Search results

Drawing on the experience of the Observatories, a set of interconnected research centers in Italy, this chapter explains why academics are in one of the best positions to orchestrate interorganizational initiatives of change and development, and highlights two prerequisites that appear necessary to render salient this orchestrator role of academics: (i) the extensive use of multiple approaches of collaborative research and (ii) the creation and maintenance of a platform allowing the management and diffusion of the network-based learning mechanisms underlying each change and development effort. The contributions extend existing knowledge on organization development and collaborative research.

The importance of relational capital for the university has grown enormously in recent years. In fact, relational capital allows universities to promote and emphasize the effectiveness of the third mission. The purpose of this paper is to propose a case study involving an Italian university that recently set up a new research observatory, and, thanks to its success, succeeded in enhancing its relational capital.

The authors adopted an action research approach to analyze the case study. Consistently, the authors followed the analysis, diagnosis, and intervention phases. First, the authors focused on the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the process through which the university created relational capital, and finally, the authors proposed solutions to improve the process.

This case study shows that the creation of relation capital for the host university was the result of a process of transfer and transformation of the individual relationships of the observatory’s promoters.

This paper contributes to filling a significant gap in the literature on relational capital and universities and provides useful insights into how these organizations can encourage its creation. It also allows scholars, managers, and politicians involved in higher education to gain a greater understanding of this relevant topic.

This paper aims to show that there has been a rise in the development of local information systems in recent years. However, little research exists on users' perspectives of the value they obtain from these systems. This paper seeks to directly address this issue.

A case study approach was employed. The system selected for the case study was the Milton Keynes intelligence (MKi) Observatory, which is managed by Milton Keynes Council. Interviews with key staff involved in the system's development were undertaken to examine the reasons for the development of a local information system. A survey with the system's users provided insight into its use and value.

The paper found that, although the MKi Observatory is of significant value to users, they experience difficulty in finding data and information and in the use and interpretation of statistical and mapping data. There is a lack of awareness of the importance and use of metadata associated with resources in the system. Implications for the development of other similar systems are outlined.

The study identifies how the MKi Observatory local information system may better facilitate the exchange of data and information to its users. Such research is essential if the full potential of these systems is to be realised and to identify how they may better meet the needs of their users. Implications for other similar systems were also elicited, so that the value of this study and its findings can be used by other local information systems, or those considering the development of such a system.

Away from central public authorities, regional (also called rural) enterprises do not have direct, physical access to all the services that governmental or public agencies offer. Very often, these services are essential for enterprises, mostly small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), in such areas, in order to perform their business operations. This paper aims to present an example of how such types of information management and use took place in the case of familiarizing rural SMEs with the use of e‐government.

This paper is a case study of how a practical application is designed and developed for the blended training of rural SMEs. First of all, an identification of the main information resources that will be stored, annotated, shared and accessed through the system took place. Then, an outline of the general architecture and user roles involved was developed. System analysis and specification using Unified Modeling Language (UML) then took place. This was accompanied by design and specification of the database, based on appropriate metadata schemas for describing the information resources. The whole process was completed by the design and prototype development of the interface, which was put into public operation and testing with a sample set of real users.

Although there are several information management systems focusing on the education and training of rural stakeholders, their learning resources are not directly relevant to SMEs' needs. The main finding of this paper is that it shows a complete case study of designing, developing and evaluating an information technology application for rural businesses.

The value of the approach presented here is the combination of training resources in an information system with a blended training approach, so that it better matches the learning needs of SMEs. Through this web‐based environment, rural SMEs are able to find information on the e‐government services offered in their region, as well as gaining access to e‐learning content on how they can use such services.

To rescue at-risk historical scientific data stored at the McGill Observatory, the objectives of the Data Rescue Archive Weather (DRAW) project are: to build a repository; to develop a protocol to preserve the data in weather registers; and to make the data available to research communities and the public. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The DRAW project adopts an open archive information system compliant model as a conceptual framework for building a digital repository. The model consists of data collection, conversion, data capture, transcription, arrangement, description, data extraction, database design and repository setup.

A climate data repository, as the final product, is set up for digital images of registers and a database is designed for data storage. The repository provides dissemination of and access to the data for researchers, information professionals and the public.

Doing a quality check is the most important aspect of rescuing historical scientific data to ensure the accuracy, reliability and consistency of data.

The DRAW project shows how the use of historical scientific data has become a key element in research analysis on scientific fields, such as climatology and environmental protection.

The historical climate data set of the McGill Observatory is by nature unique and complex for preservation and research purposes. The management of historical scientific data is a challenge to rescue and describe as a result of its heterogeneous and non-standardized form.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the first 15 months of operation of an innovative specialist national public health observatory for intellectual disability.

The paper provides a narrative account of aims and achievements of the service.

In the first 15 months of operation the observatory has: made available to those involved in commissioning health and social care services, a wealth of information on the health needs of people with intellectual disabilities; identified specific improvements that could viably be made to increase the quality of future information; and begun working with local agencies to support them in making the best use of the available information.

People with intellectual disabilities experience significant health inequalities. This paper describes an innovative approach to helping local agencies make the best use of available information in order to commission services that may reduce these inequalities.

This paper presents the findings of a project that aims to analyze the ethical treatment of the news, with special attention to the reporting of violent events, as it is carried out by digital news outlets from the State of Chihuahua (Mexico).

A media observatory was established to collect and analyze the 9,115 news reports of violent events from February to June 2019 and was published by 12 digital news outlets in Chihuahua. Quantitative data analysis was carried out using three analytical axes – ethics, human rights and violence. Each axis was, in turn, subdivided into three criteria, and this paper identifies how compliant were each news outlet and individual news report with those criteria.

Data analysis established that 5,385 of the news reports (59.1 per cent of the total news analyzed) met all the nine desirable criteria, whereas other subsets did not comply with up to a minimum five criteria. How the observed news outlets and their reports complied with the criteria used is specified in this paper.

The methodology used and the data analyzed seek to develop ethical and socially responsible journalism. Hence, this paper offers various possibilities, such as raising new questions related to journalistic deontology, helps engage responsible journalists and also represents an area of opportunity for library and information professionals who are immersed in digital environments (e.g. digital libraries and library professionals that are the ideal professionals to store, manage and disseminate the records produced by media observatories). Moreover, the data analyzed help to set a maximum limit for the non-compliance with each of the criteria analyzed, which can even lead to the development of an ethical and social responsibility accreditation that can be granted to news outlets with the best practices for journalism.

This study presents the development of a supply chain (SC) observatory, which is a benchmarking solution to support companies within the same industry in understanding their positioning in terms of SC performance.

A case study is used to demonstrate the set-up of the observatory. Twelve experts on automatic equipment for the wrapping and packaging industry were asked to select a set of performance criteria taken from the literature and evaluate their importance for the chosen industry using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. To handle the high number of criteria without requiring a high amount of time-consuming effort from decision-makers (DMs), five subjective, parsimonious methods for criteria weighting are applied and compared.

A benchmarking methodology is presented and discussed, aimed at DMs in the considered industry. Ten companies were ranked with regard to SC performance. The ranking solution of the companies was on average robust since the general structure of the ranking was very similar for all five weighting methodologies, though simplified-analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was the method with the greatest ability to discriminate between the criteria of importance and was considered faster to carry out and more quickly understood by the decision-makers.

Developing an SC observatory usually requires managing a large number of alternatives and criteria. The developed methodology uses parsimonious weighting methods, providing DMs with an easy-to-use and time-saving tool. A future research step will be to complete the methodology by defining the minimum variation required for one or more criteria to reach a specific position in the ranking through the implementation of a post-fact analysis.

Supported by the principles of the legitimacy theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship that exists between the information quality of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting provided by the most liquid companies operating in the Spanish Stock Market and their corporate reputation.

Three regression models are tested with panel data collected for a sample of the 35 most liquid companies operating in the Spanish Stock Market between 2004 and 2014.

The findings show that two axes of information quality (i.e. content and management systems) should be necessarily controlled by companies in order to improve their corporate reputation through their CSR reporting. The content axis refers to the compliance of CSR reports with the provision of qualitative, quantitative, and evaluative information concerning the impacts of the CSR of the company on society and the environment. The management systems axis refers to the compliance of CSR reports with the disclosure of details about the policies, plans, and actions that companies implement to assure an effective management of CSR initiatives.

Previous literature exploring the relationship between corporate reporting and reputation has frequently focused on either the impact of the quantity of financial and CSR information reported by companies and the role of information quality, but only in reference to a number of specific themes (environment, customers) and not to the full range of information covered by CSR reports. The authors of this paper extend on previous academic literature by empirically evaluating the relationship between two dimensions of the information quality of CSR reporting (content and management systems) and the corporate reputation of companies operating in the Spanish Stock Market.

Basándose en la teoría de la legitimidad, los autores de este trabajo exploran la relación que existe entre la calidad de la información contenida en las memorias de responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) de las principales empresas cotizadas en la bolsa española y su reputación corporativa.

Se testean tres modelos de regresión con un panel de datos recopilados entre 2004 y 2014 para una muestra de las 35 empresas más sólidas de la bolsa española.

Los resultados muestran que los dos ejes principales de la calidad de la información (es decir, contenido y sistemas de gestión) deben ser necesariamente controlados por las empresas con el fin de mejorar su reputación corporativa a través de sus memorias de RSC. El eje de contenido se refiere al cumplimiento de las memorias de RSC con el suministro de información cualitativa, cuantitativa y de evaluación en relación con los impactos de la RSC de la empresa en la sociedad y el medio ambiente. El eje de los sistemas de gestión se refiere al cumplimiento de las memorias de RSC con la divulgación de información acerca de las políticas, planes y acciones que las empresas implementan para asegurar una gestión eficaz de las iniciativas de RSC.

La literatura previa que ha explorado la relación entre la información corporativa y la reputación se ha centrado con frecuencia en (1) el impacto de la cantidad de información financiera y de RSC que generan las empresas o (2) el papel de la calidad de la información, pero sólo en referencia a una serie de temas concretos (principalmente medio ambiente y clientes) y no a toda la gama de información cubierta por las memorias de RSC. Los autores de este trabajo amplían esta línea de investigación mediante la evaluación empírica de la relación entre dos dimensiones de la calidad de la información de las memorias de RSC (contenido y sistemas de gestión) y la reputación corporativa de las empresas que operan en la bolsa española.