Designing Knowledge Strategies for Universities in Crazy Times

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the challenges universities have during crazy times and to show how to design knowledge strategies to navigate successfully through the changing economic landscape. Crazy times mean times of rapid and unpredictable changes in the economic environment, times of crises, and disruptive phenomena. For such kind of new realities, the deliberate strategies designed for a predictable future cannot help anymore. They should be replaced by emergent strategies, which consider a moving time coming from the future towards us. Universities are knowledge-intensive organizations, and knowledge is a strategic resource. Designing knowledge strategies and integrating them into the university business strategies becomes a new necessity. Our research is based on a conceptual analysis of time perception and strategy design for strengthening the university competitiveness in a changing environment. We make use of the known-unknown matrix and search for those generic strategies which contribute to the renewal of intellectual capital and achieving a competitive advantage in the new global market of higher education. The quest for becoming a world-class university and the pressure of the ranking systems require a special focus on designing and implementing knowledge strategies

Housing professionalism in the United Kingdom: the final curtain or a new age?

The unusually large, predominantly municipal, housing sector in the UK has provided the context for a large occupational grouping of "housing managers" that has claimed professional status. However, within the post-1945 British welfare state this professional project enjoyed limited success and social housing remained a fragile professional domain. This article explores the consequences for housing professionalism of the recent displacement of the bureau-professional "organisational settlement" by that characterising an emerging "managerial state". Managerialism constitutes a clear challenge to established forms of "professionalism", especially a weak profession such as housing management. However, professionalism is temporally and culturally plastic. Hence, the demands of managerialism, within the specific context of New Labour's quest for "community" cohesion, may be providing opportunities for a new urban network professionalism founded on claims to both generic and specific skills and also a knowledge base combining abstraction with local concreteness. The prominence in these networks of erstwhile "housing" practitioners may become the basis for a new, quite different, professional project. This argument is developed through both conceptual exploration and reference to empirical research. The latter involves reference to recent work by the authors on, first, the perception of housing employers of the changing nature and demands of "housing" work and its consequences for professionalism and, secondly, the professional project implications of the increasing prominence of neighbourhood management.</p

Editorial

Conversations about projects and project management are changing. Project Management researchers and practitioners are no longer only focused on the processes and practices, but increasingly looking for ‘some truths’ of project management (Morris, 2016) – truth that can be as likely found when considering values as much as knowledge. And what is considered to be so valuable that a new journal is needed to reveal those truths? Quite simply…a better world where humanity’s problems are alleviated through shared and publicly available innovative projects, and socially responsible project management research and practice. And what is PMRP’s role in this quest? To provide a forum where informed dialogue can occur with project management researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders.

To move ahead - the extension of a life-world

This licentiate thesis is a monography complemented with one published article: “Interactive Design – the desire for autonomous upright mobility: A longitudinal case study, Technology and Disability 19 (2007) 213-224”. My hope is that the combination of the monographic part (with its phenomenological tone, personified and situated), and the more unbarked “Technology and Disability” article (with its orientation towards the general rather than the personal aspects) will contribute to dialogues on different scientifical approaches. The overall purpose of this thesis is to develop new knowledge on child development under the conditions of SMA II. As I use a life-world phenomenological approach my first quest is to highlight and make explicit what appeared in Hanna’s life-world and how these experiences have contributed to her overall development. I also want to put forward how Hanna’s motility and mobility were supported, guided by what she expressed and strived for, in order to promote a healthy physical, psychological and social development. A special focus is on independent locomotion and how this was accomplished for Hanna. By using technology in a new way it was possible to enhance Hanna’s access to the world through the medium of her lived body, thus changing her life-world by widening her life-world horizon. The second quest of this licentiate thesis is to make this journey explicit

Problems of Social Research in Nigeria

The quest for knowledge is a germane task in an ever increasing changing world from the rear to the fore; from basic to advance and from spatial to a global village. Hence, survival in a world of such dynamism can only be tenable through positive adaptation which is a product of epistemological and ontological truths. Achieving this brings research to bear which is aimed at digging up knowledge for personal and public consumption, while seeking remedy to problems. Research as a factor of discovery and rediscovery of knowledge becomes a relevant ingredient for personal, organizational and national development. A branch of research that explores, explains and describes human behaviorisms and interactions and their consequences on human existence and activities, is the social research. Complexities of human dynamism and several other individual and structural factors often constitute several problems in the execution of the social research venture. It is in this regard that this paper seeks to identify, justify and explain most of these problems plaguing the survival and astuteness of social research and where necessary, make remedial suggestions. The paper would depend on concept-mapping in explaining units of knowledge that make up this work; provide for a theoretical orientation via Paul Romer’s New Growth Theory and as well make reference to relevant theoretical and empirical literatures for adequate clarification, comprehension and action sought where needed

The Force Awakens: the Individualistic and Contemporary Heroine

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is not the hero’s journey as George Lucas previously conceptualized it. Instead, the story line of The Force Awakens leads me to believe that it creates a new iteration of the hero myth. It follows the contemporary heroine’s journey while conforming to the essential construct of the hero monomyth. First, the contemporary heroine’s journey focuses primarily on the greater good and secondarily on her own personal journey, which is the converse of the traditional hero’s journey. Second, the contemporary heroine’s self is awakened and called to adventure in a different way than the traditional hero. Third, the traditional hero receives guidance on his journey, while the contemporary heroine pushes ahead alone, striving to save her society from despair

Characterization and computation of restless bandit marginal productivity indices

The Whittle index [P. Whittle (1988). Restless bandits: Activity allocation in a changing world. J. Appl. Probab. 25A, 287-298] yields a practical scheduling rule for the versatile yet intractable multi-armed restless bandit problem, involving the optimal dynamic priority allocation to multiple stochastic projects, modeled as restless bandits, i.e., binary-action (active/passive) (semi-) Markov decision processes. A growing body of evidence shows that such a rule is nearly optimal in a wide variety of applications, which raises the need to efficiently compute the Whittle index and more general marginal productivity index (MPI) extensions in large-scale models. For such a purpose, this paper extends to restless bandits the parametric linear programming (LP) approach deployed in [J. Niño-Mora. A (2/3)$n^{3}$ fast-pivoting algorithm for the Gittins index and optimal stopping of a Markov chain, INFORMS J. Comp., in press], which yielded a fast Gittins-index algorithm. Yet the extension is not straightforward, as the MPI is only defined for the limited range of socalled indexable bandits, which motivates the quest for methods to establish indexability. This paper furnishes algorithmic and analytical tools to realize the potential of MPI policies in largescale applications, presenting the following contributions: (i) a complete algorithmic characterization of indexability, for which two block implementations are given; and (ii) more importantly, new analytical conditions for indexability — termed LP-indexability — that leverage knowledge on the structure of optimal policies in particular models, under which the MPI is computed faster by the adaptive-greedy algorithm previously introduced by the author under the more stringent PCL-indexability conditions, for which a new fast-pivoting block implementation is given. The paper further reports on a computational study, measuring the runtime performance of the algorithms, and assessing by a simulation study the high prevalence of indexability and PCL-indexability.

The effect of Future Quest Transition Workshops on high school students

Includes bibliographical references

Decolonizing the Notion of Mental illness and Healing in Nigeria, West Africa

Mental illness or socially incongruent behaviours and normalcy are conceptualized in radically different ways by culturally diverse groups. These perspectives are informed by paradigms and cosmologies that situate the human person in storied relation to the self, the constructed world and others. However, an epistemological imbalance privileges Western-inspired conceptions of mental health over non-Western or indigenous perspectives. This hegemonic situation serves to propagate a single story about mental health and distress, thereby casting alternative traditions in inferior light. Bolstered by critical psychology’s critique of mainstream psychology and its decidedly postcolonial and social constructivist themes, I address this situation by interrogating the assumptions behind the modernist beliefs of universality and superiority that undergird orthodox clinical praxis. By exploring irreducibly diverse and rich impressions of mental healing, this submission espouses a socioparticipatory and multicultural clinical praxis, challenges positivistic ideas of therapeutic neutrality in Western psychotherapy, presents ‘evidence’ for the effectiveness of indigenous healing traditions and the notional integrity of culturebound ‘illnesses’, and recommends the legitimacy of attendant alleviative practices. Finally, I advocate a re-imagination of the therapeutic landscape – a rethink that addresses the marginalization of indigenous healing systems, and promotes a polyvocality of healing praxis in the Nigerian mental health terrai