What use is technology if no one uses it? The psychological factors that influence technology adoption decisions in oil and gas.

What use is technology if no one uses it? This question underscores the critical interaction between people and the technology, highlighting the importance of understanding the underlying psychological factors that influence technology uptake. This study focuses on the corporate decision makers who are the ‘gatekeepers’ to the introduction of new technologies by their organizations. The offshore oil and gas industry has been characterized as reluctant to adopt new technology. Our thematic analysis of an interview study with 37 innovation technology stakeholders from this sector identified a set of six categories encompassing 15 psychological factors that influence the organizational decision-maker. The categories were labelled personality, attitudes, motivations, cognitive factors, social factors, and organizational factors set in a Psychological Technology Adoption Framework. This is the first attempt to focus exclusively on the main psychological factors that relate to this key decision maker in the adoption of new technology. With further development, this preliminary psychological technology adoption framework can be used to develop interventions that support the successful technology uptake in the oil and gas business and similar industries

What is economic personalism? A phenomenological analysis

Much like phenomenology, the philosophical movement of economic personalism has preceded its complete and clear awareness of itself as a philosophical position. This paper attempts to articulate what exactly this position is by employing realist phenomenology as its analytical tool. The organization of this paper consists of three parts. The first is a linguistic analysis of the names 'economics' and 'personalism' that attempts to arrive at a joint meaning of these terms. The second is a regressive inquiry from meaning to a priori apprehension, and this examination is aimed at making the essential nature of economic personalism perspicuous. The third presents the necessary and sufficient conditions for either conduct or a situation to quality as a object in the domain of economic personalism.economic personalism; personalism; phenomenology; economic value; moral value; social ontology; ontology of economics; philosophy of economics

What Is Business Discourse Teaching

This chapter will:; ; ; Define business discourse teaching as it will be referred to in the rest of this book;; ; ; Discuss the most important approaches that have been taken in business discourse teaching;; ; ; Give a geographical overview of how business discourse teaching has evolved around the world;; ; ; Provide a case study that illustrates one approach to business discourse teaching, alongside a set of tasks related to the business discourse classroom and a set of further readings

Digital or Diligent? Web 2.0's challenge to formal schooling

This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both 'digital kids' and 'diligent students'. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between 'going digital' and 'being diligent' are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation. At the school under study, high levels of intellectual and technological resourcing bring with them an equally high level of expectation to excel in traditional academic tasks and high-stakes assessment. The students, under constant pressure to perform well in standardised tests, need to make decisions about the extent to which they take up school-sanctioned digitally enhanced learning opportunities that do not explicitly address academic performance. The paper examines this conundrum by investigating student preparedness to engage with a new learning innovation – a student-led media centre – in the context of the traditional pedagogical culture that is relatively untouched by such digital innovation. The paper presents an analysis of findings from a survey of 481 students in the school. The survey results were subjected to quantitative regression tree modelling to flesh out how different student learning dispositions, social and technological factors influence the extent to which students engage with a specific digital learning opportunity in the form of the Web 2.0 Student Media Centre (SMC) designed to engage the senior school community in flexible digital-networked learning. What emerges from the study is that peer support, perceived ease of use and usefulness, learning goals and cognitive playfulness are significant predictors of the choices that students make to negotiate the fundamental tensions of being digital and/or diligent. In scrutinising the tensions around a digital or a diligent student identity in this way, the paper contributes new empirical evidence to understanding the problematic relationship between student-led learning using new digital media tools and formal schooling

Cognitive playfulness, creative capacity and generation 'C' learners

This paper draws on an ongoing doctoral study of student engagement with new digital media technologies in a formal schooling environment to demonstrate the importance of playfulness as a learning disposition. The study shows that cognitive playfulness mobilises productive engagement with learning innovations in the context of a traditional learning culture. Specifically, the paper discusses findings that emerge from a quantitative study into the level of student engagement with, and usage of, one chool's digital innovation in the form of a new Student Media Centre (SMC). The study analysed how different student learning dispositions influence the extent to which students engage with new digital technologies in the context of their otherwise traditional schooling. What emerges from the study is the interesting finding that cognitive playfulness, defined as 'the learner's dexterity and agility in terms of intellectual curiosity and imagination/creativity', is a key factor in predicting students' valuing of the opportunities that Web 2.0 open-source digital learning affords. In presenting an empirical validation of this finding, the paper contributes new knowledge to the problematic relationship between student-led digitally-enhanced learning and formal academic schooling

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY?

The purpose of this thesis is to explore and define the framework for a type of military development strategy that links technological decisions to strategic effects—technology strategy. This study is novel, as most approaches to technology strategy focus on producing technology as an end in itself instead of focusing on technology development and acquisition as the principal means for achieving strategic effects. By placing technology as the means and strategic effects as the ends, this study deduces an original, perhaps seminal, description of technology strategy and a framework for its formulation. Arms-racing case studies and an exploration of offense-defense theory structure this exploration and enable the observation of technology strategy’s core characteristics, which are its relationships to doctrinal innovation and organizational design, forms or templates, approaches to acquisition, and potential pitfalls. The structural components of the technology strategy concept illuminated are then arranged in a proposed taxonomy that fits within the U.S. military’s joint concept development process. Beyond the descriptive and structural components, this study also identifies notable best practices in the application of technology strategy, particularly those that an effective technology strategy should encompass—both the decisions surrounding which weapons, transportation, and information systems to invest in, and their implications, in practice, for organization and doctrine.Outstanding ThesisMajor, United States Air ForceApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Who is what and what is who: the morpho-syntax of Arabic WH

PhDThis thesis advances a micro-parametric analysis for the variation in wh-dependencies in a number of modern Arabic dialects, especially, Iraqi, Lebanese and Jordanian. It will be shown that although these dialects have much in common, there are certain differences in the strategies used in the formation of wh-questions. At a narrower level, it will also be shown that argument wh-phrases such as ‘who’ and ‘what’ in these dialects display asymmetric behaviour in the various wh-questions. In this thesis, I argue that cross-linguistic variation can only be accounted for in terms of morpho-syntactic properties of individual wh-phrases. As far as the Arabic dialects investigated here are concerned, I propose that wh-expressions such as Iraqi meno ‘who’ and Lebanese ˇsu ‘what’, unlike what has been assumed, are copular wh-phrases and, as such, have internally complex structures. It is this internal complexity, I argue, that directly affects their external syntax. To put the findings in perspective, this thesis examines the possibilities that Universal Grammar offers languages in terms of building wh-dependencies ranging from topicalisation and variable binding to relativisation and equation. The thesis, departs away, however, from mainstream approaches to cross-linguistics variation couched in the P&P framework (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995), such as LF-movement and binding, on the grounds that they are too rigid to capture the variation observed here. Instead, the thesis supports, and makes a contribution to, novel approaches to cross-linguistic variation, such as the Nanosyntax framework (Starke 2010, 2011), which take syntax to operate on (sub)-morphemic levels. Overall, the analysis has implications for the syntax of wh-constructions in general and the interaction at the morphology-syntax interface in particular