The aim of this article is to show the increased relevance of soft skills in a continuously changing environment. A research was carried out to examine and compare students' and employers' ...perceptions regarding the importance of soft skills in different European countries. Results show that 86% of respondents indicate an increased emphasis on soft skills over the last 5-10 years and that companies consider soft skills more important than students/graduates. Furthermore, major differences have also been identified in the ranking of the 20 soft skills listed in this paper, indicating different levels of priorities. This paper suggests that companies and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) need to work together not only to increase students' awareness of the importance of soft skills but also to guide them in taking individual responsibility to acquire and develop these essential skills in order to continuously adapt to the changing labour market and improve their employability.
At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk ...averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis and governmentality theory. We make a brief review of how previous pandemics have been managed compared to Covid-19 and try to understand the consequences of the Swedish handling of present pandemic with a particular focus on the governance of the pandemic and the exercise of power rather than definite risk management strategies during the pandemic.
In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper ...develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of “caring with” as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring‐with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring‐with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co‐constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring‐with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring‐with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research.
At a time when care is being cast as an individual responsibility, this paper asks what makes care possible. It develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analysis of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking to place care in a sociomaterial, temporal, and spatial frame. The paper theorises the production and translation of care across space and identifies the assemblages that enable future care. Empirically it asks how older women care in precarious housing.
Background and Aims: One of the important life skills is responsibility in various personal and work dimensions, which is inevitable in the education system, especially higher education, for the ...development and prosperity of science and the development of society. Therefore, the aim of the current research was to provide a model of individual and professional responsibility of students. Method: The present research method was combined (qualitative-quantitative) and practical in terms of purpose. In the qualitative part, the statistical population included higher education experts and experts related to the position in the faculties of Tehran University of Science and Research, who were selected using the purposeful sampling method. In this research, the researcher reached theoretical saturation after conducting 23 interviews with the desired samples. Also, in the quantitative part, the research community included graduate students of the relevant faculties of Tehran University of Science and Research who were studying in the 1996-1997 academic year, and using the random sampling method, 387 people were selected as the sample size based on the Cochran formula. . The research tool was an interview in the qualitative part and a researcher-made questionnaire in the quantitative part, the validity of which was achieved with face validity and reliability with Cronbach's alpha test of 0.88. In order to analyze the data, the coding method was used in the qualitative part and the structural equations in the Lisrel software were used in the quantitative part. Results: The findings showed that individual responsibility included four categories (national identity, self-awareness, forward-looking, self-development) and professional responsibility included five sub-categories (professional knowledge, culture of criticism and receptivity, work conscience, professional ethics, lifelong learning). Also, the results of the structural equations showed that the structural part of the model of the relationships between the research variables and the measurement model of the variables was confirmed with a good fit (P<0.05). Conclusion: Based on the results, it can be concluded that the personal and professional responsibility of students has several components that the planners of the higher education system can pay attention to in order to promote it and improve the culture of responsibility.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume brings together an international team of contributors to provide a much-needed examination of climate litigation in Africa. ...The book outlines how climate litigation in Africa is distinct as well as pinpointing where it connects with the global conversation. Chapters engage with crucial themes such as human rights approaches to climate governance, corporate liability and the role of gender in climate litigation.
The degree to which classical liberal, individualist principles of Western societies are seen as (in)compatible with multiculturalism and minority rights is a key issue in diverse societies. ...Classical liberalism is grounded in individual justice principles, suggesting that individuals are responsible for their own fate and should be treated according to their personal characteristics, regardless of group membership. Multiculturalism, in turn, is grounded in collective justice principles, recognizing cultural differences and seeking greater equality between groups. The present research investigates how asymmetric group membership in dominant and subordinate groups shapes perceived compatibility between classical liberalism and multiculturalism. A correlational study (N = 141) first shows that cultural minorities perceive greater compatibility between the two justice principles compared to native majorities. A second (N = 202) and third (N = 164) experimental study involving the description of a fictitious society manipulated perspective-taking as a function of social status, cultural origin and numerical size of groups. The findings show that respondents taking the perspective of immigrant groups perceive greater compatibility between classical liberalism and multiculturalism as an abstract ideology compared to a native perspective, and that a low status perspective leads to greater compatibility between classical liberalism and multiculturalism as a concrete policy compared to a high status perspective. Overall, these studies suggest that membership in subordinate groups generally increases perceived compatibility between individual and collective forms of justice. Implications associated with growing civic integrationist policies in Europe are discussed.
This article examines qualitative data in an era of neoliberalism and focuses on the place of data in grounded theory studies. Neoliberal values of individual responsibility, self-sufficiency, ...competition, efficiency, and profit have entered the conduct of research. Neoliberalism fosters (a) reifying quantitative logical-deductive research, (b) imposing surveillance of types and sources of data, (c) marginalizing inductive qualitative research, and (d) limiting access to data in grounded theory studies. Grounded theory relies on data and resists current efforts to abandon data. The method resides in the space between reifying and rejecting data. Data allow us to learn from the stories of those left out and permits research participants to break silences. Data can help us look underneath and beyond our privileges, and alter our views. Grounded theory is predicated on data, but how researchers regard and render data depends on which version of the method they adopt. We propose developing a strong methodological self-consciousness to learn how we affect the research process and to counter the subtle effects of neoliberalism.
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has stressed our social organizations, health care systems and economies at a level not experienced since WWII or the last “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. This shock provides ...a real-life test of the resilience of human societies and of individuals, challenging our understanding and level of preparation. While hurried coercive non-pharmaceutical measures and vaccinations were the main responses, for the future, we propose a coupled double-system approach linking efforts to improve both human well-being and Earth environmental health. Concretely, this means linking (i) the build-up of individual health resilience using holistic medical system perspectives applied to each person with (ii) efforts to depollute and achieve more healthy Earth environments that are intrinsic pillars of humans’ health and wealth. The push to fight Earth ecological damages towards environmental sustainability should be rethought as being motivated by recovering an ecosystem in which each own personal biological ecosystem (i.e., each person's homeostatic balance) can strive again. We propose to prioritize Human-Environment-Health initiatives for depolluting the environment and of our immune systems, as well as improving individual responsibility and resilience.
The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship levels between university students' life satisfaction, academic procrastination behavior, and student's individual responsibility behaviors. ...The research is conducted as a correlational study within a survey model. The study was conducted with 401 students, 256 female, and 145 males, enrolled in a 4-year undergraduate program at Akdeniz University during the academic year 2022-2023. The data for the research were collected through face-to-face interviews using a personal information form, the 'Life Satisfaction Scale' adapted into Turkish by Dağlı and Baysal (2016) from the original developed by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffin (1985), the 'Academic Procrastination Scale' adapted into Turkish by Balkıs (2006) from the original developed by Aitken (1982), and the 'Student's Individual Responsibility Scale' adapted into Turkish by Doğan (2015) from the original developed by Signn and Ader (2001). According to the findings of the research, there is a negative relationship between university students' life satisfaction and academic procrastination levels, a positive relationship between life satisfaction and student's individual responsibility behaviors, and a negative relationship between academic procrastination and student's individual responsibility behaviors.
How is the unjust global order reproduced, and how are we to think about individual responsibility therefor? Social and global justice scholars have devoted much thought to these two interrelated ...questions. In this article I argue that to capture the multifaceted responsibility picture for the reproduction of the unjust global order, an integrated responsibility model is needed, which builds on, integrates and revises existing responsibility theories. To do so, I analyze one set of complex social processes through which the unjust global order is reproduced, namely financial crises. The integrated responsibility model defended offers three heuristic categories to think through the full responsibility picture for the reproduction of the unjust global order via financial crises: the structural-agential level, structural processes proper, and the structural-systemic level.
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