Capital, capabilities and culture: a human development approach to student and school transformation

Cliona Hannon, The University of Dublin

July 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-743-7
Availability: In stock
322pp. ¦ $64 £48 €55

This book applies the capability approach as an evaluative lens through which to explore the range of capabilities that emerged over a three-year period, through the Trinity Access 21 – College for Every Student (TA21-CFES) higher education access project in four schools. Qualitative analysis is presented from a longitudinal study of four schools over a three-year period, drawing on data from four student focus groups involving 21 student participants and 14 individual student interviews. An additional sixteen school personnel contributed in interviews. There are three main findings: first, specific student capabilities emerge because of their engagement in the TA21-CFES core practices of Leadership, Mentoring and Pathways to College. These are: autonomy, practical reason/college knowledge, identity, social relations and networks and hope. Second, students encounter a range of inhibiting social conversion factors in developing capabilities and persisting with higher education aspirations. These are: the negative pull of peer relations; pressure related to the Junior Certificate; limited subject choice and conflicting family expectations. Third, it is the combination of their own emerging capability set along with a network of trusted relationships with others that enables them to overcome potentially corrosive disadvantage and translate their experiences into fertile functionings. It is proposed that these findings have national and international relevance for widening participation interventions. The research makes a methodological contribution as it is the first use of qualitative longitudinal research (QLR) in Ireland within a ‘lived’ project aimed at working-class students over a three-year period. It contributes empirically as it provides new knowledge about the impact of interventions aimed at developing students’ capability set and how these might help them to develop navigational capital and post-secondary educational aspirations. It also makes a conceptual contribution to how we frame the design and evaluation of impact of widening participation initiatives, as it takes a capability approach to considering how students develop higher education aspirations over time, towards what they consider ‘a life of value’. It is useful to researchers, practitioners and policy makers who are interested in taking an evidence-based approach to developing higher education access programmes.

Critique of Authenticity

Edited by Thomas Claviez, University of Bern, Switzerland et al.

September 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-754-3
Availability: In stock
329pp. ¦ $67 £50 €57

The volume provides a critical assessment of the concept of authenticity and gauges its role, significance and shortcomings in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Many of the contributions communicate with each other and thus acknowledge the enormous significance of this politically, morally, philosophically and economically-charged concept that at the same time harbors dangerous implications and has been critically deconstructed. The volume shows that the alleged need or desire for authenticity is alive and kicking but oftentimes comes at a high price, connected to a culture of experts, authority and exclusionary strategies.

Market Orientation of Nonprofit Organizations: An Indian Perspective

Renjini D., Cochin University of Science and Technology, India and Mary Joseph T., Cochin University of Science and Technology, India

June 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-733-8
Availability: In stock
135pp. ¦ $34 £25 €29

This book is an insightful account on market orientation and how it enhances the performance of non-profit organizations in India. The book provides the readers with a succinct, yet comprehensive view of scholarly research on the concepts of market orientation, non-profit marketing, and organizational performance of non-profit organizations and demonstrates why and how market orientation can be an effective organizational orientation for Indian non-profit organizations. Despite the growing importance of non-profit sector in socio-economic well-being of societies, academic debate and research in developing economy context in this field is glaringly sparse. This book attempts to addresses this gap in literature by analyzing market orientation and related concepts against the background of environmental conditions in a typical emerging economy context. Therefore, it will be especially beneficial to academics, researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of non-profit management, strategic marketing and social work, desirous of advancing their knowledge in nonprofit market orientation in these settings.

An Introduction to Computational Macroeconomics

Anelí Bongers, Universidad de Málaga, Spain et al.

January 2020 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-654-6
Availability: In stock
320pp. ¦ $65 £49 €55

This book presents an introduction to computational macroeconomics, using a new approach to the study of dynamic macroeconomic models. It solves a variety of models in discrete time numerically, using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as a computer tool. The solved models include dynamic macroeconomic models with rational expectations, both non-microfounded and microfounded, constituting a novel approach that facilitates the learning and use of dynamic general equilibrium models, which have now become the principal tool for macroeconomic analysis. Spreadsheets are widely known and relatively easy to use, meaning that the computer skills needed to work with dynamic general equilibrium models are affordable for undergraduate students in Advanced Macroeconomics courses.

The Picturesque, The Sublime, The Beautiful: Visual Artistry in the Works of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)

Valerie Derbyshire, University of Sheffield

May 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-618-8
Availability: In stock
316pp. ¦ $63 £48 €54

This book considers the relationships between British Romantic-era novelist, poet and writer of educational works for children, Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), and a number of visual artists of the eighteenth century with whom she had connections. By exploring these associations with artists such as George Smith of Chichester, George Romney, James Northcote, John Raphael Smith and Emma Smith, the book demonstrates how the artwork of these individual artists influenced Charlotte Smith’s literary corpus. It also shows a mutual influence: how the literary works of Charlotte Smith impacted the corpora of these artists. This study uncovers information which was not heretofore known regarding these artists: it reveals a mistaken attribution of a sketch which accompanied the second volume of Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1797) and sheds light on a print, held by the British Museum, which was previously shrouded in mystery. The artworks also enhance the existing scholarly knowledge about Smith’s biography. This book analyses the tropes and motifs employed by Smith’s artist-associates in the context of the popular aesthetics of the period and undertakes parallel readings between such visual artistry and Smith’s literary works. The book deliberates on how Smith utilises these aesthetics as narrative devices, making use of the tropes of the picturesque, the sublime and the beautiful, as well as that of a national British heraldic artwork, in order to produce and enhance meaning in her literary oeuvre. Thus, Smith uses aesthetic structures as vehicles for social critique, commentating on political, gender, moral and class concerns in addition to enhancing the perceived authenticity of her own artistry. The scholarship aims to correct the common misperception that Smith was a lonely marginal figure of Romanticism and instead asserts her central position in an enormous network of key artistic figures of British Romanticism.