Better know an HRD scholar: a conversation with John Bing

This paper contains a conversation with John Bing, and is part of a series that focuses on different human resource development (HRD) scholars – the aim being to better understand the people behind the names we see in print and at HRD scholarly conferences. John is Chairman of the Board at ITAP International, is a well-known scholar-practitioner, was a recipient of the ASTD International Practitioner of the Year Award, and received the AHRD Service Award in 2010. The conversation explores John's background, how he got into HRD, his time in the Peace Corps, his work with Geert Hofstede, and his wide range of experience in cross-cultural HRD. The conversation also considers how world experiences improve research and practice, the benefits and challenges of applying research in practice, and the importance of practitioners having a sound education in research and statistics.     

Contemporizing teaching case management: mapping the tensions

ABSTRACT

Case management is experiencing a major evolution that involves the isolation of its roles and the compartmentalization of its functions. As educators, it is challenging to keep track of these changes and to equip students for contemporary practice. Five social work academics from three educational institutions undertook a co-operative inquiry into the research question; ‘What are the tensions within the contemporary human and community services environment that are influencing the teaching of case management?’ The inquiry examined the dominant tensions between social work case management and the contexts within case management is practiced. The shifting and shifty nature of case management and personalization approaches in the quasi-market emerged as key themes. Finally, we reflected on how our teaching practices equip students to deal credibly and courageously with the global and local trends that are currently influencing case management.     

Defining urban,suburban, and rural: a method to link perceptual definitions with geospatial measures of urbanization in central and eastern Massachusetts

Developing greater understandings of socio-ecological relationships across urbanizing areas is increasingly recognized as important for the conservation and management of natural resources in a variety of development contexts. Efforts to do so have been hindered by a lack of consistent measures of urbanization and the challenge of integrating socio-cultural characteristics into definitions of urban. We present a novel method for linking perceptual definitions of urban, suburban, and rural to geospatial characteristics and demonstrate how the method can be used to map urban, suburban, and rural areas at multiple scales in central and eastern Massachusetts. Our method can facilitate comparative approaches to urban ecology, be used to scale up socio-ecological studies, and inform conservation research and practice in urbanizing areas.     

Cholera—a step too Farr

In the mid-19th century epidemics of cholera presented a new threat to the population. In the face of conflicting theories as to how the disease was spread, William Farr came up with an interesting theory. Hilary Short and Amanda Chetwynd have investigated.     

Husbands,wives, sons,and daughters: Fertility preferences and the demand for contraception in Ethiopia

Ethiopia, with nearly 65 millionpeople, is the second most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility levels are among the highest in the world. Using the matched wife-husband sample from the 1990 National Family and Fertility Survey of Ethiopia we investigate the fertility desires of wives and husbands and the degree to which they are similar, including whether a preference for sons exists. We model the determinants of the desire to limit or space births, and estimate unmet need. Results indicate high levels of concurrence among husbands and wives on reproductive preferences. Where differences exist, husbands are more pronatalist than their wives. Both husbands and wives prefer to have sons and daughters, but more sons overall. Approximately 22% of wives and husbands desire to limit or space births but do not use contraception. More than half of wives and husbands with an unmet need for limiting are paired with a partner who has no such need. Three implications follow from these results: (1) differences in wives' and husbands' son and daughter preferences may help to explain discordant views among couples when it comes to the desire to limit or space births; (2) husbands' overall contribution to wives' unmet need can be substantial in African societies in the early stages of fertility transition; and (3) wives' preferences regarding children and contraception can result in unmet need on the part of husbands, even in highly gender-stratified societies where men are more pronatalist.     

The Meaning of Globalization for Development Policy

The Secretary of State for International Development reviews the Government's development strategy. The core commitment is to help mobilize the international political will to meet the aims of the UN international poverty eradication strategy. This will require resource transfers in the form of aid as investment, if the poorest countries are to be enabled to develop more trade and become part of the global economy. Globalization increases wealth creation, yet there is a danger that some countries could become marginalized from the world economy. To avoid this, developing countries must become full participants on the global economic stage, shaping and influencing the global rules in line with their interests and needs. There are three key challenges at the top of the Government's agenda: (1) the mainstreaming of development issues in the formation of UK and EU policy, (2) encouragement and active support for the efforts of developing countries themselves to become active players on the world economic stage, (3) the building of partnerships to make this happen—with governments, with global economic institutions, with the business sector, with donors and with NGOs. Globalization is characterized by the pace of technological change, the emergence of a more sophisticated system of global economic rules—with the World Trade Organization now at centre stage alongside the IMF and the World Bank—and the increasingly important role of multinational companies. Responding to globalization is not an optional extra. The old models of development need to be rethought. The Department for International Development has a key role to play in this, by ensuring that policy-makers in the UK, within the EU and internationally take full account of development aspects from the outset.     

Generalized Verbal Behavior Increases Following a Speaker Immersion Intervention

A goal of behavior-analytic interventions is to produce behavior that is maintained under naturalistic conditions. In this experiment, we studied the effects of a speaker immersion protocol (SIP) on the number of speaker responses (tacts and mands) emitted by 3 preschool students under naturalistic, not directly targeted, conditions. During the SIP, the researchers provided 100 daily opportunities for the participants to emit mands using the target mand form by contriving establishing operations (EOs) throughout the school day. The effects of the intervention were evaluated using a multiple-probe design by measuring target mands during EO probe sessions and the number of mands and tacts emitted during noninstructional-setting probe sessions. The researchers found that the SIP produced increases in both targeted and generalized verbal behavior.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s40616-020-00133-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Analysing metaphor in human resource development

Metaphors can be viewed as central to the task of accounting for how we think about things, make sense of reality, and set the problems we try to solve. How then can we learn about the HRD view of the world from our use of metaphor? How do we in HRD limit our thinking by using certain metaphors? What alternative metaphors might suggest new ways of approaching HRD? This article contains an argument for completing an analysis of HRD metaphor, a fourstep framework for that analysis, and the findings of a partial application of those steps based on recent HRD literature. Issues for HRD are raised and discussed.