Influencing alcohol control policies and practices at community festivals

The goal of this study was to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of two interventions aimed at reducing alcohol-related risks at community festivals--a training program for festival planners and a community organizing campaign. We randomly selected four festivals for each intervention and had 24 comparison festivals. Our assessment included process evaluation to track and evaluate types of alcohol policies resulting from each of the interventions, pre and post telephone surveys of key festival planners and law enforcement agencies, and pre and post pseudo-underage and pseudo-intoxicated purchase attempts. Analyses showed that both interventions were feasible and were successful in influencing adoption of written policies and improving alcohol-related practices. However, neither intervention appeared to decrease propensity for illegal alcohol sales at these events, likely due, in part, to the short time frame of the interventions. Future research should assess effects of the interventions on alcohol-related problems and effects of enforcement interventions.     

Handheld computers. A feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection

Recent advances in handheld computer hardware and software may provide alternatives to paper-based data collection methods. The authors compared data collected with paper forms to data collected with handheld computer-based forms in a field observation study of alcohol purchase attempts at 47 community festivals in a large metropolitan area. Agreement between data collected with paper forms and data collected with handheld computers was greater than 95%. Computer-based forms handled branching patterns better and yielded data that were immediately available for analyses. Paper forms handled written comments better. Handheld computers are a feasible alternative to paper forms for field data collection.     

The education of children in care and children in need: Who falls behind and when?

We seek to explain the development of the educational gap between children in “out‐of‐home care” (CLA), children deemed in social need (CIN), and other pupils. A cohort of 642,805 pupils aged 16 in 2013 was used to chart the educational progress of the full cohort, the CLA (n = 6,236), the CIN in 2012 or 2013 but not CLA (n = 20,384), and a sample individually matched with the CLA (n = 11,084). At age 7, attainment of the CLA and CIN was approximately 1 standard deviation lower than the cohort average and predicted attainment at 16. At this point, the persistent “CIN” (those with earlier and persistent needs) had the lowest attainment relative to others, and this declined further during secondary school. Those entering care before or during primary school had very low attainment at age 7, but their relative attainment did not decline. Attainment of CLA and CIN at age 16 likely reflects early environment, special educational needs, and poor relationships with secondary school. Policy, research, and intervention should focus on CIN as well as CLA, do so before entry to care, and take account of the onset of, and probable reasons for, educational difficulties.     

Critical research and entrepreneurship: A cross-disciplinary conceptual typology

Critical perspectives of entrepreneurship have gained increasing traction over the last two decades. The transformative potential of critical research resides in challenging some of entrepreneurship research's epistemological, ontological and theoretical assumptions, with a view to offering a range of alternatives. Critical research in entrepreneurship has remained fragmented, however, due to its heterogeneous theoretical lineages and compartmentalized and niche interests. Addressing this situation, our objective is to intensify the space of critique in entrepreneurship research by offering a theoretically informed typology that delineates different manifestations of ‘criticalness’. Our overarching contribution is to advance a typology distinguishing four ideal types of critical entrepreneurship research based on evaluative emphases (referred to as ‘valence’) and the meta-theoretical assumptions informing its critical operation (called ‘paradigmatic orientation’). By demonstrating the variegated political, ethical and ideological interests and preoccupations that critical studies serve within different management sub-disciplines, the typology provides a conceptual vocabulary for making sense of and synthesizing critical perspectives across scholarly boundaries. Also, it helps to reposition understandings of critique as gestures of negativity by stimulating a greater appreciation of the generative potential of critique and the theoretical and philosophical possibilities that this can bring to our scholarly community.     

Meeting Family Housing Needs: Experiences of Rural Women in the Midst of Welfare Reform

Though sometimes overlooked, the availability, affordability, and quality of housing in rural communities are a potential barrier to transitioning from welfare to work. In this investigation we examine housing issues confronting 17 rural women and their families who were recipients of welfare benefits in 1997. Respondents' housing accounts illustrate the significance of reliance on both government housing subsidies and informal subsidies supplied by friends, family, and more distant relatives. The study focuses on concerns women have in meeting their families shelter needs and the complexities involved in doing so. The findings of the research suggest that additional housing policy initiatives, as well as a targeted research agenda are needed, especially for families whose welfare benefits are nearing termination.     

Measuring density dependence in survival from mark-recapture data

We discuss the analysis of mark-recapture data when the aim is to quantify density dependence between survival rate and abundance. We describe an analysis for a random effects model that includes a linear relationship between abundance and survival using an errors-in-variables regression estimator with analytical adjustment for approximate bias. The analysis is illustrated using data from short-tailed shearwaters banded for 48 consecutive years at Fisher Island, Tasmania, and Hutton's shearwater banded at Kaikoura, New Zealand for nine consecutive years. The Fisher Island data provided no evidence of a density dependence relationship between abundance and survival, and confidence interval widths rule out anything but small density dependent effects. The Hutton's shearwater data were equivocal with the analysis unable to rule out anything but a very strong density dependent relationship between survival and abundance.     

Creatively prototyping the future high street

Abstract

This paper gives a voice to a range of community and individual stakeholders who would not generally be heard in the conventional town planning process. We present a methodological technique, described as creative prototyping, that has at its heart, the capability to enable full stakeholder inclusivity into the future imagining of the smart city. Actively involving these individuals and community representatives in the research process enables deeper understanding of how technology and people can interact productively to create smart cities that are socially inclusive while still being commercially relevant. The research data for this paper are drawn from the findings of a workshop conducted by the authors that utilised Science Fiction Prototyping and Lego Serious Play. This research activity was driven by questions focusing upon the current complex interplay and tensions of technology and the UK’s physical high street. We first explore these issues theoretically in previous literature and then drawn upon this review to analyse the outcomes of the workshop. Three themes emerge from this analysis that have operational and strategic relevance to the development of future high streets; the importance of ever present but invisible technology, the forefronting of people in the smart city and the need for wide-ranging stakeholder input and participation into planning. The findings also illustrate that not all future imaginings of the retail high street are immediately practical or realistically applicable. However, in examining the many issues facing the current high street and in negotiating the multiplicity of voices with their competing demands and expectations, we offer the conclusion that the future smart city must become a place of truly shared sociality – rather than just mere proximity, customised convenience or a concentration point for multiple forms of entertainment.     

Strangers of the north: South Asians,cricket and the culture of ‘Yorkshireness’

As a county, Yorkshire is a ‘cultural region’: an imagined space, where culture is constructed, refined and articulated by a set of discursive relationships between local populations and a whole range of cultural forms. In this context however, culture is conceived as something which belongs to, and is only accessible by, certain groups of people. Our focus in this article is on the culture of Yorkshire cricket. Historically, Yorkshire cricket has been linked with White male privilege and some studies have shown that people within Yorkshire take a degree of pride in this. Consequently, the county and its cricket club have faced frequent accusations from minority ethnic communities of inveterate and institutionalised racism. Drawing upon Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, we argue that the processes of deregulation and individualisation championed by New Right policies have led to a divorce between power and politics, a cornerstone of the old solid modern world. This in turn has led to an erosion of the state, causing individuals to navigate turbulent life projects which are consistently haunted by the spectres of fear and insecurity. Such an environment has caused cricket to be pushed further behind gated social spaces, in an attempt to maintain a semblance of ‘community’.     

Re-covered: Wangechi Mutu,Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle,and the postcolonial potentiality of black women in colonial(ist) photographs

By pasting on, cutting into and drawing over images of bodies, artists Wangechi Mutu and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle re-cover colonialist photographs to recover postcolonial black female subjectivities. In her project, The Uninvited, ongoing since 2009, Hinkle has literally and conceptually drawn upon colonial-era postcards that feature photographs of nude West African girls and women, while Mutu has strategically combined images of black African and black American women from ethnographic and pornographic magazines to create her Ark Collection (2006). In the artists’ hands, the black female body is no longer shot, captured, framed or otherwise subjected to the camera. The narrative force and assumed veracity of photography is denied by ambiguous re-presentations of the multifaceted, processual nature of both art and the self. Moreover, rather than merely suggest the subjugation and fragmentation of black women, the works represent the postcolonial potentiality of transformation and agency.