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1 – 10 of over 2000Pierre Saulais and Jean‐Louis Ermine
Innovation within companies is becoming mandatory and vital. A policy of voluntarism aiming at supporting innovation can be based on an operational process managing the evolution…
Abstract
Purpose
Innovation within companies is becoming mandatory and vital. A policy of voluntarism aiming at supporting innovation can be based on an operational process managing the evolution of the firm's intellectual corpus, becoming a tool for innovation. This paper seeks to explain and demonstrate the link between knowledge management and innovation.
Design/methodology/approach
The fundamental assumption is to regard knowledge creation as an intellectual corpus evolution process, based on knowledge workers' creativity. Their creativity is stimulated by the critical analysis of the intellectual corpus, which leads to the creation of new technologic trajectories in continuity or divergence from existing trajectories. Based on a systemic model of intellectual capital, the analysis of the dynamic of knowledge has shown that the increase of value of intellectual capital may be described as an evolutionist process.
Findings
An experiment was conducted to validate the assumptions based on the analysis of the intellectual capital of a company, on the process of generating new items for the intellectual capital, on the regulation of this process by a community of knowledge workers and based on the integration of the results into the value chain of the organization.
Research limitations/implications
Based on interviews with experts about their inventive tracks during recent decades, the main limitations/difficulties come from making the inventory of the intellectual corpus of an organization.
Social implications
Social implications include an emphasis on the projection of experts' inventive tracks onto the knowledge map of the organization.
Originality/value
This paper links intellectual corpus and creativity: creation leads to intellectual property rights.
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Elisabeth Albertini, Fabienne Berger-Remy, Stephane Lefrancq, Laurence Morgana, Miloš Petković and Elisabeth Walliser
This research aims to contribute to the current discussion led by international accounting bodies on intellectual capital narratives. Before setting a standard, a preliminary step…
Abstract
Purpose
This research aims to contribute to the current discussion led by international accounting bodies on intellectual capital narratives. Before setting a standard, a preliminary step is to highlight intellectual capital components' sources of value. The objective of this exploratory paper is to contribute to the discussion by proposing a detailed description and taxonomy of intellectual capital based on an analysis of discretionary accounting narrative disclosures in CEO letters.
Design/methodology/approach
To answer the research question, a computerised lexical content analysis was done of 241 letters from the CEOs of S&P Euro 350 companies addressed to shareholders.
Findings
Beyond the required disclosures about balance sheet intangibles, this study brings to light discretionary narratives about human, digital, customer and environmental capital and their interactions. In particular, CEOs are promoting two new themes, environmental capital and digital capital, as major contributors to value creation.
Research limitations/implications
The limitations of this study are inherent in the media studied, namely the CEOs' letters to shareholders, which were written as part of the firms' official communication.
Practical implications
The main contribution of the research is a detailed description of the intellectual capital components that CEOs consider to be at the heart of their companies' models to create value. Human and customer capital were already familiar under the previous classification, but CEOs present digital and environmental capital as areas of opportunity or risk in their discretionary narratives.
Originality/value
The article contributes to the current international discussions on intellectual capital by focusing on discretionary accounting narratives. It seeks to provide guidelines concerning future standards in the current stage of intellectual capital research.
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This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990…
Abstract
This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990 through the life stories of 10 intellectual-journalists, individuals whose journalistic activities have crossed over into other intellectual fields.
This study applies a symbolic interactionist framework to understand how these actors managed their reputations and careers within the intellectual world. The narratives were taken from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and supported by additional research such as interviews, biographies, and articles which have been published about their lives.
The life stories were compared to the extensive structural changes affecting the world of journalism and the world of intellectuals in Brazil. This comparison revealed gaps between these two spheres of practice, within which the ambivalent form of journalists’ identities have been constructed.
This chapter offers two contributions to the study of Brazilian journalists. From a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, it advances beyond other studies that focus more on the prevailing representations of journalists’ professional identities and their role in society. From an empirical standpoint, it describes the complex negotiations between the worlds of journalism, culture and politics. This chapter also reexamines the current dominant explanation for the changes in Brazilian journalism. It shows that building careers and new levels of interpersonal cooperation for intellectuals and journalists has been a slow process. Ultimately, this development has left some behind, especially those actors stretched between multiple professional identities such as those who self-identify as intellectual-journalists.
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Elise Y. Wong and Sarah M. Vital
The Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC) library plays an integral role in supporting one of the goals in the College’s Strategic Plan: “Raise the Academic Profile and…
Abstract
Purpose
The Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC) library plays an integral role in supporting one of the goals in the College’s Strategic Plan: “Raise the Academic Profile and Distinction”. This case study aims to assess the effectiveness of PlumX as a tool to showcase the academic profile and distinction of SMC. The library recognizes the importance of capturing impact of non-traditional creativity and engagement in addition to just traditional impact metrics of research.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper describes the collaborative effort of the College and the College’s library to identify faculty scholarship, creativity and engagement and collect data demonstrating the impact of the works. Traditional metrics, like citation counts, do not do SMC faculty justice because faculty scholarship comes beyond just books and articles. To more fully document the real intellectual corpus the College, the library is working with a new system, PlumX, to collect web-based information about both traditionally and non-traditionally published work.
Findings
The collection of metrics across five categories (citations, usage, social media, mentions and captures), and the flexibility of displaying on screen or downloading for use in other analytic reports made possible through PlumX proved to be a start toward demonstrating the academic distinction of College’s unique faculty. SMC will continue to partner with PlumX to assess and improve its usability and effectiveness.
Originality/value
This paper outlines how altmetrics can be used to measure and share impact of faculty research at a liberal arts, teaching-focused college in ways reflective of the unique intellectual contributions.
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Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory unites…
Abstract
Williams was a black feminist pragmatist who contributed to and drew on the ideas and practices of the “Hull-House school of race relations” (HHSRR). This American theory unites liberal values and a belief in a rational public with a co-operative, nurturing, and liberating model of the self, the other, and the community, based on the historical ideas and commitments of abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln. Education and democracy are emphasized as significant mechanisms to organize and improve society, especially the relations between black and white people. This school had a distinct institutional influence, structure, and status (Deegan, 2002b). As an African American women who wrote and spoke using feminist pragmatism as it applied to the black experience viewed from her lived standpoint, she developed black feminist pragmatism (Deegan, 2002a). I concentrate here on her writings on biculturalism, especially her (Williams, 1907) essay on the perils of “a White Negro.” She wrote about this anomalous racial category in a number of other pieces that I also analyze here.
The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.
Design/methodology/approach
The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.
Findings
The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.
Originality/value
In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.
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In a significant, but iconoclastic, approach to Public Administration Marshall Dimock introduced many sprawling concepts, approaches, and arguments to modern organization theory…
Abstract
In a significant, but iconoclastic, approach to Public Administration Marshall Dimock introduced many sprawling concepts, approaches, and arguments to modern organization theory. Dimock, a contemporary of Herbert A. Simon, challenged traditional wisdom with his gradual deflection away from conventional organization and administrative theories. Contrary to Simon's opinions, Dimock linked Public Administration back to classical thought, and rejected the modernistsʼn definition of progress and the growth/decay explanations for organization development.
Marshall Dimock offers students of organizational theory a potpourri of concepts, approaches and arguments. His career began in the founding era of American public administration…
Abstract
Marshall Dimock offers students of organizational theory a potpourri of concepts, approaches and arguments. His career began in the founding era of American public administration during President Roosevelt’s new deal administration. He initially supported the administrative state, but became disillusioned with problems inherent in large bureaucratic organizations. Dimock eventually embraced pre‐modern approaches to organization that relied upon strong leadership and personal ethics. He was particularly opposed to behavioural approaches to organization because they relied on management techniques rather than individual integrity. With the pre‐modern approach, Dimock swam against the current of modern organizational theory which depicted modern organization as an inherently powerful, superior institutional form. His latter works argued that organizations must conform to nature and that they wither if they do not take the natural qualities of people into account.
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Recent changes in the funding and governance of academic research in many OECD countries have altered established authority relationships governing research priorities and…
Abstract
Recent changes in the funding and governance of academic research in many OECD countries have altered established authority relationships governing research priorities and judgements. These shifts in the influence of a variety of groups and organisations over scientific choices and careers can be expected to affect the development of different kinds of intellectual innovations by changing the level of protected space they provide researchers and the flexibility of dominant intellectual standards governing the allocation of resources and evaluation of research outcomes. Variations in these features of public science systems influence scientists’ willingness to pursue unusual and risky projects over many years and help to explain cross-national differences in the rate and mode of development of four innovations in the physical, biological and human sciences.
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Lars Engwall, Enno Aljets, Tina Hedmo and Raphaël Ramuz
Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology…
Abstract
Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is found that Germany and Sweden, due to more advantageous financing and weaker communities of generativists, had a faster adoption of CCL than the other two countries. A particular late adopter among the four was Switzerland, which did not take up CCL until foreign professors had been recruited.
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