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Article
Publication date: 1 October 1995

Jacob Thimor and Uri Fidelman

Finds a statistically significant relation between top‐down concept‐mapping and the right cerebral hemisphere, and between bottom‐up concept‐mapping and the right hemisphere…

237

Abstract

Finds a statistically significant relation between top‐down concept‐mapping and the right cerebral hemisphere, and between bottom‐up concept‐mapping and the right hemisphere. Correlates scores on concept‐mapping with scores on hemispheric tests, and compares the scores of the subjects on hemispheric tests with the preferable style of concept‐mapping. Concludes that top‐down concept‐mapping, the right hemisphere, and Frege’s logic are mutually related. Similarly, bottom‐up concept‐mapping, the left hemisphere, and Russell’s logic are mutually related.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 24 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 9 August 2012

Matthew Birnbaum, Kim Okahara and Mallory Warner

This chapter examines the challenges of developing and implementing a new national evaluation approach in a complex library funding program. The approach shifts a prior…

Abstract

This chapter examines the challenges of developing and implementing a new national evaluation approach in a complex library funding program. The approach shifts a prior outcome-based evaluation legacy using logic models to one relying on nonlinear logic mapping. The new approach is explored by studying the Measuring Success initiative, launched in March 2011 for the largest funded library services program in the United States, the Institute for Museum and Library Services formula-based Grants to States program. The chapter explores the relative benefits of nonlinear logic maps and emphasizes the importance of scaling evaluation from individual projects toward clusters of similar library services and activities. The introduction of this new evaluation approach required a new conceptual frame, drawing on diffusion, strategic planning, and other current evaluation theories. The new approach can be widely generalized to many library services, although its focus is on a uniform interorganizational social network embedded in service delivery. The chapter offers a new evaluation perspective for library service professionals by moving from narrow methodological concerns involving measurement to broader administrative issues including diffusion of library use, effective integration of systematic data into program planning and management, and strengthening multi-stakeholder communication.

Article
Publication date: 10 May 2022

Ahmad Abras and Kelum Jayasinghe

This paper examines the historical evolvement of competing institutional logics (i.e. religion, profession, state, market and community) underpinning Islamic accounting…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper examines the historical evolvement of competing institutional logics (i.e. religion, profession, state, market and community) underpinning Islamic accounting standardisation projects and power relations between internal actors representing these logics.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper adopts a case-study approach and analyses two Islamic accounting standardisation projects implemented at the national and international levels. Documentary review and semi-structured interviews are used for data collection. Analysis is informed by the “Institutional Logics Perspective” and Bourdieu's notion of “power as capital in a field”.

Findings

Research findings illustrate how some local actors pre-dispose themselves in promoting strict compliance to IFRS, while others endeavour to ensure compliance to “Islamic Sharia requirements” in financial reporting. In this power dynamic, there is an ongoing “constructive resistance” actively exerted by the latter group against the former, preserving the existence of religion-based reporting demands in Islamic accounting standardisation approaches. The paper also highlights chronological “dynamic” accounts that explain the evolvement of institutional logics prevailing in these projects over different historical stages at both national and international levels.

Originality/value

This paper's findings contrast and challenge the existing assumption that the “epistemic community” promoting IFRS agenda always faces “passive responses” from local actors. Moreover, the paper's offering of a dynamic view to institutional logic mapping extends the previously used “static analyses” of logics prevailing in Islamic accounting standardisation projects.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 36 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 March 2020

Mahmud Al Masum and Lee D. Parker

While the world-wide adoption of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) aims to eliminate differences in national accounting standards between countries, the…

Abstract

Purpose

While the world-wide adoption of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) aims to eliminate differences in national accounting standards between countries, the socio-political institutions surrounding financial reporting practices remain localised. This paper aims to penetrate and reveal the manner in which local national context, stakeholder intentions and financial reporting practices can moderate the compliance with IFRS in a developing country.

Design/methodology/approach

An interview-based qualitative research framework was used to analyse the experience and attitudes of accountants, auditors and financial reporting regulators during a passage of accounting reform initiatives.

Findings

This paper provides a critical analysis of the financial reporting practices of a developing country that has ostensibly implemented accounting reforms prescribed by the World Bank. It has revealed the key firm- and field-level logics that are experienced and managed by regulators and corporate managers in their approaches to financial reporting and accountability. The World Bank-led accounting reform can be constrained by a complex mix of institutional logics originating from market and corporate structures, networks of institutionalised family and political relationships, professional and regulatory structure and resourcing limitations and cultural business conventions. This paper provides evidence of firm- and field-level logics that contest and influence the emergence of a financial reporting oversight body and lead to highly variable compliance with international accounting standards.

Originality/value

This paper aims to extend our knowledge beyond broad national-level elements of institutional orders. It presents a more penetrating examination of the existence and contestation of logics originating from various local and global actors and interests. It presents a theoretical mapping of institutional logics, which operate in international and local settings and also encompass firm- and field-level imperatives. Any effort to understand and improve accounting practices of a developing country need to consider the power, contestation and influence of multiple logics operating in its institutional environment.

Details

Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, vol. 17 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1176-6093

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 August 2014

Nikos Houssos, Kostas Stamatis, Panagiotis Koutsourakis, Sarantos Kapidakis, Emmanouel Garoufallou and Alexandros Koulouris

This paper aims to propose a toolset that enables individual digital collections owners to satisfy the requirements of aggregators even in cases where their IT and software…

530

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to propose a toolset that enables individual digital collections owners to satisfy the requirements of aggregators even in cases where their IT and software infrastructure is limited and does not support them inherently. Managers of repositories/digital collections face the challenge of exposing their data via Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to multiple aggregators and conforming to their possibly differing requirements, for example on output metadata schemas and selective harvesting.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors developed a software server that is able to wrap existing systems or even metadata records in plain files as OAI-PMH sources. They analysed the functionality of OAI-PMH data providers in a flow of discrete steps and used a software library to modularise the software for these steps so that the whole process can be easily customised to the needs of each pair of OAI-PMH data provider and service provider. The developed server includes a mechanism for the implementation of schema mappings using an XML specification that can be defined by non-IT personnel, for example metadata experts. The server has been applied in various real-life use cases, in particular for providing content to Europeana.

Findings

It has been concluded through real-life use cases that it is indeed possible and feasible in practice to expose metadata records of digital collections via OAI-PMH even when the data sources do not support the required protocols and standards. Even advanced OAI-PMH features like selective harvesting can be supported. Mappings between input and output schemas in many practical cases can be implemented entirely or to a large extent as XML specifications by metadata experts instead of software developers.

Practical implications

Exposing data via OAI-PMH to aggregators like Europeana is made feasible/easier for digital collections owners, even when their software infrastructure does not inherently support the required protocols and standards.

Originality/value

The approach is original and applicable in practice to diverse technology environments, effectively addressing the indisputable fact of the heterogeneity of software and systems used to implement digital repositories and collections worldwide.

Book part
Publication date: 12 August 2009

John W. Mohr and Brooke Neely

The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York…

Abstract

The work of Michel Foucault is taken as inspiration for a study of the organizational field of asylums, prisons, orphanages, and other carceral organizations operating in New York City in 1888. Foucault argues that institutional power is organized into dually ordered system of truth and power. Using text data describing the clients and institutional technologies (organizational “power signatures”) of 168 organizations, we apply structural equivalence methods to unpack speech activity, showing that as Foucault suggests, there may be dually ordered sub-domains of truth and power that help define the underlying logic of this institutional field.

Details

Institutions and Ideology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-867-0

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 9 August 2012

Abstract

Details

Advances in Librarianship
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-060-4

Book part
Publication date: 31 October 2014

Michael J. Thompson

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those…

Abstract

Purpose

To defend the thesis that the base-superstructure hypothesis central to Marxist theory is also central paradigm of the tradition of Critical Theory. This is in opposition to those who see this hypothesis as determinist and eliminating the possibilities for the autonomy of social action. In doing so, it is able to retard and atrophy the critical capacities of subjects.

Design/methodology/approach

Emphasis on the return to a structural-functionalist understanding of social processes that places this version of Critical Theory against the more domesticated forms that consider “discourse ethics” and an “ethic of recognition” as the normative research program for Critical Theory. Also, an analysis of the purpose and logic of functional arguments and their relation to Marx’s concept of “determination” is undertaken.

Findings

The essence of Critical Theory hinges upon the ways that social structures are able to deform and shape structures of consciousness of modern subjects to predispose them to forms of domination and to view the prevailing hierarchical structures of extractive domination as legitimate in some basic sense.

Research limitations/implications

The foundations of Critical Theory need to be rooted in a renewed understanding of the relation between social structure and forms of consciousness. This means a move beyond theories of social practices into the realm of social epistemology as well as the mechanisms of consciousness and their relation to ideology.

Originality/value

Few analyses of the relation between the base and the superstructure or material organization of society and the social-epistemological layer of consciousness delineate the mechanisms involved in shaping consciousness. I undertake an analysis that utilizes insights from the philosophy of mind such as the theory of intentionality as well as the sociological approach to values through Parsons.

Details

Mediations of Social Life in the 21st Century
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-222-7

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 24 October 2022

Joanne Jin Zhang, Charles Baden-Fuller and Jing Zhang

This study aims to explore how entrepreneurial firms' networking logics may change under different types of perceived uncertainty. The arrival of new knowledge from the…

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore how entrepreneurial firms' networking logics may change under different types of perceived uncertainty. The arrival of new knowledge from the entrepreneurial firm's network may alter the perceived technology and market uncertainty that in turn determines how the firm adopts or combines the two opposing logics of causation and effectuation. Focusing on the roles of external advisors recruited by the firms, the study probes the details of the cyclical process and the mechanism through which networking logics are altered.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study the authors conducted a 3-year longitudinal multiple case study of 12 United Kingdom (UK) high-tech start-ups from prefounding to A-round funding with 54 semistructured interviews and meeting observations.

Findings

The knowledge of external advisors with distinct experience often reshapes the entrepreneurial firm's perceptions of uncertainty, leading to logics change in network development. The authors identify two types of knowledge brought by external advisors and discover how these can influence three networking logic pathways under different levels of technology and market uncertainty.

Originality/value

The study is one of the first to map the paths of changing logics along with different types of uncertainty in the context of entrepreneurial network development. The study unpacks one of the key mechanisms of networking logic changes: the knowledge and expertise of those advisors recruited by the entrepreneurial firms. The process model of changing logics contributes to the effectuation literature and entrepreneurial network research.

Details

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, vol. 28 no. 9
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1355-2554

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 12 June 2023

Diane Yendol-Hoppey and Eva Garin

The study aims to present a logic map linking the Professional Development School (PDS) Nine Essentials as a PDS theory of action and offer an analysis of dissertations that…

Abstract

Purpose

The study aims to present a logic map linking the Professional Development School (PDS) Nine Essentials as a PDS theory of action and offer an analysis of dissertations that compare outcomes of learning in PDS and non-PDS contexts.

Design/methodology/approach

For this current study, the authors identified 25 of the 210 dissertations from a larger study that used a comparison methodology to provide a window into how learning in PDS and non-PDS settings may differ. In reviewing these comparison studies, the authors identified a set of clustered themes, as well as a variety of comparison constructs and measurements researchers used to determine the impact of PDS.

Findings

Five themes emerged including (1) the experience of learning to teach in a PDS setting vs. a non-PDS; (2) the experience of teaching in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (3) teacher candidate quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (4) teacher quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; (5) school leader quality in a PDS vs. non-PDS; and (6) K-12 student learning in PDS vs. non-PDS.

Research limitations/implications

Limitations of this study include the complications related to comparison, logic-related fallacies and the complexity of capturing simultaneous renewal.

Originality/value

In the 30th year of PDS work, the study utilizes a theory of action comprised of linking the PDS Nine Essentials to situate the comparison dissertation analysis of outcomes in PDS and non-PDS contexts suggesting challenges and possibilities and perhaps a direction for new research questions.

Details

School-University Partnerships, vol. 16 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1935-7125

Keywords

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