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The aim of this article is to present the relationship between the nature of business processes (BPs) and the nature of knowledge used in the course of their execution on the basis of an analysis of the relevance of different dimensions of BPs. The conclusion presented herein points to the inextricable relationship between business process management (BPM) and knowledge management (KM) in the knowledge economy (KE).

The paper is conceptual in nature and is grounded in the theories of BPM and KM.

The article analyses the significance of the changing nature of BPs for particular dimensions of BPs, as well as the relationships between the nature of BPs and the kinds of knowledge used in subsequent stages of the BPM Lifecycle. These relationships, which are primarily tied to the dimensions of BP Unpredictability and Knowledge-intensity, should be taken into account in each element of the BPM ecosystem to a larger degree, the larger the significance of processes which require dynamic management in an organization.

The article is a contribution to the theoretical reflection on the holistic approach to BPM. It expressly points to the inevitable necessity of integration (dynamic) BPM with KM, with the exception of the specific case of traditional BPM, which encompasses structured BPs. This integration requires us to take into account the influence of KM in virtually all of the elements of the BPM ecosystem.

The article points to the necessity of researching the nature of executed and managed BPs as early as in the course of preparing the organization to implement BPM in the KE. The aim is to select and/or adapt implementation methodologies and systems, supporting BPM in the organization to the real BPs nature. The analysis presented in the article on the dimensions of BPs points to the particular significance of the method of adjusting elements of the BPM ecosystem in the execution and analysis and diagnosis stages of the BPM lifecycle.

The article presents an original view of the interrelations between BPM and KM in the knowledge intensive organizations (KIOs) in the KE.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

The purpose of this study is to enhance the knowledge of advertising effects of nature of advergame (game speed) on gamers’ brand recall and attitude. More specifically, this study investigates varying effects of game speed in advergames on young Indian gamers’ brand recall and attitudes under varied game-product congruence and persuasion knowledge conditions from attention, elaboration and persuasion perspectives.

A 2 (nature of advergame: fast or slow) × 2 (game-product congruence: high or low) × 2 (persuasion knowledge: high or low) between-subject measures design is used. Experimental data were collected from 235 Indian graduate students. ANOVAs and MANOVA with pre-planned contrasts are used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that for a slow-paced advergame, low game-product congruence result in high brand recall than high game-product congruence. For a fast-paced advergame, there is no difference in brand recall between low game-product congruence and high game-product congruence. Furthermore, findings reveal that for a slow-paced advergame with low game-product congruence, subjects with high persuasion knowledge report high brand recall and less favorable brand attitude than subjects with low persuasion knowledge. On the other hand, for a fast-paced advergame with low game-product congruence, there is no difference in brand recall and brand attitude between the subjects with high persuasion knowledge and the subjects with low persuasion knowledge.

The findings of the study are very important for advertising practitioners, as selection of media that fit the advertised product with reference to the nature and content of the media is a planning strategy that has been widely used by media planners. Thus, if advertisers want to create high brand awareness by creating high brand memory, then slow-paced advergames with low congruent brand placements can be chosen as an effective in-game media strategy for online advertising. Additionally, game developers and marketers can plan and develop more effective advergames by taking into account the persuasion knowledge factor so that the implementation would have the strongest positive effect on consumers’ brand recall and brand attitude.

This study contributes to the literature of non-traditional media advertising, specifically advergaming context by exploring the impact of nature of game and game-product congruence on gamers’ ad-persuasion. Also, this study is the first attempt to understand how the game speed and its boundary conditions influence gamers’ brand recall and attitude and in attention, elaboration and persuasion perspectives.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether the nature of innovation is accumulative or radical and to what extent past year accumulation of technology stock can predict future innovation. More importantly, the authors are concerned with whether a change of policy regime or a variance in the quality of technology will moderate the nature of innovation.

The authors examined a dataset of 3.6 million Chinese patents during 1985–2015 and constructed more than 5 million citation pairs across 8 sections and 128 classes to track knowledge spillover across technology fields. The authors used this citation dataset to calculate the technology innovation network. The authors constructed a measure of upstream invention, interacting the pre-existing technology innovation network with historical patent growth in each technology field, and estimated measure's impact on future innovation since 2005. The authors also constructed three sets of metrics – technology dependence, centrality and scientific value – to identify innovation quality and a policy dummy to consider the impact of policy on innovation.

Innovation growth is built upon past year accumulation and technology spillover. Innovation grows faster for technologies that are more central and grows more slowly for more valuable technologies. A pro-innovation and pro-intellectual property right (IPR) policy plays a positive and significant role in driving technical progress. The authors also found that for technologies that have faster access to new information or larger power to control knowledge flow, the upstream and downstream innovation linkage is stronger. However, this linkage is weaker for technologies that are more novel or general. On most occasions, the nature of innovation was less responsive to policy shock.

This paper contributes to the debate on the nature of innovation by determining whether upstream innovation has strong predictive power on future innovation. The authors develop the assumption used in the technology spillover literature by considering a time-variant, directional and asymmetric matrix to model technology diffusion. For the first time, the authors answer how the nature of innovation will vary depending on the technology network configurations and policy environment. In addition to contributing to the academic debate, the authors' study has important implications for economic growth and industrial or innovation management policies.

Presents the thoughts on decision processes of Chester I. Barnard, one of the century’s greatest management theorists. Includes his classic article, “Mind in everyday affairs”; his unpublished book, “The Significance of Decisive Behaviour in Social Action”; his correspondence with Herbert Simon, and significant comments found in his personal papers.

This paper aims to explain and discuss the complex nature and value of knowledge as an exploitable resource for business.

The authors propose a conceptual explanation of knowledge based on three pillars: the plurality of its nature, understood to be conservative, multipliable and generative, its contextual value and the duality of carrier incorporating business knowledge, objects or processes. After conceptualizing the nature of knowledge, the authors offer a metaphor based on the classic transformation from “potential” to “kinetic” energy in an inclined plane assuming that the conservative nature of knowledge makes it act as energy.

The metaphor uses the concept of potential and kinetic energy: if energy is only potential, it has a potential value not yet effective, whereas if the potential energy (knowledge) becomes kinetic energy (products and/or services), it generates business value. In addition, business value is a function of the speed acquired and caused by the angle of inclined plan, namely, the company’s business model. Knowledge is the source of the value and can be maintained and regenerated only through continuous investments. Several years later the value extraction reaches a null value of the company (potential energy) which will cease to act (kinetic energy) for triggering both the value generated and the value extracted.

The paper proposes an initial attempt to explain the meaning of the transformation of knowledge using a metaphor derived from physics. The metaphor of the energy of knowledge clearly depicts the managerial dilemma of balancing a company’s resources for both the generating and extracting value. Similarly, future study should try to associate other knowledge peculiarities to physical phenomena.

Studies have shown that organizations that are capable of effectively transferring knowledge are often more productive than others. At the same time, there is increasing ambiguity regarding how the nature of knowledge transfer affects performance. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on the nature of knowledge transfer and to understand why it remains a hindrance to most organizations, even now. This conceptual paper tries to identify the major debates surrounding the nature of knowledge transfer in an organization. The challenges and opportunities facing research on knowledge transfer are also elaborated.

This conceptual paper is structured to first provide a brief summary of the construct of knowledge transfer and then provide a detailed account of research that highlights the major findings regarding the nature of knowledge transfer and their relation to the current themes. A selective review of the literature was carried out in this paper instead of a meta-analysis. The papers were identified through popular databases. The authors also examined the references of selected papers to provide a comprehensive review of the construct.

The debate about codification of knowledge that has stimulated the academic community in organizational studies is still in its infancy. The other debates that have been discussed in this paper have either reached their peak or have given way to newer debates. A clear understanding of the significance of the nature of knowledge transfer is very important at this juncture. The model developed toward the end of the paper assumes a path in this direction. The authors also discuss how research on knowledge has both deepened and expanded the authors’ understanding of knowledge transfer since March and Simon (1958).

The debate in the field of organizational studies around the nature of knowledge transfer has been occurring for some time. However, there has not been any final consensus on the nature of knowledge transfer. While looking at these debates with a critical eye, the authors may appear to be cynical about the prospect of an end to these deliberations. The authors conclude the paper with a model that examines knowledge transfer from a broader perspective that encompasses the various theoretical perspectives.

Prior research has shown the effectiveness of inquiry education in increasing content knowledge and motivation. Improving learners’ epistemologies is an additional component that should be examined when considering inquiry effectiveness. The basis for students’ participation in inquiry-based science education (IBSE) is to emulate the scientific process in classroom learning – and, by extension, to alter their scientific epistemologies. In this chapter, we discuss the challenges associated with the construction and assessment of IBSE. First, despite it being a common underlying theoretical framework of inquiry units, assessments of learning outcomes rarely reflect a consideration of students’ changing epistemologies. Second, we examine whether inquiry practices in the classroom are constructed to alter students’ epistemologies. We integrate preliminary research findings from a week-long, researcher-taught ecology inquiry unit with urban adolescents, reporting on posttest assessments of students’ thoughts on sources of knowledge, their ecology content knowledge, and their understanding of the nature of science. While we expected this unit to foster learner epistemology, our results did not confirm our expectations. In fact, students who participated in the inquiry unit were outperformed by a comparison group matched on age and ethnicity in several unexpected areas relevant to learner epistemology. This chapter explores explanations of unexpected findings and recommendations for the future assessment and practice of inquiry couched in challenges associated with current challenges to instructing and assessing learner epistemology.

This paper aims to explore whether philosophical insights from Plato's dialogue “Parmenides” on the complex and often paradoxical nature of change can illuminate the nature of information retrieval (IR). IR is modelled as a dialectic process involving mutually dependent yet conflicting forces between the subjective and the objective. These forces operate to produce change in the subjective experience of users (becoming informed) through facilitating a relationship with objective documents. Accurately modelling, predicting and enabling this process remains a persistent problem for IR and this paper seeks to examine the extent to which this is because of the nature of change.

The paper is a conceptual analysis and literature review.

The problem of change (what it is, how it happens and how we can know it has happened) is essential to our understanding of information as information normally implies some kind of change in knowledge state. Any process of change, however, on examination of its qualities, appears to necessitate the combination of irreconcilable and conflicting forces. The apparent contradictions within the existence of change as discussed in “Parmenides” also exist in IR on both a theoretical and a technical level.

Change is a central concept for information in general and IR in particular. A deeper understanding of the paradoxical nature of change can provide new insights into IR theory and practice.

The paper presents a new historical philosophical perspective on the nature of change and applies it to current IR problems.