Why Do You Control? The Concept of Control Purpose and Its Implications for IS Project Control Research

Existing IS project control research primarily draws on agency theory to conceptualize control, relating control closely to aligning behaviors of self-interested controllees with organizational objectives. Recent studies in neighboring disciplines, however, suggest that the agency view of control is too narrow to fully understand control activities. Informed by these studies as well as drawing on stewardship and coordination theory, we introduce the concept of control purpose to the IS literature. We define this concept as the intentions underlying the controller’s control activities, and distinguish between appropriation- and coordination-oriented controls. To evaluate the control purpose concept, we conduct a secondary analysis of 21 IS project control case studies. Results show that, despite their stated agency focus, most studies report on controls addressing both appropriation concerns and coordination requirements. On this basis, we discuss two potential research areas, knowledge management and control dynamics, where the control purpose concept can offer novel insights

In for a Penny, or: If You Disapprove of Investment Migration, Why Do You Approve of High-Skilled Migration?

While many argue investment-based criteria for immigration are wrong or at least problematic, skill-based criteria remain relatively uncontroversial. This is normatively inconsistent. This article assesses three prominent normative objections to investment-based selection criteria for immigrants: that they wrongfully discriminate between prospective immigrants that they are unfair, and that they undermine political equality among citizens. It argues that either skill-based criteria are equally susceptible to these objections, or that investment-based criteria are equally shielded from them. Indeed, in some ways investment-based criteria are less normatively problematic than skill-based criteria. Given this analysis, the resistance to investment-based migration criteria, but not to skill-based criteria, is inconsistent

Why you do not adore you in Hungarian

This paper provides an overview of the pronominal coding of local coreference relations in Hungarian. In Hungarian, unlike in English, personal pronouns do not normally take local antecedents even if favourable pragmatic conditions are available. The paper argues that complex forms of the reflexive anaphor are used for the coding of local coreference, and they outcompete, as it were, personal pronouns in this function

Why Do You Go to University? Outcomes Associated With Student Beliefs About the Purposes of a University Education

Students enter the realm of higher education with a wide variety of beliefs about the purposes of attending university, which often relate to or reveal their various motivations for pursuing a post-secondary education. Research demonstrates that some student motivations align more fully with intrinsic factors, such as the love of learning or quest for excellence, while other student motivations align with extrinsic factors, such as vocational preparedness and monetary incentives (Vallerand et al., 1989). Using a Bourdieusienne lens, this study sought to place these student motivations in the larger sociocultural context and argue for greater opportunities for democratic equity in post-secondary environments. Relying on Self-Determination Theory, the study investigated the relationship between student academic motivations and longitudinal academic performance at a four-year, research oriented university in the United States. More importantly, the study sought to determine if institutional interventions, specifically incoming student orientation and a first-year experience (FYE) course, were valuable in helping align student motivations with the central values of higher education. Using the Academic Motivation Scale for College (AMS-C) across two years, the study employed a Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) and Latent Transition Analysis (LTA) to extract several profiles or “types” of student motivation and examined developmental variability of these profiles across time. Students who shifted from a more controlled to a more autonomous motivational profile in connection with institutional intervention demonstrated the highest levels of first-year academic performance and retention. However, these results diminished during the second academic year. Implications for practice suggest the importance of providing students with a values-based intervention to enhance autonomy-oriented academic motivation and to do so in a manner that sustains this enhancement throughout the academic career

COMM 1311: Fundamentals of Speech Communication

This OER packet contains the course materials for COMM 1311: Fundamentals of Speech Communication that introduce you to why do we/I need to take a public speaking course. The answer is also always the same. “Because it is required.” However, you the reader, and us as the authors/editors, know that this doesn’t answer the question. The real answer can be complicated, but this author/editor believes that the skills gained by public speaking will help you in any field, despite whether or not you end up working in a field that requires public speaking.https://digitalcommons.pvamu.edu/pv-open-education-resources/1009/thumbnail.jp

ON | OFF : risks and rewards of the anytime-anywhere internet

Are you constantly online? Or are you offline sometimes? Are you offline if you are not interacting with your connected devices? Or if no data about you is being collected? Do you check Instagram and Twitter during dinner? Do you turn off your smartphone at night? Do you check work emails on vacation? Do you feel you have to disconnect regularly–to relax, to concentrate, or to protect your privacy? Or do you feel more relaxed when constantly connected because your loved ones, a work emergency, or the news are always at your fingertips? Why are some people–even within networked societies–still completely offline given the tremendous opportunities of the Internet? And what does it even mean to be online or offline in the age of hyper-connectivity? In ON |OFF, Sarah Genner assesses the risks and rewards of the anytime-anywhere Internet, focusing on digital divides, social relationships, physical and mental health, and data privacy. She discusses implications for a variety of decision-makers in the world of work, in education, in families, and in politics. The author deconstructs the online/offline dichotomy and suggests the ON | OFF scale as a new theoretical framework for researchers and practitioners

“Why archive?” and Other Important Questions Asked by Occupiers

As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement began to take shape in Zuccotti Park—also known as Liberty Square—in New York City, an archives working group formed as a collective interested in preserving the physical and digital documents created by activists in the movement. Members of the Archives Working Group (AWG) were faced with a unique set of challenges, as well as the opportunity to address these challenges in an independent, non-hierarchical, non-institutional setting. Consensus-based decision-making drove the actions of the group, but competing visions also needed to be reconciled. Some of the most common questions about the role and function of archives required explanation, both within and beyond the working group. The desire and need to interact with the archives’ creators was integral to the establishment of the OWS AWG's collection. Managing relationships with any set of living donors is inherently complicated, and the occupiers we found ourselves working with represented a dynamic group of content creators and contributors. Activists ask a lot of questions. By definition activists are challenging the status quo. As members of the AWG, we were asked a lot of very valid questions including: “What is an archive? Is there a difference between art and archives?” “What are you collecting?” “Who will have access to what you are collecting?” “Where is this stuff going to be kept?” “Are you trying to collect all the archives produced in the movement?” “Why collect this?” and “Why not this?” “What do archivists do and why?” “Why should archives matter to people in the movement?” These questions and how we answered them serve as the foundation for this chapter. We will elaborate on our answers to activists’ questions and put forth an analysis of archival theory as related to some of the questions with especially complex implications. The formation of a digital archive also brought up some issues that are beyond those most relevant to the discussion of management of and access to analog archives. Part of this essay is dedicated to the ways in which we addressed these particular concerns. We will conclude with lessons learned in the process of creating a collection of physical and digital archives coming out of Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012

DATUM in Action

This collaborative research data management planning project (hereafter the RDMP project) sought to help a collaborative group of researchers working on an EU FP7 staff exchange project (hereafter the EU project) to define and implement good research data management practice by developing an appropriate DMP and supporting systems and evaluating their initial implementation. The aim was to "improve practice on the ground" through more effective and appropriate systems, tools/solutions and guidance in managing research data. The EU project (MATSIQEL - (Models for Ageing and Technological Solutions For Improving and Enhancing the Quality of Life), funded under the Marie Curie International Research Staff Exchange Scheme, is accumulating expertise for the mathematical and computer modelling of ageing processes with the aim of developing models which can be implemented in technological solutions (e.g. monitors, telecare, recreational games) for improving and enhancing quality of life.1 Marie Curie projects do not fund research per se, so the EU project has no resources to fund commercial tools for research data management. Lead by Professor Maia Angelova, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences (SCEIS) at Northumbria University, it comprises six work packages involving researchers at Northumbria and in Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico and South Africa. The RDMP project focused on one of its work packages (WP4 Technological Solutions and Implementation) with some reference to another work package lead by the same person at Northumbria University (WP5 Quality of Life). The RDMP project‟s innovation was less about the choice of platform/system, as it began with existing standard office technology, and more about how this can be effectively deployed in a collaborative scenario to provide a fit-for-purpose solution with useful and usable support and guidance. It built on the success of the Datum for Health project by taking it a stage further, moving from a solely health discipline to an interdisciplinary context of health, social care and mathematical/computer modelling, and from a Postgraduate Research Student context to an academic researcher context, with potential to reach beyond the University boundaries. In addition, since the EU project is re-using data from elsewhere as well as creating its own data; a wide range of RDM issues were addressed. The RDMP project assessed the transferability of the DATUM materials and the tailored DATUM DMP

Environmental Education in the Public Sphere: Comparing Practice with Psychosocial Determinants of Behavior and Societal Change

Environmental education of the general public is widely practiced by a variety of types of organizations. Dedicated environmental groups, nature centers, zoos, parks, and other entities work on issues ranging from local threats to air, water, and habitat to global problems such as climate change and deforestation. A great deal of those efforts focus largely on providing information and raising awareness. Behavioral research and change models, however, suggest other factors are important in order to effect change on an individual, regional, or societal level. An analysis of environmental education in practice, examining methods and materials in use, showed the degree to which there were alignments between the content and psychosocial determinants of change, as well as how actions related to change theories. This mixed-methods study of groups doing environmental education in the public sphere compared their practices with the factors shown to help predict pro-environmental behavior, why people change their actions and habits. Through this survey research and multiple case study, increased knowledge and understanding can help inform future efforts at change on critical local, national, and world environmental problems. It can also lead to further research into environmental education, using behavior and change theories

Monitoring and the Risk Governance of Repository Development and Staged Closure:Exploratory Engagement Activity in Three European Countries.

This report is the product of research activity within the EC Seventh Framework Programme “Monitoring Developments for Safe Repository Operation and Staged Closure” (MoDeRn) Project. This project aims to further develop understanding of the role of monitoring in staged implementation of geological disposal to a level of description that is closer to the actual implementation of monitoring. It focuses on monitoring conducted to confirm the basis of the long term safety case and on monitoring conducted to inform on options available to manage the stepwise disposal process from construction to closure (including e.g. the option of waste retrieval). This report investigates the potential of citizen stakeholder engagement in the identification of monitoring objectives and the development of monitoring strategies for geological disposal of high level waste (HLW) or spent nuclear fuel (SNF). It builds on an earlier MoDeRn report describing monitoring the safe disposal of radioactive waste as a socio-technical activity (Bergmans, Elam, Simmons and Sundqvist 2012)