involved in adolescents’ and parents’ functioning. First, research has uncovered several important mediating processes behind the effects of autonomy-relevant parenting, including adolescents’ need-based experiences. Second, studies with intensive repeated assessments have demonstrated substantial short-term ups and downs in parents’ engagement in autonomy-relevant practices, with these fluctuations relating to both adolescents’ developmental outcomes and parents’ experiences. Third, recent studies focus on adolescents’ agency in autonomy-relevant parenting, attending to adolescents’ appraisals and cognitive-behavioural responses to parental behaviours. We discuss the theoretical implications of these three strands of research and their applied value.

Sustainability transitions in consumption-production systems.

The need for faster and deeper transitions toward more sustainable development pathways is now widely recognized. How to meet that need has been at the center of a growing body of academic research and real-world policy implementation. This paper presents our perspective on some of the most powerful insights that have emerged from this ongoing work. In particular, we highlight insights on how sustainability transitions can be usefully conceptualized, how they come about and evolve, and how they can be shaped and guided through deliberate policy interventions. Throughout the paper, we also highlight some of the many how questions that remain unresolved and on which progress would be especially helpful for the pursuit of sustainable development. Our approach to these "how" questions on sustainability transitions draws on two strands of solution-driven research and policy advice: one emerging from studies of how human societies interact with nature and the other emerging from studies of how those societies interact with their technologies. Consumption-production systems have been a focus of extensive work in both strands. To help build bridges between them, we recently brought together a cross-section of relevant scholars for a PNAS Special Feature on "Sustainability transitions in consumption-production systems." Their contributions are summarized in a companion paper we have written to introduce the Special Feature [F. W. Geels, F. Kern, W. C. Clark, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (2023)]. We draw on that work in the Perspective we present here as well as our reading of the relevant literatures.

Multilingualism, multicultural experience, cognition, and creativity.

The once widely held notion that bilingualism is related to enhanced cognitive functions has recently been challenged, in particular among young adults, as opposed to children and older adults. This strand of research, however, is essentially focused on executive functions (e.g., attention, inhibition, and shifting). But there is another side to the bilingualism-cognition story. Indeed, growing evidence has shown that bilingualism, and by extension multilingualism, are associated with enhanced creativity. However, this relation is arguably quite complex, for several reasons. First, creativity is a fuzzy notion; it is usually conceptualized as a mix of cognitive, personality and motivational factors. Second, multilingual people generally have a richer multicultural experience than monolingual people. In addition, multicultural experience itself is also positively related to creativity. Hence, there are manifold relations between cognition, creativity, multilingualism, and multicultural experience. In this brief research report, using a latent variables model which replicates some of our recent findings, we show that both multilingualism and multicultural experience are positively associated with creativity, even when controlling for cognitive abilities (divergent thinking and intelligence). We discuss these results in a perspective that considers methodological challenges and factors that are relevant to goal-directed behavior.

Approach to Modernizing Residential-Dominated District Heating Systems to Enhance Their Flexibility, Energy Efficiency, and Environmental Friendliness

The need to modernize existing district heating systems is due to increased requirements for their flexibility, energy efficiency, and environmental friendliness. The technical policy on district heating pursued in different countries centers on the listed goals and takes account of historical, climatic, and regional features of the resource, technology, and economic availability of various thermal energy sources. This study aims to analyze methods designed to improve the flexibility, energy efficiency, and environmental friendliness of district heating systems. The focus of the study is district heating system, which provides heating and hot water supply to consumers and consists of various types of thermal energy sources. The work shows the possibility for the heating system to transition from the third generation to the fourth one, which differ in their level of intellectualization. The establishment of an intelligent control system will ensure the interaction of various heat sources, but this is a separate strand of research. In this study, a model and a methodology were developed to optimize the structure of thermal energy sources and their operating conditions when covering the heat load curve of a territory with a predominance of household consumers. Gas-reciprocating and gas-turbine cogeneration plants are considered as the main thermal energy sources, whose efficiency is boosted through their joint operation with electric boilers, thermal energy storage systems, low-grade heat sources, and absorption chillers. The primary emphasis of the study is on the assessment of the environmental benefit to be gained by using cogeneration plants as a factor of enhancing the investment appeal of the district heating systems. The findings suggest that the transition of district heating systems to the next generation is impossible without changing the institutional environment, strengthening the role of active consumers, and introducing intelligent control for district heating systems.

Organizational fashion and trend setting in the hospitality industry

PurposeThis study aims to use organizational fashion to underscore a novel phenomenon in which products, services and practices fade in and out of the tourism/hospitality setting within a specific time frame. Drawing from the fashion theoretical strands in organization research, this paper studies how fashion has been conceptualized, operationalized and then diffused among tourism/hospitality enterprises.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative case design was used. A total of 37 semistructured in-depth interviews with executives of innovative tourism/hospitality companies (e.g. restaurants, hotels, theme parks and travel agencies) were conducted. This paper focuses on the organizational fashion phenomenon in which organizational trendsetters with creative, “hot” products/services have emerged prominently in the marketplace.FindingsThis inquiry illustrates a social phenomenon concerning the organizational fashion setting process by integrating existing production practices among different organizational suppliers in the hospitality sector. Different cases in the study show that fashion consists of a series of hybrid, paradoxical processes. These include conceptualization (conventionalization vs novelty, and personalization vs conformity), operationalization (bundling vs unbundling, and learning vs relearning) and diffusion (framing vs co-framing, and adaptation vs alteration).Research limitations/implicationsThroughout the three continuous processes, service design and identity development for consumption, as well as value creation and knowledge transformation for production, are carried out according to the decision of what is “hot” and what is “out” at a particular time. In essence, fashion helps to explain why hospitality institutions imitate specific innovations to take advantage of popular trends in the consumer market, as well as how such trends vanish eventually.Originality/valueThis research contributes the insight that organizations use fashion as a managerial initiative to translate their organizational goals and improvise nascent products and services. The fashion processes can be triggered by microlevel individual organizations and are spread through a series of social interactions to become macrolevel phenomena in a recurring manner.

Governance mechanisms, school principals and the challenge of personalized education in contexts

Schools around the world are diverse and there are a variety of progressivist initiatives in place that aim to promote quality and equitable pedagogy and overcome formalist paradigms. Country contexts present different challenges based on factors such as the type of governance, teachers’ autonomy, and pedagogical cultures. Most critical, however, is the unequal distribution of leadership opportunities. Beyond conflicting or contrived possibilities in school leadership arrangements and cultures, it should be recognized that certain contexts lack effective leadership as an organizational quality. Nevertheless, school principals are able to create coherent environments, offering space for debate and clarification of what equity and equality mean in terms of curriculum delivery, as well as supporting school-level structural facilitations and adaptations. This is a conceptual paper, at the crossroads of different research strands. It focuses on governance mechanisms and leadership tasks and skills in pedagogical and organizational school cultures. It argues that well-articulated school organization is needed, not only in terms of autonomy, but also with the possibility to collaborate, develop professionally, and engage locally in order to achieve equitable student-oriented teaching. The aim is to investigate the feasibility of supporting personalized and adaptive teaching strategies at the school level, in a variety of country contexts.

Exploring the potential of city networks for climate: the case of URBACT

ABSTRACT Over the last decades, a growing strand of research has focused on the role that city networks play in local policy innovation and learning in the field of climate and the environment. In this regard, global transnational city networks have been at the core of the academic debate, whereas the number of studies investigating the European context and, more specifically, the networking initiatives supported or ‘orchestrated’ by the European Union (EU) has, to date, been limited. This article improves our understanding of how the latter type of network operates, and the extent to which these networks comply with expectations regarding their learning and capacity-building potential. By adopting social network analysis as a framework, we formulate and test a number of research propositions, and thus unpack the relevance and impact of the EU URBACT programme, which, since the year 2000, has promoted the creation of city networks as a tool for use in peer-to-peer learning and capacity-building in the field of sustainable urban development.

The Circumplex of Faith Modes

This article presents the Circumplex of Faith Modes (CFM), a model that integrates and organizes the existing body of knowledge about the types of religiousness in the Allportian approach and related strands of research. The model was developed from the emic perspective, describing the various forms of Christian religiousness understood as the relationship between man and God within the community of the Church. Here, faith plays out in two domains: the relationship with Transcendence (God) and the relationship with the community of the Church (the psychosocial domain). In both domains, the various faith modes are described using two orthogonal dimensions: in the former domain these are (1) one’s attitude to God/relationship with God and (2) one’s attitude to the doctrine/rites/prescriptions/law; and in the latter domain the dimensions are (1) the significance/role of the religious community and (2) the role/strength of self in one’s personal attitude to God and the doctrine. The circumplex was created by superimposing the orthogonal dimensions of the two domains rotated by 45 degrees with respect to one another, with the four dimensions forming its main axes. The resulting model distinguishes and describes eight modes of faith (poles of the four dimensions), which are related to one another in specific ways and which comprise the Circumplex of Faith Modes.

Nonprofit Landlord Types on the Housing Market—A Key to Rising Displacement in Berlin?

Displacement research emphasizes the importance of housing market processes and their consequences for tenants. In recent years, a lively discussion in housing studies has emerged around policy mechanisms to promote permanently decommodified housing and nonprofit landlord types. This article picks up on the two strands of research and links them to our own empirical material from two studies on the city of Berlin that respond to two questions: (a) What role do the different landlord types play in processes of displacement? and (b) To what extent are the management strategies of nonprofit landlords equipped to dampen displacement processes? Our results, which are based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, show that public housing companies, cooperatives, and novel shared homeownership models pose a significantly lower risk of displacement. Although these landlord types do not prevent displacement entirely, their property management strategies, their self-understanding, and their networks make it possible to identify housing policy levers to minimize displacement.

How the War in Ukraine Affects Food Security.

The war in Ukraine has caused severe disruption to national and worldwide food supplies. Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat, maize, and oilseeds, staples that are now suffering a war-triggered supply risk. This paper describes the background of the problem and illustrates current trends by outlining some of the measures that may be deployed to mitigate the conflict's impacts on achieving SDG 2 (Zero hunger), especially focusing on ending hunger, achieving food security, improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. In order to understand the main research strands in the literature that are related to food security in the context of wars, the authors adopted a bibliometric literature review based on the co-occurrence of terms technique, conducted with 631 peer-reviewed documents extracted from the Scopus database. To complement the bibliometric assessment, ten case studies were selected to narrow down the food insecurity aspects caused by the war in Ukraine. The co-occurrence analysis indicated four different thematic clusters. In the next stage, an assessment of the current situation on how war affects food security was carried out for each one of the clusters, and the reasons and possible solutions to food security were identified. Policy recommendations and theoretical implications for food security in the conflict context in Ukraine were also addressed.

Relevance and its epistemic underpinnings in B2B marketing research: four axioms and nine relevance types

PurposeThis study aims to explore what characteristics contribute to the definition of relevance in business-to-business (B2B) marketing research and how/why different strands of B2B marketing maintain or lose their relevance.Design/methodology/approachThis study is conceptual. It adopts a performative-phenomenal standpoint for B2B marketing research and approaches relevance through the concept of episteme, which is considered pivotal for understanding this phenomenon.FindingsThis study proposes four axioms that define the characteristics of relevance in B2B marketing research and discusses their implications for scholars and practitioners. Consequently, an action plan for revitalizing B2B marketing research is developed, comprising learning and temporal dimensions, resulting in nine different relevance types.Research limitations/implicationsThe central argument put forward in this study is that different research strands of B2B marketing have deeply rooted epistemic underpinnings that influence their interpretation of relevance. Consequently, fostering dialogue between practitioners and scholars is considered necessary to sustain relevance in B2B marketing research. B2B scholars are urged to think beyond their subspecialized silos and acknowledge how the business environment and the various strands of B2B marketing congruently shape B2B marketing relevance, while also embracing research methods that bring them closer to business practice.Practical implicationsMarketing practitioners and academics continue to drift apart. This study puts forward three recommendations to bring marketing academics and practitioners closer together.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the B2B marketing literature by grappling with the theory-praxis gap and critically exploring what constitutes relevance in B2B marketing research.

Activating transrelational ethnography. Interweaves of the field in the process of energy transition

The article presents one of the strands of empirical research on the energy transition process conducted by an anthropologist in Upper Lusatia, in the Bogatynia municipality, in the area around the Turów mining and power complex. The perspective of transrelational ethnography makes it possible to weave together the various elements of this process and look at its changing environmental/economic, political and socio-cultural conditions. The text shows some of the many interweaves uncovered in the field, in the decarbonisation process, seen in the perspective of transrelational ethnography. It focuses on the ambiguities in the worlds of the region’s residents as brought to light in the study. The author draws attention to epistemological traps, such as the category of conflict, that await the anthropologist in a field that faces an uncertain post-coal future. Also, the author stresses the lack of preparedness of the volatile, conceptually unclosed field and its unstable, complex, assemblage architecture.

Common enemies? Coups, insurgent strength and intra-elite competition: evidence from Latin America

ABSTRACT What is the relation between coups d’etat and civil wars? While a wide set of studies have traced the determinants of internal armed conflicts and coup attempts, the interplay between these contentious processes remains unexplored. Building on different strands of research, this article seeks to explain why, and under what conditions, some regimes experience coup attempts in the midst of civil wars while others do not. Concretely, I posit that coup attempts during internal armed conflicts are more likely to occur when two conditions converge: when insurgents reach a medium-level of strength in situations of intra-elite competition. Key military forces, elite outsiders and coalition insiders interpret this situation as a unique opportunity for changes in the distribution of power and potentially coalesce through the formation of alternative regime coalitions. This argument is tested with a novel dataset on 90 Latin American revolutionary socialist insurgencies active since 1950 and a qualitative case study of the dynamics leading to the 1976 coup d’etat in Argentina, with results supporting the theoretical expectations. These findings contribute to a more detailed understanding of the relation between coups and civil wars, opening the way for further studies on this burgeoning area of research.

Idioms in General English Corpora: on Frequency, Register, and Cross-Variety Variation

Research into idioms and phraseology has become an established part of the corpus linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around either corpus-based or corpus-driven methodologies. At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has contributed to establishing an ideal platform for the study of variation in the varieties of English. The present paper rests on these two research strands in a survey devoted to variation on the level of idioms in present-day English, namely those denoting competition. While idioms, first and foremost, are theoretically identified with the frameworks of Phraseology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, among others, this study will make use of a corpus-based method of idioms introduced by Moon and Gustawsson’s idioms frequency and significance threshold, paired with Moze and Mohamed’s sociolinguistic profiling of idioms. The Idioms will be examined in two national varieties of English, namely those spoken in Great Britain and the USA, which are represented in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, respectively. With the assumption that the concept of competition is variety-specific, the main questions to be answered during the analysis are: (1) To what extent can the frequency of use of idioms be regarded an element of variation? and (2) Are there any differences in the prominence of specific variables, such as frequency, register, gender, and age across the two varieties under study? The preliminary findings indicate a significant amount of similarity, but upon closer examination of the data, some important variations are emphasised. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for an inter-variety comparison of the idioms denoting competition and, in so doing, adds to the universality / variation debate.

Theorizing ‘The Gap’ Twenty Years Later: Global Development, Design, and Speculative Ethics in Edtech Research

AbstractDrawing from Feminist Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores how we might revisit and recuperate past academic research projects, theories, and relationships to design futures that matter for social good. As context, I begin by outlining a decade of research in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), which linked the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to innovations in telecommunications and computing. I then introduce the ‘theory of design-reality gaps’ that was proposed by Heeks to study ’wicked problems’ in this domain (2002). I revisit two strands of research that I carried out in relation to the ‘design-reality gap’. The first involved an ethnographic study of a participatory mobile phone based learning intervention for Kenyan health workers. I argued that instead of a singular ‘gap’ explained by geographic, sociocultural, or economic ‘divides’, there was a messy entanglement, constituted by sociomaterial practices that enacted a multiplicity (Mol in The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press, 2002) of desired futures. In the second strand, I attempted to care for the practices that were abandoned by the learning intervention when one kind of justice was prioritized over others. This explored how the research could be more ‘speculative’ and how this ‘speculative commitment’ could generate new ethical questions and logics for living with technology (Puig de la Bellacasa in Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106, 2011 and Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017). I argue that approaching the design-reality ‘gap’ as a multiplicity instead of a void can support Tuck’s call for educational interventions that turn away from damage oriented theories of change to ones based on desire – approaching difference not as a lack, but as an ever-growing assemblage (2009). Tinkering with the original Heeks model, I conclude that in the postdigital era, the design-reality gap is now better-understood as a fluid space of multiplicities, and what is arguably most pressing is to study the differences in competing objectives and values, rather than disparities in information and technology.

A critical review: developing a birth integrity framework for epidemiological studies through meta-ethnography

Over the past decade, there has been growing evidence that women worldwide experience sub-standard care during facility-based childbirth. With this critical review, we synthesize concepts and measurement approaches used to assess maternity care conditions and provision, birth experiences and perceptions in epidemiological, quantitative research studies (e.g., obstetric violence, maternal satisfaction, disrespect or mistreatment during childbirth, person-centered care), aiming to propose an umbrella concept and framework under which the existing and future research strands can be situated. On the 82 studies included, we conduct a meta-ethnography (ME) using reciprocal translation, in-line argumentation, and higher-level synthesis to propose the birth integrity multilevel framework. We perform ME steps for the conceptual level and the measurement level. At the conceptual level, we organize the studies according to the similarity of approaches into clusters and derive key concepts (definitions). Then, we ‘translate’ the clusters into one another by elaborating each approach’s specific angle and pointing out the affinities and differences between the clusters. Finally, we present an in-line argumentation that prepares ground for the synthesis. At the measurement level, we identify themes from items through content analysis, then organize themes into 14 categories and subthemes. Finally, we synthesize our result to the six-field, macro-to-micro level birth integrity framework that helps to analytically distinguish between the interwoven contributing factors that influence the birth situation as such and the integrity of those giving birth. The framework can guide survey development, interviews, or interventional studies.

Paid care among older adults with long-term care needs declined in the first year of COVID-19 while families stepped in.

Separate strands of research have documented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in nursing homes and among paid and family caregivers, yet there is little evidence connecting changes in the residential decisions of older adults with the provision of paid and family care, limiting our ability to identify potential substitutions and gaps in care. Using the 2020 wave of the Health and Retirement Study linked to county-level COVID-19 mortality rates, we found that, among older adults with long-term care needs, higher county-level mortality rates were associated with a decline in nursing home residence and an increase in co-residence with adult children. These changes were coupled with a decline in the likelihood of receiving paid care and in the number of paid caregivers and an increase in the hours of unpaid care received. This analysis documents a reduction in nursing home residence and paid care during the first year of the pandemic and shows that families filled some of the resulting care gaps. Policymaking around long-term care should consider whether declines in the use of paid care are permanent and how they will affect the health of older Americans and their caregivers over the next decade.

On the Origins of American Business Leaders: Frank W. Taussig, Carl S. Joslyn, and the “Brain Trust” of American Eugenics

In their 1932 volume American Business Leaders: A Study in Social Origins and Social Stratification, Frank W. Taussig and Carl S. Joslyn, then a young Harvard graduate, argued that success in business depended more on innate superiority than on other environmental factors such as financial aid, influential connections, and formal education. The aim of this article is to analyze the main contentions of Taussig and Joslyn, as well as the intellectual genesis of, and the general reactions to, this controversial volume. Although our main focus is on Taussig and Joslyn, other figures, all directly affiliated with Harvard, will play a decisive role in our narrative—the economist Thomas Nixon Carver, the psychologist William McDougall, and the sociologist Pitirim Aleksandrovič Sorokin. This makes the scope of this article in many respects broader than its title may suggest—in the sense that it will allow us to place a work like American Business Leaders within the context of an important strand of social science research at Harvard during the interwar years