Search results

This report appeared originally in Computer Weekly for 18th September, and is reprinted here, with small alterations, by kind permission of the publishers of Computer Weekly. The papers presented at the conference will be published in forthcoming issues of ‘Information Storage and Retrieval’, but copies of preprints may be obtained at Xerox cost price from Mr. C. W. Cleverdon, Librarian, College of Aeronautics, CRANFIELD, Bedford.

Our regular contributor Edgar Baker CBE, former Staff HMI in Business Studies, looks at a trio of books covering the maintenance of standards throughout the British educational system.

The 19th Annual British Conference on Non‐destructive Testing Organised by The British Institute of Non‐destructive Testing at the University of Lancaster on 17–19 September, 1984. The wide ranging papers by eminent authorities will cover the use of robotics in non‐destructive testing, developments in ultrasonic generation and signal processing, real‐time radiography and fluoroscopy, thermography and magnetic particle crack detection. Special sessions will be devoted to condition monitoring, inspection in the aerospace environment and to the role of certification and standards in non‐destructive testing.

Shows how the gaming industry is now bigger than film, music and video, with PlayStation better than all other divisions of Sony combined. Points out the implications for advertising: gaming can deliver huge audiences on a global scale, but gamers are proactive and cynical about conventional marketing ploys. Shows how media, like the UK’s “Sun” newspaper, are including gaming content, while the supremacy of American Hollywood‐type entertainment may decline in the face of gaming’s popularity. Recounts an early example of a highly successful video game and brand promotion; this was virtual heroine Lara Croft’s celebrity endorsement of Lucozade, a British soft drink that in 1999 was reinventing itself as a sports drink with appeal to the 18‐24 year old market.

Purpose – In this chapter we highlight the potential of critical and poststructural paradigms and associated qualitative research approaches for future research in strategy. In addition, we aim to contribute to the proliferation of applications of qualitative methodologies as well as to facilitate the diversity of qualitative inquiry approaches in the strategy field.

Methodology/Approach – Building on insights from standpoint theory, we discuss the importance and necessity of cultivating critical and poststructural paradigms in strategy. Furthermore, we review three related qualitative inquiry approaches (i.e., discourse analysis, deconstruction, and genealogy) and develop suggestions for their utilization in future strategy research on emerging market economies.

Findings – We highlight key concepts of critical and poststructural paradigms as well as of the selected approaches and provide a variety of examples relevant to strategy research to illustrate potential applications and analytic considerations.

Originality/Value of chapter – Critical and poststructural paradigms and related research methodologies are underutilized in strategy research; however, they are important contributions to paradigmatic and methodological diversity in the field generally and necessary approaches for developing our understanding of strategy phenomena in the context of emerging market economies specifically.

This paper describes the development of a genetic algorithm (GA) for the assignment of weights to query terms in a ranked‐output document retrieval system. The GA involves a fitness function that is based on full relevance information, and the rankings resulting from the use of these weights are compared with the Robertson‐Sparck Jones F4 retrospective relevance weight. Extended experiments with seven document test collections show that the ga can often find weights that are slightly superior to those produced by the deterministic weighting scheme. That said, there are many cases where the two approaches give the same results, and a few cases where the F4 weights are superior to the ga weights. Since the ga has been designed to identify weights yielding the best possible level of retrospective performance, these results indicate that the F4 weights provide an excellent and practicable alternative. Evidence is presented to suggest that negative weights may play an important role in retrospective relevance weighting.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate determinants of social entrepreneurship.

The study uses a large-scale database covering Sweden’s 290 municipalities over the 1990-2014 period. The theoretical analysis is based on the demand and supply theory of entrepreneurship, while the empirical analysis is based on feasible generalized least-squares regression models.

The results indicate that the male proportion of the workforce, education level, the presence of entrepreneurial role models, wealth, unemployment rate, age, and urbanization positively influence the rate of social venture creation in a region.

This is one of few studies that empirically investigate determinants of social entrepreneurship, and the very first in the Swedish context. The study uses a large-scale database and advanced regression methods.