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Most flip chip assemblies require underfill to bestow reliability that would otherwise be ravished by stress due to thermomechanical mismatch between die and substrate. While underfill can be viewed as “polymer magic” and the key to modern flip chip success, many see it as the process “bottleneck” that must be eliminated in the future. Both views are accurate. A substantial amount of R&D is being focused on making underfill more user‐friendly. Electronic materials suppliers, various consortia, government labs and university researchers are working diligently to shatter the bottleneck and fully enable flip chip ‐ the final destination for micropackaging. This paper will describe these efforts and provide a status report on state‐of‐the‐art underfill technologies. We will also examine new processing strategies.

What has been called “the McDonaldization of universities” (another name for top-down and strong corporate managerialism) has gained momentum as a model for governing and managing universities. This trend exacerbates the traditional tension between academic freedom and managerial control – a major challenge for the administration of academic institutions. The ideas of Charles Darwin represent an opportunity for overcoming such a challenge. However, traditional managerial models show inadequate, pre-Darwinian assumptions for devising organizational designs. This paper aims to show not only the opportunities but also the challenges of embracing a Darwinian paradigm for designing social systems. The case of managerialism in universities is an illustrative example. The paper proposes evolutionary guidelines for designing universities capable of maintaining managerial control while warranting academic freedom.

The paper proposes to understand the tension between academic freedom and managerial control in universities as the same tension between freedom and control that Karl Popper identified as successfully handled by evolutionary processes. The paper uses Darwinian theory, understood as a broader theory for complex systems, as a heuristic for designing social systems – universities in this case – able to adapt to changing environmental conditions while handling equilibrium between freedom and control. The methodology articulates the Popperian model of knowledge with the Darwinian scheme proposed by David Ellerman known as “parallel experimentation” for suggesting organizational forms in which university administrators and faculty can interact for generating free innovations in pseudo-controlled organizational arrangements.

A salient characteristic of strong managerialism is its pre-Darwinian understanding of survival and adaptation; such an approach shows important flaws that can lead universities to unfit designs that changing environments can select for elimination. As an alternative, the philosophy behind the ideas of Charles Darwin provides guidelines for designing innovative and adaptive social systems. Evolutionary principles challenge basic tenets of strong managerialism as Darwinian designs discard the possibility of seeing managers as knowledgeable designers that allegedly can avoid mistakes by allocating resources to “one-best” solutions through ex ante exhaustive, top-down control. Instead, a Darwinian model requires considering survival as a matter of adaptability through continuous experimentation of blind trials controlled by ex post selection. The key is to organize universities as experimenting systems that try new and different things all the time and that learn and improve by making mistakes, as an adaptive system.

Governing and managing universities require to acknowledge the uniqueness of academic institutions and demand to look for appropriate forms of organization. The proposal of this paper opens possibilities for exploring and implementing action-research initiatives and practical solutions for universities. Studies in management and administration of higher-education institutions must take into account the characteristics of this type of organizations and should consider wider spectrums of possibilities beyond the core ideas of managerialism.

University managers face a special challenge for achieving equilibrium between managerial control and academic freedom. Darwinian models of management invite to reconsider several management creeds, for instance, that “errors are bad things” – instead of innovation triggers and learning opportunities or that “one solution must fit all” – instead of considering bottom-up, different and adaptive solutions triggered by local academic units, each facing different environments.

Currently, there is no clear picture for governing universities. This paper introduces principles and guidelines for facing the current challenge that strong managerialism represents if universities are expected to maintain academic freedom and also survive in volatile environments.

The paper shows that current research systems are not geared to organise and evaluate research involving several scientific disciplines. A consequence is exaggerated promises and expectations based on “speculative interdisciplinarity”. These expectations are one cause of “speculative ethics”. Evaluators of interdisciplinary research proposals should be aware of the pitfalls existing in this kind of research. The purpose of this paper is to highlight “speculative interdisciplinarity” as a cause of exaggerated expectations with the result that ethical analysis and similar activities focus on unlikely impacts.

The paper confronts documented statements of champions of emerging technologies with assessments by specialists from the scientific disciplines involved in the development of the technologies and examines the extent to which differences are due to problems with interdisciplinary work.

The paper identifies the causes of exaggerated expectations related to the impact of emerging technologies based on interdisciplinary research. Lack of experience with interdisciplinary research is shown to be a major cause.

This is basically a case study for a spectacular individual example. There is a need to show that the same problems exist for less spectacular scientific endeavours.

Review process organisers and reviewers should be aware that exaggerated expectations can arise as a result of insufficient attention to the organisation of interdisciplinary research. There is a need for studies to confront expectations with the genuine state of research.

The paper highlights a need to pay attention to the organisation of interdisciplinary research.

The paper reports on a research project exploring the change in the organizational context of communicators and communication units in higher education and research institutions (HERIs), the importance of informal processes within their daily work and the great diversity of expectations communicators have to tackle.

Based on a literature review, a mixed-methods study combining expert interviews with 54 German HERI heads of communication units, an online-survey and a document analysis of organizational characteristics was conducted. Findings were validated in four focus groups.

The study illuminates the impact of organizational and operational structures of HERIs on communicators and their boundary spanning activities. Due to varying expectations of stakeholders, communicators constantly have to switch roles. Members of HERIs' executive boards affect status and working conditions for communicators in the organization.

Interviews with other HERI actors, especially members of the executive board, are proposed to get more thorough insights into the organizational context of HERIs and the mutual expectations of different internal stakeholders.

Insights from the project may help HERI actors to reflect their organizational context and to identify potentially contentious structures or processes.

Communicating science sometimes clashes with complex organizational and operational structures. Despite the “organizational turn” in HERI research, there is a lack of data on the relation between communicators, their communication units and the larger organizational context. The exploratory study addresses this gap.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the pandemic affects the motivation and job satisfaction of university researchers as a whole and by their separate groups by gender, age, academic position (career stage) and degree.

The authors studied French universities for changes in motivation and job satisfaction among researchers under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this, two hypotheses were tested, using the one-way ANOVA parametric test and the Kruskal–Wallis nonparametric statistical test with the data collected during the in-depth interviews and surveys with university researchers from the Paris Diderot University and Jean Moulin University of Lyon III in 2019 and 2021.

There were found significant differences between changes in motivation and job satisfaction of respondent groups by gender, career stage and scientific degrees. All these differences in changes confirm hypothesis about the significant impact of the pandemic on certain motivators and elements of job satisfaction of various groups of university researchers. The study showed that pandemic restrictions and fears positively affect the motivation and job satisfaction of the younger generation of researchers and males, and negatively on the older generation and female researchers. During the pandemic, early-stage researchers are mostly unhappy only with the salary and the lack of teaching skills. While experienced and senior researchers do not have time to fulfill all their duties due to overload by a combination of different forms of teaching, many teaching hours, administrative duties and mastering new communication tools.

The results capture the selective impact of pandemic restrictions, its physical and mental effects on academic staff. Although only two universities in a single country were considered, the findings show the heterogeneity of the perception of new (pandemic) working conditions by different groups of university workers. If such heterogeneity is revealed in the example of two universities, then it is very likely to be observable also in broader studies.

The results of this study can help university administrations, higher education regulators and national research agencies address the needs of all groups of researchers, alleviating the most acute restrictions and fears caused by the pandemic and providing the necessary incentives for relevant groups, e.g. higher salary, teaching school and awards for young researchers and a lower teaching loading for experienced and senior researchers.

This is the first study that define pandemic impact on motivation and job satisfaction of university researchers in France.

This paper aims to present “Bouncecasting,” a seminar gaming foresight approach useful for examining “wicked problems” where the path to the future is uncertain and malleable and where major stakeholders may have different preferences for different futures. The approach gets its name because it goes back and forth between forecasting and backcasting, provides for give and take among different groups of stakeholders and creates and compares multiple scenarios depicting plausible futures.

After defining Bouncecasting, presenting its main features and providing a recommended way of conducting Bouncecasting studies, the approach is illustrated by four Bouncecasting projects conducted between 1998 and 2004.

The four projects taken together show that Bouncecasting can be used to address a range of wicked problems in a practical way. The projects considered in sequence show the evolution of the method.

Bouncecasting is a way of doing foresight that examines in an integrated way multiple characteristics of a policy problem, thereby providing promising solutions for complex issues. Although there have been over a dozen Bouncecasting studies conducted by the author and different sets of colleagues, this is the first general description of the approach.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different heating approaches during thermal rounding of polymer powders on powder bulk properties such as particle size, shape and flowability, as well as on the yield of process.

This study focuses on the rounding of commercial high-density polyethylene polymer particles in two different downer reactor designs using heated walls (indirect heating) and preheated carrier gas (direct heating). Powder bulk properties of the product obtained from both designs are characterized and compared.

Particle rounding with direct heating leads to a considerable increase in process yield and a reduction in powder agglomeration compared to the design with indirect heating. This subsequently leads to higher powder flowability. In terms of shape, indirect heating yields not only particles with higher sphericity but also entails substantial agglomeration of the rounded particles.

Shape modification via thermal rounding is the decisive step for the success of a top-down process chain for selective laser sintering powders with excellent flowability, starting with polymer particles from comminution. This report provides new information on the influence of the heating mode (direct/indirect) on the performance of the rounding process and particle properties.

This paper aims to provide a framework with the antecedents of women managers’ resilience in SMEs.

This developmental study uses a comprehensive literature review and a set of propositions to identify the antecedent of women managers’ resilience and develops a conceptual framework for resilience.

The results indicate that in addition to personal resilience traits, interactive engagement with the work environment, career adaptability and positive human resource management (HRM) interventions are the main antecedents of women managers’ resilience.

This paper contributes to theory by providing a new perspective on the study of resilience as a process at the organisational level and as a trait at personal level. It contributes to the women employee-centric resilience discussion in HRM literature and explores the relationship between resilience and women managers’ career progression. This is a developmental study, and despite the strengths of the undertaken approach, there are a number of limitations due to the lack of empirical evidence. Therefore, future research activities should focus on validating the framework and determining any potential boundaries of this resilience framework.

The study reveals a number of practical implications leading to a recommended resilience toolkit for HR managers of organisations to develop and promote resilience in their women managers and aspiring managers.

The social implications of this study include the social relationships within the work-setting, better employee engagement and interaction with the work environment and flexible career progression pathways.

The paper is based on rich conceptual and theoretical discussion that identifies the key antecedents of women managers’ resilience. The study also conceptually establishes the moderating relationship between women managers’ resilience and work stress and burnout.