Top-down Authority Research Articles

Service, suffering, and silence: a duoethnographic exploration of the evangelical roots of gender hierarchies in American elementary schools

ABSTRACT The authors utilize a duoethnographic approach to interrogate their positionality within a co-caring community of elementary school educators who participated in a week-long writers’ workshop as part of their professional development. The teachers worked in a rural elementary school in the American South that served students who represent multiple/intersectional marginalized identities. A self-reflexive inquiry led to connections between the gendered hierarchies in the authors’ evangelical upbringings and the top-down authority structures in the immediate school context of the professional development. In both instances, micro-resistance to gendered hegemony took form in co-caring communities among women. However, these co-caring communities also caused tension for women who risked severing relationships to leave oppressive situations.

Identifying implementation strategies to address barriers of implementing a school-located influenza vaccination program in Beijing

BackgroundThe school-located influenza vaccinations (SLIV) can increase influenza vaccination and reduce influenza infections among school-aged children. However, the vaccination rate has remained low and varied widely among schools in Beijing, China. This study aimed to ascertain barriers and facilitators of implementing SLIV and to identify implementation strategies for SLIV quality improvement programs in this context.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with diverse stakeholders (i.e., representatives of both the Department of Health and the Department of Education, school physicians, class headteachers, and parents) involved in SLIV implementation. Participants were identified by purposive and snowball sampling. The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research was adopted to facilitate data collection and analysis. Themes and subthemes regarding barriers and facilitators were generated using deductive and inductive approaches. Based on the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research—Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (CFIR-ERIC) matching tool, practical implementation strategies were proposed to address the identified barriers of SLIV delivery.ResultsTwenty-four participants were interviewed. Facilitators included easy access to SLIV, clear responsibilities and close collaboration among government sectors, top-down authority, integrating SLIV into the routine of schools, and priority given to SLIV. The main barriers were parents’ misconception, inefficient coordination for vaccine supply and vaccination dates, the lack of planning, and inadequate access to knowledge and information about the SLIV. CFIR-ERIC Matching tool suggested implementation strategies at the system (i.e., developing an implementation blueprint, and promoting network weaving), school (i.e., training and educating school implementers), and consumer (i.e., engaging students and parents) levels to improve SLIV implementation.ConclusionsThere were substantial barriers to the delivery of the SLIV program. Theory-driven implementation strategies developed in this pre-implementation study should be considered to address those identified determinants for successful SLIV implementation.

Negotiating performance between policy and platform — heritage practice of a Chinese craftsperson on Douyin (TikTok)

ABSTRACT The pervasiveness of digital media has profoundly transformed how we preserve and promote intangible cultural heritage (ICH). With the growing popularity of Douyin, a video-focused social networking platform, ICH inheritors in China have begun to post videos that showcase their artisanship. On the one hand, the affordances of Douyin encourage its users to keep up with the latest trend, subjugating them to mimetic participation; on the other hand, heritage policies in China foster the top-down formation of nationalist identity. Therefore, how heritage practitioners negotiate between the top-down authority of policies and the horizontal mimesis of the platform is a matter of concern. This paper applies performance analysis to explore the Douyin videos of a Chinese craftsperson, Li Niangen, a municipal ICH inheritor whose Douyin videos are highly popular. ICH policies in China and the affordances of the platform may support the formation of distinct identities. However, by assuming multiple and even contrasting roles in his videos, Li is fully engaged in none of them. This paper proposes that the presentation of multiple roles copes with the conflicting logic in Chinese society. In addition, the misalignment of these roles may simultaneously utilise and unsettle the administrative and digital authorities.

Making MalagasyZebu: The Biopolitics of Cattle Commodification in Socialist Madagascar, 1960–1978

AbstractAt the dawn of Madagascar’s independence in 1960, political entrepreneurs harnessed the enduring significance of Malagasy cattle, known aszebu, and declared them integral to the new national identity. From 1960–1972, President Philibert Tsiranana led the country through the period known as the First Republic, in which officials and technocrats launched development projects around breeding and constructing abattoirs and feedlots, in the hopes of creating a viable international meat export economy. For elites,zebuserved as speculative vessels for remaking economic and political geographies and shifting away from dependence on French interests. Malagasy government officials and technical experts saw pastoralists as key to actualizing the economic potential of cattle and they sought to combat “peasant idleness” as a hindrance to Madagascar’s flourishing. Pastoralists, though, challenged the bounds of top-down authority and debated the kinds of knowledge that could and should inform modernization projects in the new nation-state. Cattle ranchers’ critiques of the logics and encroachment of prescriptive modernization schemes during the 1960s and 1970s can be understood as their insistence on sharing in the fruits of independence, and that they, with their deep knowledge of cattle behavior, had a role to play in forging meaningful, prosperous lives in broader ancestor-focused cosmologies. Investigating the twinned history of Madagascar’s beef exportation and cattle modernization plans reveals how cattle were enlisted in the project of nation-making and a crucial moment of possibility, in which state-crafters ambitiously pursued a path toward self-determination while navigating oscillating geopolitics and asymmetrical global economic relations.

Factors influencing discipline-specific facilitators’ roles in a multi-tiered professional learning programme in higher education

ABSTRACT This study investigated the roles of eleven discipline-specific facilitators in a multi-tiered professional learning programme implemented in a higher education context. The study also examined the factors supporting and hindering their emerging roles, as they facilitated professional learning opportunities to other faculty in their colleges, while also being supported by programme coordinators. Using a phenomenological approach, data were generated from multiple qualitative sources, mainly portfolio entries and interviews conducted with the eleven facilitators at the end of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the programme. Data analysis revealed the emerging facilitation roles, as well as the intricacies of the factors that were either supports or constraints to the different facilitators. Implications for the role that facilitation played in transforming teaching and learning in a centralised context are discussed. Specifically, this study delineated the need for both bottom-up approaches supported by top-down structures, which can enhance teaching and learning pedagogies and practices. This mix of bottom-up agency and top-down authority was shown to better support discipline-specific facilitators and faculty participants alike.

Equality as a Theological Principle within Roman Catholic Ecclesiology

Abstract As the Roman Catholic Church aspires ‘to embrace a synodal way’, some old questions about its ecclesial vision return. One such question is the equality of all the baptised within the church. This question is particularly fraught because of the church’s long history of viewing the itself as a society of unequals, its hierarchical structures, and its culture of top-down authority modelled on pre-modern monarchical conceptions of society. This paper argues that not only must the church face the implications of accepting the equality of the baptised as a basis of its praxis, but also that it should embrace that equality as part of its witness and service to the world. Thus, it must not simply take equality to heart and express it in its rituals, but must create a ‘theology of human equality’ which then becomes part of its preaching.

International cooperation and coordination in the Global Legislation of High Seas ABMTs including MPAs: Taking OSPAR practice as reference

In the negotiation of the new Agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), how to resolve potential overlaps, inconsistencies and conflicts between the new Agreement and relevant global, sectoral and regional instruments, framework and bodies (IFBs) on the issues about Area-Based Management Tools (ABMTs) including Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in ABNJ, is a key matter on the table. To explore how establishing high seas ABMTs including MPAs via the BBNJ might work in practice, this paper selects the practice of OSPAR and NEAFC as an example of regional cooperation. It finds that in the absence of top-down authority, this regional cooperation cannot fill the functional and geographical gaps, or harmonize different instruments relating to establishing and managing the High Seas ABMTs including MPAs. It then examines the challenges under a centralized global structure proposed in BBNJ negotiation, and proposes a practical global structure for cooperation and coordination. It suggests that a global decision-making body and their subordinates under the BBNJ may be empowered with different authorities under different scenarios. They may act as "cooperation initiator" and “conflict coordinator” of the ABMTs including MPAs where there is relevant IFBs, achieving objectives by coordinating with existing mechanisms; or act as “gap filler” by directly establishing and managing ABMTs including MPAs where there is no IFBs. This decision-making body should be empowered to develop general objectives and indicative criteria for the identification of areas, establish or designate ABMTs including MPAs, and strengthen monitoring and review.

TRANSITION INTO HIGHER EDUCATION: THE STRUCTURE AND PRACTICE OF ACADEMIC ADVISING

This qualitative study aimed to understand how U.S. institutions assist students in transitioning into higher education (HE) and how the individual characteristics and qualifications of academic advisors and administrators at Dream State University assisted first-year students to transition and navigate through the campus. HE comprises not only direct instruction facilitated by the faculty, but teaching is also employed in academic staff’s and academic advisor’s responsibilities (Crookston, 1972; Hunter & White, 2004). Hence, Appleby (2008) states, “Advising is teaching” (p. 85). Academic advisors strive to explore their interests, weaknesses and strengths, and the impact of classes students favor, directing students to resources on campus and encouraging their socialization. Conversing about ethics, beliefs and values with academic advisors, students align their academic engagement and socialization (Bigger, 2005; Campbell, 2008). The higher education system in Azerbaijan is centralized, the organizational structure is highly hierarchical, and the educational leadership executed is traditionally based on the top-down authority (Boer et al., 2017). The four-year higher education institutions (HEIs) do not provide first-year students with academic advising, and such a pivotal component is missing in the higher education culture (Light, 2001). Faculty advisors only advise graduates, academic advising remains fragmented, and mediocracy still exists. The study was based on educational inquiry (Maxwell, 2013), and it drew primarily on interviews (Kvale, 2006). The constructivist and interpretivist frameworks were interchangeably applied. The collected, analyzed, interpreted and utilized data assisted in understanding the organization and delivery of academic advising in a four-year public institution in the U.S.. A purposeful sampling, particularly snowball sampling strategy, was utilized. The saturation applied helped to find distinct knowledgeable individuals. Data triangulation assisted in drawing the evidence from multiple sources, including observation and document review. The construct validity and reliability of findings were addressed and established. There was not revealed any fixed or long-established ways to advise first-year students, except Academic Orientation Programs in fall, spring, and summer terms and First-year seminars. This research occurred right in the middle of a year of significant change in advising at a college level. Loosely coordinated and decentralized advising practice in the College of IT, Technology, and Machinery transitioned and moved under the Undergraduate Studies Office. The big shift in the structure made academic advising delivery somewhat consistent, centrally coordinated, and overseen across the campus. The academic advisors and supervisors’ evaluation and assessment of advising delivery were not completely centralized and unified across campus. There were not fixed or established benchmarks. The evaluation forms and templates differed from college to college, even departments. Recently, a new rewarding component was incorporated into the assessment process. The leadership tended to conduct centralized student surveys and analyze the data to be used as the base for changes by a taskforce. Thus, the departments individually launched students survey to measure student satisfaction on academic advisors’ performance. The leadership attempted to align professional development activities, advisor training program and delivery of advising with NACADA core competency areas. Still, brand-new Advisor Portal launched for fast, constant, and sustainable virtual interaction and communication across campus community and networking was not effectively used as expected. Based on the Academic Advising Model implemented in DSU, the researcher offered an adapted academic advising model to be established as a structure in HEIs in the Republic of Azerbaijan. The centralized Academic Advising Model will assist HEIs to best ensure the first-year students have equal access to quality studies and academically support them. This model is a combination of academic services and student affairs that is a centralized advising unit in which professional academic advisors and faculty are housed in one office.

Development and Participation: Whose Participation? A Critical Analysis of the UNDP’s Participatory Research Methods

Participatory development became a new development orthodoxy during the early 1990s. However, many researchers have criticised that its implementation often fails to live up to its original transformative roots. This article analyses the participatory research methods promoted by the UNDP, its epistemological foundations and the knowledge–power dynamics within them. The inquiry finds that the local experts hired by the UNDP play a central role in articulating the top-down authority of the UNDP with the bottom-up legitimacy of the local perspectives. Rather than promoting ‘development by the people, for the people’, the UNDP promotes ‘development by the experts, for the people’.

Two Differential Games Between Rent-Seeking Politicians and Capitalists: Implications for Economic Growth

We comparatively study two differential games between politicians and capitalists in terms of reducing rent-seeking distortions and stimulating economic growth. These two games imply two relationships — top-down authority and rational cooperation — between politicians and capitalists. In the current context, we prove that cooperation leads to faster growth than does authority, and simultaneously satisfies individual rationality, group rationality, Pareto efficiency and sub-game consistency. We thus show that setting a bargaining table between capitalists and politicians may create desirable incentives for reducing rent-seeking distortions, developing the spirit of capitalism and stimulating economic growth.

Evaluation of reconfigurations of acute stroke services in different regions of England and lessons for implementation: a mixed-methods study

Evaluation of reconfigurations of acute stroke services in different regions of England and lessons for implementation: a mixed-methods study

Multi-Voiced Archival Performances and Sun Ra/ El Saturn Collection

This article critically explores creative reinterpretations of a sonic archive. It focusses on the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection, a catalogue of the experimental jazz composer Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, 1914-93). In 2010 the collection’s caretakers commissioned visual artists, writers and musicians, including myself, to create new works based on the recordings. Each resulting work acts as an archival performance, understood here as any embodied reimagining and recontextualisation of the archive. Together, the works suggest a process of listening to and remixing the archive ‘from below’, rather than a singular, top-down authority of archival interpretation and power. I examine these works through analysis and artist interviews, noting a tension between appropriation and recontextualisation on one hand and archival stewardship and acknowledgement on the other. I observe how exchange, conflict, solidarity and accountability are all potentially present within each archival performance.

Religious authority online: catholic case study in Poland

Drawing on a popular Catholic online forum in Poland, this study examines the interaction between top-down (traditional institutional) and bottom-up (informal expert) forms of religious authority. In adapting Campbell’s concept of online religious authority, this study shows that both forms of authority emerge in varying contexts and have distinct yet mutually supplementary functions. Top-down authority occurs as topic and background of discussions and appears mostly through references to religious doctrine. Informal experts in turn emerge from the group of most active users and gain their status through the recognition of fellow patrons for their expertise, experience and interpretation skills. The aim of the latter is less to undermine or replace traditional religious authority than to intervene in those areas where the institutional representation of the Church fails or disappoints fellow believers.

Resuscitating the Promise

This article explores the challenges and opportunities that accompany efforts on the ground to nurture innovation as we promote stewardship, preserve valued places, advance education, and facilitate citizens’ connection to their parks and historic sites in the second century of the National Park Service. Using the first nationally designated historic site, Salem Maritime, as a case study, we examine efforts to grapple with bureaucratic inertias, entrenched patterns of insularity, and reliance on top-down authority. Support from leadership is necessary to allow education and interpretation staff on the ground to invite scholars, teachers, school districts, community educators, park neighbors, and others to participate in developing more engaged, complex, multivocal, and democratic histories and a broader vision for the new century in the NPS.

A Chinese approach to protected areas: A case study comparison with the United States

China is being transformed by economic development, urban migration, and social change. Environmental reporting on China has tended to focus on environment damage, especially air pollution. Relatively unnoticed in the West, however, China has invested in improving and expanding its system of protected areas. These protected areas follow varied models—they include nature reserves, forest parks, wetland parks, and more—and face challenges roughly similar to those of protected areas in the United States and many other countries. Unsurprisingly, though, there are important differences that make China's protected area program uniquely Chinese. Chinese protected areas have been largely created and continue to be developed with strong top-down authority, although national-level control is softening and other models are being tested. Several nature reserves have received influxes of government funding in recent years to improve and expand their infrastructure and activities to support conservation, tourism, and other uses. Chinese nature reserves also tend to have explicit zoning and economic activities designed to promote economic development in and around them; this emphasis on economic development is greater and takes a different approach in Chinese parks than is typical in Western park systems. Here we compare aspects of the Chinese and US investments in national parks and national nature reserves; we use two examples—Wudalianchi National Nature Reserve in China and Acadia National Park in the United States—to highlight similarities and differences. We conclude that each country's approach to protected areas has strengths and weaknesses in terms of conservation value, engagement with local communities, and sustainability, but that overall each country's protected areas program has structural deficiencies, particularly related to the allocation of funding, that undermine their ability to achieve their stated mission over the long term. The shortcomings in each country are different and may not be as substantial as the shortcomings of` national parks in many other countries, but they are critical nonetheless.

Seeing Development as Security: Constructing Top-Down Authority and Inequitable Access in Jharkhand

This article examines governmental development interventions and their local-level implications for access to and authority over resources, using a framework of assemblage practices (Li 2007) as an analytical strategy in a mixed-methods study in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum. This insurgency-affected district, populated by the Ho tribe, has India’s largest iron deposits. It hosts the Saranda Action Plan (SAP), a controversial intervention that exemplifies how India’s government elides development with security in resource-conflict regions. SAP aims to bring security and development to mineral-rich Saranda forest division, but has been widely critiqued for its failure to deliver community-oriented development, while the security agenda paves the way for mining concessions. Meanwhile, neighbouring Sadar Chaibasa division, with comparable development issues but less minerals, is treated indifferently. Based on secondary research in Saranda and empirical work in Sadar Chaibasa’s forest villages, this article untangles the practices through which governmental development interventions construct inequitable resource access locally in both extreme and ordinary cases. It argues that seeing development as security enables the mutual constitution of top-down authorisation and inequitable resource access, building an undemocratic local-level state.

Teachers’ Belief and Practices in Teacher-Centered Empowerment Reform in Taiwan

Over the past 2 decades, Taiwan has introduced a series of decentralization reforms in school administration and curriculum. Teachers, who are at the center of these reforms, are expected to enrich their knowledge and cultivate strong beliefs regarding these reforms; the teachers’ beliefs and knowledge are not only affected by their personal profile but also by contextual factors of structure and culture at all levels. I conducted this study in order to explore these factors and determine how they affect teachers’ beliefs and practices. Qualitative methods guided this study in which a case-study approach was used. The findings of this study highlight a variety of factors that were identified by teachers. Contextual factors of structure and culture identified by the teachers include the context of the classroom, school administration and top-down authority, teachers’ culture, and government policy. The personal factors include personality, educational background and teacher preparation, demographic profiles, and teachers’ abilities. For the purpose of developing a comprehensive and culturally sensitive model of belief development, implications for practice and future research are provided.

Case study

Purpose – This case study aims to discuss how the Met Office developed a process for creating ideas that help people look at markets differently and bring people with diverse knowledge together to generate better ideas. The Met Office is the UK’s national weather service and an arm of the Department for Business Innovation and Skills. In its 160 years of history, it has been part of a number of Government Departments, including the Board of Trade, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Defence, where it became an executive agency with a remit to act commercially. Design/methodology/approach – Creating and maintaining income streams in a competitive international market requires ongoing innovation and while its long history and sector pre-eminence means the Met Office has always been successful, it is not always easy to innovate in a public sector organisation with an ingrained culture and traditional top-down authority structure. Findings – This case study discusses how the Met Office developed a process for creating ideas that help people look at markets differently and bring people with diverse knowledge together to generate better ideas. Originality/value – Inspired by external influence, a small core of innovators began a process of “guerrilla” tactics to drive the process forward, firstly by visiting other businesses including Google and Innocent and learning from the experiences they found there. This included Google’s concept of “Playtime” (allowing people some freedom to play with their pet products) and the use of kitchens to encourage employee interaction. The case study concludes with observations for others to consider in the process of introducing employee-led innovation.

Follow the money: how foundation dollars change public school politics

Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America. Available in OSO:

NEW AND NONCONVENTIONAL RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL HARMONY

In contemporary society there is far greater cultural and religious diversity than in the past. New religious movements are often misunderstood, portrayed inaccurately, and challenged by members of the wider society. Characteristics of new religious movements include a constituency of converts, atypical representations, charismatic leaders, top-down authority coupled with informal communication structures, an unambiguous worldview, and frequent change. New religions present significant challenges to society, but governments and societies should accord them the same rights and freedoms as those accorded to any other citizen, as outlined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.