What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works

This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept's reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger's 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid's article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger's 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal relations and understandings that develop in mutual engagement on an appropriated joint enterprise, but his focus is the impact on individual identity. The applicability of the concept to the heavily individualized and tightly managed work of the twenty-first century is questionable. The most recent work by Wenger – this time with McDermott and Snyder as coauthors – marks a distinct shift towards a managerialist stance. The proposition that managers should foster informal horizontal groups across organizational boundaries is in fact a fundamental redefinition of the concept. However it does identify a plausible, if limited, knowledge management (KM) tool. This paper discusses different interpretations of the idea of 'co-ordinating' communities of practice as a management ideology of empowerment

The B-Meson Distribution Amplitude in QCD

The B-meson distribution amplitude is calculated using QCD sum rules. In particular we obtain an estimate for the integral relevant to exclusive B-decays \lambda_B = 460 \pm 110 MeV at the scale 1 GeV. A simple QCD-motivated parametrization of the distribution amplitude is suggested.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, Latex styl

Resummations of free energy at high temperature

We discuss resummation strategies for free energy in quantum field theories at nonzero temperatures T. We point out that resummations should be performed for the short- and long-distance parts separately in order to avoid spurious interference effects and double-counting. We then discuss and perform Pade resummations of these two parts for QCD at high T. The resummed results are almost invariant under variation of the renormalization and factorization scales. We perform the analysis also in the case of the massless scalar $\phi^4$ theory.Comment: 16 pages, revtex4, 15 eps-figures; minor typographic errors corrected; the version as it appears in Phys.Rev.

Scaling Rule for Nonperturbative Radiation in a Class of Event Shapes

We discuss nonperturbative radiation for a recently introduced class of infrared safe event shape weights, which describe the narrow-jet limit. Starting from next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) resummation, we derive an approximate scaling rule that relates the nonperturbative shape functions for these weights to the shape function for the thrust. We argue that the scaling reflects the boost invariance implicit in NLL resummation, and discuss its limitations. In the absence of data analysis for the new event shapes, we compare these predictions to the output of the event generator PYTHIA.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, uses JHEP3.cls (included); v2 - version to appear in JHE

The rhetoric of the consumer and customer control in China

This article explores the extent to which the rhetoric of the sovereign consumer and the use of the customer as a device of managerial control have been transferred to the subsidiaries of multinational retail firms operating in China. Based upon data drawn from over 200 interviews conducted at UK and Japanese multi-nationals' stores, in this rapidly internationalizing context it was evident that the notion of the sovereign consumer was ubiquitous and procedures designed to inculcate management by customers or consumer control had been implemented. However, it was equally apparent that the rhetoric of the consumer not only served managerial ends, but also provided a rich and fertile resource for shopfloor workers. Meaningful, socially embedded relationships could also play a crucial role in transactions. Moreover, with respect to discipline and control, employees were fully aware that power lay with their managers, rather than disembodied consumers or even actual customers

Scale-free static and dynamical correlations in melts of monodisperse and Flory-distributed homopolymers: A review of recent bond-fluctuation model studies

It has been assumed until very recently that all long-range correlations are screened in three-dimensional melts of linear homopolymers on distances beyond the correlation length $\xi$ characterizing the decay of the density fluctuations. Summarizing simulation results obtained by means of a variant of the bond-fluctuation model with finite monomer excluded volume interactions and topology violating local and global Monte Carlo moves, we show that due to an interplay of the chain connectivity and the incompressibility constraint, both static and dynamical correlations arise on distances $r \gg \xi$. These correlations are scale-free and, surprisingly, do not depend explicitly on the compressibility of the solution. Both monodisperse and (essentially) Flory-distributed equilibrium polymers are considered.Comment: 60 pages, 49 figure

New Faces and New Masks of Today's Consumer

In 1995, we proposed that consumption and contemporary consumerism could not be studied or understood separately from the world of work and production. We proposed that contemporary consumerism was built on the back of what we referred to as `the Fordist Deal'. This deal, pioneered by Henry Ford for his employees, was the promise of ever increasing standards of living in exchange for a quiescent labour force accepting alienating work. Since that deal was struck, consumerism came to signify a general pre-occupation with consumption standards and choice as well as a willingness to read meanings in material commodities and to equate happiness and success with material possessions. In this sense, Ford may be seen as the father both of mass production and mass consumption. Since the Fordist high noon of consumerism in the West, mass consumption is widely seen as having fragmented into a proliferation of highly individualized niche products. For its part, a considerable part of mass production has migrated to countries with lower wages and looser environmental and social controls, fueling their own variants of consumerism. In this article, we examine the gradual erosion of the Fordist Deal in the light of developments in the last 10 years or so, seeking to assess the future of consumerism at a global level. We also seek to identify and discuss some emerging conceptualizations of the consumer, some of the new faces and masks assumed by the archetypal character of our types. We analyse some of the tensions and contradictions lurking behind these conceptualizations and try to envisage some of the real choices facing consumers today and some of the processes of social change that hinge on the outcomes of these choices. The article identifies a fundamental paradox between the ubiquity of the consumer in contemporary discourses and the virtual impossibility of generalizing about consumers. We suggest, then, that the consumer may be viewed as one of those `essentially contested concepts' proposed by Gallie that defy domestication. The consumer, we argue, is unmanageable, both as a concept, since no-one can pin it down to one specific conceptualization at the expense of all others, and as an entity, since attempts to control and manage the consumer lead to the consumer mutating from one impersonation to another. It is precisely this paradox that we seek to capture in our article's title. The article concludes with a consideration of three basic challenges that are liable to lead to fundamental reorientation of consumption and production, as well as of our conceptualizations and theorizing about them. These challenges are the outcomes of environmental, demographic and social factors that, we argue, make the current situation unsustainable and will bring about its dissolution

Heavy quarkonium: progress, puzzles, and opportunities

A golden age for heavy quarkonium physics dawned a decade ago, initiated by the confluence of exciting advances in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and an explosion of related experimental activity. The early years of this period were chronicled in the Quarkonium Working Group (QWG) CERN Yellow Report (YR) in 2004, which presented a comprehensive review of the status of the field at that time and provided specific recommendations for further progress. However, the broad spectrum of subsequent breakthroughs, surprises, and continuing puzzles could only be partially anticipated. Since the release of the YR, the BESII program concluded only to give birth to BESIII; the $B$-factories and CLEO-c flourished; quarkonium production and polarization measurements at HERA and the Tevatron matured; and heavy-ion collisions at RHIC have opened a window on the deconfinement regime. All these experiments leave legacies of quality, precision, and unsolved mysteries for quarkonium physics, and therefore beg for continuing investigations. The plethora of newly-found quarkonium-like states unleashed a flood of theoretical investigations into new forms of matter such as quark-gluon hybrids, mesonic molecules, and tetraquarks. Measurements of the spectroscopy, decays, production, and in-medium behavior of c\bar{c}, b\bar{b}, and b\bar{c} bound states have been shown to validate some theoretical approaches to QCD and highlight lack of quantitative success for others. The intriguing details of quarkonium suppression in heavy-ion collisions that have emerged from RHIC have elevated the importance of separating hot- and cold-nuclear-matter effects in quark-gluon plasma studies. This review systematically addresses all these matters and concludes by prioritizing directions for ongoing and future efforts.Comment: 182 pages, 112 figures. Editors: N. Brambilla, S. Eidelman, B. K. Heltsley, R. Vogt. Section Coordinators: G. T. Bodwin, E. Eichten, A. D. Frawley, A. B. Meyer, R. E. Mitchell, V. Papadimitriou, P. Petreczky, A. A. Petrov, P. Robbe, A. Vair

The antiferromagnetic phi4 Model, I. The Mean-field Solution

Certain higher dimensional operators of the lagrangian may render the vacuum inhomogeneous. A rather rich phase structure of the phi4 scalar model in four dimensions is presented by means of the mean-field approximation. One finds para- ferro- ferri- and antiferromagnetic phases and commensurate-incommensurate transitions. There are several particles described by the same quantum field in a manner similar to the species doubling of the lattice fermions. It is pointed out that chiral bosons can be introduced in the lattice regularized theory.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev.

Human Resource Flexibility as a Mediating Variable Between High Performance Work Systems and Performance

Much of the human resource management literature has demonstrated the impact of high performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational performance. A new generation of studies is emerging in this literature that recommends the inclusion of mediating variables between HPWS and organizational performance. The increasing rate of dynamism in competitive environments suggests that measures of employee adaptability should be included as a mechanism that may explain the relevance of HPWS to firm competitiveness. On a sample of 226 Spanish firms, the study’s results confirm that HPWS influences performance through its impact on the firm’s human resource (HR) flexibility