Search results

This paper aims to look at how organisational partnerships balance knowledge exploration and exploitation in contexts that are rife with paradoxes. It draws on paradox theory to examine the partnership’s response to the explore-exploit relationship.

A multiple interpretive case study was used to examine international partnerships in three African countries. These partnerships were between international (Northern-based) non-governmental organisations and local African non-governmental organisations.

The research finds that within the partnership, knowledge exploration and exploitation exist as a duality rather than a dualism. This is supported by the acceptance and confrontation of paradoxes of performing and belonging. However, macro-level paradoxes of organising linked to power, culture and epistemologies inhibit further effective confrontation of the explore-exploit paradox.

The findings can help managers working in international development organisations to understand how learning is enabled and constrained in partnership-based programmes.

The study provides a novel contribution to knowledge management by applying the paradox perspective to the explore-exploit relationship. This paper extends previous work by drawing on the levels and repertoires present in the paradox perspective to understand how knowledge exploration and exploitation can be mutually reinforcing and can exist as a duality.

Knowledge reuse using electronic repositories, while increasingly important, requires more thorough analysis. Service modularity has been recently applied in services research but has not been integrated into knowledge reuse studies. The purpose of this paper is to draw on both service modularity and knowledge reuse to develop and validate a framework that categorises forms of packaged knowledge in an electronic repository.

Drawing on knowledge reuse and service modularity research, a model is proposed. The model is empirically tested using a case study research design.

This research highlighted the value of including both context and process as key dimensions when packaging service knowledge for reuse. This study identifies knowledge types present in modular solutions and how they were configured and reconfigured in the knowledge repository. This research identified five ways modularised services were leveraged. In addition to the traditional scale and stretch approaches, already present, but conflated, in the service literature, three other configurations were identified; shrink, separate and segment.

The findings are based on a single empirical case study which may limit the generalisability of the findings. There is a need for additional research to further validate the model in additional contexts.

This study provides managers with empirical examples of how a modular repository was used in practice and outlines five ways of recombining contextual and processual elements to enable service codification and reuse. It has implications for how knowledge is decomposed and recombined in repositories, suggesting an explicit separation of context and process knowledge while developing modular elements within both.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that explicitly uses context and process as dimensions and draws on service modularity to understand types of knowledge reuse in electronic repositories. In doing so, it adds value by developing and validating a model that identifies five types of reuse.

While service scholars see modularisation as balancing the efficiency of standardisation with the value added through customisation the relationships between these concepts are under-theorised. In addition, although information and communication technologies can facilitate all three service strategies, the degree to which they codify service knowledge is not explicitly considered in the extant literature. The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a model that examines service strategy trajectories by specifically considering the ICTs used and the degree of knowledge codification employed.

This study draws on three qualitative case studies of service departments of firms involved in cardiovascular applications, orthopaedic, spinal and neuroscience product development and information technology support. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews, document analysis and non-participant observation.

Findings show that ICTs were increasingly used to codify both standardised and customised services, though in different ways. For standardised services ICTs codified the service process, making them even more rigid. Due to the dynamic nature of customised services, drawing on experts' tacit knowledge, ICTs codified the possessors of knowledge rather than the service process they undertook. This study also identified a duality between the tacit development of customised services and modular service codification.

The model is validated using case studies from three companies in the medical and information technology sectors limiting its generalisability.

The importance of considering the degree of tacitness or explicitness of service knowledge is important for service codification. The paper provides managers with empirical examples of how ICTs are used to support all three strategies, allows them to identify their current position and indicates possible future trajectories.

The papers main contribution is the development of a model that integrates the literature on service strategies with knowledge management strategies to classify service standardisation, customisation and modularisation in terms of both service orientation and degree of ICT codification.

Part II and last MECHETTI. Vienna FOUNDED in 1795 by Carlo Mechetti as a dealer; since 1807 in partnership with his nephew, Pietro; the publishing firm styled Carlo Mechetti & Neffe in 1809; after Carlo's death in 1811, Pietro became sole owner; he was succeeded in 1850 by his widow, Therese; c. 1855 the firm was taken over by A. Diabelli & co. (cp. Peter Cappi).

An introduction is given to the generation and use of new transform techniques which have important applications in binary control and processing methods. A comparison is made between the fast Fourier transform and the equivalent fast Walsh transform together with the steps required to produce a transform algorithm and computer program. Some applications of the transform are then discussed and which include spectral analysis, filtering, non‐linear control and communications uses. 18 references to current work in these applications areas are included.

As a result of the changes caused by the preparation of foods gradually passing out of the home into the hands of manufacturers, there has arisen an absolute need for a complete supervision of the public food supplies. A supervision which shall place some limit upon the substitution of cheaper and inferior methods and dangerous materials in place of the standard formerly used in our homes.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the British public may be congratulated on the salutary, if rude, awakening which the gale raised in Chicago has given them. Peacefully slumbering, and content for years to accept as gospel truths the asseverations of all sorts and conditions of food‐fakers, both of home and foreign growth, the “Britisher” has suddenly received a shock from which it will take him a long time to recover. The abominable crime of milk‐adulteration—striking as it does at helpless infancy and at the vitality of the infirm and the weak; the “doctoring” of food products with a variety of pernicious drugs on the pleas of “preservation” and of meeting “public wants,” but in reality done for the sake of sordid gain; the gigantic meat and butter frauds, whereby largely the agricultural interest of this country has been brought to its present pass; the faking of beer and the wholesale arsenical poisoning which was one of its direct consequences; the denaturing of other foods by abstraction, substitution, and sophistication—all these things have been regarded by the “man in the street” with a sort of languid interest; have, at most, called forth passing comment from the lay press, and cheap sneers about faddery and faddists from various ignorant scribblers; while a succession of lethargic and feeble administrations have shelved the reports of their own Committees and Commissions, and, except under rare and abnormal pressure, have been content to adopt a policy of laissez faire.