Teaching research methods: Introducing a psychogeographical approach

This paper explores teaching business students research methods using a psychogeographical approach, specifically the technique of dérive. It responds to calls for new ways of teaching in higher education and addresses the dearth of literature on teaching undergraduate business students qualitative research methods. Psychogeography challenges the dominance of questionnaires and interviews, introduces students to data variety, problematizes notions of success and illuminates the importance of observation and location. Using two studies with undergraduate students, the authors emphasize place and setting, the perception of purpose, the choice of data, criteria of success and the value of guided reflection and self-reflection in students’ learning. Additionally the data reflect on the way students perceive research about management and the nature of management itself. The paper concludes that the deployment of psychogeography to teach business research methods although complex and fraught with difficulty is nevertheless viable, educationally productive and worthy of further research

What Practical use is Made of Student Evaluations of Teaching?

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are an accepted method of investigating the impact of lecturers’ work with students. Although research generally shows that student evaluations are a positive development, conflicting research on the reliability and validity of the methods used leads to our overall research objective of discovering what practical use is made of the evaluation data by lecturers. Particular focus is placed on the lecturers’ attitude to the use of quantitative and qualitative questions and the reliability of the evaluations as an effective tool. Considerations include the halo effect, students’ ability to accurately assess course content, the influence of assessment grading, and fundamentally the fitness of this instrument for the purpose of acquiring useful, objective data. In a global context SETs may be used by institutions for recruitment or promotion purposes. However, in Europe they tend to be regarded as confidential documents seen only by individual course leaders and senior management at faculty level. They are therefore more commonly expected to be used by the lecturers themselves as evidence of particular necessary steps that would improve course quality and student satisfaction. With regard to the use to which the evaluation results may be put, a certain cynicism is evident among lecturers who perhaps shrink from a perceived obligation to cater to the demands of the student in the role of consumer. Such evaluations include both quantitative and qualitative measurements, generally concentrating on the quantitative as a useful tool to produce statistically comparable data. This initial study uses interviews with lecturers and senior faculty staff at a German private business school and examines their perceptions of the procedures, including their assessment of the effectiveness and use of the results of SETs of their undergraduate students. The data analysis shows a diverse attitude to the evaluations and the call for more open debate and agreement on the format, reliability and use of these evaluations

Crisis as a plague on organisation: Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of current models of organisational response to crises and offer additional perspectives on some of these models. It is also intended to confirm the value of fiction as a truth-seeking and hermeneutic device for enriching the imagination. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year to draw parallels between his portrayal of the London Great Plague of 1665 and the management of modern-day crises. Defoe uses London’s ordeal of the Great Plague to advise those subjected to future crises. Through his representation of plague-ridden streets, Defoe shows stakeholders acting in ways described in current crisis management literature. Findings – The authors note how the management of the Plague crisis was unsuccessful and they challenge the very idea of managing a true crisis. The authors are able to illustrate and offer refinements to the Pearson and Clair (1998) and Janes (2010) models of crisis management as well as confirming the value of their constructs across a lapse of centuries. Research limitations/implications – Although it is an examination of a single novel, the findings suggest value in conceptualising organisational crises in innovative and more imaginative ways. Originality/value – It confirms the heuristic value of using fiction to understand organisational change and adds value to current model

A bifurcation study to guide the design of a landing gear with a combined uplock/downlock mechanism

This paper discusses the insights that a bifurcation analysis can provide when designing mechanisms. A model, in the form of a set of coupled steady-state equations, can be derived to describe the mechanism. Solutions to this model can be traced through the mechanism's state versus parameter space via numerical continuation, under the simultaneous variation of one or more parameters. With this approach, crucial features in the response surface, such as bifurcation points, can be identified. By numerically continuing these points in the appropriate parameter space, the resulting bifurcation diagram can be used to guide parameter selection and optimization. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of this technique by considering an aircraft nose landing gear, with a novel locking strategy that uses a combined uplock/downlock mechanism. The landing gear is locked when in the retracted or deployed states. Transitions between these locked states and the unlocked state (where the landing gear is a mechanism) are shown to depend upon the positions of two fold point bifurcations. By performing a two-parameter continuation, the critical points are traced to identify operational boundaries. Following the variation of the fold points through parameter space, a minimum spring stiffness is identified that enables the landing gear to be locked in the retracted state. The bifurcation analysis also shows that the unlocking of a retracted landing gear should use an unlock force measure, rather than a position indicator, to de-couple the effects of the retraction and locking actuators. Overall, the study demonstrates that bifurcation analysis can enhance the understanding of the influence of design choices over a wide operating range where nonlinearity is significant

Psychogeography in a Time of Calamity: Dériving with Defoe

This paper responds to the ECRM Call for Papers by discussing and assessing the value of a co-articulation of two research approaches, that of psychogeography and the use of fictional writing, particularly novels, as a basis for business and management research. It examines Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year as the prototypical psychogeographical text and a model of the dérive. In doing so it explores the opportunities and problems of using fiction to understand complex current phenomena. This enables us to further the case for psychogeographical exploration or the dérive as a research method which is well established as a literary genre and which contributes to new understandings of the limits of management and organization theory. We draw parallels between the London Great Plague of 1665 which exposed the contrasting mobility of the rich and poor when calamity strikes, the problems of balancing the private and public good, the challenge of providing employment when businesses have closed and other consequences of urban disaster and how these can help us analyse the impact of such modern day disasters as 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, climate change, and the world-wide refugee crisis. Through repeated forays (dérives) into the plague-ridden streets of London, the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year illustrates the limits of ‘management thinking’. In the light of current claims that we have reached ecological limits in the ‘global village’ and the apparent widespread breakdown of social order in many parts of the world, the research approach adopted here has the potential to illuminate our current condition. Given this condition, the need to transcend current frames of reference and the necessity to innovate according to the situation includes innovation in research approaches. To the best of our knowledge the co-articulation of psychogeography and fiction has not yet been tested. Treating A Journal of the Plague Year as our ‘case study’ we are able to argue for the dérive as a useful and productive research method that illuminates different aspects of organizational life, as well as the larger context of our organizations. We also contribute to the growing body of work that uses fiction to extend management theory

Probing quasiparticle excitations in a hybrid single electron transistor

We investigate the behavior of quasiparticles in a hybrid electron turnstile with the aim of improving its performance as a metrological current source. The device is used to directly probe the density of quasiparticles and monitor their relaxation into normal metal traps. We compare different trap geometries and reach quasiparticle densities below 3um^-3 for pumping frequencies of 20 MHz. Our data show that quasiparticles are excited both by the device operation itself and by the electromagnetic environment of the sample. Our observations can be modelled on a quantitative level with a sequential tunneling model and a simple diffusion equation

Experimental investigation of some aspects of insect-like flapping flight aerodynamics for application to micro air vehicles

Insect-like flapping flight offers a power-efficient and highly manoeuvrable basis for micro air vehicles for indoor applications. Some aspects of the aerodynamics associated with the sweeping phase of insect wing kinematics are examined by making particle image velocimetry measurements on a rotating wing immersed in a tank of seeded water. The work is motivated by the paucity of data with quantified error on insect-like flapping flight, and aims to fill this gap by providing a detailed description of the experimental setup, quantifying the uncertainties in the measurements and explaining the results. The experiments are carried out at two Reynolds numbers-500 and 15,000-accounting for scales pertaining to many insects and future flapping-wing micro air vehicles, respectively. The results from the experiments are used to describe prominent flow features, and Reynolds number-related differences are highlighted. In particular, the behaviour of the leading-edge vortex at these Reynolds numbers is studied and the presence of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability observed at the higher Reynolds number in computational fluid dynamics calculations is also verified

Rotational excitation of methylidynium (CH+) by a helium atom at high temperature

We aim to obtain accurate rate coefficients for the collisional excitation of CH+ by He for high gas temperatures. The ab initio coupled-cluster [CCSD(T)] approximation was used to compute the interaction potential energy. Cross sections are then derived in the close coupling (CC) approach and rate coefficients inferred by averaging these cross sections over a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of kinetic energies. Cross sections are calculated up to 10'000 cm^-1 for J ranging from 0 to 10. Rate coefficients are obtained at high temperatures up to 2000 K.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, table with rate coefficients, accepted for publication by A&

Benchmark full configuration-interaction calculations on HF and NH2

Full configuration-interaction (FCI) calculations are performed at selected geometries for the 1-sigma(+) state of HF and the 2-B(1) and 2-A(1) states of NH2 using both DZ and DZP gaussian basis sets. Higher excitations become more important when the bonds are stretched and the self-consistent field (SCF) reference becomes a poorer zeroth-order description of the wave function. The complete active space SCF - multireference configuration-interaction (CASSCF-MRCI) procedure gives excellent agreement with the FCI potentials, especially when corrected with a multi-reference analog of the Davidson correction