Search results

Post-pandemic education will be impacted by spatial and technological shockwaves, alongside other areas of society. Significant expansion of online learning will build on skills developed by educators and students in this tumultuous time, and in response to emerging challenges and structural transformations. This paper explores an oft-overlooked skill that underpins contemporary teaching, and posits that “coordination” will find its way to the centre of this new online world. The paper presents research investigating the translation of tactics for good subject coordination to an online context.

The authors reviewed academic literature that explored coordination in higher education settings, and recent grey literature identifying expected changes to post-pandemic university learning. The authors developed a survey instrument to investigate the translation of previously identified characteristics of good coordination, and tactics to achieve them, into the pandemic-driven online learning environment. Survey analysis explored the level of difficulty reported by subject coordinators for this translation online, as well as their suggestions of additional tactics or concerns.

While the low number of respondents limits these conclusions, initial analysis suggests that the identified Tactics for Coordination can be applied with relative ease to online learning environments. At the same time, the expected burgeoning of online education identified an expected increase in demand for these skills.

The authors identified a lack of literature addressing subject coordination as a key skill, or evaluating coordination tactics, as well as a lack of resources for focused skill development. This paper addresses this gap, and prompts further and urgent response.

In this article, we survey experiments that are directly related to monetary policy and central banking. We argue that experiments can also be used as a tool for central bankers for bench testing policy measures or rules. We distinguish experiments that analyze the reasons for non-neutrality of monetary policy, experiments in which subjects play the role of central bankers, experiments that analyze the role of central bank communication and its implications, experiments on the optimal implementation of monetary policy, and experiments relevant for monetary policy responses to financial crises. Finally, we mention open issues and raise new avenues for future research.

This study aims to expose the various roles that teachers and students adopt in the architecture design studio. It highlights how these roles change over time, through three distinct phases, which relate to the stages of the design project. This understanding of how roles change over the semester will guide academics in understanding how to better relate to students.

Through a series of interviews and surveys, this study utilised a modified Delphi method to establish a consensus of opinion, both within and across the three stakeholder groups of students, tutors and coordinators/lecturers. Two rounds of data collection were conducted, with “expert” perceptions of the three stakeholder roles being established.

The roles that are adopted and perceived by students, tutors and coordinators/lecturers vary over time and respond to the stages of the design project. While there is general agreement between the perceptions of students and their teachers, there are some notable differences at key times.

This research builds upon previous studies into the roles of students and their teachers in the architecture design studio. It provides a nuanced map of how roles change and how interactions happen, over the duration and through the phases, of the architecture design project.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of three virtual fashion stores using product display methods dominant by colour, visual texture and style coordination on consumers' retailer interest, retail pleasure, perception of merchandise quality, patronage intention, and purchase behaviour to provide empirically tested, actionable product display methods to visual merchandising researchers and practitioners.

The authors used mixed methods for this exploratory study, combining experimental and focus group methods to gather data. For the experiment, data were collected via a between-subjects design reflecting manipulation of three variables (i.e. colour, style coordination, visual texture). After the experiment, participants completed a self-administered online questionnaire. A segment of the participants also participated in focus group discussions of the virtual stores.

Participants who shopped in the style coordination store spent significantly more money than those who shopped in colour or visual texture stores. Participants who shopped in the colour store experienced significantly more retail pleasure and showed significantly higher patronage intention than those who shopped in the visual texture and style coordination stores; and they showed more retailer interest than subjects in the visual texture store. Retail pleasure and interest were found to mediate the link between methods of product display and patronage intention. Participants' fashion involvement moderated the relationship between fashion product display methods and retail interest.

This research is one of the first to create three virtual stores featuring product display methods dominant by colour, visual texture, and style coordination using 3D technology – a Mockshop software package. The effect of these different display methods on shoppers' reactions and responses was tested, which provided actionable results for visual merchandising practitioners, not only in the physical but also in the virtual store environment.

Expectations play a crucial role in finance, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and fiscal policy. In the last decade a rapidly increasing number of laboratory experiments have been performed to study individual expectation formation, the interactions of individual forecasting rules, and the aggregate macro behavior they co-create. The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive literature survey on laboratory experiments on expectations in macroeconomics and finance. In particular, we discuss the extent to which expectations are rational or may be described by simple forecasting heuristics, at the individual as well as the aggregate level.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to solving the complexity problem as increased complexity is a main reason why projects fail to reach their goals, and it is unclear what complexity is.

Conceptual development integrating theories of materiality, teleology, and complexity, decision-making theory, communication theory, coordination theory, and qualitative, quantitative and participatory approaches are used in this paper.

To understand complexity, it is necessary to develop a material-systemic process approach and to distinguish structured from unstructured complexity. The social actors construct a complex material-systemic process between themselves and nature to handle unwieldy outer nature. The material-systemic approach reveals how materiel life-world arenas are developed through increased complexity and specialization. Handling complexity is possible by materiality in general and structural material in special, the interplay between inner time (planning) and outer time (production), and between human subjects and an underlying coordination mechanism. It is a systematic organizational blockade that reproduces internal complexity as unstructured and incomprehensible complexity.

The practical models of organizing are tested to the highest degree in construction industry. It is a task to try and examine the models in other types of projects.

The paper offers a proposal to a theoretical solution to the complexity problem going back to the roots in Enlightenment and shows at the same time through practical models how increased complexity may be the most important productive force in future projects.

The contemporary life of an Australian academic has changed in almost every way imaginable in response to the challenges and opportunities emerging from global and national policy agendas. In this context, the subject coordinator11A subject coordinator may also be referred to as a Unit Chair, Unit Coordinator or Course Coordinator at different universities. represents the frontline of a move towards increasingly distributed forms of leading and learning. The knowledge that managing teaching responsibilities does not provide a clear route to promotion (with active research status providing a more well established path) means that academics may proactively minimise the time they spend on the discretionary tasks of leading and managing teaching well. Tasks that include adopting a proactive longer term of curriculum development, team building and teaching innovation, in addition to the more immediate needs for compliance and measurable outcomes. Research from an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) project provides evidence that despite lack of formal recognition for many of the discretionary responsibilities of subject coordination, coordinators believe they are executing their job well. This chapter discusses factors that impede discretionary academic leadership behaviours in Australian higher education and suggests strategies to empower leadership and thus improve engagement with discretionary teaching and learning responsibilities.

This paper seeks to examine two humanitarian information coordination bodies. The goals of both coordination bodies are the same, to find mechanisms for multiple organizations, engaged in humanitarian relief, to coordinate efforts around information technology and management. Despite the similarity in goals, each coordination body has taken a different path, one toward defining the problem and solution in a more technical sense and the other as defining the problem and solution as more organizational in nature.

The paper develops case studies of two coordinating bodies using qualitative methodologies.

The data suggest that coordination bodies which pursue problems requiring low levels of organizational change are more likely to have visible successes. Coordination bodies that pursue a more challenging agenda, one that aims for information management or management of information technology in ways that require organizational change, are likely to face greater challenges and experience more failures.

The paper only examines two coordination bodies at one point in time thus claims can not be made about all coordination bodies and all information coordination efforts.

In a time where coordination bodies are seen as an answer to the problem of information sharing during disasters, it is essential to gain understanding concerning the success of these efforts.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the compatibility between entrepreneurial and social attitudes. Specifically, it seeks to analyze whether subjects with a more developed economic entrepreneurial attitude exhibit a less social attitude.

The methodology integrates an economic experimental approach with a standard entrepreneurial intention questionnaire to analyze the interaction between entrepreneurial and social self‐perceptions and behavior.

There is empirical evidence that experimental entrepreneurial behavior (characterized by detecting an opportunity and accepting risk to take an economic advantage from it in laboratory experiments) reduces the incentive for social behavior. However, this effect does not appear if just self‐perceptions instead of experimental behaviors are considered.

The social attitude of entrepreneurs may be overestimated in those empirical research studies based only on data obtained from entrepreneurs' answers to hypothetical questions in a survey.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper presenting a laboratory experiment to represent the key features of entrepreneurial behavior instead of a case‐control analysis to set differences in the experimental behavior of sub‐samples of subjects defined in terms of their entrepreneurial motivation or experience.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse how different ways of organising transport and logistics activities in construction impact on efficiency. The paper scrutinises three particular transport and logistics configurations: the de-centralised coordinated configuration, the on-site coordinated configuration and the supply network coordinated configuration.

Three configurations are derived from the literature and from case studies. The efficiency of the three configurations is analysed on three levels of analysis: the construction site, the supply chain, and across supply chains and construction sites.

The paper concludes that there are possibilities to enhance efficiency on all three levels of analysis by widening the scope of coordination beyond the individual construction site.

The analysis points to efficiency potentials in applying the supply network coordinated configuration, although this configuration puts high demands on collaboration amongst the actors involved.

The paper provides illustration, and explanation, of the efficiency potentials involved in the three configurations.