Levels of Multiplexity in Entrepreneur's Networks: Implications for Dynamism and Value Creation

© 2016 by De Gruyter. Relationships and networks are important to how entrepreneurs create value. However, many aspects about relationships and networks remain poorly understood because their characteristics are often reduced to one-dimensional variables or dichotomous measures. This paper unpacks the concept of multiplexity and proposes a hierarchy of four different levels (social, relational, strategic, and closed). Each level is associated with a different level of dynamism which governs how rapidly entrepreneurs can alter their network. The hierarchy of multiplexity and associated levels of dynamism, have implications regarding different value creation processes that are associated with these network conditions

When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time

Intergovermental policy integration and poverty eradication in a developmental state: the case of the PGDP and Amathole IDP in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

The post-apartheid South African government inherited an economy characterised by a dichotomy between well developed and affluent whites and the underdeveloped and impoverished African blacks. This dichotomy was manifest in sharp divisions with regard to access to decent housing, health, education and transport just to mention a few, thus reflecting poverty, as a widespread phenomenon. Since 1994, the South African government has made major efforts aimed at addressing poverty, however, that poverty persists, despite the efforts, cannot be contested. One of the major challenges has been the disjuncture between policies at various spheres of government. This study examines the articulation between two spheres of government focusing on the Provincial Growth and Development Programme of the Eastern Cape and the integrated development plan of Amathole District Municipality. Currently not much research has been carried out in this area. This study illuminates various analytical and practical issues and hopefully provides a useful basis for improvement in the government’s declared commitment to poverty eradication. Triangulating qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, the study aimed to investigate the integration of the Provincial Growth and Development Program and the Integrated Development Plan and the contribution of these policy instruments towards poverty eradication in the Eastern Cape. A further aim was to analyse community participation in and knowledge of the PGDP and Amathole IDP and how they have been effective. This was an empirically grounded study, based on the use of a combination of data collection methods, analysis of primary and secondary sources of data including government documents, administering in-depth interviews to a range of informants within government, the community and a questionnaire survey of a sample drawn from members of the community in the Amatole District Municipality and, finally the use of Amatole district as a case study which was the major unit of analysis. The findings from the study revealed that there is a plethora of challenges confronting policy integration, often resulting in institutional paralysis and inertia. Such challenges vary from lack of capacity in local government, lack of political will, policy shifts, a plethora of legislation, competing if not conflicting priorities, nonattendance of Intergovernmental forums, lack of cooperation by sector departments, contradictions between legislation, policy inconsistencies, conceptual imprecision and conceptual blurring. Moreover, the neo-liberal ideology informing development planning not only in the province, but in South Africa as a whole as propagated by western main stream economists leaves benefits indeed merely ‘trickling down’ to the poor and not ‘pouring’, such that the transition in South Africa has been reduced to an ‘elite transition’. The research results confirm, as observed elsewhere, that experiences of several developing countries over the past decades do not appear to support the trickle down hypothesis. On the other hand, community participation is also stifled by lack of participatory spaces, poor participatory methodologies and structures which make participation difficult while the poor remain trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. Real participation goes beyond ‘passive development objects’ and ‘recipients of development’ to ensuring that people are empowered to become ‘masters of their own development’ within the context of a participatory democratic developmental state. There is need for not only a thorough examination of the political use of the ‘local’, the ‘poor’ but even the very conceptualisation of participation and its methodologies for effective community participation to be realised.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Management and Commerce, 200

Intergovermental policy integration and poverty eradication in a developmental state: the case of the PGDP and Amathole IDP in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

The post-apartheid South African government inherited an economy characterised by a dichotomy between well developed and affluent whites and the underdeveloped and impoverished African blacks. This dichotomy was manifest in sharp divisions with regard to access to decent housing, health, education and transport just to mention a few, thus reflecting poverty, as a widespread phenomenon. Since 1994, the South African government has made major efforts aimed at addressing poverty, however, that poverty persists, despite the efforts, cannot be contested. One of the major challenges has been the disjuncture between policies at various spheres of government. This study examines the articulation between two spheres of government focusing on the Provincial Growth and Development Programme of the Eastern Cape and the integrated development plan of Amathole District Municipality. Currently not much research has been carried out in this area. This study illuminates various analytical and practical issues and hopefully provides a useful basis for improvement in the government’s declared commitment to poverty eradication. Triangulating qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, the study aimed to investigate the integration of the Provincial Growth and Development Program and the Integrated Development Plan and the contribution of these policy instruments towards poverty eradication in the Eastern Cape. A further aim was to analyse community participation in and knowledge of the PGDP and Amathole IDP and how they have been effective. This was an empirically grounded study, based on the use of a combination of data collection methods, analysis of primary and secondary sources of data including government documents, administering in-depth interviews to a range of informants within government, the community and a questionnaire survey of a sample drawn from members of the community in the Amatole District Municipality and, finally the use of Amatole district as a case study which was the major unit of analysis. The findings from the study revealed that there is a plethora of challenges confronting policy integration, often resulting in institutional paralysis and inertia. Such challenges vary from lack of capacity in local government, lack of political will, policy shifts, a plethora of legislation, competing if not conflicting priorities, nonattendance of Intergovernmental forums, lack of cooperation by sector departments, contradictions between legislation, policy inconsistencies, conceptual imprecision and conceptual blurring. Moreover, the neo-liberal ideology informing development planning not only in the province, but in South Africa as a whole as propagated by western main stream economists leaves benefits indeed merely ‘trickling down’ to the poor and not ‘pouring’, such that the transition in South Africa has been reduced to an ‘elite transition’. The research results confirm, as observed elsewhere, that experiences of several developing countries over the past decades do not appear to support the trickle down hypothesis. On the other hand, community participation is also stifled by lack of participatory spaces, poor participatory methodologies and structures which make participation difficult while the poor remain trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty. Real participation goes beyond ‘passive development objects’ and ‘recipients of development’ to ensuring that people are empowered to become ‘masters of their own development’ within the context of a participatory democratic developmental state. There is need for not only a thorough examination of the political use of the ‘local’, the ‘poor’ but even the very conceptualisation of participation and its methodologies for effective community participation to be realised.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Management and Commerce, 200

Community-Engaged Development of a Parent-Child Book Reading Wise Intervention

Children living in communities with high rates of poverty experience significant detriment to their academic skills and social, emotional, and behavioral health. Though a range of evidence-based interventions exist that aim to reduce these disparities, they face substantial barriers (e.g., related to financial and human resources, opportunity cost to target families, variable fit across the diverse populations in low-income households). In contrast, wise interventions use psychologically precise pathways to produce small, recursive changes that result in significant benefits. As such, they represent a resource efficient strategy with the potential for considerable impact with contextual adaptation. The current study utilized social marketing research strategies in the context of an academic-community partnership to design, iteratively refine, and examine an emotion-enhanced children’s book – or picture book infused with opportunities to label and explain character emotions – as a wise intervention based in parent-child book reading, an especially warm and nurturing form of parent-child interaction. We employed the Social Marketing Assessment and Response Tool (SMART Model) to guide intervention development and evaluation. In SMART Phases 2-4 (Formative Research), end-users (n=14) completed surveys on basic demographic information, mental health, current beliefs about joint book reading and ongoing practices, and perspectives and response styles to children’s emotions. We then engaged participants in focus groups and interviews to obtain insights regarding the perceived need and preferred characteristics of the proposed intervention. Feedback informed the design of prototype components (i.e., book characters and storylines) that we presented to both new and returning end-users (n=10) for feedback in SMART Phase 5 (Development) pre-testing. Stakeholders (i.e., end-users) again completed surveys on basic demographic information, mental health, current beliefs about joint book reading and ongoing practices, and perspectives and response styles to children’s emotions, and participated in interviews to provide additional feedback. Results from Phase 5 pre-testing informed iterative refinement, and a completed intervention was evaluated by a broad audience via an online survey (n=31) to examine acceptability, usability, and perceived effectiveness

Conceptualising a Personal Capacity Development Framework for Senior Management Service in the Department of Defence

Military Science: EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY (EDUTECH

Feminist Methodologies

This open access book gives insights into feminist methodologies in theory and practice. By foregrounding the experiential and embodied nature of doing feminist research, this book offers valuable tools for feminist research as a continuous praxis. Emerging from a rich collective learning process, the collection offers in-depth reflections on how feminists shape research questions, understand positionality, share research results beyond academe and produce feminist intersectional knowledges. This book reveals how the authors navigate theory and practice, candidly exploring the difficulty of producing knowledge on the edge of academia and activism. From different points of view, places and disciplinary positions, artistic and creative experiments and collaborations, the book provides a multi-layered analysis. This book will be a valuable resource and asset to early career researchers and interdisciplinary feminist students who can learn more about the doing of feminist research from realistic, accessible, and practical methodological tools and knowledge