The role of film production policy in stimulating a Flemish identity (1964–2002)

The role of the official film production policy in stimulating a Flemish identity forms the central research question of this study. This research project examines the period that starts in 1964, when a selective and culturally inspired support mechanism for feature films was introduced in Flanders. Subsequently, the support system ran until 2002, when it was structurally renewed. This study makes use of original archival research, policy documents analysis, expert interviews, qualitative press documents analysis, and a quantitative content and qualitative textual analysis of films. The research shows that throughout the course of the second half of the 20th century, there was an evolution in Flemish film policy towards more pluralistic and less essentialist and explicit national discourses, in which national elements, nevertheless, retained an important place

Corporate Social Responsibility on the International Area.Present Developments in Romania and Bulgaria

Corporate Social Responsibility is no longer an object of novelty in literature or the business sector. The practices in this matter have became a new area of activity expansion and a new way that companies use to strengthen their image, consumer appreciation and even employees motivation. The present paper proposes an analyses of the literature, a comparative study and a summary of the international organizations view on the matter.Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Theory Development, Country report

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

Envisioning and evolving: Future evolution of the concept and the practice of service design

ervice Design is evolving from an emerging field, breaking new ground in the design and service research areas, to a more mature stage, developing a set of fundamental concepts, methods and principles that can provide the foundation for its further significance and impact in both research and practice. This paper reflects on the roots and recent evolution of service design in terms of fundamental concepts, methods and outcomes, taking into account the papers in the Envisioning and Evolving track. It considers how the growing interrelation with close fields of service research is introducing useful “contaminations” and reports how the Service perspective is revealing its potential to bring life to technical and entrenched systems. It goes on to argue that design should aim to bring services to life to prove its real, distinguishing value and contribution

Design thinking support: information systems versus reasoning

Numerous attempts have been made to conceive and implement appropriate information systems to support architectural designers in their creative design thinking processes. These information systems aim at providing support in very diverse ways: enabling designers to make diverse kinds of visual representations of a design, enabling them to make complex calculations and simulations which take into account numerous relevant parameters in the design context, providing them with loads of information and knowledge from all over the world, and so forth. Notwithstanding the continued efforts to develop these information systems, they still fail to provide essential support in the core creative activities of architectural designers. In order to understand why an appropriately effective support from information systems is so hard to realize, we started to look into the nature of design thinking and on how reasoning processes are at play in this design thinking. This investigation suggests that creative designing rests on a cyclic combination of abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning processes. Because traditional information systems typically target only one of these reasoning processes at a time, this could explain the limited applicability and usefulness of these systems. As research in information technology is increasingly targeting the combination of these reasoning modes, improvements may be within reach for design thinking support by information systems