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This paper uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to understand the lives of a set of young White working-class men living in a deprived urban locale in the north of England. All participants were classi...

This paper reports on findings from a three-year ethnographic study of 24 young people in northern England who were classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET), or at risk of becoming so. Drawing on conceptions of opportunity structure and educational marginality, the paper discusses the processes leading to young people becoming NEET after leaving school. It presents findings concerning the family backgrounds, school experiences, and educational attainment of participants, and traces their initial post-16 destinations and their pathways to NEET status. Although most participants did not become NEET immediately after leaving school, restricted labour market opportunities and a lack of high-quality education and training for middle- and low-attaining young people exacerbated social and educational disadvantage. Over time, participants became increasingly restricted to marginal forms of learning. The paper argues that a focus on opportunity structures provides a powerful way of und...

Multiple regression has a previously unrecognized "statistical blind spot" because when multicollnearity and measurement error are present, both path estimates and variance inflation factors are biased. This can result in overestimated t-statistics, and excessive false positives. PLS has the same weakness, but CB-SEM's estimation process accounts for measurement error, avoiding the problem. Bringing together partial insights from a range of disciplines to provide a more comprehensive treatment of the problem, we derive equations showing false positives will increase with greater multicollinearity, lower reliability, greater effect size in the dominant correlated construct, and, surprisingly, with higher sample size. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that false positives increase as predicted. We also provide a correction for the problem. A literature search found that of IS research papers using regression or PLS for path analysis, 33% were operating in this danger zone. Our findings are important not only for IS, but for all fields using regression or PLS in path analysis.

This paper uses Raymond Boudon’s model of educational expansion to examine the relationship between education and social mobility, paying particular attention to post-compulsory education – an important site of social differentiation in England. The paper shows how Boudon focuses explicitly on the consequences of educational expansion, and argues that his work helps us understand why widening access to post-compulsory education does not necessarily lead to higher rates of social mobility. We investigate Boudon’s key theoretical insights and assess the contemporary relevance of his model. The paper argues that the fundamental assumptions of Boudon’s model not only remain valid, but have been intensified by systemic changes in English post-compulsory education, and its articulation with the labour market.

The characteristics, experiences and long-term prospects of young people outside the labour market and education have attracted widespread international attention in recent decades, and the specific category of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) has been a policy concern for the UK Government since 1997. This paper examines the analytical and empirical basis of our knowledge of NEET young people, in the light of more general conceptualisations of social exclusion and the individualisation of social risk. It relates the NEET category to a conception of social exclusion in which the central policy focus is on moving young people across a boundary between participation and non-participation, and inequalities within education and employment receive less attention. This focus, allied with discourses of individualisation, obscures the structural basis of inequality in education and training. However, the paper argues that the research evidence shows that individualised approaches based...

Official discourse in the United Kingdom and many other OECD countries emphasises education and training as a vehicle for social inclusion and economic growth. Accordingly, those who do not participate are seen to be at risk of long-term exclusion. However, interventions aimed at re-engaging young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) can be ineffective or counter-productive. This article presents findings from the first year of a 3-year ethnography of NEET young people in the north of England and examines the opportunities and barriers experienced by NEET young people as they attempt to negotiate the complex territory following the end of compulsory education. Drawing on Giddens' structuration theory, we discuss young people's actions and the narratives underlying their decisions about post-school education, work and training. The article explores the limitations young people experience and the interplay of agency and structure for those on the margins of education and employment.

This paper discusses the findings from a one-year ethnographic study of young people attending Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in two local authorities in the north of England. The paper locates E2E within the broader context of provision for low-achieving young people and of UK government policy on reducing the proportion of young people who are not in education, employment or training. Although discourses associated with these categories of young people often present them in negative terms, the paper shows that this type of conceptualisation is inadequate to understand the lives of young people on the margins of education and employment. The paper also finds that the success of E2E in improving employability is mixed. The programme helps young people to improve their confidence, basic skills and personal effectiveness, as well as provides opportunities to acquire qualifications. However, employability is also linked to broader social and economic factors. Although E2E can help young people gain emp...

This paper uses Bourdieu's concept of field to analyse findings from an ethnographic study of Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in England. Entry to Employment is a work-based learning programme which aims to re-engage young people with ‘barriers to learning’ inhibiting access to further education, training or employment. The paper examines field positions associated with E2E, such as learner and tutor, distinguishing between the taking of positions by individual agents and the construction of these positions by dominant institutions. The paper argues that official constructions are based on a discourse which positions E2E learners as a deficit category alongside young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) and separates E2E programmes from those in mainstream educational provision. In consequence, although learners are supported and make individual progress, E2E contributes to the exclusion that Bourdieu identifies as the chief means of social reproduction in the education system.

The pair-wise comparison technique is a common approach for completing multi-attribute evaluations. However, this approach has limitations, especially for larger attribute sets, where the use of the technique is time-consuming because it requires a relatively large number of comparisons. The authors conducted an experiment to test the efficacy of three alternative approaches for eliciting preferences, specifically pairs, triads and quads. Ninety-three subjects used one of the three approaches to rank the importance of fifteen items. The results indicate that those employing the pair-wise approach took significantly longer than those using the triad or quad approach. In addition, the triad technique yielded more accurate results (compared to the pair and quad methods). Finally, the quad approach generated fewer intransitivities than the pair-wise or triad approaches. No differences were observed across the three techniques with respect to reliability or perceived ease of use. Implications are provided for both practitioners and researchers.

This paper presents research findings on practitioners working with young people on Entry to Employment (E2E) programmes in the north of England. E2E continues a long tradition of work‐related learning for unemployed school leavers for whom other forms of education or training are deemed unsuitable, and is part of the UK government’s strategy for reducing the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET). The paper explores the biographies of tutors and their routes into E2E teaching. It also discusses the training and development they have experienced, in the light of the expansive–restrictive continuum of workforce development introduced by Fuller and Unwin. By analysing the dispositions, interpretations and actions of practitioners and relating them to wider policy discourses, the paper also examines the learning culture of E2E. It argues that, although they demonstrate significant levels of care, enthusiasm and teaching ability, practitioners operate within a largely restrict...

Transitions of young people from school to employment, further education or training have been a focus of government policy in the UK for at least the last three decades. Since the late 1990s, numerous policy initiatives have been introduced by New Labour in an attempt to reduce social exclusion through the increased participation of young people in work‐related training. This paper reports on a mixed‐methods research project exploring Entry to Employment (E2E) provision in the north of England. It outlines the experiences of Connexions practitioners working with learners and staff at four E2E providers and illustrates the complexities involved with young people's transitions to and from E2E programmes. The paper shows that a marketised system driven by targets and funding constraints can compromise the ability of practitioners to best meet the needs of young people struggling with often difficult circumstances.

This paper draws on the work of Basil Bernstein to offer a (re-) conceptualisation of creativity for the English further education (FE) sector. It begins by locating creativity within the political economy of FE and argues that teaching and learning is constrained by an instrumental remit for the sector, which prioritises perceived economic needs over broader conceptions of education and training. The paper goes on to analyse the FE curriculum, relating Bernstein's work on generic modes to critiques of competence. It proposes a central role for knowledge and broad conceptions of skill in FE in order to contest an instrumental approach to teaching and learning arising from official discourse on competitiveness. The paper uses Bernstein's typology of vertical and horizontal discourse to argue that creativity needs to be re-defined in a way that recognises the value of principled, conceptual knowledge in vocational education whilst acknowledging the socially constructed nature of creativity and kno...

This paper examines the class distribution of young people, aged 16–17 years, in colleges of further education (FE) using data from the Youth Cohort Study. It finds that, contrary to popular perceptions of FE colleges as being for ‘other people’s children’, middle‐class students as well as working‐class students are well represented. However, this does not imply that FE colleges are institutions of choice; middle‐class representation is often related to lower achievement and, for low‐achieving working‐class students, leaving education entirely is more likely than entry to FE. These findings are explored using notions of habitus and field. Their relationship with studies of the education of middle‐class children is also discussed, and the paper suggests that research on class in FE colleges must come to terms with middle‐class presence.

This article examines the circumstances affecting creative teaching and learning within the specific context of English further education (FE)—a sector which has proved to be particularly fertile ground for performativity. Beginning with an analysis of notions of creativity in education and a description of the peculiar history and policy context of FE, the article problematises the relationship between representations of creativity and the current situation of teachers and learners. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and policy analyses, it is argued that FE is increasingly positioned at the ‘lower end’ of a largely class‐based division of post‐compulsory education in England. In such a division, the authors argue, meaningful creativity is difficult to achieve. Within the performative context of FE, attempts to interpret official discourse on creativity may only serve to reproduce and exacerbate existing inequalities in education.

The unprecedented degree of attention given to the learning and skills sector in England by successive New Labour governments has led to a significant increase in what is expected of the teaching workforce. To help meet these expectations, a ‘step change’ in the quality of initial teacher training for the sector is promised, alongside provisions for career‐long professional development. In this article, the authors argue that the effectiveness of these reforms is likely to be compromised by a combination of under‐funding, poor integration of initial teacher training into human resource policies within colleges, and an over‐prescriptive curriculum. In addition, they consider the re‐definition of teaching roles currently taking place in the sector and warn that this may further undermine the reforms by simultaneously discouraging many teachers from achieving fully qualified status and downgrading their professional standing.

Recent research on post‐compulsory teacher educators in England suggests that there is a high degree of feminisation of this workforce, particularly where further and higher education partnerships are concerned. This process of feminisation has taken place against a background in which English post‐compulsory education has increasingly been brought under state control and direction, with profound consequences for those engaged in the professional development of teachers in the sector. Although teacher education is also highly feminised in other sectors and in many countries, the recent history of post‐compulsory education in England has a number of characteristics that have strongly influenced the gender distribution of its teacher educators. This article examines the locus of power driving the gendered division of labour in post‐compulsory teacher education and attempts to account for it by means of the intersection of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. It is argued that the trends taking ...

A significant amount of information systems (IS) research involves hypothesizing and testing for interaction effects. Chin et al. (2003) completed an extensive experiment using Monte Carlo simulation that compared two different techniques for detecting and estimating such interaction effects: partial least squares (PLS) with a product indicator approach versus multiple regression with summated indicators. By varying the number of indicators for each construct and the sample size, they concluded that PLS using product indicators was better (at providing higher and presumably more accurate path estimates) than multiple regression using summated indicators. Although we view the Chin et al. (2003) study as an important step in using Monte Carlo analysis to investigate such issues, we believe their results give a misleading picture of the efficacy of the product indicator approach with PLS. By expanding the scope of the investigation to include statistical power, and by replicating and then extending their work, we reach a different conclusion—that although PLS with the product indicator approach provides higher point estimates of interaction paths, it also produces wider confidence intervals, and thus provides less statistical power than multiple regression. This disadvantage increases with the number of indicators and (up to a point) with sample size. We explore the possibility that these surprising results can be explained by capitalization on chance. Regardless of the explanation, our analysis leads us to recommend that if sample size or statistical significance is a concern, regression or PLS with product of the sums should be used instead of PLS with product indicators for testing interaction effects.

Initial teacher training for post‐compulsory education in England is currently undergoing profound change in terms of central direction of curricula and the provision of financial support for trainees. Within a discourse of the ‘professionalisation’ of teaching in the sector, unprecedented control of the detailed structure and content of training courses has been established and is increasing in extent. At the same time, principles of free access to Cert. Ed. and PGCE courses are being set aside, so that those universities which provide training are simultaneously contending with imposed curriculum change and with a serious threat to student recruitment. This article examines the origins and nature of these developments, considers the political and economic background from which they stem, and discusses in detail some features of the characteristic discourse of the reforms instituted by central government. It goes on to consider the likely effects of the recent and on‐going changes in university‐led train...

Recent research has suggested that flawed status reporting is a serious concern in IS projects. However, the linkage between reporting quality and project performance has not been empirically confirmed. Our investigation consisted of two complementary studies, both of which employed previously validated measures of reporting quality and project outcomes. The first considered the perceptions of 210 IS project members of the quality of status reports they submitted to their project managers. The second considered the perceptions of 485 IS project managers of the quality of project reports they received from project members reporting to them. Both showed that the perceived quality of project reporting was less than perfect and was significantly associated with project task and psychological outcomes. Moreover, the second study results suggested that reporting quality was also related to organizational outcomes. We offer recommendations for project managers.

Group decisions are an important element of successful knowledge management in organizations. Such decisions are difficult to make, however, especially when they involve a large set of attributes that require decision-makers to develop rankings. This paper presents a goal programming model for determining constrained regression estimates of attribute weights. The model is developed using pair-wise comparison ratings that are derived by using triads of the attributes. In addition, metrics are presented for measuring individual and group consensus. A specific application to the health care industry is presented to illustrate results that are obtained from the model.

The construction of polynomials with maximum turning points lower than minimum turning points is investigated. As well as providing cautionary examples for students, the solution requires the application of quadratic inequalities and could provide an interesting topic for coursework at A level. The problem also provides an opportunity for practice in the use of graph plotting software.

In the Foreword to an MIS Quarterly Special Issue on PLS, the senior editors for the special issue noted that they rejected a number of papers because the authors attempted comparisons between results from PLS, multiple regression, and structural equation modeling (Marcoulides et al. 2009). They raised several issues they argued had to be taken into account to have legitimate comparison studies, supporting their position primarily by citing three authors: Dijkstra (1983), McDonald(1996), and Schneeweiss (1993). As researchers interested in conducting comparison studies, we read the Foreword carefully, but found it did not provide clear guidance on how to conduct "legitimate" comparisons. Nor did our reading of Dijksta, McDonald, and Schneeweiss raise any red flags about dangers in this kind of comparison research. We were concerned that instead of helping researchers to successfully engage in comparison research, the Foreword might end up discouraging that type of work, and might even be used incorrectly to reject legitimate comparison studies. This Issues and Opinions piece addresses the question of why one might conduct comparison studies, and gives an overview of the process of comparison research with a focus on what is required to make those comparisons legitimate. In addition, we explicitly address the issues raised by Marcoulides et al., to explore where they might (or might not) come into play when conducting or evaluating this type of study.

This study investigates selective reporting behaviors that are pursued by project managers when communicating the status of their information system initiatives to their executives. To understand the types, motivations, impacts, and antecedents of such behaviors, a message-exchange perspective is adopted and the prior literature on IS project status reporting is reviewed. This study incorporates an empirical investigation that examined the influence of five dyadic factors on selective reporting using a survey of 561 project managers. The findings of the study reveal a positive effect of reporting quality on project performance and indicate that a specific type of selective reporting behavior (optimistic biasing) has a degrading effect on reporting quality. Moreover, the findings show that all five antecedents have a significant influence on the propensity of project managers to report selectively. Specifically, the project executive's power, the project manager's trust in the executive, and the executive's quality of communication impact selective reporting directly; the executive's familiarity with the IS development process and the executive's organizational affiliation vis-a-vis that of the project manager have an indirect influence (it is mediated through other factors). The effects of each of these factors on the two types of selective reporting (optimistic and pessimistic biasing) are examined, and the implications of these findings for both researchers and managers are discussed in this article.

Public sector organizations are being scrutinized and held accountable for their use of funds, now more than ever. Further, taxpayers are increasingly comparing the public sector to the private sector, demanding better customer service. As an added dimension, public organizations find themselves spending more on information technology (IT), even as their budgets come under pressure. In a situation similar to the private sector, public organizations find a large number of IT projects that are over budget, behind schedule, and producing fewer benefits than expected. The trend in computing is to migrate from mainframe-based systems to smaller computer platforms, frequently employing Graphical User Interface (GUI) software. Such migrations are proving difficult for private sector and public sector managers alike. The problem is more acute in the public sector, however, because the bulk of the IT management experience in the public sector is with mainframe-based systems. Such experience does not translate readily to the skills needed for Local Area Networks (LANs) and client-server architectures. Project management frameworks have been developed in the private sector that can provide guidelines, but blindly adopting such frameworks to the public sector can be misleading. What is needed is a workable project management framework that addresses the common elements of risk assessment and project management, while taking into account the unique needs of public organizations. Our purpose in this article is to suggest a framework that will address the needs of managing large-scale IT projects in the public sector. We first discuss the differences between public and private organizations, with emphasis on IT project management. Next a discussion is offered of trends in human resource management systems (HRMS), providing an introduction to the case. The case describes a specific attempt to implement an HRMS in a state government. The case is followed by the presentation of an IT project management framework. We close with a discussion of the lessons learned. Information Technology in the Public Sector The role of IT in public organizations has been the subject of numerous research efforts, including a major research program at the University of California at Irvine (Northrop et al., 1990). The Irvine group argued that many of the intended benefits of IT, such as better information for planning and managerial control, had not been realized. A long-term, longitudinal study found that most payoffs from computerization were in the areas of fiscal control, cost avoidance, and better interactions with the public. However, those payoffs were not immediate, and the prospects for future payoffs in these areas were mixed. Other research has focused on the control of information resources (including IT) at the state level. A national study of state governments investigated new organizational structures, planning processes, and policy formulation activities relating to the acquisition, use, and management of IT (Caudle, 1990). The study concluded that although the focus remained on IT management, public sector management was increasingly considering information itself as an important resource to be managed. Another study was designed to test the basic premise that management of IT in public organizations differs from that carried out in private sector firms (Bretschneider, 1990). Using a sample of slightly more than 1,000 public and private sector organizations, the study presented a list of potential differences between public and private organizations that could affect the capacity of an organization to manage IT effectively. The differences identified by Bretschneider included the following (MIS stands for the management information systems function in the private sector, and PMIS for the public management information systems in the public sector): 1 .PMIS managers must contend with greater levels of interdependence across organizational boundaries than do private MIS managers. …

A key concern in Information Systems (IS) research has been to better understand the linkage between information systems and individual performance. The research reported in this study has two primary objectives: (1) to propose a comprehensive theoretical model that incorporates valuable insights from two complementary streams of research, and (2) to empirically test the core of the model. At the heart of the new model is the assertion that for an information technology to have a positive impact on individual performance, the technology: (1) must be utilized and (2) must be a good fit with the tasks it supports. This new model is moderately supported by an analysis of data from over 600 individuals in two companies. This research highlights the importance of the fit between technologies and users' tasks in achieving individual performance impacts from information technology. It also suggests that task-technology fit when decomposed into its more detailed components, could be the basis for a strong diagnostic tool to evaluate whether information systems and services in a given organization are meeting user needs.

Organizations continue to invest heavily in personal computers for their knowledge workers. When use is optional, however, having access to the technology by no means ensures it will be used or used effectively. To help us gain a better understanding of factors that influence the use of personal computers, researchers have recently adopted the theory of reasoned action proposed by Fishbein and Azjen (1975). This study uses a competing theory of behavior proposed by Triandis (1980). Responses were collected from 212 knowledge workers in nine divisions of a multi-national firm, and the measures and research hypotheses were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS). The results show that social norms and three components of expected consequences (complexity of use, fit between the job and PC capabilities, and long-term consequences) have a strong influence on utilization. These findings confirm the importance of the expected consequences of using PC technology, suggesting that training programs and organizational policies could be instituted to enhance or modify these expectations.