Nita Cherry

Preparing for Practice in the Age of Complexity.

In The university of learning, John Bowden and Ference Marton explore the idea that being able to handle varying and unfamiliar conditions is fundamental to effective practice in ‘real‐life’. They suggest that in an age of rapid change and complexity, the challenge for educators and students is to ‘prepare for the unknown by means of the known’, and they offer the powerful proposition that the educational experience itself should provide rich diversity in the ways in which learning encourages engagement with phenomena. Variation, they suggest, is fundamental to what they call the ‘whole idea’ of the university. This paper is a tribute to John Bowden, reflecting upon the significance of his thinking for the development of teaching and learning practice. In particular, it explores the practical possibilities and the fruitful, though considerable, challenges of deliberately introducing variation into teaching and learning in the university context.

Human Resource Management Challenges in the Hotel Industry in Taiwan

Contemporary international literature identifies three major human resource management (HRM) issues as being critical in the hospitality industry across the globe, both currently and in the future. They are: service quality, training and development, and staff recruitment and selection. This study involved interviews with the most senior managers in a sample of chain hotels in Taiwan nominated by the hotels as being responsible for HRM. This study explored whether three major HRM issues identified in the literature are perceived as important by Taiwanese hoteliers. The results suggest that although most participants perceive these issues as significant and challenging, they are focused mainly on operational rather than strategic solutions for dealing with these issues. It is argued that the current and emerging challenges facing the industry demand an approach to HRM that is far more strategic than the traditional focus of personnel administration. The implication is that HRM has a key role to play in creating and sustaining competitive advantage in hotels. A particular strength of this study was its use of face-to-face interviews, which enabled a more intensive exploration of the thinking of participants than is often the case with quantitative surveys.

Researching in Wicked Practice Spaces

Practice confronts us with “wicked” problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) that constantly challenge our commitment, courage and expertise, as individuals, as organisations and as societies. These problems are messy, circular, aggressive and feature ill-defined design and planning problems. Such challenges can seem very difficult and personally demanding. Even without these stimulating opportunities and wicked problems, our individual and collective practice constantly needs to develop to keep pace with the perpetual change of our globally connected world. (Higgs & Cherry, 2009, p. 4)

The paradox and fog of supervision: Site for the encounters and growth of praxis, persons and voices

Purpose – Several paradoxes have been presented in the literature as inherent in supervision of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to explore these paradoxes and offer the concept of praxis as a way of effectively engaging with complex and paradoxical dimensions of supervision, rather than denying or avoiding them.Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on sometimes provocative offerings of others, and the seminal work of Grant, views are presented that problematise supervision, challenging its representation as something to be transparently understood, planned and managed. Sophisticated theories of supervision have been offered in literature to hold its inherent paradoxes while opening up its practice for inquiry. It is suggested that supervision is usefully understood as the development of praxis: challenging supervisor and student to understand their practice journey as one of interwoven, often tacit, dimensions of knowing, doing, being and becoming (that are personally and therefore distinc...

Leadership as Emotional Labour

This chapter takes up a theme identified in Chapter Eight, which explored the dynamics of trying to have influence in circumstances that place the practice of leadership work under pressure. The chapter uses the concept of emotional labour to further explore what can be involved in undertaking that sort of leadership work. It considers the accounts of the women in educational leadership roles in terms of their engagement with emotional labour.

The Voices of the Women in Universities

This chapter presents the voices of the fourteen senior university women who were interviewed. It intends to represent what these women had to say about several issues. The first issue is the sorts of things that have been important to them and have motivated their efforts to influence things and to make a difference in the university setting.

Taking Up Authority

This chapter explores how our group of university women have engaged with a central concern of leadership in organisational and community settings: how to take up explicit and implicit possibilities to exercise authority. Many contemporary framings of leadership focus on its socially constructed dimensions, and especially on the negotiated and contested dynamics of authority.

Starting the Conversation

This book explores how women in educational institutions experience their leadership work. It responds to calls that such domains of challenging human practice deserve to be considered and understood not only through the lenses provided by existing academic theory, but even more deeply through first hand accounts of what it is like to try to do difficult things and to learn how to do them better. As a result, the book is based on accounts of how women in two different educational settings – universities and secondary schools – have learned to take up authority and how they use it in the context of leadership.

Leadership Engagement in Real Time

Previous chapters have considered the range of ways in which the women in educational leadership roles that we interviewed have developed and used their leadership authority. Over time, and in a range of circumstances, they have done this through exercising the formal mandates associated with their roles, by taking up authority on their own terms in self-defining ways, or by enacting some combination of the two. Their descriptions of just how they have gone about this alert us to the many different ways in which leaders can attempt to influence the behaviour of others and the events, environments and processes that shape their practice.

Working in Complex Practice Spaces

There is no doubt that the spaces in which contemporary professional practice is enacted are inherently complex. These spaces hold in tension the practice requirements of being human and technical, discipline-framed as well as interdisciplinary, client-centred yet professionally “managed”, particularised for client and setting but held to evidence-based standards, and priceless in benefit but constrained by cost-efficiency imperatives.