Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Human Rights: Implications for Higher Education,Based on the South African Experience

ABSTRACT

Africa has rich traditions and knowledge systems founded on the principles of caring for one another and the spirit of mutual support embedded in the African philosophy of Ubuntu. These collective values tend to be marginalised in international human rights standards built on western values. The standards were developed without broad-based consultation of the different value systems in Africa. Therefore, in order to inspire sustainable implementation among diverse cultures, dialogue to develop universal human rights and obligations based on the diversity of cultures and ways of knowing is needed. Using South Africa's experience at two universities, the extent to which these institutions have attempted to incorporate African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) and human rights into the higher education curriculum is investigated. The implications for higher education and the human rights and development paradigms built on western knowledge systems are investigated. North-West University has been the pioneer of integrating AIKS into higher education in South Africa and is the only higher education institution in South Africa with an accredited IKS Teaching Programme at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels – which has been notably successful, albeit with some challenges. AIKS has also been integrated into research and teaching at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has registered significant successes since 2012. The need to embed AIKS in the curriculum of higher education institutions is affirmed.     

Corruption and Policy Implementation in the Philippines: A Comparative Analysis of the Teacher Training and Textbook Delivery Programmes

Corruption is a perennial obstacle to the Philippines’ pursuit of development. The Department of Education (DepEd) is considered to be one of the most corrupt agencies in the Philippines. However, there are two DepEd programmes with different levels of effectiveness in controlling corruption. The Textbook Delivery Programme has been ineffective while the Programme on Basic Education has been successful. The article explains the different levels of implementing these programmes by using local perspectives via the ‘narratives of implementation actors’. Apart from providing insights on the challenges facing the evolving educational bureaucracy in the Philippines, this article also demonstrates the utility of network actor perspectives in appreciating the many concerns that determine and impede implementation performance and discusses the causes and impact of corruption and policy implementation on two public educational programmes.     

Quality of Service,Expectation, Satisfaction and Trust in Public Institutions: The Abu Dhabi Citizen Satisfaction Survey

Structural equation modelling was utilised to develop and test three models while exploring the causality effect of constructs. The models hypothesised that trust in the government was a result of interactions of several other forces: namely, citizens’ expectation, perception of service quality and satisfaction with these services. The article validates and replicates the findings on the question of causality between performance and trust. The findings were very consistent with the previous ones. The model incorporating citizen's demographic data provided the best fit. According to this model, citizen demographics, expectations and quality of services influence citizen satisfaction; and ultimately, citizen satisfaction influences trust in government. The perceived quality of all services provides significant standardised estimates. However, congestion in streets, parking facilities, parks and recreation and schools are the most salient drivers of citizen satisfaction. The variables of income, education level, years living in Abu Dhabi and marital status exert the highest influence on this satisfaction construct. Perception of quality of services has a significant effect on overall satisfaction; and overall satisfaction drives trust in local government officials. In addition, citizen expectation influences perceptions of the quality of service and overall satisfaction.     

The Quality of Life in English Local Authority Areas

Abstract

Since the enactment of New Labour's sustainable development agenda in 1999, English local authorities have been placed at the helm of a variety of devolved localism initiatives designed to foster sustainable communities that contribute to a high quality of life for existing and future generations. This paper considers the scale of the challenge that confronts local authorities in terms of attaining these outcomes, by drawing attention to their current quality of life situation. The baseline conditions in question are measured by reference to the Audit Commission's local quality of life indicators dataset, which it compiled in 2005 from a range of existing local government performance indicators. The dataset is subjected to k-means clustering and principal components analysis to assess how far English local authorities measure up to Labour's sustainable communities ideal and to highlight the type and degree of quality of life disparity that exists between them. The results from the analysis are used to evaluate the feasibility of Labour's devolved localism approach to sustainable community formation and to provide important insights to local policy makers responsible for fostering sustainable communities. The implications of the findings for future research are also considered.     

Democracy and the multinationals

The relationship between western multinational corporations' perceived commercial interests and democratic quality in developing markets is more varied than habitually argued. While autocratic policy making and low-intensity democracy have been judged to provide benefits to investors, they are also increasingly recognized to generate features prejudicial to commercial operations. Many investment trends reflect the adverse impact of democratic limitations in developing markets. Multinational companies can be faulted less for a uniform effort to frustrate democratic improvements than for a failure to develop a coherent or proactive engagement in relation to the international democracy promotion agenda.     

Actively Cultivating Policy Similarity. A Regional Strategy in Education Policy in France and Germany

Regionalization processes across Western Europe have triggered analyses of regional policy divergence. Yet, in a number of cases, regional governments appear to have deliberately strived to achieve policy conformity. Previous research tends to emphasize exogenous explanations of regional policy convergence. In contrast, this paper addresses the issue of regional policy convergence by focusing on endogenous explanatory factors. Its objective is to carry out an investigation of when, how, and with what effect a ‘desire for conformity’ arises, and contends that regional governments may actively cultivate policy similarity as a strategy to develop or secure their policy capacity. Specifically, the paper argues that the adoption of this strategy is contingent upon two requirements that may or may not be met, and that its outcome is the convergence on targeted dimensions of regional policies. The two requirements are: (i) a countrywide public preference for policy uniformity in the policy area of concern, and (ii) the presence of a threat posed to regional policy capacity by various political entrepreneurs, including the central state, who blame regions for providing divergent policies on particular dimensions. This paper is based on the comparison of two case studies where regional governments deliberately pursued policy conformity on targeted dimensions of their education policy: school-building policy in France and curricula policy in Germany. The two case studies also present dissimilar features that make it possible to investigate the effects of institutional setting and policy distribution on the adoption and operation of the active-cultivation-of-policy-similarity strategy.     

高等学校学生处分权研究——以教育仲裁为视角的考察

学生处分权是高等学校教育管理权内容,是高等学校依据法律、法规或大学章程对违犯国家法律、法规和学校纪律的学生实施惩戒的权力。高等学校处分权特殊性质和我国以和为贵的传统文化,都与教育仲裁机制相契合,这为我国构建教育仲裁纠纷解决机制打下了坚实的基础。     

信息网络时代国防生思想政治教育新探

当今社会处于信息网络时代,在此时代背景之下,信息网络正对人们的工作、学习、生活、思维等生存方式的方方面面产生着广泛而深刻的影响,它必然也会对国防生思想政治教育产生一定的影响。其中,国防生的心里动态、思想信念、政治理想受到的影响尤为明显。针对新情况、新问题,探寻出新的思想政治教育对策,就显得十分迫切与重要。     

公安高职院校教学质量监控体系的构建理念

公安高职院校以培养高素质应用型公安后备人才为使命,人才培养质量是衡量高职院校综合办学能力、办学水平高低的重要标准,而教学质量则直接影响甚至决定人才培养的质量。因此,为了提高公安高职院校人才培养质量,就必须建立一套高效和谐的教学质量监控体系,及时发现、正确分析并有效解决教学中的相关问题。本文结合甘肃警察职业学院构建教学质量监控体系的实际,就公安高职院校构建教学质量监控体系进行理论和实践的探讨。