REVISTING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN BROADBAND DIFFUSION AND REGIONAL SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT: A PRIMER

As they create generative conditions for socioeconomic development ICTs and broadband technology, can be understood as an innovation kernel for system evolution. Whereas for a regional system (a local area), technological progress may at certain times be regarded as exogenous, information endowments and expected level of functionalities are not. An innovation kernel, in fact, cannot exist outside the organization of the regional/local system which it belongs to. To grow and deploy its potentials, a fertile environment capable to adapt pro-actively to the changes it produces is needed. In this paper the conceptual underpinnings of an innovation kernel are overviewed and their relationships with those conventionally addressed in regional science studies briefly discussed. Bbuilding upon the IRES research undertaken as a part of the Piedmont ICT Observatory activities, an effort is made to pinpoint the determinants and processes of regional development on which an innovation kernel would encroach. A conceptual framework is outlined which makes it possible to elicit some main relationships between ICTs, broadband and developmental processes in a regional system.

Crisis response, organizational improvisation and the dispassionate communicative genre during the 2003 French heat wave.

Ce papier examine le rôle joué par les technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC lorsque les organisations qui répondent à des crises doivent improviser à l’échelle organisationnelle. La littérature sur le management de la crise et dans le domaine des systèmes d’information ne rend pas compte de toute la complexité du phénomène d’improvisation. Nous proposons donc de mener une étude qualitative rétrospective de la canicule de 2003 en France. En suivant une démarche inductive, nous identifions le genre de communication que nous qualifions de dépassionné, développé par les administratifs autour du fax et de l’email qui a compromis leur participation à l’improvisation organisationnelle.This paper seeks to understand the role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in organizational improvisation during crisis response. The crisis management literature and the IS literature do not fully capture the complexity of improvisation and crisis response. Due to the lack of theoretical background in relation to ICT support to crisis improvisation, we conduct a retrospective qualitative analysis of the 2003 French heat wave crisis response. Going back and forth between theory and data, we identify the dispassionate communicative genre, developed by the administrative actors around emails and faxes that hindered their participating in organizational improvisation.Organizational improvisation; communicative genre; crisis response; Improvisation organisationnelle; genre de communication; réponse à la crise;

Crossing the Digital Divide: Monism, Dualism and the Reason Collective Action is Critical for Cyber Theory Production

In studying topics in cyber conflict and cyber-security governance, scholars must ask—arguably more so than has been the case with any other emergent research agenda—where the epistemological and ontological value of different methods lies. This article describes the unique, dual methodological challenges inherent in the multifaceted program on global cyber-security and asks how problematic they are for scholarly efforts to construct knowledge about digital dynamics in world affairs. I argue that any answer to this question will vary depending on how one perceives the social science enterprise. While traditional dualistic perspectives on social science imply unique challenges for researcher, a monistic perspective of Weberian objectivity does not. Regardless of one’s perspective, however, the most important steps to be taken at the level of the research program are clearly those focused on constructing the trappings of community. To this end, I outline steps that might be taken to develop a range of community-building and -supporting mechanisms that can simultaneously support a micro-foundational approach to research and expose community elements to one another. Doing this stands to better opportunities for the production of knowledge and direct researchers towards fruitful avenues whilst shortening gaps between the ivory tower and the real world

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Trust for E-Business Management

How do we develop and sustain trust? What is the process for building trust between business partners in virtual environments? Is there a significant difference between the development and sustainability of trust online or offline? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of e-business and discuss the importance of trust for ensuring effective collaboration. Secondly, we discuss the relationships between e-collaboration and trust for managing e-business. Thirdly, we suggest a framework, which may help facilitate the development and sustainability of trust in an online environment. Finally, implications for the development and sustainability of trust online, which can be used to understand the interplay among technologies, e-business and collaboration is provided. We suggest that the implications of this study are three-fold: trustworthy relationships among business partners, effective sustainable collaboration, and optimal use of ICT for supporting e-business activities

Beyond Research Ethics: Dialogues in Neuro-ICT Research

open access articleThe increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to help facilitate neuroscience adds a new level of complexity to the question of how ethical issues of such research can be identified and addressed. Current research ethics practice, based on ethics reviews by institutional review boards (IRB) and underpinned by ethical principlism, has been widely criticized. In this article, we develop an alternative way of approaching ethics in neuro-ICT research, based on discourse ethics, which implements Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) through dialogues. We draw on our work in Ethics Support, using the Human Brain Project (HBP) as empirical evidence of the viability of this approach