Control, conflict and concession: Corporate governance, accounting and accountability at Birmingham Small Arms, 1906-1933

This paper takes as its starting point the relevance of a historical perspective to the study of corporate governance. Corporate governance is concerned with the institutions that influence how business corporations allocate resources and returns, and with the exercise of accountability to investors and other stakeholders. The historical model adopted is that of personal capitalism which is informed by scholars such as Chandler, and in the British context, Quail. Birmingham Small Arms, a quoted and diversified engineering company, was selected for analysis because although it was relatively large and adopted a holding company format, it retained many of the characteristics of a personal capitalist firm. Our longitudinal study of 1906 to 1933 shows that what emerged at BSA was a dominant group of directors who were eventually impelled to concede change by a sustained shareholder critique and an altered legal and business environment

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE UPTAKE AND BENEFIT OF VIRTUAL LEARNING NETWORK OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SMALL BUSINESS TOURISM SECTOR - RIKON Group

While there is a growing interest in learning networks, relatively little research has been published with a specific tourism focus. Thus, this paper is concerned with tourism learning networks (TLN) and the role of virtual learning environments (VLE) in sustaining member viability following facilitated TLN interaction. The authors investigate user adoption and uptake of Fáilte Ireland2’s VLE, commencing with a comprehensive literature review, relating to virtual learning network (VLN) environments, and resulting in a VLN framework for a small firm environment. A mixed method approach enabled the authors to comprehensively uncover quantitative measurements with qualitative insights through the use of key informant interviews, census questionnaire, click stream data analysis and semi-structured interviews. Findings classified the nature of the network in both physical and virtual capacities, through the identification of modes of communication, level of membership, intentions to seek advice, make contact and contribute within the networking community. In terms of VLN usage, time was identified as the lead barrier to using the VLE, followed by a lack of training, and a low usage level among TLN members. Furthermore, findings suggest that while participants are willing to seek advice and share information, most felt they made only limited contributions to the VLN community. From a theoretical perspective, this research offers a framework for VLN facilitation in the tourism sector, and indicates the necessary dimensions involved in promotion of interactive learning online. The study also provides an in-depth analysis of participants’ perspectives in relation to virtual collaboration (activity, barriers, and adoption levels), participants’ perspectives in relation to the TLN support structure, and any underlying behavioral mediators, that may be responsible for poor VLN activity

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE UPTAKE AND BENEFIT OF VIRTUAL LEARNING NETWORK OPPORTUNITIES IN THE SMALL BUSINESS TOURISM SECTOR(RIKON Group)

While there is a growing interest in learning networks, relatively little research has been published with a specific tourism focus. Thus, this paper is concerned with tourism learning networks (TLN) and the role of virtual learning environments (VLE) in sustaining member viability following facilitated TLN interaction. The authors investigate user adoption and uptake of Fáilte Ireland2’s VLE, commencing with a comprehensive literature review, relating to virtual learning network (VLN) environments, and resulting in a VLN framework for a small firm environment. A mixed method approach enabled the authors to comprehensively uncover quantitative measurements with qualitative insights through the use of key informant interviews, census questionnaire, click stream data analysis and semi-structured interviews. Findings classified the nature of the network in both physical and virtual capacities, through the identification of modes of communication, level of membership, intentions to seek advice, make contact and contribute within the networking community. In terms of VLN usage, time was identified as the lead barrier to using the VLE, followed by a lack of training, and a low usage level among TLN members. Furthermore, findings suggest that while participants are willing to seek advice and share information, most felt they made only limited contributions to the VLN community. From a theoretical perspective, this research offers a framework for VLN facilitation in the tourism sector, and indicates the necessary dimensions involved in promotion of interactive learning online. The study also provides an in-depth analysis of participants’ perspectives in relation to virtual collaboration (activity, barriers, and adoption levels), participants’ perspectives in relation to the TLN support structure, and any underlying behavioral mediators, that may be responsible for poor VLN activity

VIRTUAL LEARNING NETWORKS IN SMALL TOURISM BUSINESSES A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Much of tourism development is predicated on the successful working of organisations and their competitive alignment in the form of partnerships or networks. Specifically, national and international research studies acknowledge the importance of small firm network-centred learning, where an integral part of this learning process is the complete network of relationships of the small firm owner-manager. Despite their importance in the context of small business development, networks, both physical and virtual, have been relatively neglected as an area of academic study, particularly in the tourism context. This paper focuses on virtual learning networks (VLN) among small tourism businesses, and seeks to establish a conceptual frame within which VLNs can be studied from a small firm perspective. A comprehensive review of the literature on VLNs is presented, drawing from traditional learning theories and their adoption into a virtual standpoint. The review also draws from networking philosophy and relational capital domains. Previous research suggests a number of factors including collaboration, trust, and reciprocity as indicators for the building of social capital in order to increase participation levels among network members. The approach to learning, its theories and behavioural analysis are a predominant focus in the examination of existing literature. A conceptual framework is presented identifying the elements (trust, commitment and reciprocity) necessary for building social capital as a means for effective collaboration among members within a small firm virtual network. The research goal is to suggest factors for consideration by managers and national support agencies (including Fáilte Ireland in the tourism context) when establishing small business virtual networking operations. Further research includes the operationalisation of this conceptual model in the Irish tourism sector

The effects of marine heatwaves on acute heat tolerance in corals

Scleractinian coral populations are increasingly exposed to conditions above their upper thermal limits due to marine heatwaves, contributing to global declines of coral reef ecosystem health. However, historic mass bleaching events indicate there is considerable inter- and intra-specific variation in thermal tolerance whereby species, individual coral colonies and populations show differential susceptibility to exposure to elevated temperatures. Despite this, we lack a clear understanding of how heat tolerance varies across large contemporary and historical environmental gradients, or the selective pressures that underpin this variation. Here we conducted standardised acute heat stress experiments to identify variation in heat tolerance among species and isolated reefs spanning a large environmental gradient across the Coral Sea Marine Park. We quantified the photochemical yield (F-v/F-m) of coral samples in three coral species, Acropora cf humilis, Pocillopora meandrina, and Pocillopora verrucosa, following exposure to four temperature treatments (local ambient temperatures, and + 3 degrees C, +6 degrees C and + 9 degrees C above local maximum monthly mean). We quantified the temperature at which F-v/F-m decreased by 50% (termed ED50) and used derived values to directly compare acute heat tolerance across reefs and species. The ED50 for Acropora was 0.4-0.7 degrees C lower than either Pocillopora species, with a 0.3 degrees C difference between the two Pocillopora species. We also recorded 0.9 degrees C to 1.9 degrees C phenotypic variation in heat tolerance among reefs within species, indicating spatial heterogeneity in heat tolerance across broad environmental gradients. Acute heat tolerance had a strong positive relationship to mild heatwave exposure over the past 35 years (since 1986) but was negatively related to recent severe heatwaves (2016-2020). Phenotypic variation associated with mild thermal history in local environments provides supportive evidence that marine heatwaves are selecting for tolerant individuals and populations; however, this adaptive potential may be compromised by the exposure to recent severe heatwaves

A portal for indexing distributed FAIR digital objects for catalysis research

A research object (RO) is defined as a semantically rich aggregation of (potentially distributed) resources that provide a layer of structure on top of information delivered as linked data (Bechhofer et al. 2013, Soiland-Reyes et al. 2022). A RO provides a container for the aggregation of resources, produced, and consumed by common services and shareable within and across organisational boundaries. This work sees research digital objects as composites which may consist of objects hosted in different repositories.In catalysis research, the characterisation of a sample may require analysing experimental data obtained from an instrument, data from a computer model, and/or comparing to data from a specialized database. Additionally, data may need to be reduced and cleaned before analysis, resulting in intermediate data. In this scenario the composite research object is integrated by all these data objects and their corresponding metadata. UK Catalysis Hub (UKCH) researchers perform these tasks as part of their day-to-day work. However, most of the time they need to manually collect, catalogue, and preserve all these data assets.The UKCH aims to support researchers with tools and services for the management and processing of data, through the development of the Catalysis Data Infrastructure (CDI Nieva de la Hidalga et al. 2022a) and the Catalysis Research Workbench (CRW Nieva de la Hidalga et al. 2022b). This work is integrated in the context of the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI Coles and Knight 2022). The PSDI aims to provide a layer that enables transparent access to existing resources whilst ensuring that they remain dedicated to its specific application. The intention is to explore the concept of the composite research digital object and the services required to facilitate both human and programmatic interactions with those objects to browse, review, retrieve, and use digital objects in the context of the research produced by UKCH scientists. The CDI will act as a thematic portal presenting data managed through the PSDI and serve as an example for the development of similar portals targeting specific research domains.In this case, the CDI is in the process of being redesigned with a sematic metadata model. The basic ontologies being considered for this model are: DCAT (Albertoni et al. 2022) will encode the metadata of digital objects; PROV-O (Belhajjame et al. 2013) will track the generation of digital objects. SPAR (Peroni and Shotton 2018) to encode publications data; SCHOLIX to encode the links between publications and data objects (Burton et al. 2017); FOAF (Brickley and Miller 2014) to encode researcher information; the Organization Ontology (ORG Reynolds 2014) to encode institution information; EXPO (Soldatova et al. 2006) to encode experiment information; and various domain specific ontologies for adding metadata about experiments, for instance CHEBI (Hastings et al. 2011), CHEMINF (Hastings et al. 2015), and FIX (Chebi-Administrators 2005).The implementation of the CDI using these ontologies will provide a roadmap for the integration of FAIR data object repositories with a service infrastructure which supports reproducibility, reuse of data, reuse of processing tools and implementation of advanced processing tools.The integration of the CDI and CRW with existing and new infrastructures will further support the work of catalysis scientists. In this context, a researcher can access the CDI to look for publications, see if there are data objects linked to them, and then look for processing tools which can be used to reproduce the results. An experiment for an early use case demonstrated the feasibility of reproducing published results using data and metadata linked to existing publications (Nieva de la Hidalga et al. 2022b). In the experiment, papers citing processable data were used to retrieve, process, and reproduce published results with no need for contacting the authors. Fig. 1 presents a view of the experiment performed.The current practices of publishing catalysis research data can be seen as aligned to the FAIR data principles, for instance Fig. 1 above can be also seen as Fig. 2Reproducing results required several human-centered activities, partly due to the encoding of the metadata as text documents. The challenge is to accelerate and automate these processes. It is important to highlight the role of cataloguing interfaces, such as the CDI, containing DO crates with only metadata and links to the different data assests that constitute the composite digital objects. The users of these interfaces will in turn rely on transparent services which do not require them to manually track the location and formats of the data assets they want to retrieve and use

Designing a data infrastructure for catalysis science aligned to FAIR data principles

The UK Catalysis Hub (UKCH) is designing and implementing an infrastructure to facilitate the management of research data produced by researchers, the Catalysis Data Infrastructure (CDI). The CDI is proposed to encompass the presentation of research outputs (publications and data) in a digital repository that brings together an array of heterogeneous data types. The CDI is designed to hold references to research outputs, maintains links between them and promotes publishing and sharing of data. The proposal is to create persistent relationships between the different types of data and publications complying with FAIR data principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse). In this paper, we will discuss how the elicited requirements for data management are being incorporated in the design of the CDI. The prototype has been used in discussion with researchers and in presentations to the UKCH community, generating increased interest and providing ideas for further development. Additionally, the CDI prototype and its code are publicly available for further analysis

“I’ll meet you at our bench”: adaptation, innovation and resilience among VCSE organisations who supported marginalised and minoritised communities during the Covid-19 pandemic in Northern England – a qualitative focus group study

Background: The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities and increased adversity and challenges for vulnerable and marginalised communities worldwide. In the UK, the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector play a vital role in supporting the health and wellbeing of people who are marginalised or experiencing multiple complex needs. However, only a small number of studies have focused on the impact that Covid-19 had on the VCSE sector. Methods: As part of a Health Inequalities Impact Assessment (HIIA), we conducted qualitative focus groups with staff and volunteers from five organisations to examine short, medium and longer-term impacts of Covid-19 upon the VCSE sector in Northern England. Nine online focus groups were conducted between March and July 2021. Findings: Focus group transcripts were analysed using Framework Analysis and yielded three central themes: (1) exacerbation of pre-existing inequalities, adversity and challenges for vulnerable and marginalised populations; (2) the ‘price’ of being flexible, innovative and agile for VCSE staff and volunteers; and (3) the voluntary sector as a ‘lifeline’ - organisational pride and resilience. Conclusions: While the voluntary sector ‘adapted at pace’ to provide support during Covid-19 and in its continued aftermath, this resilience has potentially come at the cost of workforce and volunteer wellbeing, compounded by political obstacles and chronic shortage in funding and support. The VCSE sector has a vital role to play in the post-lockdown ‘levelling up’ agenda. The expertise, capacity and resilience of VCSE organisations, and their ability to respond to Covid-19, should be celebrated, recognised and supported adequately to maintain its resilience. To not do so threatens the sector’s sustainability and risks jeopardising attempts to involve the sector in addressing the social determinants of health

A workflow demonstrator for processing catalysis research data

The UK Catalysis Hub (UKCH) is designing a virtual research environment to support data processing and analysis, the Catalysis Research Workbench (CRW). The development of this platform requires identifying the processing and analysis needs of the UKCH members and mapping them to potential solutions. This paper presents a proposal for a demonstrator to analyse the use of scientific workflows for large scale data processing. The demonstrator provides a concrete target to promote further discussion of the processing and analysis needs of the UKCH community. In this paper, we will discuss the main requirements for data processing elicited and the proposed adaptations that will be incorporated in the design of the CRW and how to integrate the proposed solutions with existing practices of the UKCH. The demonstrator has been used in discussion with researchers and in presentations to the UKCH community, generating increased interest and motivating further development