The development and scope of employer involvement during the firstyear of the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative at the Universityof Liverpool is described. The Initiative…
Abstract
The development and scope of employer involvement during the first year of the Enterprise in Higher Education Initiative at the University of Liverpool is described. The Initiative has proved to be of benefit both to employers and students in the short term and promises further benefits in the future.
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Serdal Temel, Anne-Laure Mention and Alp Eren Yurtseven
Embracing a large set of innovation objectives and collaborating with diverse partners have been promoted as a means to improve innovation performance. However, empirical evidence…
Abstract
Purpose
Embracing a large set of innovation objectives and collaborating with diverse partners have been promoted as a means to improve innovation performance. However, empirical evidence on the relationships between breadth of objectives, breadth of cooperation and innovation performance is limited, particularly in the context of emerging economies. A larger number of objectives and cooperation partners inevitably increases the complexity in organizational alignment, and cooperation eventually leads to diminishing returns. This study adds to the debate on the costs and benefits of cooperation for innovation. Understanding the optimal levels of the breadth of objectives and cooperation supports managerial decision-making and productivity in the practice of cooperation for innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
Operationalizing breadth of innovation objectives and cooperation via the Turkish Community Innovation Survey data, self-reports reflecting 5,863 firm-level responses between 2006 and 2008 are analysed using tobit and probit models. The maximum likelihood estimator is used to find the optimal levels for breadth of objectives and cooperation.
Findings
Firms with greater breadth of innovation objectives experience higher innovation performance; those with greater breadth of cooperation also experience higher innovation performance, but our results indicate the existence of optimal levels of breadth for both innovation objectives and cooperation.
Research limitations/implications
The authors extend the logic that there is no safety in numbers in cooperation for innovation. If the aim is to enhance innovation performance, managers and policymakers need to pay attention to the number of innovation objectives and the amount of cooperation pursued by firms. However, innovation success may be closely associated with a firm's dynamic capabilities and ability to mobilize its resources. Drawing on organizational learning theories, future research could explore why a lower than maximum level of cooperation may be more conducive to reaching levels of enhanced innovation performance and whether this level is influenced by cognitive processes.
Originality/value
The authors draw attention to the ideal number of innovation objectives and number of cooperating partners required to enhance innovation performance, thus contributing to the debate on the complex relationships between innovation, performance and cooperation in the unique setting of a large developing economy.
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Damian Mellifont, Annmaree Watharow, Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes, Jennifer Smith-Merry and Mary-Ann O'Donovan
Ethical principles and practices frequently support the position that people with disability are vulnerable. Vulnerability in research traditionally infers a need for protection…
Abstract
Ethical principles and practices frequently support the position that people with disability are vulnerable. Vulnerability in research traditionally infers a need for protection from harm and raises questions over the person’s capacity to consent and engage. In addition, vulnerability in ethics infers a state of permanency and one that is all-encompassing for everyone within the vulnerable groups. This construction of vulnerability in effect legitimises the exclusion of people with disability from research or monitors and restricts how people with disability can engage in research. This results in an implicitly ableist environment for research. In this chapter, which has been led by researchers with disability, we argue that there is a critical need to move beyond a popularised social construction of vulnerability which serves to perpetuate barriers to including people with disability in research. Like all terms, the traditional and popular construction of vulnerability is open to reclaiming and reframing. Under this reconstruction, what is traditionally viewed as a limiting vulnerability can be owned, openly disclosed and accommodated. Following a pandemic-inspired ‘new normal’ that supports flexible workplace practices, and in accordance with UNCRPD goals of inclusive employment and reducing disability inequity, we argue that the pathway for people with disability as career researchers needs an ethical review and overhaul. We provide readers with a practical roadmap to advance a more inclusive academy for researchers with disability.
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Delphine Godefroit-Winkel, Marie Schill and Margaret K. Hogg
This paper aims to examine the interplay of emotions and consumption within intergenerational exchanges. It shows how emotions pervade the trajectories of grandmothers’ relational…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the interplay of emotions and consumption within intergenerational exchanges. It shows how emotions pervade the trajectories of grandmothers’ relational identities with their grandchildren through consumption practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This study analyses qualitative data gathered via 28 long interviews with French grandmothers and 27 semi-structured interviews with their grandchildren. This study draws on attachment theory to interpret the voices of both grandmothers and their grandchildren within these dyads.
Findings
This study uncovers distinct relational identities of grandmothers linked to emotions and the age of the grandchild, as embedded in consumption. It identifies the defining characteristics of the trajectory of social/relational identities and finds these to be linked to grandchildren’s ages.
Research limitations/implications
This study elicits the emotion profiles, which influence grandmothers’ patterns of consumption in their relationships with their grandchildren. It further uncovers distinct attachment styles (embedded in emotions) between grandmothers and grandchildren in the context of their consumption experiences. Finally, it provides evidence that emotions occur at the interpersonal level. This observation is an addition to existing literature in consumer research, which has often conceived of consumer emotions as being only a private matter and as an intrapersonal phenomenon.
Practical implications
The findings offer avenues for the development of strategies for intergenerational marketing, particularly promotion campaigns which link either the reinforcement or the suppression of emotion profiles in advertising messages with the consumption of products or services by different generations.
Social implications
This study suggests that public institutions might multiply opportunities for family and consumer experiences to combat specific societal issues related to elderly people’s isolation.
Originality/value
In contrast to earlier work, which has examined emotions within the ebb and flow of individual and multiple social identities, this study examines how emotions and consumption play out in social/relational identity trajectories.
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MISS ANNE SHAW's presence on the platform at the annual general meeting of the Management Consultants Association was a solid assurance that work study still lies within its…
Abstract
MISS ANNE SHAW's presence on the platform at the annual general meeting of the Management Consultants Association was a solid assurance that work study still lies within its scope. The initial impression was weakened, however, when the chairman, Mr. D. J. Nicolson, mentioned that the bulk of consultancy work was no longer concerned with work study. Instead, it gave more than half its attention to policymaking and the broad aspects of organising financial, manufacturing and marketing resources.
This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to…
Abstract
This essay will consider three theories developed by international law scholars to analyze the international legal terrain and the strengths of each as well as issues it fails to address sufficiently in the dimensions of power, meaning, and social relationships: bottom-up lawmaking; transnational legal processes; and global legal pluralism. The idea of bottom-up lawmaking, already discussed, has the strength of beginning from the everyday practices by which problems are solved that lead eventually to the creation of a body of law. However, the phrase bottom-up suggests that this is a grassroots movement, while it is typically cosmopolitan elites who generate the informal rules that become established over time. Explicit attention to the power relationships underlying this process would help to clarify what “bottom-up” means. As Judith Resnick points out, the terms “soft law” and “hard law” are themselves problematic, incorporating gender ideologies and suggesting that some international laws are enforced firmly, which is rarely the case in practice (personal communication).
Amit Desai, Giulia Zoccatelli, Sara Donetto, Glenn Robert, Davina Allen, Anne Marie Rafferty and Sally Brearley
To investigate ethnographically how patient experience data, as a named category in healthcare organisations, is actively “made” through the co-creative interactions of data…
Abstract
Purpose
To investigate ethnographically how patient experience data, as a named category in healthcare organisations, is actively “made” through the co-creative interactions of data, people and meanings in English hospitals.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on fieldnotes, interview recordings and transcripts produced from 13 months (2016–2017) of ethnographic research on patient experience data work at five acute English National Health Service (NHS) hospitals, including observation, chats, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis. Research sites were selected based on performance in a national Adult Inpatient Survey, location, size, willingness to participate and research burden. Using an analytical approach inspired by actor–network theory (ANT), the authors examine how data acquired meanings and were made to act by clinical and administrative staff during a type of meeting called a “learning session” at one of the hospital study sites.
Findings
The authors found that the processes of systematisation in healthcare organisations to act on patient feedback to improve to the quality of care, and involving frontline healthcare staff and their senior managers, produced shifting understandings of what counts as “data” and how to make changes in response to it. Their interactions produced multiple definitions of “experience”, “data” and “improvement” which came to co-exist in the same systematised encounter.
Originality/value
The article's distinctive contribution is to analyse how patient experience data gain particular attributes. It suggests that healthcare organisations and researchers should recognise that acting on data in standardised ways will constantly create new definitions and possibilities of such data, escaping organisational and scholarly attempts at mastery.
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Evaluation of public library makerspaces traditionally examines achievement of library goals, which reflect leaders’ and funders’ values. Understanding makers’ experiences and…
Abstract
Purpose
Evaluation of public library makerspaces traditionally examines achievement of library goals, which reflect leaders’ and funders’ values. Understanding makers’ experiences and perspectives may help evaluators frame their inquiry to reflect community values, test assumptions about makers and support democratic and equity-focused aims. This paper aims to inform how evaluations of public library makerspaces are framed to address the experiences, values and visions for success of adult women, a group that is often marginalized in making and makerspaces.
Design/methodology/approach
Informed by democratic approaches to evaluation and activity theory, this paper draws on semi-structured interviews with women makers engaged with digital fabrication in public library makerspaces.
Findings
The women in the sample leveraged digital fabrication to deepen existing creative practices, challenging gendered distinctions between crafting and technology. They directed making toward economic survival and thriving, including creative-sector entrepreneurship. Making was also directed toward strengthening families and communities, centering relationships beyond the makerspace. Learning emerged as a byproduct of engagement, organized to produce specific artifacts. Library resources, arrangements and rules supported women with varying technology skills and also constrained some making activities.
Practical implications
Findings suggest evaluators should resist deficit framing of women and making; broaden science, technology, engineering and mathematics-focused definitions of making; focus on the personally meaningful ends to which making is directed; expand conceptualizations of community; examine arrangements and resources that mediate making and learning; and center the perspectives of local women makers.
Originality/value
This paper presents an empirical account of makers who are often marginalized and identifies six implications for evaluations of public library makerspaces.
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This article looks at the relationship between human rights law and geography. Drawing from a meeting of the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), the article explores how the right to…
Abstract
This article looks at the relationship between human rights law and geography. Drawing from a meeting of the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC), the article explores how the right to life was legally interpreted to apply to the loss of life associated with Hurricane Katrina. In particular, the article argues that the HRC’s legal interpretation of the right to life shifted as part of a discussion between the United States and nongovernmental organizations. The shift incorporated a more nuanced understanding of the spatial dimension of injustice by including preexisting inequalities and ongoing internal displacement in the analysis of human rights obligations related to the hurricane. The HRC meeting and the legal interpretations arising from that meeting therefore provide an example of Seyla Benhabib’s concept of “democratic iterations” as well as an example of how law can be “spatialized” through international legal processes.