New frontiers in democratic self-management

This book chapter develops an argument on the way legal forms for co-operative enterprise are designed to meet the needs of members. In developing a critique of the investor-owned firm, the role of legal membership and its link to legal identity in establishing a co-operative enterprise are evaluated. The purpose is to distinguish conceptually between common ownership, joint ownership and co-ownership, and their potential influence on future co-operative development. It is argued that the mediation of business purpose and social identity through the choice of legal form influences the power and wealth sharing arrangements of a co-operative enterprise. Furthermore, the emergence of social enterprise has challenged co-operative models based on common ownership by a single stakeholder to produce hybrid models that express co-operative values and principles in new ways

What Would Paulo Freire Think of Blackboard: Critical Pedagogy in an Age of Online Learning

The rise of online learning in higher education presents a unique challenge for educators committed critical pedagogy. While Paulo Freire formulated his ideas about teaching in a pre-Internet era, he did not object to the use of technology in the teaching-learning process. He urged educators to think critically about the use of technology and to find new ways of seeking and creating knowledge with the aid of technology. This article offers a brief review of the development of online learning. Then with the assistance of Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology, I analyze the practice of online teaching and learning through the lens of several Freirean concepts. Then I conclude with a series of problem-posing which guide our exploration moving forward

An Integrated View of Data: Application of Knowledge Modeling to Data Management

Data management has become an important challenge. Good data management requires an effective approach to collecting, storing, and accessing data across the enterprise. In this paper, a knowledge modeling approach to data management is introduced with an emphasis on data requirements analysis. A knowledge model can provide a high-level view of organizational data by specifying the structure and relationships of the knowledge contents used in business processes. The proposed knowledge modeling approach is business process oriented and decision oriented. The description of the knowledge contents in the model is based on ontological specification. The model is comprised of five elements: work product, work unit, producer, stage, and modeling language. The elements of the model and the modeling process are elaborated. The proposed modeling approach is applied to the vessel chartering process in a shipping company to demonstrate its application in real-world practices

Software is Scholarship

This Article provides the first systematic account and justification of software applications as works of scholarship. Software is scholarship to the extent that software functionality is derived from scholarly research, software is used as a means to develop scholarship, or software is used as a medium to communicate scholarly ideas. Software applications are superior to articles and books for communicating scholarly ideas because software is not limited by the constraints of traditional written works. Software can communicate using a wide variety of textual components, graphical elements, and programmable interactivity that significantly enhance the ability to communicate scholarly concepts, arguments, and findings. This Article identifies four methods for software applications to enhance scholarly communication: app-ified argumentation that provides theoretical clarity, interactive toolkits that create rich qualitative studies, data visualizations that persuade using data, and policy tech that improves the ability to enact social change. Interactive software applications can enhance research agendas in the humanities and social sciences by making traditional, prose scholarship more thorough, persuasive, and analytically precise. Due to recent innovations, developing software for scholarly purposes is accessible to those that work in the humanities. Platforms for developing software have grown so sophisticated that they no longer require creators to write code to develop powerful, data rich, and well-designed interactive applications. Scholars should accordingly use and develop software to better communicate their ideas. By providing a framework for developing software as works of scholarship, this Article contributes to the field of digital humanities. To better understand this Article’s concept of scholarly software, I apply my conceptualization of scholarly software to legal scholarship and legal technology and discuss three case studies: LegalTech toolkits, voice recognition for automated contract drafting, and court data visualizations. Law is a fertile ground for the development of scholarly software because the core of legal reasoning consists of a formalistic, computational structure that is well-expressed through programmable applications. This Article contributes to legal scholarship by identifying how it can be enhanced through the creation of software applications

Helping Systems Engineers to Include Human Values in Early Specification of Systems

The thesis is publication-based and complemented with the paper “Inclusion of human values in the specification of systems: bridging design and systems engineering” published in 2019, July, in INCOSE International Symposium, volume 29, no. 1, pp. 284-300. The purpose was to investigate ways to apply Design Thinking principles in the context of Systems Engineering to increase the attention of early specifications of systems in human values. It sought to answer the question “How to ensure that systems engineers include human values in the early specification of systems?” by introducing changes to the activities of identifying stakeholders and describing use case scenarios. These activities affect greatly the specification of systems. The overarching research methodology was a combination of case study and participatory action research (PAR). The intervention – foundational to PAR – was steered by the human-centred design process and resulted in the creation of an artefact used to perform the above-mentioned activities. The case study provided the background to implement a quasi-experiment comparing the pre-intervention specification of a system with the specification of the same system which resulted from the application of the artefact. The results of interest of the research can be summed up to, 1) the artefact – a set of two visual canvas used to identify stakeholders and describe use case scenarios, 2) the requirements generated during the intervention, and 3) the feedback provided by the participants. The research concludes that the artefact helped to better specify human values. The application of the artefact ensures visibility of it. Consequently, the number of requirements covering these values increased significantly. Moreover, besides the small number of the survey’s respondents, participants had reported the intervention and the artefact to be successful

Toward successful knowledge transfer in web-based self-service for information technology services

Web-based self-service has emerged as an important strategy for providing pre- and post-sales customer support. Yet, there is a dearth of theoretical or empirical research concerning the organisational, customer-oriented, knowledge-based, and employee-oriented factors that enable web-based self-service systems (WSS) to be successful in a competitive global marketplace. In this paper, we describe and discuss findings from the first phase of a multi-method research study designed to address this literature gap. This study explores critical success factors (CSFs) involved in the transfer of support-oriented knowledge from an information technology (IT) services firm to commercial customers when WSS are employed. Empirical data collected in a CSF study of a large multinational IT services business are used to identify twenty-six critical success factors. The findings indicate that best-in-class IT service providers are aware of a range of critical success factors in the transfer to commercial customers of resolutions and other support-oriented knowledge via WSS. However, such firms remain less certain about what is needed to support customer companies after support-oriented knowledge has initially been transferred to the customer firm.<br /

Tools and techniques for security and privacy of big data: Healthcare system as a case study

As a case study, this Master thesis will also review the state-of-the-art of security and privacy issues in big data as applied to healthcare industry