Examining the Personal and Institutional Determinants of Research Productivity in Hospitality and Tourism Management

The transition toward a post-capitalist knowledge-oriented economy has resulted in an increasingly competitive academic environment, where the success of faculty is dependent on their research productivity. This study examines the personal and institutional determinants of the quantity and quality of the research productivity of hospitality and tourism management faculty in US institutions. A survey of 98 faculty found that a different set of determinants impact the quantity and quality aspects of research productivity. Also, institutional determinants were found to play a larger role, indicating the need for administrators to strive for a culture that is supportive of and an infrastructure that is conducive to their faculty’s research success. The authors use the field of hospitality and tourism management as a case study to develop a holistic and cohesive framework for knowledge worker productivity that can guide the evaluation, hiring, and development of researchers

Evaluation and characterization of the methane-carbon dioxide decomposition reaction

A program was conducted to evaluate and characterize the carbon dioxide-methane (CO2-CH4) decomposition reaction, i.e., CO2 + CH4 = 2C + 2H2O. The primary objective was to determine the feasibility of applying this reaction at low temperatures as a technique for recovering the oxygen (O2) remaining in the CO2 which exits mixed with CH4 from a Sabatier CO2 reduction subsystem (as part of an air revitalization system of a manned spacecraft). A test unit was designed, fabricated, and assembled for characterizing the performance of various catalysts for the reaction and ultraviolet activation of the CH4 and CO2. The reactor included in the test unit was designed to have sufficient capacity to evaluate catalyst charges of up to 76 g (0.17 lb). The test stand contained the necessary instrumentation and controls to obtain the data required to characterize the performance of the catalysts and sensitizers tested: flow control and measurement, temperature control and measurement, product and inlet gas analysis, and pressure measurement. A product assurance program was performed implementing the concepts of quality control and safety into the program effort

Big data-savvy teams’ skills, big data-driven actions and business performance

Prior studies on big data analytics have emphasized the importance of specific big data skills and capabilities for organizational success; however, they have largely neglected to investigate the use of cross-functional teams’ skills and its links to the role played by relevant data-driven actions and business performance. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and on the data collected from big data experts working in global agrifood networks, we examine the links between the use of big data-savvy (BDS) teams’ skills, big data-driven (BDD) actions and business performance. BDS teams depend on multidisciplinary skills (e.g., computing, mathematics, statistics, machine learning, and business domain knowledge) that help them to turn their traditional business operations into modern data-driven insights (e.g., knowing real time price changes and customer preferences), leading to BDD actions that enhance business performance. Our results, raised from structural equation modelling, indicate that BDS teams' skills that produce valuable insights are the key determinants for BDD actions, which ultimately contribute to business performance. We further demonstrate that those organisations that emphasise BDD actions perform better compared to those that do not focus on such applications and relevant insights

The Early Days of Research on Carbonic Anhydrase

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73862/1/j.1749-6632.1984.tb12310.x.pd

The development of absorptive capacity-based innovation in a construction SME

Traditionally, construction has been a transaction-oriented industry. However, it is changing from the design-bid-build process into a business based on innovation capability and performance management, in which contracts are awarded on the basis of factors such as knowledge, intellectual capital and skills. This change presents a challenge to construction-sector SMEs with scarce resources, which must find ways to innovate based on those attributes to ensure their future competitiveness. This paper explores how dynamic capability, using an absorptive capacity framework in response to these challenges, has been developed in a construction-based SME. The paper also contributes to the literature on absorptive capacity and innovation by showing how the construct can be operationalized within an organization. The company studied formed a Knowledge Transfer Partnership using action research over a two-year period with a local university. The aim was to increase its absorptive capacity and hence its ability to meet the changing market challenges. The findings show that absorptive capacity can be operationalized into a change management approach for improving capability-based competitiveness. Moreover, it is important for absorptive capacity constructs and language to be contextualized within a given organizational setting (as in the case of the construction-based SME in the present study)

Knowledge transfer within strategic partnerships: the case of HRM in the Brazilian motor industry supply chain

This paper investigates knowledge transfer (KT) of human resource management (HRM) across strategic partnerships in the Brazilian automotive industry, and the contextual factors impacting on KT within the supply chain. Case-study research in automotive companies and suppliers in Brazil is used to illustrate how in automotive industries, relationships with suppliers have traditionally been viewed as close, strategic partnerships, but over time, there has been a move towards more attenuated, supply chains, involving a shift towards more remote suppliers for basic components, and arms length relationships with them. In turn, this has impacted on how knowledge on HR has been transferred from manufacturers to suppliers. Both strategic partnerships and KT have been affected by internal drives towards cost cutting and talent retention, and external factors such as global competition through cheap imports, legislation, taxes, and unions. Evidence on the sometimes contradictory attitudes towards KT contributes towards the broader literatures on international HRM and KT in emerging economies, while the gradual unwinding of relationships has implications for policy and practice

Investigating knowledge management factors affecting Chinese ICT firms performance: An integrated KM framework

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in the Journal of Information Systems Management, 28(1), 19 - 29, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10580530.2011.536107.This article sets out to investigate the critical factors of Knowledge Management (KM) which are considered to have an impact on the performance of Chinese information and communication technology (ICT) firms. This study confirms that the cultural environment of an enterprise is central to its success in the context of China. It shows that a collaborated, trusted, and learning environment within ICT firms will have a positive impact on their KM performance

An examination of the effects of self-regulatory focus on the perception of the media richness: the case of email

Communication is a key element in organizations’ business success. The media richness theory and the channel expansion theory are two of the most influential theories regarding the selection and use of communication media in organizations; however, literature has focused little on the effects of self-regulation by managers and employees in these theories. To analyze these topics, this study develops an empirical investigation by gathering data from 600 managers and employees using a questionnaire. The results suggest that the perception of media richness is positively affected when the individual shows a promotion focus or strategy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Unsupervised, Efficient and Semantic Expertise Retrieval

We introduce an unsupervised discriminative model for the task of retrieving experts in online document collections. We exclusively employ textual evidence and avoid explicit feature engineering by learning distributed word representations in an unsupervised way. We compare our model to state-of-the-art unsupervised statistical vector space and probabilistic generative approaches. Our proposed log-linear model achieves the retrieval performance levels of state-of-the-art document-centric methods with the low inference cost of so-called profile-centric approaches. It yields a statistically significant improved ranking over vector space and generative models in most cases, matching the performance of supervised methods on various benchmarks. That is, by using solely text we can do as well as methods that work with external evidence and/or relevance feedback. A contrastive analysis of rankings produced by discriminative and generative approaches shows that they have complementary strengths due to the ability of the unsupervised discriminative model to perform semantic matching.Comment: WWW2016, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. 201