Emergence and Spread of ‘Unconferences’ as a New Temporary Organizational Form

Extant research mostly looks at the process of how temporary organizations proliferate within a single organization field. This study examines temporary organizations that emerge in one organizational field and are then introduced into other organizational fields. We argue that when this occurs, organizers must contend with the illegitimacy threat posed by temporary organizational forms that have long been institutionalized in the other fields. Organizers must decide whether they should accept the threat and retain the original form of the temporary organization, or whether they should modify the new temporary organizational form in order to make it more acceptable to audiences in other organizational fields. We argue that organizers will use legitimacy claims from the organizational field in which the temporary organization first emerged to mitigate the threat of illegitimacy. We further argue that the effectiveness of this strategy will depend on similarity in norms and beliefs between these fields: The more similar the organizational fields the more persuasive are the legitimacy claims, and the easier it is for the organizers to retain the form as it was first created; the more dissimilar are the organizational fields when it comes to norms and beliefs the harder it is for organizers to persuasively use these legitimacy claims, and the more organizers will have to modify the temporary organizational form to take account of audience expectations. We examine this using the case of the so called “unconferences”: an alternative conference form that emerged within the software development community at the start of the millennium in conjunction with the Web 2.0 movement. Our data comprises of 228 distinct unconferences between 2004 – when the unconference was first launched, and 2015. We examine the influence of organizational field dissimilarity of unconferences from the original field where it was first held, on the extent to which the pure unconference format is retained. We show that as adopters of the new form move away from the original organizational field, they are more likely to modify the original unconference form

A question of (mis)alignment: Innovation mandates and absorptive capacity routines

Research suggests that effective R&D requires the right combination ofinward-looking and outward-looking absorptive capacity routines. However, we do not have an adequate understanding of how these routines influence innovative output in R&D units with different mandates.In this paper, we argue that adopting an absorptive capacity routine would positively or negatively influence the R&D subsidiary’s innovative output, depending on whether the routine is aligned or misaligned with the subsidiary’s innovation mandate to ‘exploit’ existing knowledge or ‘explore’ new knowledge. We test this using data collected from a global packaged-software firm with 14 international R&D subsidiaries that implemented six major absorptive capacity routines in the period 2000-2010. Our research provides new insights for both scholars and practitioners in R&D management, by showing that balancing of absorptive capacity routines should be considered in light of innovation mandates of subsidiaries as well as the firm.Our analysis also provides insights on why decision-makers may still adopt misaligned routines

Blame it on Hollywood: The Influence of Films on Paris as Product Location

This paper explores the way location myths conveyed through Hollywood movies influence consumer expectations, by looking at how the city of Paris is represented in motion pictures. We develop measures of the location image of Paris in a sample of Hollywood movies released between 1985 and 2011. These are used to examine the images of Paris held by American consumers who have never directly experienced the location. Our results show that Hollywood movies project specific location images and myths of Paris. More specifically, we show that these images fall into two distinct stereotypic patterns and are widely shared by consumers. Individuals who seek information on location from popular culture are shown to embrace and reproduce Paris myths. The study concludes that the cultural industries influence the cognitive consumption of location through the production and dissemination of meaning, via stories and fueled by perpetual myth making

Resonant Diffraction Radiation from an Ultrarelativistic Particle Moving Close to a Tilted Grating

A simple model for calculating the diffraction radiation characteristics from an ultrarelativistic charged particle moving close to a tilted ideally conducting strip is developed. Resonant diffraction radiation (RDR) is treated as a superposition of the radiation fields for periodically spaced strips. The RDR characteristics have been calculated as a function of the number of grating elements, tilted angle, and initial particle energy. An analogy with both the resonant transition radiation in absorbing medium and the parametric X-ray radiation is noted.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, RevTe

Electronic transport through nuclear-spin-polarization-induced quantum wire

Electron transport in a new low-dimensional structure - the nuclear spin polarization induced quantum wire (NSPI QW) is theoretically studied. In the proposed system the local nuclear spin polarization creates the effective hyperfine field which confines the electrons with the spins opposite to the hyperfine field to the regions of maximal nuclear spin polarization. The influence of the nuclear spin relaxation and diffusion on the electron energy spectrum and on the conductance of the quantum wire is calculated and the experimental feasibility is discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Guiding principles for peptide nanotechnology through directed discovery

Life's diverse molecular functions are largely based on only a small number of highly conserved building blocks-the twenty canonical amino acids. These building blocks are chemically simple, but when they are organized in three-dimensional structures of tremendous complexity, new properties emerge. This review explores recent efforts in the directed discovery of functional nanoscale systems and materials based on these same amino acids, but that are not guided by copying or editing biological systems. The review summarises insights obtained using three complementary approaches of searching the sequence space to explore sequence-structure relationships for assembly, reactivity and complexation, namely: (i) strategic editing of short peptide sequences; (ii) computational approaches to predicting and comparing assembly behaviours; (iii) dynamic peptide libraries that explore the free energy landscape. These approaches give rise to guiding principles on controlling order/disorder, complexation and reactivity by peptide sequence design

Electron spin relaxation by nuclei in semiconductor quantum dots

We have studied theoretically the electron spin relaxation in semiconductor quantum dots via interaction with nuclear spins. The relaxation is shown to be determined by three processes: (i) -- the precession of the electron spin in the hyperfine field of the frozen fluctuation of the nuclear spins; (ii) -- the precession of the nuclear spins in the hyperfine field of the electron; and (iii) -- the precession of the nuclear spin in the dipole field of its nuclear neighbors. In external magnetic fields the relaxation of electron spins directed along the magnetic field is suppressed. Electron spins directed transverse to the magnetic field relax completely in a time on the order of the precession period of its spin in the field of the frozen fluctuation of the nuclear spins. Comparison with experiment shows that the hyperfine interaction with nuclei may be the dominant mechanism of electron spin relaxation in quantum dots

Optical pumping NMR in the compensated semiconductor InP:Fe

The optical pumping NMR effect in the compensated semiconductor InP:Fe has been investigated in terms of the dependences of photon energy (E_p), helicity (sigma+-), and exposure time (tau_L) of infrared lights. The {31}P and {115}In signal enhancements show large sigma+- asymmetries and anomalous oscillations as a function of E_p. We find that (i) the oscillation period as a function of E_p is similar for {31}P and {115}In and almost field independent in spite of significant reduction of the enhancement in higher fields. (ii) A characteristic time for buildup of the {31}P polarization under the light exposure shows strong E_p-dependence, but is almost independent of sigma+-. (iii) The buildup times for {31}P and {115}In are of the same order (10^3 s), although the spin-lattice relaxation times (T_1) are different by more than three orders of magnitude between them. The results are discussed in terms of (1) discrete energy spectra due to donor-acceptor pairs (DAPs) in compensated semiconductors, and (2) interplay between {31}P and dipolar ordered indium nuclei, which are optically induced.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Physical Review