Inside the Hallowed Walls: Convent Life through Material History

This paper is an inquiry into the nature of convent life through an examination of the material history of a religious community. Consideration is given to the spatial structure of the first convent built in southern New Brunswick, convent artifacts, and religious habits. This discussion touches upon the tension within apostolic communities of having to address both the services dimension and the prayer life. In this paper it is observed that in the course of attempting to improve the services dimension much of the externals of the prayer life receded in importance. These artifacts, now relegated to museums, serve today as a poignant material legacy of a Catholic religious social organization that once functioned as a compelling career route for women. Résumé La communication étudie la nature de la vie dans un couvent, en examinant l'histoire matérielle d'une communauté religieuse. Elle décrit, entre autres, la structure spatiale du premier couvent établi dans le sud du Nouveau-Brunswick, des objets et des habits religieux. La discussion fait état des difficultés auxquelles se heurtaient les communautés apostoliques pour servir le public tout en continuant à mener une vie de prière. On mentionne que les efforts consacrés à améliorer le service à la population ont grandement diminué l'importance de nombreuses formes extérieures de dévotion. Ces objets, maintenant relégués dans les musées, constituent le poignant témoignage laissé par une organisation sociale catholique et religieuse qui représentait autrefois la carrière féminine par excellence

Best practice litter management manual for Australian meat chicken farms : Covering fresh, in-shed, reuse and spent litter management

Litter is most likely one of the largest operational investments on meat chicken farms. Litter management can affect meat chicken health, human health, odour and dust. Despite the issue being important for all industry participants, there hasn’t been a single point where information has been brought together and maintained in an up-to-date format. While the industry has done a large amount of work in this area, the results are documented in a variety of reports, scientific papers and guides, without there being one document that synthesises this information and makes it applicable and relevant to the various industry participants. This Best practice litter management manual for Australian meat chicken farms collects this knowledge in one place. The manual covers: litter selection; management of litter in sheds, including reuse; and options and use of spent litter following removal from sheds. It has been structured so that users can access concise information and guidance on the best management practice for each process involving litter

The performance effects of creative imitation on original products: Evidence from lab and field experiments

Research Summary: A market entrant often challenges the incumbent using creative imitation: The entrant creatively combines imitated aspects of the original with its own innovative characteristics to create a distinct offering. Using lab and field experiments to examine creative imitation in China, we find the effects of creative imitations on the originals depend on the creative imitation's quality. We explore the underlying mechanisms, and show that including a low-quality creative imitation in the retail choice set increases satisfaction with and choice of the original, while a moderate-quality creative imitation does the opposite. Moreover, creative imitation affects consumers' satisfaction with the original by influencing whether their experience with the original verifies their expectations. Our paper reveals creative imitation effects to help incumbent firms effectively address them. Managerial Summary: When the incumbent is challenged by an entrant using creative imitation, consumers may react differently to the incumbent, and understanding consumers' reactions allows the incumbent to make better strategic decisions about how to address the challenge. Using lab and field experiments, we investigate creative imitations with two quality levels common in our empirical context, low quality and moderate quality, and examine how and why they differentially affect the originals. We find the presence of a low-quality creative imitation actually increased choice of the original by enhancing consumers' satisfaction with it, while a moderate-quality creative imitation reduced choice of the original by undermining satisfaction with it. Our research suggests the incumbent should address moderate-quality creative imitations' challenges to customer satisfaction, while temporarily tolerating low-quality creative imitations

Ellipsometric determination of optical constants for silicon and thermally grown silicon dioxide via a multi-sample, multi-wavelength, multi-angle investigation

Optical constant spectra for silicon and thermally grown silicon dioxide have been simultaneously determined using variable angle of incidence spectroscopic ellipsometry from 0.75 to 6.5 eV. Spectroscopic ellipsometric data sets acquired at multiple angles of incidence from seven samples with oxide thicknesses from 2 to 350 nm were analyzed using a self-contained multi-sample technique to obtain Kramers–Kronig consistent optical constant spectra. The investigation used a systematic approach utilizing optical models of increasing complexity in order to investigate the need for fitting the thermal SiO2 optical constants and including an interface layer between the silicon and SiO2 in modeling the data. A detailed study was made of parameter correlation effects involving the optical constants used for the interface layer. The resulting thermal silicon dioxide optical constants were shown to be independent of the precise substrate model used, and were found to be approximately 0.4% higher in index than published values for bulk glasseous SiO2. The resulting silicon optical constants are comparable to previous ellipsometric measurements in the regions of overlap, and are in agreement with long wavelength prism measurements and transmission measurements near the band gap

Research on Markets for Inventions and Implications for R&D Allocation Strategies

Several streams of literature have examined the phenomenon of “markets for inventions”, that is, the trade of elements of knowledge which are “disembodied” from individuals, organizations, and products. The aims of this paper are to bring together the various streams of research in this area and discuss their major assumptions and limitations, in order to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the phenomenon, and identify promising paths for future research. We start our review by identifying the object of market exchange—that is, an invention whose knowledge has been codified and disembodied from individuals, organizations, or artifacts. We then identify those factors that enable firms to trade inventions, distinguishing between institutional-, firm-, and industry-level factors. We close our analysis of the extant literature by discussing the implications of markets for inventions for firm behavior and performance. Against this background, we highlight an important avenue for future research. A neglected implication of the development of invention markets is that firms are confronted with a wide variety of technological paths from which to choose, because the opportunity to acquire technologies on the market offers them a greater variety that can their internal R&D departments. However, the streams of research on markets for inventions and on R&D allocation strategies have been surprisingly disconnected so far. Hence, in the final section, we start to establish and explore the link between these literatures, and to identify a research agenda in this domain

Resources, Capabilities, and Routines in Public Organizations

States, state agencies, multilateral agencies, and other non-market actors are relatively under-studied in strategic management and organization science. While important contributions to the study of public actors have been made within the agency-theoretic and transaction-cost traditions, there is little research in political economy that builds on resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to the firm. Yet public organizations can be characterized as stocks of human and non-human resources, including routines and capabilities; they can possess excess capacity in these resources; and they may grow and diversify in predictable patterns according to behavioral and Penrosean logic. This paper shows how resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to understanding public agencies and organizations shed light on their nature and governance