Search results

Corporate campuses have been justified on many grounds, including lower operational costs, greater flexibility, stronger corporate branding and enhanced cross‐functional communication. Despite the tens of millions of dollars spent to acquire and develop them, little research exists that has systematically tested the validity of the benefits attributed to a corporate campus. This paper reports on an initial set of case studies examining one potential benefit of a corporate campus: the nature and extent of communication across organisational units. The results suggest that the amount of cross‐unit communication on a corporate campus may be less than expected. Implications for workplace and collocation strategies are discussed.

William Sims Bainbridge earned his doctorate in Sociology from Harvard University, with a dissertation based on research about the space program. He is the author of 13 books, 4 textbook-software packages, and about 200 shorter publications in information science, social science of technology, and the sociology of religion. Most recently, he is the editor of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human–Computer Interaction and author of God from the Machine (2006), Nanoconvergence (2007), and Across the Secular Abyss (2007). At the National Science Foundation since 1992, he has represented the social and behavioral sciences on five advanced technology initiatives, and represented computer science on the Nanotechnology initiative and the Human and Social Dynamics initiative. Currently, he is program director for Human-Centered Computing, after having directed the Sociology, Human Computer Interaction, Science and Engineering Informatics, and Artificial Intelligence programs.

Both environment and learning process must be planned to maximise their special contributions to managerial competence. Kolb's Experiential Learning Model provides a framework for matching each managerial competence with the training most likely to instil it. Optimally, student and teacher will join in collaborative ventures, seeking and creating a wide variety of competency‐based learning experiences.

Rapid growth and increased competition led to organisational problems in a high tech manufacturing concern in the US. A course was designed to introduce new behaviours, skills and attitudes to the management team. A combination of classroom/active participation, off‐site workshops, and on‐the‐job training was devised.

After boom days in the Industrial Revolution and 1920's West Cumberland hit hard times. Now this special development area looks for a much brighter future, with improved roads, new industrial estates and keen, reliable workers Report by Richard Brooks; photographs by Colin Porter.

A century ago, the ancestors of modern computers were largely devoted to analysis of social data, but sociology and computer science diverged, and today they need to be reunited. This conceptual chapter argues for the development of an integrated social-information science, in order to understand and develop socio-technical information systems, to explore and extend recommender and reputation systems, to establish the cultural basis for flourishing virtual worlds, and to deal with revolutionary issues concerning intellectual property rights. It suggests that three forms of human–machine collaboration will become increasingly important: (1) partnerships between humans and information technology, (2) cultures jointly created by the human mind and information technology, and (3) environments where humans and machines cooperate.

Some people assert that the tendency of modern Governments is to be too grandmotherly. They urge that people must not depend on the Government preventing them from coming to harm, and that they should be self‐reliant. This is very true, but nowadays one individual cannot be a specialist in everything. The ordinary person has to take a great many things on trust. For instance, a passenger by train is not able to inspect the engine and look at all the wheels, examine the whole length of railway, and in other ways assure himself that he and his are fairly safe from the results of the carelessness of others. On the contrary, he has to trust to the “powers that be” that they have adjusted the laws concerning responsibility in case of accident to any train that, on the average, the proper amount of care has been exercised. It is the same with weights and measures; a purchaser cannot always carry about with him a pair of scales and a set of weights to ensure his not being cheated; he has to trust to the Government and its inspector. And the Food and Drugs Acts constitute an attempt to protect people who are not in a position to protect themselves from being cheated. It has been suggested that the same principle should be extended to ensuring the proper cooking of food. The digestibility of most foods depends very largely upon the cooking, and yet how many of those who keep restaurants or roadside inns are really capable of cooking food properly? A busy man at the lunch hour and a cyclist at an inn are usually in a hurry. They have to eat the food supplied or go for some hours without any, and there ought to be some means invented to ensure the food being fit to eat. There would, of course, have to be some legal definition of “well‐done” or “under‐done” meat, and what a cup of “fresh” tea ought to be. The exact hardness of potatoes allowable by law would give rise to appeal cases, and some glaring case of an egg boiled too hard might send a landlord to prison for a month. Boarding‐houses might even be brought within the administrations of the Proper Cooking of Food Acts.

58. In addition to Government control the co‐operative societies have their own organisations for controlling the health of the cattle and improving the cleanliness and quality of the milk produced by their members. These organisations co‐operate closely with the Government Keuringsdienst van Waren (Food Control Service) and welcome the Government's efforts; they say, however, that they can do far more than the Government officials could do unaided since they are in very intimate touch with the farmers, and have behind them the power to pay the farmer a lower price for his milk or to refuse it entirely, or expel him from the Society; these possibilities have greater compelling force than the necessarily more formal official methods of procedure and the threat of legal proceedings.

Sociology of religion is the study of the relationship between religion and culture. Sociologists focus on the nature and structure of religious organizations and movements, leadership, the effect of religious commitment on individuals and social process or social change. Central to the discipline is the search for an adequate definition of religion and for a coherent explanation of the distinction between religious myth and social reality.

The Student Christian Movement (SCM) arose from the formal integration in one unit of a number of different strands of student‐run evangelical religion in British Universities(1). The Jesus Lane Sunday School in Cambridge, staffed by students, had been open since 1827. David Livingstone's visit to Cambridge in 1858 inspired the Church Missionary Union and in the same period Cambridge students began a Daily Prayer Meeting. In 1877, the students brought their various efforts together into the Cambridge Inter‐Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU). Similar movements were developing in other colleges. The first major links were created by the “Cambridge Seven”. Even at the end of the period of the “Saints” (as Wilberforce and his fellow evangelicals were known), more than three‐quarters of the men who volunteered for foreign missions were artisans, shop‐boys, labourers and apprentices(2).