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  • An exploration of factors influencing the recent levels of incarceration of girls in England and Wales

    Goodfellow, Pippa (University of BedfordshireUniversity of Bedfordshire, 2024-02)
    This study seeks to highlight the existing gaps in understanding the imprisonment of girls in England and Wales. The relatively small number of girls in the youth justice system, further marginalised within custody, exacerbates the fact that they are overlooked by the penal system in both policy and practice. Compared to boys, the number of girls in the justice system and custody is low, but their particular vulnerabilities and aetiology of offending justify their consideration from a gendered perspective. The damaging effects of custody on girls during and after their release underline the argument that incarceration should be kept at an absolute minimum. Since the early 1990s, shifting systemic responses have produced substantial fluctuations in the levels of criminalisation of girls, which have been even more pronounced for their levels of incarceration. While the overall numbers were much lower, the dramatic proportionate increase and subsequent decline in numbers were more marked than similar trends for their male counterparts. This systemic dynamic has received less attention than other aspects of girls’ involvement in the penal system and represents a significant gap in youth justice scholarship. This thesis seeks to explain the shifting levels of custody for girls by exploring a range of factors and gendered dynamics that have influenced these trends. This thesis provides an analytical account of custody trends over the past three decades, considering the socio-political context, changing public perceptions and narratives, and how these dynamics have influenced policy, practice and professional culture. By drawing on the research literature, analysis of legislative and policy developments, and the views of a wide range of professionals, this study integrates empirical findings with existing theoretical concepts to engender original insights into the phenomenon under investigation. The current low levels of penal incarceration of girls are certainly welcome but have further engendered a vacuum of strategic attention for girls at a time when the youth justice system is otherwise ripe for potential reform. To guard against a future increase in incarceration, the factors driving these systemic dynamics must be recognised from a gendered perspective to inform a gender-responsive and effective decarcerative strategy. Without an understanding of what explains the extent to which custody is used for females in the youth justice system, there is a perpetual risk of a future upward spiral of hyper-custodial inflation for girls.
  • Accounting professionals' legitimacy maintenance of modern slavery inspired extreme work practices in an emerging economy

    Win, Sandar; Chhatbar, Mehul; Parajuli, Mahalaxmi Adhikari; Clement, Seyefar; Sheffield Hallam University; Coventry University; Abertay University; University of Bedfordshire (Taylor and Francis, 2024-02-23)
    It is well-established in the human resource management literature that high intensity and excessive workload can cause undesirable physiological, psychological, behavioural, and social outcomes. However, there is a need to theorise the process by which extreme work has been legitimised and embedded among professionals. In this paper, we view extreme workers as those professionals who contribute to their works beyond acceptable contractual obligations, either voluntarily for personal rewards or involuntarily due to the menace of penalty, or both. We chose to investigate how accounting professionals in India legitimise extreme work in their workplaces using exploratory qualitative research methods and applied economies of worth theoretical framework. Our findings demonstrate that senior accounting professionals with the assistance of professional associations can play an important role in mobilising professional and organisational resources to tackle extreme work in their accounting firms and the industry.
  • Passion and intention among aspiring entrepreneurs with disabilities: the role of entrepreneurial support programs

    Dakung, Reuel Johnmark; Bell, Robin; Orobia, Laura Aseru; Dakung, Kasmwakat Reuel; Yatu, Lemun Nuhu; University of Jos; University of Worcester; Beijing Foreign Studies University; Makerere University; University of Bedfordshire (Emerald Publishing, 2023-11-10)
    Purpose: This study examines the relationship between entrepreneurial passion, entrepreneurial support programs and entrepreneurial intention, and the moderating role of entrepreneurial support programs in the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial intention, among students with physical disabilities in Nigerian tertiary institutions. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a closed-ended questionnaire survey, composed of previously validated scales, to sample 209 students with physical disabilities at tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Hierarchal regression was performed to assess the relationships between the variables and test the hypotheses. Findings: Both entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial support programs were found to be significantly positively related to entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial support programs also moderated the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial intention. Research limitations/implications: This research paper identifies that developing entrepreneurial passion and providing accessible and inclusive entrepreneurial support programs are valuable in supporting and facilitating a passage into entrepreneurship for those with disabilities. Originality/value: This research paper addresses calls for further understanding of how those with disabilities can be supported into entrepreneurship, by identifying supporting factors. The research paper provides further understanding of the entrepreneurial passion and intention nexus by exploring the relationship within those with a physical disability, where significant barriers exist and within a developing country context where entrepreneurship might be a necessity rather than driven by passion.
  • Enhancing text comprehension via fusing pre-trained language model with knowledge graph

    Qian, Jing; Li, Gangmin; Atkinson, Katie; Yue, Yong; Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University; University of Bedfordshire; University of Liverpool (Association for Computing Machinery, 2024-02-16)
    Pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and GPTs capture rich linguistic and syntactic knowledge from pre-training over large-scale text corpora, which can be further fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks. However, these models still have limitations as they rely on knowledge gained from plain text and ignore structured knowledge such as knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, there has been a growing trend of explicitly integrating KGs into PLMs to improve their performance. For instance, K-BERT incorporates KG triples as domain-specific supplements into input sentences. Nevertheless, we have observed that such methods do not consider the semantic relevance between the introduced knowledge and the original input sentence, leading to the issue of knowledge impurities. To address this issue, we propose a semantic matching-based approach that enriches the input text with knowledge extracted from an external KG. The architecture of our model comprises three components: the knowledge retriever (KR), the knowledge injector (KI), and the knowledge aggregator (KA). The KR, built upon the sentence representation learning model (i.e. CoSENT), retrieves triples with high semantic relevance to the input sentence from an external KG to alleviate the issue of knowledge impurities. The KI then integrates the retrieved triples from the KR into the input text by converting the original sentence into a knowledge tree with multiple branches, the knowledge tree is transformed into an accessible sequence of text that can be fed into the KA. Finally, the KA takes the flattened knowledge tree and passes it through an embedding layer and a masked Transformer encoder. We conducted extensive evaluations on eight datasets covering five text comprehension tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach exhibits competitive advantages over popular knowledge-enhanced PLMs such as K-BERT and ERNIE.
  • Coachees’ experiences of integrating a self-selected soundtrack into a one-off coaching session

    Wilcox, Donna; Nethercott, Kathryn; University of East London; University of Bedfordshire (Oxford Brookes University, 2024-02-01)
    Artistic media use in coaching has received growing interest in recent years with increased research and encouraging results. Music benefits wellbeing, aids new perspectives, and enhances embodiment, however, research on the use of music in coaching is limited. This study thematically analysed participants’ reflective texts (N=12) relating to their experience of a one-off coaching session that integrated a self-selected piece of music as a soundtrack related to the session topic. Results support previous literature on the subject, while also providing new findings that the soundtrack primed thinking for the session and was a motivational reminder of the session.

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