Search results for "AGENCY"
showing 10 items of 578 documents
How Does the Romanian State Support the Increase of Energy Efficiency of Buildings by Using Public Funds?
2020
Abstract The issue of improving the energy efficiency of buildings in Romania is one of interest, both for the state authorities and for the population. The general purpose is to encourage the production of thermal energy and domestic hot water through the use of renewable energy sources. This is part of the EU's long-term objective of decarbonising the existing and inefficient European real estate park. In order to start renovating the existing buildings on the national territory, considerable financial resources are needed which the owners should have. The Romanian state, through the Agency for Environmental Protection, comes to the support the interested persons by granting financial sup…
Conservatism and Accounting Earnings
2015
The article refers to accounting conservatism and its relation with accounting earnings. After providing the conceptual background of the prudence concept, which is the basis of accounting conservatism, the paper introduces some more empirically testable concepts, known as conditional and unconditional conservatism. It also explains the economics behind this accounting practice, mainly associated to contracting due to the asymmetric information between managers and external stakeholders, but also linked to litigation risks, taxation, political and regulatory processes. After providing a brief explanation of the empirical measures of conservatism, it gives a summary of the vast empirical res…
Insights into the agency, positioning and development of professional Finnish language skills of international nursing students
2016
This article focuses on international students studying in an English-mediated nursing degree program in Finland. From sociocognitive and ecological perspectives, this study examines the development of the students’ professional Finnish language skills and agency during their practical training. In addition, this article explores how students are positioned as capable workers. To shed light on the students’ professional language skills, agency, and positionings, interviews with vocational teachers, head nurses, and two international nursing students are examined using narrative analysis. The findings suggest that due to their lack of Finnish language skills, international students are posit…
Distributed leadership in Finnish and Shanghai schools
2016
The present research employed mixed-methods approach to further theorise distributed leadership and to investigate its manifestations in Finnish and Shanghai schools. The whole research comprised two phases. The first phase contained a meta-analysis (Sub-study I), which systematically reviewed 85 key distributed leadership articles published between 2002 and 2013. The meta-analysis identified two main research paradigms: the descriptive-analytical paradigm and the prescriptive-normative paradigm. It also yielded a resource–agency duality model of distributed leadership. In this model, distributed leadership is seen as a process with both organisational and individual perspectives. From the …
Rural futures in developed economies: The case of Finland
2015
Abstract This study presents four possible images of rural futures in Finland: decentralized bio-economy, colonial countryside, museum countryside and rural business islets. They are distilled through literature reviews, futures workshops and futures tables. Alternative specifications of structures, contents and agencies result in highly divergent states of key dimensions and, consequently, divergent rural futures. This diversity challenges the conventional public wisdom or intellectual monoculture that considers decay as the only future for rural areas. Key challenges in crafting plausible but divergent futures images are finding an appropriate level of abstraction or “flight altitude”, es…
Does country-level gender equality explain individual risk of intimate partner violence against women? A multilevel analysis of individual heterogene…
2019
Abstract Background Gender equality is widely accepted as an important explanatory factor for the occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women. However, the relationship is not straightforward, as high country-level gender equality is not always associated with lower IPV prevalence. We apply ‘multilevel analysis of individual heterogeneity and discriminatory accuracy’ (MAIHDA) to (i) quantify the extent to which the country of residence determines individual risk of IPV and (ii) investigate the association between country-level gender equality and individual experience of IPV, and to which extent this association explains the observed between-country differences. Methods Usin…
Explainable Student Agency Analytics
2021
Several studies have shown that complex nonlinear learning analytics (LA) techniques outperform the traditional ones. However, the actual integration of these techniques in automatic LA systems remains rare because they are generally presumed to be opaque. At the same time, the current reviews on LA in higher education point out that LA should be more grounded to the learning science with actual linkage to teachers and pedagogical planning. In this study, we aim to address these two challenges. First, we discuss different techniques that open up the decision-making process of complex techniques and how they can be integrated in LA tools. More precisely, we present various global and local e…
Critical stance within a community of inquiry in an advanced mathematics course for pre-service teachers
2020
AbstractThis paper reports a study of university students’ experiences of learning mathematics in an introductory differential equations course that takes an inquiry approach to learning and teaching. The students are on a trajectory leading toward a bachelor’s degree in mathematics to be followed by a year-long teacher education credential program. The analysis of students’ end of course presentations and written portfolios is framed with community of practice theory, complemented with analytic categories from community of inquiry, including notions of inquiry stance and critical alignment. Our social theorization of university mathematics education adds a complementary perspective to the …
Ammatillinen toimijuus työelämän muutosvirrassa.
2014
Työorganisaatioilta ja työntekijöiltä edellytetään jatkuvaa kehittymistä nykyajan työelämässä. Jatkuvan uudistamisen tuoksinnassa on oleellista pohtia ja tutkia, miten kehittäminen voi tapahtua kestävällä tavalla tukien yksilöiden aktiivista osallistumista, jaksamista ja identiteettityötä. Hallinnolliset määräykset ja ohjeistukset saattavat olla tehokkaita luomaan muutoksia työelämässä, mutta samalla uudistusten inhimilliset kärsimykset saattavat nousta liian suuriksi. – Katja Vähäsantasen väitöskirja Vocational teachers’ professional agency in the stream of change (Jyväskylän yliopisto 2013).
Accessible stories within mediascapes. Voicing otherness in digital museums
2022
This article presents the first steps in the investigation of the potential for digital storytelling and digital museums to be used as instruments for access, as enablers of epistemic and poietic agency. Digital storytelling and migration museums are used as a case study to explore in what ways digital storytelling impacts meaning-making processes performed by migrants, allowing them to become active creators and disseminators of their own experiences. Through the combination of corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, and lexical semantic analysis, an ad-hoc comparable corpus of migrant narratives in English and in Italian was cross-examined in order to scrutinise the conceptua…