Business events and friendship: Leveraging the sociable legacies

© 2014 Cognizant Comm. Corp. Business events are celebrated for their contributions to community and industry. They are understood to be shared social contexts in which people meet to advance knowledge, sell products, and network. Less celebrated and, arguably, less understood is that business events provide a context for the development of friendships. In 2011 an online survey was conducted with the delegates of five international business events held in Sydney, Australia in the period 2009-2011. The survey was designed to investigate business legacies of the events (such as investment opportunities, research collaborations) rather than sociable legacies. However, a surprising number of references to friendship were made in the "additional comments" sections of the questionnaire. Reflecting on this finding, this article argues that friendships forged at business events contribute to, respectively: the well-being of delegates, association membership levels, conference attendance, retention of personnel in the profession, successful research and professional collaborations, and creativity and innovation in the sector. Business event planners can maximize opportunities for sociable outcomes among delegates by designing warm and inviting event spaces that facilitate interaction, and by providing social space for the development of relationships, optimal conditions for sociability, and opportunities for play to stimulate creativity and build community

Transitioning to a Personalized Learning Environment Leveraging One-to-One Devices

Today’s educational blueprint is evolving from the traditional teacher-directed model into a student-driven curriculum approach. Specifically, education is experiencing a paradigm shift from the long-established one-size-fits-all model to a customized learning process known as personalized learning. Personalized learning aims at engaging students in more relevant and rigorous learning and turns them into co-designers as the curriculum becomes tailored to their individual learning needs, skills, and interests. Additionally, when coupled with educational technology, personalized learning will provide the teacher with the tools to individualize, differentiate, and accommodate multiple student learning styles and preferences. Indeed, as personalized learning increases in popularity the need to effectively implement the new instructional model also increases. Moreover, it is imperative to understand how the roles of teachers and administrators change as schools’ transition from a traditional learning paradigm to a personalized learning approach influenced by one-to-one devices, and how these changes affect implementation. Therefore, the aim of this research was to explore the perceptions of administrators and teachers as they transition from a traditional learning paradigm to a personalized learning model influenced by one-to-one devices

I'm a celebrity, get me into politics: the political celebrity and the celebrity politician

This chapter discusses the political celebrity and the celebrity politician

The Impact Of Regulatory Stringency On The Foreign Direct Investment Of Global Pharmaceutical Firms

Cross-national regulatory differences in safety, price and intellectual property protection are an inherent feature of the operating environment of the global pharmaceutical firm. Institutional, transaction cost and more recent ‘race to the bottom’ theories assume that regulation represents a cost to the firm; therefore firms ‘vote with their feet’ and avoid investment in stringently regulated markets. However, a cross-national empirical study of the FDI levels of 20 firms across 19 markets reveals that regulatory stringency is not related to FDI, and price control stringency is positively related to FDI, when controlling for other market factors. National governments are not powerless in games of regulatory arbitrage, and have in fact developed adaptive strategies to maintain high regulatory standards and FDI simultaneously. Furthermore, global firms weigh various factors in their investment decisions, and suffer from classic optimisation problems, including information asymmetries and bounded rationality, which prevent total ‘regulatory optimisation’. The implications for existing theories of international business, globalisation and regulation are discussed.international business, foreign direct investment (FDI), globalisation, regulation, responses to regulation, political economy

The human right to water and sanitation: Using natural language processing to uncover patterns in academic publishing

After years of advocacy and international negotiation, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to officially recognize a stand-alone human right to water and sanitation on 28 July 2010. Since, academic scholarship has continued to grow in an effort to understand the implications of the codification of this human right. Yet, with this growth, it has become impractical if not impossible for scholars to keep up with the advancement of academic knowledge or to make sense of it in a systematic way. In short, to date, we know very little about the trends in the literature as they have unfolded over the past thirty years and the topics to which scholars have devoted significant attention within the broader field, particularly over time. This is an important area of inquiry, as developing a comprehensive understanding of where prior literature has focused and where it appears to be going offers scholars an opportunity to identify areas in need of refinement and/or increased attention. Given the practicalities of reading thousands of research papers each year, this project utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to identify topics and trends in academic literature on the human right to water and sanitation (HRtWS). NLP provides the opportunity to digest large quantities of text data through machine learning, culminating with descriptive information on trends and topics in the field since 1990. The results of this exercise show that the research related to the human right to water and sanitation has grown exponentially, particularly over the last decade, illustrates the multidisciplinary nature of the literature, and demonstrates the diversity of topics in the field

Rural consumers' adoption of CRM in a developing country context

This paper illustrates how understanding consumer preferences through market research may enhance CRM adoption among the rural customers of a developing country like Bangladesh. It presents the case of Community Information Centre (CIC) established by Grameenphone, a company owned by Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications company and Grameen Bank, the Nobel prize winning micro credit organisation in the rural settings of Bangladesh. The paper shows that CIC is an innovative way of building and maintaining customer relationships and technological interface with the financially constrained consumers in a poor developing economy like Bangladesh

How Platform Affordances and Information Ecosystems Shape Digital Counterpublics

This study analyzes how platform affordances, their appropriation by movement actors, and these actors’ leveraging of information ecosystems—in combination—helped form a digital counterpublic during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on public communication data sent by more than 300 Telegram channels and group chats affiliated with the Querdenken movement over a 2-year period, and combines automated and manual text classification with network analysis. The study demonstrates how Telegram afforded connective and collective action in distinct ways that reflected the movement’s organizational structure and aims, as well as the impact of individual information-sharing on the process of movement-building itself. Accounting for time-dependent dynamics, the study also found that different parts of the counterpublic latched onto and sustained distinct information ecosystems to articulate their claims and mobilize contentious action

Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice

Theorizing WPA expertise as problem-oriented, stakeholder-inclusive practice, we apply the twenty-first-century paradigm of transdisciplinarity to a campus WID Initiative to read and argue that data-driven research capturing transdisciplinary WPA methods in action will allow us to better understand, represent, and leverage rhetoric-composition/writing studies’ disciplinary expertise in twenty-first-century higher education

Business Modelling as the Configuration of Control and Value

This paper provides a theoretically grounded framework for designing and analysing business models for ICT services, products and systems. It critically revisits the most topical literature on business modelling, as well as general strategic management, industrial organisation and network economics literature. Business model design is interpreted as the (re)configuration of control parameters on the one hand, and value parameters on the other hand, within a particular innovation system

Co-creation in networks of SMEs: a conceptual model of the co-creation process

publishedVersio