Rethinking political process in technological change : socio-technical configurations and frames

The political process perspective has done much to enhance our understanding of the organizational effects of technological change as a negotiated outcome reflecting the political and power dynamics of the adopting context. In so doing, we suggest, technology has been marginalized as an analytical category and the problem of change agency, although better understood, remains largely unresolved. This article addresses these issues through the articulation of the concepts of socio-technical configurations and technological frames and explores their utility in understanding change agency through an action research project. The project sought a novel form of \u27socio-technology\u27 transfer, taking ideas and concepts of \u27human-centered\u27 manufacturing embodied in team-based cellular manufacture from a European context into three firms in Australia.<br /

Reviews

Reviews of International and comparative industrial relations, Tatau Tatau - one big union altogether, Remedy for present evils: a history of the New Zealand Public Service Association from 1890, Sexual harassment in the workplace, Employee selection, Legislating for workplace hazards in New Zealand: overseas experience and our present and future needs, People and enterprises - human behaviour in New Zealand organisations and From school to unemployment? The labour market for young peopl

The Impact of HD Cooling on the Formation of the First Stars

We use numerical simulations to investigate the importance of HD formation and cooling on the first generation of metal-free stars in a LCDM cosmology. We have implemented and tested non-equilibrium HD chemistry in an adaptive mesh refinement simulation code and applied it to two situations. (1) It is first applied to the formation of 10^5 - 10^6 Msun halos which form in the absence of any ionizing source. We show, in agreement with previous work, that HD cooling is of only marginal importance for most halos; however, we find that for the lowest mass halos, HD cooling can equal or surpass the H2 cooling rate. This leads to a population of stars formed in halos with effective HD cooling that are less massive by a factor of ~6 compared to halos dominated by H2 cooling. (2) In the second part of the paper, we ionize the halos in order to explore the impact of HD cooling in the presence of an ample population of free electrons. This leads to cooler temperatures (due to the electron- catalyzed production of H2) and somewhat lower resulting proto-stellar mass. Adding HD chemistry lowers the temperature further, to the level of the CMB. We find that HD cooling dominates over H2 cooling in the density range 10^2 cm^-3 to 10^6 cm^-3, but above this density, the temperature rises and H2 cooling dominates again. Because of this, the accretion rate on to the protostar is almost the same as in the H2 case (at least for accreted masses below 50-100 Msun), therefore we argue that HD cooling in ionized halos will probably not result in a population of significantly lower mass stars.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, with referee suggestions; ApJ accepte

Model reduction of homogeneous-in-the-state bilinear systems with input constraints

Accepted versio

Measurement of the Production Rate of Charm Quark Pairs from Gluons in Hadronic Z0Z^{0} Decays

The rate of secondary charm-quark-pair production has been measured in 4.4 million hadronic Z0 decays collected by OPAL. By selecting events with three jets and tagging charmed hadrons in the gluon jet candidate using leptons and charged D* mesons, the average number of secondary charm-quark pairs per hadronic event is found to be (3.20+-0.21+-0.38)x10-2

Lost in translation? Building science and innovation city strategies in Australia and the UK

With the development of the ‘knowledge economy' in many advanced industrial nations, there has been a growing interest in regional innovation systems and the role that universities might play in these. One result has been the demarcation by government actors of specific spaces for the creation, transfer and transformation of knowledge. Such spaces have been given various names, such as ‘smart regions', ‘science cities' and ‘innovation corridors'. Whilst the associated policy rhetoric has much in common with the earlier interest in science and technology parks there are also clear distinguishing differences. More recent policy initiatives have sought to foster industry clusters within these spaces to contribute to economic development and diversification and link this to economic, social and cultural regeneration. This paper explores policy-driven creation of ‘innovation areas' by focusing on two contrasting examples: Newcastle Science City in the North East of England and the Gold Coast Pacific Innovation Corridor in Queensland, Australia. The paper compares the rhetoric of university-industry-government policies with the realities

Knowledge spillovers and innovation spaces in Australia

The literature on innovation spaces stresses the importance of knowledge spill-overs, particularly local forms that explain the geographic agglomeration of clusters. Local knowledge spillovers are knowledge externalities bounded by geographic region, which foster the flow of information (Ko and Liu, 2015). This enables firms in a region access to knowledge sources and depositories, which may have unintended consequences. Knowledge is often seen as a non-rival production asset so the geographic position of firms can help create positive externalities and lead to economic gain (Zahra, 2015). More importantly, local knowledge spillovers can facilitate further innovation efforts to induce market change. This is evident in countries like Australia, which, despite its large land mass, has the majority of its major regional and urban cities clustered along the eastern coastline.In his seminal contribution to innovation policy debates in Australia, West (2001) examined how successful national innovation systems are built. He argued that Australia’s national innovation system had developed critical gaps since Fed-eration, which occurred on 1 January1901, in particular. ‘...in its ability to mobilize resources, its system for allocating investment to innovation, and– most significantly– its institutions for managing the risk of science-based innovation’ (West, 2001, p.42). His conclusion was that the nation was not in a good posi-tion to build a knowledge-based economy. From the perspective of an economist this may seem to be an incisive analysis. However, we suggest that from the knowledge spillover theory of management and organisation, it overlooks not only the historical dimension of why the Australian economy has developed in the way that it has, but also the political and symbolic dimensions that shapes how it will develop into the future. In this chapter, we seek to put the ‘political’ back into the ‘economy’, and in so doing pursue a perspective which hitherto has been poorly developed in the study of innovation and its management.We argue that innovation and associated government policy is essentially politi-cal in so far as the actors so engaged ‘exert control, influence, or power over each other’ (Lindblom, 1980, p.28) in order to pursue interests and achieve desired ends. "From introduction