Business School Partnerships for Globalization

International partnerships are an essential tool to enable business schools to internationalize their activities. They can lead to improved research, better more internationally relevant teaching, provide staff with an international perspective, and help prepare students for careers in global business. Using case studies of four of Durham University Business School's main partnerships, the article identifies the motivations for forming partnerships, examines some of the practical management issues associated with partnership working in higher education, and details the many benefits that can be derived from such arrangements

The Stakes in Bayh-Dole: Public Values Beyond the Pace of Innovation

Evaluation studies of the Bayh-Dole Act are generally concerned with the pace of innovation or the transgressions to the independence of research. While these concerns are important, I propose here to expand the range of public values considered in assessing Bayh-Dole and formulating future reforms. To this end, I first examine the changes in the terms of the Bayh-Dole debate and the drift in its design. Neoliberal ideas have had a definitive influence on U.S. innovation policy for the last thirty years, including legislation to strengthen patent protection. Moreover, the neoliberal policy agenda is articulated and justified in the interest of “competitiveness.” Rhetorically, this agenda equates competitiveness with economic growth and this with the public interest. Against that backdrop, I use Public Value Failure criteria to show that values such as political equality, transparency, and fairness in the distribution of the benefits of innovation, are worth considering to counter the “policy drift” of Bayh-Dole

A rhetoric-in-context approach to building commitment to multiple strategic goals

There are still few explanations of the micro-level practices by which top managers influence employee commitment to multiple strategic goals. This paper argues that, through their language, top managers can construct a context for commitment to multiple strategic goals. We therefore propose a rhetoric-in-context approach to illuminate some of the micro practices through which top managers influence employee commitment. Based upon an empirical study of the rhetorical practices through which top managers influence academic commitment to multiple strategic goals in university contexts, we demonstrate relationships between rhetoric and context. Specifically, we show that rhetorical influences over commitment to multiple goals are associated with the historical context for multiple goals, the degree to which top managers' rhetoric instantiates a change in that context, and the internal consistency of the rhetorical practices used by top managers. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications

Thermoresponsive, stretchable, biodegradable and biocompatible poly(glycerol sebacate)-based polyurethane hydrogels

Thermoresponsive, stretchable, biodegradable and biocompatible polyester-based polyurethane (PEU) hydrogels, based on poly(glycerol sebacate) pre-polymer and poly(ethylene glycol)s of different molecular masses were synthesized by a facile solvent-based two-step method. The chemical and physical characteristics of the PEU hydrogels are tunable, enabling the design of various negatively thermosensitive, mechanically stable and biodegradable systems. The PEU hydrogels demonstrate reversible responses to a change in medium temperature from 5 °C to 37 °C, with the swelling ratio at equilibrium varying from 499% to 12%. The hydrogels have a tensile Young’s modulus, ultimate tensile strength and elongation at break in the range of 0.02–0.20 MPa, 0.05–0.47 MPa and 426–623%, respectively, and show high stretchability and full shape recovery after compression. These are similar to the mechanical properties of adipose tissues. In vitro degradation tests show mass losses of 8.7–16.3% and 10.7–20.7% without and with the presence of lipase enzyme for 31 days, respectively. In vitro cell tests show clear evidence that some of the PEU hydrogels are suitable for culturing adipose-derived stem cells and dermal fibroblasts and hence for future soft tissue regeneration. The functionalities of the PEU hydrogels were also evaluated for potential applications in drug delivery, thermal actuation and ultralow power generation. The results demonstrate the versatility of these PEU hydrogels for a variety of biomedical and engineering application

Algorithms, governance, and governmentality:on governing academic writing

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls ‘‘social sorting.’’ Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin

Motivations for collaborating with industry: has public policy influenced new academics in Argentina?

Between 2005 and 2015 a series of science, technology and innovation policies were deployed in Argentina among which academic research collaborations with industry was particularly fostered. This paper studies the effect of those policies on newer researchers, defined as those with PhD or postdoctoral scholarships, looking at their motivations to collaborate and, to some extent, at their actual collaborations with Industry. Our hypothesis is that those policies had a positive effect on young academics’ perception of collaborations with industry, now conceived as a dimension of their job, and also on actual collaborations. To conduct our study, we used an original database constructed from an online survey answered by more than 600 newer researchers. Empirical results partly confirm our hypothesis: a direct policy encouraging collaborations by providing collaborative grants was not associated with actual collaborations, while orienting research towards strategic areas–defined by the Science and Technology Ministry- is

Practical Applications as a Source of Credibility: A Comparison of Three Fields of Dutch Academic Chemistry

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the interplay between these two developments in a set of three case studies of fields of chemistry in the Netherlands. First, we describe how the conditions under which academic chemists work have changed since 1975. Second, we investigate whether practical applications have become a source of credibility for individual researchers. Indeed, this turns out to be the case in catalysis, where connecting with industrial applications helps in many steps of the credibility cycle. Practical applications yield much less credibility in environmental chemistry, where application-oriented research agendas help to acquire funding, but not to publish prestigious papers or to earn peer recognition. In biochemistry practical applications hardly help in gaining credibility, as this field is still strongly oriented at fundamental questions. The differences between the fields can be explained by the presence or absence of powerful upstream end-users, who can afford to invest in academic research with promising long term benefits

'Excellence' and exclusion:the individual costs of institutional competitiveness

A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality

Dynamika „tworzenia-rynków” w szkolnictwie wyższym

This paper examines what to some is a well worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketisation’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally–competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involves a considerable amount of micro–work, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio–technical tools (Çalışkan and Callon 2009, 2010; Berndt and Boeckler 2012). Taken together, these market–making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.W niniejszym artykule przedstawiamy wyniki badania tego, co wiele osób uznało za dobrze już opracowaną niszę, a mianowicie procesów i rezultatów czegoś, co najczęściej określa się mianem ‘urynkowienia’ sektora szkolnictwa wyższego. Podejmujemy tę kwestię w oparciu o przygotowane przez nas studium przypadku Newton University, w kontekście którego odsłaniamy gwałtowne rozpowszechnienie się wymiany rynkowej między administracyjnymi sekcjami  uniwersytetu i jego szerszym otoczeniem. Nasze podejście do procesu „tworzenia-rynku” rozwinięte zostało w dwóch (dialektycznie powiązanych ze sobą) krokach. Po pierwsze, rozpoznajemy zakres wymian rynkowych, wyłonionych w kontekście szerszych ideologicznych i politycznych przemian obszaru ładu instytucjonalnego szkolnictwa wyższego, których celem było uczynienie go bardziej konkurencyjnym wytwórcą wiedzy w skali globalnej, jak również sektorem usługowym. Po drugie, badamy sposoby, w jakie tworzenie rynków wymaga dużego nakładu mikro-pracy, takiej choćby jak zastosowanie szerokiego zakresu określonych ram czy narzędzi socjo-technicznych (Çalışkan, Callon 2009, 2010; Berndt, Boeckler 2012). Ujęte łącznie, wspomniane procesy tworzenia-rynku dokonują ponownego dopasowania i przekształcenia struktury, stosunków społecznych i podmiotowości w obrębie uniwersytetu i poza nim, w ten sposób z kolei konstytuując uniwersytet i sektor szkolnictwa wyższego w nowej formie