Understanding the rise of faculty-student coaching: an academic capitalism perspective

We examine the rise of coaching within management education to support student learning. We question the assumption that faculty-student coaching (FSC) is beneficial and propose that there may be some limitations in the use of FSC that have yet to be adequately acknowledged and discussed in the literature. In particular, we propose that there is currently insufficient evidence to conclude that coaching can produce knowledge acquisition and therefore ask why we persist in the use of FSC when we have limited evidence of its efficacy in delivering a core education outcome. We suggest that the theory of academic capitalism provides a useful, critical lens through which to view the growing trend in FSC, identifying that FSC may be utilized as a method of increasing student satisfaction, perceptions of value for money and as a useful marketing tool for business schools competing for students. However, academic capitalism may also explain the use of coaching via its ability to enhance the skills and attitudes of students, providing outcomes that are valued by students, employers and governments. We conclude our essay by providing recommendations to mitigate these proposed dangers and consequently maximise the effectiveness of coaching as a development tool in management education

Monitoring of critical assets

Sensors used in the MANTIS project must be able to measure the physical phenomenon relevant for the assets’ condition. Examples of this include temperature, light intensity, pressure, fluid flow, velocity, and force among others. Anyhow, it is not a trivial problem for a given installation, where an adequate measurement solution must be chosen or developed in order to accurately and robustly acquire data about the physical process related to each MANTIS use cases [Jantunen et al., 2017]. Another relevant matter is the cost of the monitoring solution. Industry is always aiming for cost savings and a better market positioning. Therefore, new technological solutions such as WSNs have become a strategic asset in this context, increasing the interest of the industrial companies. This type of sensor networks is used to share information with the purpose of increasing productivity, gathering data for developing future technological improvements and/or detecting/predicting maintenance issues. Moreover, even when a single sensor is considered instead of a WSN, the use of wireless communications provides flexibility, installation ease, weight reduction, which makes them suitable for many applications, conditions and situations. Industrial environments usually have hostile site conditions, both for the sensors themselves and for the wireless communication systems, and a section is devoted to the analysis of the issues and the solutions raising in these environments. Finally, a section is focused on the intelligent functions that can be offered by CPS, both to preprocess collected data and to support the CPS itself

Is there a global super‐bourgeoisie?

In recent decades, accelerating processes of globalization and an increase in economic inequality in most of the world's countries have raised the question of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie integrated at the global level, sometimes described as a global super-bourgeoisie. This group would be distinguished by its unequaled level of wealth and global interconnectedness, its transnational ubiquity and concentration in the planet's major global cities, its specific culture, consumption habits, sites of sociability and shared references, and even by class consciousness and capacity to act collectively. This article successively discusses how the social sciences have examined these various dimensions of the question and begun to provide systematic empirical answers