Open Education and Bildung: Ideas, Assumptions, and Their Vigour to Transform Higher Education

We are witnessing tremendous changes and transformations in learning and education due to the advancement of digital technologies. This pertains not only to various forms of e-learning but also to more recent sorts of open online learning environments such as MOOCs or P2P-University. As Bell (2011) has argued, learning theories fall short of explaining change in learning activities as these theories do not consider the complexity of technology, social network, and individual activities. Therefore, this paper revisits the German concept of Bildung (Formation) to get a better understanding of the ongoing changes in learning environments, especially in informal Higher Education

Liquid retail:cultural perspectives on marketplace transformation

Inspired by Bauman’s notion of ‘liquidity’, we problematize the socio-cultural dynamics taking place in contemporary retail. The notion of liquid retail enables reserachers to untangle marketplace transformation and to highlight developments centred around markets and market actors that jointly transform each other. This introduction underlines, as a point of departure, recent developments in retailing that have been marked by the corrosion of fixity and boundaries. We provide a short synopsis of marketplace transformation and liquid retail, from a socio-cultural perspective, and summarize the papers included in this special issue

The New 'Hidden Abode': Reflections on Value and Labour in the New Economy

This paper engages with the works of Autonomist Marxists, such as Hardt, Negri and Arvidsson, who have argued that the so-called ‘new economy’, which is characterized by a new importance of immaterial labour, knowledge and processes of consumption, gives rise to a new law of value and changed labour relations in what they call the ‘social factory’. While we see a lot of value in this emerging body of literature – particularly in terms of its potential for critiquing relatively narrow debates in critical organization and management studies – this paper critiques the highly optimistic analyses put forward by Hardt, Negri and Arvidsson, especially with regard to their claims for a new autonomy and freedom of labour emerging out of the ‘new economy’. We counter these claims by showing how in contemporary capitalism, despite the discourses of autonomy and freedom, labour is continuously subjected to control, measurement and governance

Filling some black holes: modeling the connection between urbanization, infrastructure, and global service intensity in 112 metropolitan regions across the world

This empirical article combines insights from previous research on the level of knowledge-intensive service in metropolitan areas with the aim to develop an understanding of the spatial structure of the global service economy. We use a stepwise regression model with GaWC’s measure of globalized service provisioning as the dependent variable and a range of variables focusing on population, infrastructure, urban primacy, and national regulation as independent variables. The discussion of the results focuses on model parameters as well as the meaning of outliers, and is used to explore some avenues for future research

Bus rapid transit system : a study of sustainable land-use transformation, urban density and economic impacts

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has shown significant growth in recent years, particularly in developing countries because of its cost-effectiveness. However, empirical evidence on land-use and economic impacts of BRT is limited. This study measures the sustainable land-use transformation, urban density, and economic impact witnessed after the development of BRT. Spatial analysis shows that BRT has the potential to simulate land-use transformation, however, the extent of transformation is context-dependent. Population density has increased from 268 persons/acre to 299 persons/acre. Besides land-use transformations, inward investments and extension of the labor market were also evident in areas served by BRT. The amount almost equal to US $140 million of inward investment was detected after implementation of BRT, which ultimately brought around 800 new employees from remote areas. An efficient land-use policy, streamlining these land-use transformations, and inward investments, can benefit from developing compact and sustainable neighborhoods. This study will help in the performance evaluation of BRT systems in developing countries for sustainable development

Semi-automatic semantic enrichment of raw sensor data

One of the more recent sources of large volumes of generated data is sensor devices, where dedicated sensing equipment is used to monitor events and happenings in a wide range of domains, including monitoring human biometrics. In recent trials to examine the effects that key moments in movies have on the human body, we fitted fitted with a number of biometric sensor devices and monitored them as they watched a range of dierent movies in groups. The purpose of these experiments was to examine the correlation between humans' highlights in movies as observed from biometric sensors, and highlights in the same movies as identified by our automatic movie analysis techniques. However,the problem with this type of experiment is that both the analysis of the video stream and the sensor data readings are not directly usable in their raw form because of the sheer volume of low-level data values generated both from the sensors and from the movie analysis. This work describes the semi-automated enrichment of both video analysis and sensor data and the mechanism used to query the data in both centralised environments, and in a peer-to-peer architecture when the number of sensor devices grows to large numbers. We present and validate a scalable means of semi-automating the semantic enrichment of sensor data, thereby providing a means of large-scale sensor management