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The purpose of this paper is to explore the prior knowledge perspective on e-business environments to maintain expertise by firms. The perspectives indicate the crucial of e-service innovation and emphasize the transformative learning in the model.

The model proposed in this study examines the relationships among customer empowerment, normative pressure, innovativeness, transformative learning, and performance. This study presents empirical results from benchmark services in e-markets of Taiwan. There were 225 valid samples to test the proposed model with SEM.

Customer empowerment has significant and positive effects on innovativeness and transformative learning, respectively. Normative pressure has significant and positive effects on innovativeness and transformative learning, respectively. Innovativeness has significant and positive effects on transformative learning. Transformative learning has significant and positive effects on financial, customer, and business performance, respectively. In addition, innovativeness mediates the effects of customer empowerment and normative pressure on transformative learning.

This study finds that transformative learning is a crucial role on customer performance. Firms should emphasize on transformative learning of prior market and technological knowledge to achieve customer performance.

Customer empowerment is the technological knowledge innovation of e-business environments. However, normative pressure has to implement the market knowledge orientation on e-business environments. Besides, transformative learning has the largest effect on customer performance.

This study aims to investigate the use of gamification and serious games as transformative technologies that encourage health and well-being behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the transformative value that can be created by gamified apps and serious games and the role involvement plays between transformative value and desired outcomes.

Four gamified apps/serious games were examined in the study, with data collected from N = 497 participants. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results revealed that gamified apps and serious games can create three transformative value dimensions – knowledge, distraction, and simulation – which can have direct and indirect effects on desired outcomes. Examination of competing models revealed involvement plays a mediating rather than a moderating role for gamification and serious games for well-being.

This research contributes greater understanding of how technology can be leveraged to deliver transformative gamification services. It demonstrates the multiple transformative value dimensions that can be created by gamified apps and serious games, which assist the performance of well-being behaviors and which have yet to be theorized or empirically examined. The study also establishes the mediating rather than the moderating role of involvement in gamification and serious games, as called for in the literature.

One common feature of different variants of participatory and action research is rejection of technocratic, undemocratic elements in science and inquiry, aiming to break the dominance of traditional academic views of science. These variants open up broader participation of people, and emancipate knowledge creation for the production of actionable knowledge with transformative potentials. The purpose of this chapter is to recognize and clarify a striving for knowledge democracy in these explicit or implicit democratizing ambitions and tendencies in the sense of broadening the participation of concerned parties in research and development work on open and equal terms. This recent concept, still in the process of formulation, has been proposed as a global mobilizing and unifying thinking for distributed networks and movements for participatory oriented research. The concept and movement had an initial embedding in the First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in June 2017, Cartagena, Columbia. The purpose of the chapter is to elaborate on the meaning of knowledge democracy as a vision for the participatory and action research community. Particularly I will distinguish between different orientation to knowledge democracy, and the character of the logic of a more, open, democratic and coproductive science that can be a carrier of it.

Different images of teacher knowledge and of teaching are described using the conceptual structure of Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999a), in which knowledge and practice are viewed as either formal, practical, or transformative. Instructional design (ID) represents a formal image of knowledge and frames the teacher as a problem-solver. Teachers, however, have been resistant to the use of ID. In a graduate ID course, students were given the task of drawing their own representation of the ID process. Two research questions framed the study, including How might these models be categorized? and What views of teaching were found in the models? From 13 deliveries of the course, 123 models and explanatory narratives were analyzed from students who were teachers. The course and ID model task are described. A recursive cycle of categorization and theme-building were used. Types of models included those characterized by Human Activity (51 models), Components (23), Artifacts (20), Organic (15), and Flow Charts (14). Views of teaching included Teacher-centered (47 models), Designer-centered (36 models), Co-centered (18), Learner-centered (16), and De-centered (6). Analysis revealed that for teachers ID activity is a human activity and the principal focus for design activity is teacher needs. Implications are summarized in terms of teacher knowledge and expertise, as well as limitations to our methodology.

Knowledge management (KM) approaches that ignore the principles of operations theory will achieve slow bottom‐line results if any. Many knowledge‐management programs operate under the implicit assumption that all improvements from KM‐enabled learning are equally beneficial. Because of this, organizations spread their KM investments too thin on organization‐wide initiatives that consequently do not produce near‐term business results. In this paper, we propose a knowledge‐management continuous process that first discovers where KM‐enabled learning will address a constraint to business results and then implements an appropriate intervention in the organizational learning process to accelerate the transfer and application of knowledge at the constraint.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between employees’ knowledge and organisational performance.

Using a structural equation model, feedback received from 237 blue-collar workers from multinational high-tech manufacturing enterprises in Italy was studied to understand, from a dynamic capabilities perspective, the role of soft skills in the career success of production workers.

The results of the analysis indicate a positive relationship between workers’ commitment to develop their soft skills and their career success, as well as a positive relationship between an organisation’s approach to both knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation and the prospects for career success of blue-collar workers.

The research has both theoretical and practical implications, as any efforts by researchers and practitioners to find effective ways to motivate the workforce will be likely to lead to a positive attitude towards learning and, ultimately, to improved business performance.

The originality of the paper is the focus on the personality and interpersonal attributes of workforce – blue-collar workers – and how they can affect business performance in highly innovative contexts.

This chapter critically considers two conceptions of sociological labor as they have recently been articulated in two competing visions for public sociology. I use the contrast between Ben Agger's and Michael Burawoy's recent professions of public sociology as a lens through which to critically understand the way in which the narratives produced by sociological labor govern the emergence of knowledge, which would be the basis of transformation.

In order to understand the pros and cons of an open organization regarding the flow of knowledge between firms, this paper introduces the concept of “protective capacity”. The purpose of the paper is to elaborate the concept of “protective capacity” especially in relation to absorptive capacity, by presenting a number of propositions.

Literature on mainly interfirm relationships, absorptive capacity and resources‐based theory are reviewed and combined.

Protective capacity is defined as the “capacity to sustain, or to reduce the speed of depreciation of knowledge‐based resources by preventing knowledge from being identified, imitated, and/or acquired by direct or indirect competitors”. Owing to the strong moderating factor of organizational openness, it is argued that protective capacity is inversely related to absorptive capacity. A number of propositions that can explain and moderate the inverse relationship between protective capacity and absorptive capacity are elaborated and discussed. These propositions concern organizational openness, knowledge management practices, realized and potential absorptive capacity, and dyadic relationships.

Acquiring external knowledge is a key feature of knowledge management. In order for a firm to absorb external knowledge, it is generally argued that it has to be open towards the environment. However, according to resource‐based theory, firms have to safeguard their knowledge by, for example, having a secluded organization, thereby enhancing the uncertainty associated with tacit knowledge in order to sustain their competitive advantages. Whereas numerous studies have discussed the capacity to absorb knowledge, few studies have analyzed the capacity to protect knowledge.

The paper aims to examine high school students' use of social networking to participate in teledeliberative democratic dialogue and explicates the implications of this dialogue for democratic education that is inclusive of all students.

The case study analyzes the comments of 111 high school students over ten days following what they perceived to be an injustice committed by the administration against one of their fellow classmates.

Analysis of student commentary led to the development of three categories of teledeliberative citizenship: the demagogue, the proselyte, and the egalitarian. Together, these categories serve as a spectrum of sophistication along which democratic discourse can be classified.

The primary limitation of this research is a product of the online medium in which it occurs. Though “observing” students' interactions on Web 2.0 application was beneficial for cataloguing conversations, social cues like body language and tone of voice had to be inferred.

Web 2.0 provides students with an opportunity to build a community of shared belief that crosses gender, racial, religious, and cultural divisions.

Teachers could use Web 2.0 as a forum for teledeliberative democratic dialogue in a multicultural democratic educational framework to engage students and encourage a sophisticated, active citizenship.