Early childhood teachers spend their professional lives in social interactions with children, families and colleagues. Social interactions shape how people understand themselves and each other through discourses. Teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand negotiate their subjectivities, or self-understandings, within initial teacher education (ITE), professional expectations, education and society. They are shaped by historical and contemporary discourses of early childhood teaching professionalism as they gain status as qualified and registered teachers. Early childhood teachers’ understandings of their personal professional identities influence self-understandings of everyone they encounter professionally, especially young children. This poststructural qualitative collective case study investigates five newly-qualified early childhood teachers’ negotiations of their personal professional identities. My research study is based in postmodern understandings of identities as multiple, complex and dynamic, and subjectivities as self-understandings formed within discourses. In contrast, institutionally-directed reflective writing in early childhood ITE can reflect modernist perspectives that assume essentialist, knowable identities. Tensions exist between my postmodern theoretical framework and my data collection strategy of facilitated self-study, an approach that is usually based on the modernist assumption that there is a self to investigate and know. My participants explored their subjectivities through focus group discussions, individual interviews, and reflective writing, including institutionally-directed reflective writing. Three dominant discourses of early childhood education emerged from data analysis that drew on Foucault’s theoretical ideas: the authority discourse, the relational professionalism discourse and the identity work discourse. Positioned in these discourses, all participants regarded themselves as qualified and knowledgeable, skilled at professional relationships and as reflective practitioners. They actively negotiated tensions between professional expectations and understandings of their multiple, complex and changing identities. I concluded that these participants negotiated understandings of their personal professional identities within three dominant discourses through discursive practices of discipline and governmentality, seeking pleasurable subject positions, and agentic negotiation of tensions and contradictions between available subjectivities.

Background: Hospital drug formularies are developed in order to support safe, effective and cost-effective prescribing. Their utilisation is based on the assumption that prescribers and other users will follow guidance outlined within them. The role of formulary users’ attitudes has been largely overlooked in the research literature. The nature and impact of attitudes to formularies on influencing prescribing practice have not been fully investigated. This study seeks to address this issue through a local practice based research project. Objectives: To determine the attitudes and experiences of users and key stakeholders with the utilisation of a new formulary at a local hospital trust. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were conducted exploring the views of doctors, pharmacists and non-medical prescribers. An online self-completion questionnaire was sent to all key stakeholders. In addition prescribing data was also extracted from the Pharmacy computer system to assess impact of the new formulary. Data collection was thus split into two phases with modifications made to the formulary based on preliminary findings and emerging themes. Results: The local formulary symbolises a ‘critical split’ in the approach to resource management and patient care. Pharmacists are ‘closely bound’ to the formulary, relying on it for retrospective decision-support and ultimately seen to improve pharmacists’ autonomy while prescribers consider it to be over-rationalisation eroding their professional autonomy. Although the quantitative data in this study demonstrates a statistically significant improvement in doctors’ perceptions of using the formulary, the distinct divide between doctors’ and pharmacists’ attitudes towards the formulary remained. Prescribing data extracted showed no significant impact of the formulary on prescribing practice. Conclusion: The study confirms the existence of deeper sociological constructs, particularly concerning autonomy and professionalism. Doctors claim an ability to manage uncertainty during patient consultations while pharmacists claim to be drug ‘experts’. The monopoly on drug knowledge is therefore contested ground. This study concludes that both the formulary and the pharmacy profession need to be more influential, and embrace a more ‘humanised-bureaucracy.’ It is recommended that pharmacists build on a new philosophical union with the formulary and focus on asserting their claim and dominance on the monopoly of drug knowledge.

The government primary education system in Karachi, Pakistan, is faced with many problems and dilemmas and each dilemma justifies a reason, but perhaps no problem is as grave as the dejected professional status of the government primary school teachers in Karachi. Schools are only as good as their teachers, regardless of how high their standards, how up-to-date their technology, or how innovative their programs. With a large numbers of under-educated, under-trained, under-paid and, most importantly of all, undervalued government primary school teachers in Karachi, Pakistan (Hoodbhoy, 1998; Shaikh, 1997), only a low percentage of teachers can be effective. Whether the children in Pakistan will be the enlightened and the informed citizens of tomorrow or ignorant members of society will depend on teacher knowledge, teacher education and above all teacher professionalism. If teachers do matter the most, then a series of questions result. What is being done for this section of the society that matters so much? Are efforts being taken to find out what teachers in the government primary schools need to achieve their professional goals? Are these teachers given adequate opportunities to learn, to improve and to become effective teachers? How can these teachers meet the ever increasing demands placed upon them? How will these teachers successfully lead the students into the twenty-first century? Do the primary government school teachers believe that they can successfully lead children into the twenty-first century? Are school reforms geared towards enhancing teachers' professionalism? This research that focuses on the relationships between school reforms and teacher professionalism in government primary schools in Karachi, Pakistan, addresses such questions. In this thesis, I outline some of the measures that have been taken at the government, at the non-government and at the school sector level to restructure and reform primary government schools in Pakistan. A mixed methods research approach was undertaken to investigate the relationships between these reforms and teacher professionalism. Quantitative data were collected by means of questionnaire surveys and qualitative data were collected in the selected four case sites by means of interviews and field notes. In this research it was important to investigate teacher efficacy, teacher practice, teacher leadership and collaborative efforts as the different dimensions of professionalism and the relationships between these and the school reforms for enhanced teacher professionalism. Research was required which addressed the question of "What it actually means to be a professional teacher in government primary schools in Karachi, Pakistan, and how school reforms can actually develop teacher learning for improved teacher professionalism?" Contrary to the detached and noncommittal attitude with which the government primary school teachers are characterized in many contexts, the teachers in this study have indicated that they are confident and capable; they can articulate and communicate ideas; they can make decisions and undertake responsibilities; they understand that it is important to collaborate and learn from one another; and they are willing to undertake leadership roles if they have the opportunities. This has strong implications for policy makers to provide teachers with the opportunities to become active and reflective professionals. It is important to regard teachers as change agents capable of generating knowledge and of making change happen, rather than as passive recipients and users of knowledge. The data provided by the teachers have indicated that it is possible to enhance teacher professionalism within the existing government primary school structures. While the different teachers were at different levels or stages of professionalism, it was quite clear that they had all advanced in terms of their professionalism as a consequence of reform initiatives. These changes in the teachers' levels of professionalism defined the relationships between the school reforms and teacher professionalism. In other words, the school reforms have been able to develop teacher professionalism and take it to a higher level than where it was when the reforms were initiated in the schools. Based on the analysis of the findings, this research theorizes that teacher professionalism is developed when teachers are provided with both the professional knowledge and skills to improve their capabilities, and opportunities to translate professional knowledge and skills into classroom and school activities to make the most of their capabilities. The research proposes that the strength of these relationships between school reforms and teacher professionalism depends on the dynamism with which the reform managers take teachers through the stage of involving them in developmental process, the stage of initiating professional development programmes and the stage of developing schools into collaborative cultures and establishing networks with the help of enlightened principals and hybrid support structures. Based on this proposition a number of principles have been identified for sustaining and further developing teacher professionalism. The study acknowledges that the process of developing teacher professionalism is complex and that it will be the blend of different elements in the schools, the particular school context and political will that will decide how professionalism can best be fostered in the government primary schools. However, since the principles derived from this research are based on grounded research findings and are also supported by literature and other relevant research in the area of teacher development, they may be applicable to other primary schools where similar reforms are being implemented in Pakistan and other developing countries seeking to address similar problems. Policy makers and large private organizations may benefit from the principles of developing and fostering teacher professionalism.

This study investigates variation in IT professionals' experience of ethics with a view to enhancing their formation and support. This is explored through an examination of the experience of IT, IT professional ethics and IT professional ethics education. The study's principal contribution is the empirical study and description of IT professionals' experience of ethics. The empirical phase is preceded by a review of conceptions of IT and followed by an application of the findings to IT education. The study's empirical findings are based on 30 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals who represent a wide demographic, experience and IT sub-discipline range. Their experience of ethics is depicted as five citizenships: Citizenship of my world, Citizenship of the corporate world, Citizenship of a shared world, Citizenship of the client's world and Citizenship of the wider world. These signify an expanding awareness, which progressively accords rights to others and defines responsibility in terms of others. The empirical findings inform a Model of Ethical IT. This maps an IT professional space increasingly oriented towards others. Such a model provides a conceptual tool, available to prompt discussion and reflection, and which may be employed in pursuing formation aimed at experiential change. Its usefulness for the education of IT professionals with respect to ethics is explored. The research approach employed in this study is phenomenography. This method seeks to elicit and represent variation of experience. It understands experience as a relationship between a subject (IT professionals) and an object (ethics), and describes this relationship in terms of its foci and boundaries. The study's findings culminate in three observations, that change is indicated in the formation and support of IT professionals in: 1. IT professionals' experience of their discipline, moving towards a focus on information users; 2. IT professionals' experience of professional ethics, moving towards the adoption of other-centred attitudes; and 3. IT professionals' experience of professional development, moving towards an emphasis on a change in lived experience. Based on these results, employers, educators and professional bodies may want to evaluate how they approach professional formation and support, if they aim to promote a comprehensive awareness of ethics in IT professionals.

ABSTRACT As this thesis argues, the pursuit of professionalism in journalism should be understood as a discourse that hegemonises the discursive formation of journalism and produces news that fulfils professional needs. Professionalism articulates and states its object, in this case war, rather than apprehending it through fidelity to normative criteria, such as the objective truth of ‘reality’. Conceiving of professional journalism as such provides a means of understanding and analysing media production outside of the theoretical bounds of ‘ideology critique’. Empirically, this thesis takes Australian war journalism during the invasion of Iraq, 2003, and professional journalistic discourse observed in interview with a selection of Australian Iraq war correspondents as its object of analysis. Previous analyses and critiques of journalism generally, and war journalism specifically, rely heavily on some conception of journalism as ideological. As this thesis argues this category of analysis is theoretically redundant and the discourse perspective provides a more fecund and insightful critique of journalism. The thesis provides a historical and critical account of professionalism’s emergence, eventual domination and hegemony of the journalistic field. It is argued that professionalism, as an articulation of social and cultural norms, retains its central cultural legitimacy in journalism, and is expressed through the journalistic norms of objectivity, independence and news values. It is argued that within the contemporary cultural conditions of postmodernism and neo-liberalism these modern norms are no-longer credible and useful in journalism. The empirical analysis of the professional discourse undertaken by the thesis demonstrates journalism as a pragmatic and contingent process of meaning creation, which legitimates and normalises its practices, forms and pre-occupations. In this sense the discourse, as a regime and process of meaning creation, produces its object, or makes war ‘real’ for news audiences, rather than reflecting the independent reality of war. In the context of the Iraq invasion, 2003, the thesis reveals many limitations, contradictions and inconsistencies within journalistic norms and subjectivities. The thesis also demonstrates how the discursive needs of professional journalism tend to be coincident with the strategic communication intent of military and political power. This stands in marked contrast to journalism’s professed normative democratic function and to analyses of war journalism that consider this normative function irresistibly dominated by military and political power.

ABSTRACT As this thesis argues, the pursuit of professionalism in journalism should be understood as a discourse that hegemonises the discursive formation of journalism and produces news that fulfils professional needs. Professionalism articulates and states its object, in this case war, rather than apprehending it through fidelity to normative criteria, such as the objective truth of ‘reality’. Conceiving of professional journalism as such provides a means of understanding and analysing media production outside of the theoretical bounds of ‘ideology critique’. Empirically, this thesis takes Australian war journalism during the invasion of Iraq, 2003, and professional journalistic discourse observed in interview with a selection of Australian Iraq war correspondents as its object of analysis. Previous analyses and critiques of journalism generally, and war journalism specifically, rely heavily on some conception of journalism as ideological. As this thesis argues this category of analysis is theoretically redundant and the discourse perspective provides a more fecund and insightful critique of journalism. The thesis provides a historical and critical account of professionalism’s emergence, eventual domination and hegemony of the journalistic field. It is argued that professionalism, as an articulation of social and cultural norms, retains its central cultural legitimacy in journalism, and is expressed through the journalistic norms of objectivity, independence and news values. It is argued that within the contemporary cultural conditions of postmodernism and neo-liberalism these modern norms are no-longer credible and useful in journalism. The empirical analysis of the professional discourse undertaken by the thesis demonstrates journalism as a pragmatic and contingent process of meaning creation, which legitimates and normalises its practices, forms and pre-occupations. In this sense the discourse, as a regime and process of meaning creation, produces its object, or makes war ‘real’ for news audiences, rather than reflecting the independent reality of war. In the context of the Iraq invasion, 2003, the thesis reveals many limitations, contradictions and inconsistencies within journalistic norms and subjectivities. The thesis also demonstrates how the discursive needs of professional journalism tend to be coincident with the strategic communication intent of military and political power. This stands in marked contrast to journalism’s professed normative democratic function and to analyses of war journalism that consider this normative function irresistibly dominated by military and political power.

ABSTRACT As this thesis argues, the pursuit of professionalism in journalism should be understood as a discourse that hegemonises the discursive formation of journalism and produces news that fulfils professional needs. Professionalism articulates and states its object, in this case war, rather than apprehending it through fidelity to normative criteria, such as the objective truth of ‘reality’. Conceiving of professional journalism as such provides a means of understanding and analysing media production outside of the theoretical bounds of ‘ideology critique’. Empirically, this thesis takes Australian war journalism during the invasion of Iraq, 2003, and professional journalistic discourse observed in interview with a selection of Australian Iraq war correspondents as its object of analysis. Previous analyses and critiques of journalism generally, and war journalism specifically, rely heavily on some conception of journalism as ideological. As this thesis argues this category of analysis is theoretically redundant and the discourse perspective provides a more fecund and insightful critique of journalism. The thesis provides a historical and critical account of professionalism’s emergence, eventual domination and hegemony of the journalistic field. It is argued that professionalism, as an articulation of social and cultural norms, retains its central cultural legitimacy in journalism, and is expressed through the journalistic norms of objectivity, independence and news values. It is argued that within the contemporary cultural conditions of postmodernism and neo-liberalism these modern norms are no-longer credible and useful in journalism. The empirical analysis of the professional discourse undertaken by the thesis demonstrates journalism as a pragmatic and contingent process of meaning creation, which legitimates and normalises its practices, forms and pre-occupations. In this sense the discourse, as a regime and process of meaning creation, produces its object, or makes war ‘real’ for news audiences, rather than reflecting the independent reality of war. In the context of the Iraq invasion, 2003, the thesis reveals many limitations, contradictions and inconsistencies within journalistic norms and subjectivities. The thesis also demonstrates how the discursive needs of professional journalism tend to be coincident with the strategic communication intent of military and political power. This stands in marked contrast to journalism’s professed normative democratic function and to analyses of war journalism that consider this normative function irresistibly dominated by military and political power.

Diss. Stockholm : Tekniska högskolan, 2001.

The aim of this dissertation is to study the conditions of and changes in sociative democracy processes at club level. One sports club is studied, Örebro Sportklubb (ÖSK), from its foundation in 1908 up to 1989. The main sources are club minutes, member magazines and annual reports. Democracy, and its twofolded relation to sport and economy processes, is the main problem area of the study. The specific question is how aspirations for economic effectiveness and sporting success influenced the democracy processes in ÖSK between 1908 and 1989. The Swedish sports movement has been described as a democratic movement. But the same movement has also been portrayed as an undemocratic movement made of men, for men. The study is based on a broad understanding of the democracy concept where issues of representativeness, influence, participation and knowledge are prominent. At a club level, the study is analysing the contents of the Swedish sports movement's democracy and its change during the 1900s. The thesis also illustrates how the pursuit of economic efficiency affected the associative democracy. These efficiencies were visible already in the 1920s, but was deepened during the 1970s. In short, the democratic range decreased, and successful sections became less and less motivated to finance the deficits of other sections. But the increased market orientation did not only represent a threat to the associative democracy. Marketisation and commercialization also preconditioned the democracy. At the club arena (Eyravallen), the members met in the clubhouse and café which, in turn, deepened the social capital and friendships within the club.

No description available.