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21 – 30 of 244Christian Nielsen, Robin Roslender and Stefan Schaper
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the Danish Guideline Project (DGP) and its subsequent fate within participating companies since its conclusion in late 2002…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the Danish Guideline Project (DGP) and its subsequent fate within participating companies since its conclusion in late 2002. Particular focus is placed on the traction that the intellectual capital statement (ICS) approach to reporting, as the principal outcome of the project, was able to acquire in practice.
Design/methodology/approach
Following the reconstruction of the original sample of 102 companies that originally participated in the project, a survey using semi-structured interviews was pursued among 64 individuals who were identified as having some involvement with the guideline project and/or producing ICSs in these companies. In addition to the interviews, a range of secondary information has been used to supplement the primary data and research protocol.
Findings
The project was found to have enjoyed only modest success and thereby failed to achieve any substantial traction among the participating companies and related public stakeholders. On balance, however, respondents believed that the exercise had been a positive experience, with benefits for the internal management of the companies, as well as for human capital (employees). The obstacles that radical initiatives such as the ICS continue to face should not be underestimated.
Research limitations/implications
A single study of a specific initiative necessarily entails many limitations. It is conceivable that the views of some of the participants in the guideline project who are absent from the present sample may provide details of a different experience, although it is unlikely that these would seriously challenge the findings reported here.
Originality/value
This study is the first to explore the fate of the critically acclaimed ICS approach among companies participating in the DGP.
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Christian Barth and Stefan Koch
In the last years the penetration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems within small, medium and large organizations increased steadily. Organizations are forced to adapt…
Abstract
Purpose
In the last years the penetration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems within small, medium and large organizations increased steadily. Organizations are forced to adapt their systems and perform ERP upgrades in order to react to rapidly changing business environments, technological enhancements and rising pressure of competition. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the critical success factors for such projects.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with CEOs, CIOs, ERP consultants and project managers who recently carried out ERP upgrade projects in their respective organizations.
Findings
This paper identifies 14 critical success factors for ERP upgrade projects. Amongst others, effective project management, external support, the composition of the ERP team and the usage of a multiple system landscape play a key role for the success of the ERP upgrade. Furthermore, a comparison to the critical success factors for ERP implementation projects was conducted, and even though there are many similarities between these types of projects, several differences emerged.
Originality/value
ERP upgrade projects have a huge impact on organizations, but their success and antecedents for it are currently under-researched.
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Frank Fischer, Elisabeth Bauer, Tina Seidel, Ralf Schmidmaier, Anika Radkowitsch, Birgit J. Neuhaus, Sarah I. Hofer, Daniel Sommerhoff, Stefan Ufer, Jochen Kuhn, Stefan Küchemann, Michael Sailer, Jenna Koenen, Martin Gartmeier, Pascal Berberat, Anne Frenzel, Nicole Heitzmann, Doris Holzberger, Jürgen Pfeffer, Doris Lewalter, Frank Niklas, Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha, Mario Gollwitzer, Andreas Vorholzer, Olga Chernikova, Christian Schons, Amadeus J. Pickal, Maria Bannert, Tilman Michaeli, Matthias Stadler and Martin R. Fischer
To advance the learning of professional practices in teacher education and medical education, this conceptual paper aims to introduce the idea of representational scaffolding for…
Abstract
Purpose
To advance the learning of professional practices in teacher education and medical education, this conceptual paper aims to introduce the idea of representational scaffolding for digital simulations in higher education.
Design/methodology/approach
This study outlines the ideas of core practices in two important fields of higher education, namely, teacher and medical education. To facilitate future professionals’ learning of relevant practices, using digital simulations for the approximation of practice offers multiple options for selecting and adjusting representations of practice situations. Adjusting the demands of the learning task in simulations by selecting and modifying representations of practice to match relevant learner characteristics can be characterized as representational scaffolding. Building on research on problem-solving and scientific reasoning, this article identifies leverage points for employing representational scaffolding.
Findings
The four suggested sets of representational scaffolds that target relevant features of practice situations in simulations are: informational complexity, typicality, required agency and situation dynamics. Representational scaffolds might be implemented in a strategy for approximating practice that involves the media design, sequencing and adaptation of representational scaffolding.
Originality/value
The outlined conceptualization of representational scaffolding can systematize the design and adaptation of digital simulations in higher education and might contribute to the advancement of future professionals’ learning to further engage in professional practices. This conceptual paper offers a necessary foundation and terminology for approaching related future research.
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Michał Wilczewski, Zbigniew Wróblewski, Mariusz Wołońciej, Arkadiusz Gut and Ewelina Wilczewska
The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the role of spirituality, understood as a personal relationship with God, in missionary intercultural experience.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the role of spirituality, understood as a personal relationship with God, in missionary intercultural experience.
Design/methodology/approach
We conducted narrative interviews with eight Polish consecrated missionaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay. We used thematic analysis to establish spirituality in missionary experience and narrative analysis to examine sensemaking processes.
Findings
Missionary spirituality was defined by a personal relationship with God as a source of consolation, psychological comfort, strength to cope with distressing experiences, and Grace promoting self-improvement. It compensated for the lack of family and psychological support and enhanced psychological adjustment to the environment perceived as dangerous. Spirituality helped missionaries deal with cultural challenges, traumatic and life-threatening events. Traumatic experiences furthered their understanding of the mission and triggered a spiritual transition that entailed a change in their life, attitudes and behavior.
Research limitations/implications
Comparative research into religious vs nonreligious individual spirituality in the experience across various types of expats in various locations could capture the professional and cultural specificity of individual spirituality. Research is also needed to link spirituality with expat failure.
Practical implications
Catholic agencies and institutions that dispatch missionaries to dangerous locations should consider providing professional psychological assistance. Narrative interviewing could be used to enhance missionaries' cultural and professional self-awareness, to better serve the local community. Their stories of intercultural encounters could be incorporated into cross-cultural training and the ethical and spiritual formation of students and future expats.
Originality/value
This study captures a spiritual aspect of intercultural experience of under-researched expats. It offers a model of the involvement of individual spirituality in coping in mission.
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Stefan Toepler and Christian Fröhlich
The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study…
Abstract
Purpose
The growing trend towards closing the political space for civil society in authoritarian regimes has primarily targeted NGOs focused on rights-based advocacy. Drawing on a study of disability NGOs in Russia, this paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the advocacy options that nonprofit organizations have even in repressive political contexts. The authors first review the extant literature to identify common actors, types and tactics and then trace what types of advocacy Russian NGOs are engaged in and what tactics they are able to utilize.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical part of this paper is based on 20 interviews conducted among active participants in disability NGOs in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm and Nizhniy Novgorod. Despite not being a representative sample of organizations, the selection of cities and organizations was intended to reflect spatial and structural factors of the field.
Findings
The authors find that NGOs are able to pursue a broad range of advocacy activities despite a generally restrictive legal environment for civil society.
Research limitations/implications
Research on advocacy in authoritarian countries is often focused on NGOs that are primarily engaged in these activities. This has overshadowed the considerable leeway that nonprofit service providers have to engage in advocacy.
Practical implications
Service-providing NGOs should not forsake advocacy activities, even in authoritarian contexts, but can find access points in the political system and should seek to utilize their voice on behalf of their clients.
Social implications
Despite general restrictions, NGOs can still find ways to successfully secure social rights, justice and solidarity, provided they accept the supremacy of the state in social policy and appeal to the state's responsibility for the welfare of its citizens without directly questioning the overall status quo too heavily.
Originality/value
We develop a broad framework for various advocacy forms and activities and apply it to nonprofit service providers.
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Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making…
Abstract
Both the ideals of the European Union (EU) and the EU's recent political difficulties have attracted comparison with the Habsburg empire. In recent years, some of those making comparison have turned to the Austrian Jewish novelists, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who were crucial to the imaginative emergence of the Habsburg Myth. This paper analyses their writings and those of Robert Musil and Gregor von Rezzori in relation to the Habsburg Myth as a story about European unity, about Austria-Hungary as a supranational polity and about Austria-Hungary's self-proclaimed providential purpose in European affairs. It explores the dissonance between the Habsburg Myth and the EU's territorial composition and argues that the Habsburg Myth is, nonetheless, revealing about the EU's internal hierarchies and its geopolitical difficulties in relation to Russia.
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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the significance and limitations of ethical shopping in Britain in the period between the 1880s and 1914 and, in particular, the use of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the significance and limitations of ethical shopping in Britain in the period between the 1880s and 1914 and, in particular, the use of white lists as a means of encouraging consumers only to buy goods produced in satisfactory working conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
A brief survey of earlier examples of ethical shopping provides the context for a discussion of the published prospectus of the “Consumers” League’. Unpublished records of the Christian Social Union (CSU), supplemented by newspaper reports, are used to examine the rationale for white lists, their creation and effectiveness.
Findings
The paper demonstrates that, contrary to what has generally been thought, consumers’ leagues originated in Britain not the USA. The CSU was not ineffective but provided an ethical and religious rationale for consumer activism. It was also responsible for the creation of white lists in several towns and cities in Britain and promoted the concept of preferential buying. CSU activity helped shape public opinion, but sustained improvements to working conditions also required effective trade unions and government intervention.
Research limitations/implications
Relatively few CSU branch records survive and this precludes a comprehensive survey of its role in ethical shopping.
Originality/value
The British consumer movement in this period has been little studied and often dismissed. By making use of archives, particularly CSU branch records, that have generally been ignored, the paper demonstrates that ethical shopping mattered and deserves more attention. It also highlights the importance of setting this in a wider context, particularly trade unionism and co-operation.
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Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely…
Abstract
Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.
Payam Akbar and Stefan Hoffmann
The purpose of this paper is to develop and introduce the new concept of the collaborative space.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop and introduce the new concept of the collaborative space.
Design/methodology/approach
Building on an extensive overview of past research and footing on extant conceptual work, the paper chooses an explicating conceptualization approach.
Findings
The paper presents the collaborative space, which features the three bipolar dimensions, namely, the type of consumption (access vs reownership), source of resource (company-owned vs consumer-owned) and the type of compensation (with vs without monetary fee). These dimensions open up multiple areas of the collaborative space, including the pseudo sharing economy, sharing ecology, redistribution markets and redistribution communities.
Research limitations/implications
The paper shows blind spots in the literature as well as the need to consider the consumption context to outline directions for future research.
Practical implications
For managers, this paper develops a foundation for entering, exploring and exploiting the collaborative space along the stages acquisition, distribution, consumption and compensation.
Social implications
Collaborative consumption is associated with community-building, resource saving and sustainability. The conceptualization of the collaborative spaces provides different options to enable more sustainable consumption and raise social exchange between consumers.
Originality/value
So far, an overarching framework that reveals similarities and differences of business models that are associated with collaborative consumption and the sharing economy is missing. This paper develops this framework, which is labelled the collaborative space.
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Niek Bebelaar, Robin Christian Braggaar, Catharina Marianne Kleijwegt, Roeland Willem Erik Meulmeester, Gina Michailidou, Nebras Salheb, Stefan van der Spek, Noortje Vaissier and Edward Verbree
The purpose of this paper is to provide local environmental information to raise community’s environmental awareness, as a cornerstone to improve the quality of the built…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide local environmental information to raise community’s environmental awareness, as a cornerstone to improve the quality of the built environment. Next to that, it provides environmental information to professionals and academia in the fields of urbanism and urban microclimate, making it available for reuse.
Design/methodology/approach
The wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor platforms deployed at fixed locations in the urban environment, measuring temperature, humidity, noise and air quality. Measurements are transferred to a server via long range wide area network (LoRaWAN). Data are also processed and publicly disseminated via the server. The WSN is made interactive as to increase user involvement, i.e. people who pass by a physical sensor in the city can interact with the sensor platform and request specific environmental data in near real time.
Findings
Microclimate phenomena such as temperature, humidity and air quality can be successfully measured with a WSN. Noise measurements are less suitable to send over LoRaWAN due to high temporal variations.
Research limitations/implications
Further testing and development of the sensor modules is needed to ensure consistent measurements and data quality.
Practical implications
Due to time and budget limitations for the project group, it was not possible to gather reliable data for noise and air quality. Therefore, conclusions on the effect of the measurements on the built environment cannot currently be drawn.
Originality/value
An autonomously working low-cost low-energy WSN gathering near real-time environmental data is successfully deployed. Ensuring data quality of the measurement results is subject for upcoming research.
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