Search results

This study identifies gendered disparities among women students participating in work-integrated learning and explores the effects of the disparities on their perceptions on perceived opportunities, competencies, sense of belonging, and professional identity.

A series of semi-structured focus groups were run with 59 participants at six higher education institutions in four countries (Australia, Canada, Sweden, United Kingdom). All focus groups were designed with the same questions and formatting.

Thematic analysis of the transcripts revealed two overarching themes, namely perceptions of self and interactions with others in work placements. Theme categories included awareness of self-presentation, sense of autonomy, perceived Allies, emotional labour, barriers to opportunity, sense of belonging, intersections of identity, and validation value.

This study fills an important gap in the international literature about gendered experiences in WIL and highlights inequalities that women experience while on work placements.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of professional and leader identity and the maintenance of identity, through identity work as IT professionals transitioned to a permanent hybrid role. This study therefore contributes to the under-researched area of permanent transition to a hybrid role in the context of IT, where there is a requirement to enact both the professional and leader roles together.

The study utilised a longitudinal design and two qualitative methods (interviews and reflective diaries) to gather data from 17 IT professionals transitioning to hybrid roles.

The study findings reveal that IT professionals engage in an ongoing process of reconciliation of professional and leader identity as they transition to a permanent hybrid role, and they construct hybrid professional–leader identities while continuing to value their professional identity. They experience professional–leader identity conflict resulting from reluctance to reconcile both professional and leader identities. They used both integration and differentiation identity work tactics to ameliorate these tensions.

The longitudinal study design, the qualitative approaches used and the unique context of the participants provide a dynamic and deep understanding of the challenges involved in performing hybrid roles in the context of IT.

This paper uses a large‐scale survey of SMEs (1,531 respondents) in the UK to assess the factors associated with their competitive conditions and their competitive advantage. Results appear to confirm that, as SME businesses grow, they develop their strategy to seek specialisation and differentiation of their products and services and diversification of their customer base. However, the paper suggests caution about any government policies based on local intervention. It suggests that policy assisted areas have no association with different local competitive conditions or advantage/disadvantage. Instead, the paper suggests that firms increasingly obtain competitive advantage from developing trading relationships with other regions or countries beyond their own locality. Consequently policy assistance should be tailored closely to the needs of the SME rather than the locality.

Moving from hierarchical management with annual reviews to a program and project‐management approach has helped the mighty British American Tobacco (BAT) to gain market share in 13 Middle Eastern countries.

EARL (Electronic Access to Resources in Libraries) is a collaborative approach to establishing a national networked information and resource sharing service for public libraries in the UK. This paper provides information on the early stages of EARL during 1994 and 1995 which resulted in a pilot demonstration service being developed as a result of a scoping study. The achievements to date are then outlined and these include membership of EARL by 120 library authorities who use it to provide e‐mail facilities, creation of web pages, access to databases and the development of EARLweb which provides a gateway to a number of Internet resources likely to be of use in public libraries. The current work is described including the British Library funded project, Readiness, the work of the Task Groups and collaboration with European partners. In conclusion the challenges presented to EARL members in the future are included.

Discrete choice models are widely used for estimating the effects of changes in attributes on a given product's likely market share. These models can be applied directly to situations in which the choice set is constant across the market of interest or in which the choice set varies systematically across the market. In both of these applications, the models are used to determine the effects of different attribute levels on market shares among the available alternatives, given predetermined choice sets, or of varying the choice set in a straightforward way.

Discrete choice models can also be used to identify the “optimal” configuration of a product or service in a given market. This can be computationally challenging when preferences vary with respect to the ordering of levels within an attribute as well the strengths of preferences across attributes. However, this type of optimization can be a relatively straightforward extension of the typical discrete choice model application.

In this paper, we describe two applications that use discrete choice methods to provide a more robust metric for use in Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency (TURF) applications: apparel and food products. Both applications involve products for which there is a high degree of heterogeneity in preferences among consumers.

We further discuss a significant challenge in using TURF — that with multi-attributed products the method can become computationally intractable — and describe a heuristic approach to support food and apparel applications. We conclude with a summary of the challenges in these applications, which are yet to be addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the ways in which large‐scale e‐participation projects can be evaluated. It argues that existing evaluation approaches can be improved upon by taking a closer look at the characteristics of the users of such systems, by estimating their self‐efficacy.

Literature review is followed by the development of relevant research questions, and an assessment of points at which relevant and useful data can be collected in a petitioning process.

It is found that data relating to self‐efficacy, while not simple to collect, can add much to the evaluation process, and have the potential to result in more effective projects and systems.

The findings are specific to one project, EuroPetition, which will allow the co‐ordination and submission of cross‐border pan‐European petitions.

The paper represents the first attempt to integrate perspectives derived from social cognitive theory to the evaluation of a large e‐participation project. Self‐efficacy is discussed in terms of both computer self‐efficacy and political self‐efficacy.