This article argues that certain established vocabularies that are used to interpret the circulation of educational discourse and its transformation in different settings have significant limitations to capture the complexity inherent to new geographies of power/knowledge in education and that, consequently, we need to develop new concepts to…

This study explored the influence social capital had over parental sports volunteers who are considered to be of paramount importance in the delivery of UK sports initiatives. A review of the relevant literature identifies and discusses the complexities within the debate to define social capital while human and cultural capital emerge as an…

In the unfolding Maltese education scenario of decentralization and school networking, I explore distributed leadership as it occurs at the college level through the leaders' narrative and performance in an investigation of the power relations among the different-tiered leaders. This article uses data from the case study of a Maltese college…

Over the past decade much has been written by journalists, policy makers, and academics, about young women's leisure time pursuits. A great deal of this interest has focused around a concern that teenage girls in the UK are taking up smoking in larger numbers than their male peers. This paper draws on findings from my small-scale doctoral research…

World polity theory is explicitly relational, implying a global network structure that exists outside of the nation-state. And world polity theory increasingly acknowledges power--that some states and regions are dominant in the international field. But current world polity measures of international non-governmental organizations do not…

This research investigates the process through which individuals build cohesive relationships in positively connected exchange relations. Positive connections exist any time exchange in one relation must precede exchange in another. Such situations arise through gatekeeping, in generalized exchange contexts, and when resources diffuse across a…

Issues of gender and mentoring are explored through several theoretical lenses--similarity-attraction paradigm, power dependence, social exchange, biological, and psychological theories--to provide a more comprehensive view of mentoring from a gender-based perspective. Issues related to gender and mentoring presented in past mentoring research and…

The aim of this paper is to expand the conceptualization of social capital to guide investigations of the construct in educational settings. Based on fieldwork in six U.S. high schools, the authors present a framework for studying the effects of school-based forms of social capital on adolescents' academic development. The study identified six…

This paper focuses on investigating the purposive design of learning environments to counter the erosion of social capital in communities and schools in contemporary society. Can schools intentionally replenish stocks of social capital by creating normative systems conducive to the optimal academic and social development of students, and by…