Search results for "Agency"
showing 10 items of 578 documents
Professional Agency and Creativity in Information Technology Work
2017
The meaning of professional agency in the context of professional learning, as well as in the development of working practices and work organisations, is pivotal. The role of creativity is also crucial for long-term economic growth in the current global environment, which is characterised by rapid changes in both technology and economy. Hence, it is important to study the relationship between professional agency and creativity. In this chapter, we explore professional agency and creativity within two Finnish information technology organisations. This study’s data include interviews with staff members and open-ended questionnaire responses to the question ‘What is creativity in your work?’. …
Agency as the Ability and Opportunity to Participate in Evaluation as Knowledge Construction
2011
School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and ‘evidence-based’ practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with potential meaning for practice. This raises questions of democratic purposes of education, of leaders' and teachers' agency and corresponding accountability. This article is therefore an empirically based discussion of the relationship between multiple understandings of democracy and multiple practices of evaluation. It presents certain results of three ethnographi…
A Novel Instrument to Measure the Multidimensional Structure of Professional Agency
2018
This study aimed to construct and validate a quantitative measurement instrument to determine the structure of professional agency in working life. Empirical data (N = 589) were collected via a web-based, theoretically informed questionnaire, within the professional domains of education, healthcare, rescue services, and information technology. The questionnaire items incorporated theoretically based dimensions of professional agency. The structure of professional agency was initially analysed via exploratory factor analysis. Thereafter, using exploratory structural equation modelling, the structure of professional agency was investigated with a view to confirmation and validation. The resul…
The Complexity of Learner Agency
2012
Successful language learning depends crucially on the activity and initiative of the learner (van Lier 2008: 163). However, before a learner engages their agentic resources and chooses to exercise their agency in a particular learning context, they have to hold a personal sense of agency – a belief that their behaviour can make a difference to their learning in that setting. In this article, I examine the construct of learner agency through the lens of complexity theory. I attempt to show how a learner’s sense of agency emerges from the complex dynamic interaction of a range of components in multiple levels of context. Considering longitudinal data from a single case study of a tertiary-lev…
Two routes to actorhood: Lexicalized potency to act and identification of the actor role
2015
The inference of causality is a crucial cognitive ability and language processing is no exception: recent research suggests that, across different languages, the human language comprehension system attempts to identify the primary causer of the state of affairs described (the “actor”) quickly and unambiguously (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky and Schlesewsky, 2009). This identification can take place verb-independently based on certain prominence cues (e.g., case, word order, animacy). Here, we present two experiments demonstrating that actor potential is also encoded at the level of individual nouns (a king is a better actor than a beggar). Experiment 1 collected ratings for 180 German nouns on 12 …
Teachers' perception of children's agency in early childhood education
2017
The concept of agency is currently brought more and more into the focus of ed- ucational research. While professional agency at work is for instance already broadly discussed in adult education, research on children’s agency is still in its infancy. Children’s agency can be viewed from every aspect of children’s life, the focus of this research will be on early childhood education (ECE). For this study, children’s agency is examined from the teachers’ point of view. Five open-ended interviews were carried out with ECE teachers working in different kindergartens in Vienna, Austria. Additionally, one interview was held with two regional managers of the largest provider of kindergartens in Vie…
Does communal context bring the worst in narcissists?
2014
The present experiment (N = 95) investigated the relations of narcissism with social value orientation under facade conditions of testing communal or agentic traits (or none – in a control condition). The results indicated that narcissism predicted less willingness to share resources with others and more competitive orientation in a facade communal condition compared to the remaining two conditions: control and agentic. The results confirm narcissistic disregard for communal domain and are consistent with the extended agency model of narcissism and the “success as a drawback” effect.
Internet-based information and foreign direct investment (FDI) location decision making: An information cost perspective
2012
Published version of an article in the journal: African Journal of Business Management. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5897/AJBM11.1203 Open Access Information and communication technology (ICT) is considered to play an important role to reduce information cost for potential foreign investors. While a growing body of literature has suggested such connections, conceptual clarity is yet to be achieved. This study introduces a conceptual framework based on the Information-theoretic approach and transaction cost perspective to explore how ICT may reduce information cost. To illustrate our proposed framework, we apply it to examine the role of Internet-based informati…
How do remuneration committees affect corporate social responsibility disclosure? empirical evidence from an international perspective
2022
The main goal of this study is to analyze whether the existence of remuneration committees tend to disclose more corporate social responsibility (CSR) information. In addition, we test the moderating role played by the proportion of independent directors on boards of directors with the relationship between the constitution of remuneration committees and CSR disclosure. Previous research does not appear to have addressed these questions. The research questions proposed are tested using an international sample of 28,610 listed companies, and we took into consideration information on industrial companies from the Middle East, developed Asian and Pacific countries, both emerging and developed E…
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) services: What are public relations agencies selling?
2016
Different discourse communities have associated corporate social responsibility (CSR) with different meanings. Because of the lack of a universal definition, organizations could attach different labels to the concept to their own advantage. Public relations agencies are one type of consultancies which has packaged CSR as a service for which they offer advice for planning and implementation. Based on an analysis of the web sites of 22 public relations agencies in the United States, this study found that these agencies presented to be offering a variety of services for different purposes, some of which are related to their expertise in communication and some of which are not. They highlighted…