Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes

This report presents results from a national study of what Americans understand about how the climate system works, and the causes, impacts, and potential solutions to global warming. Among other findings, the study identifies a number of important gaps in public knowledge and common misconceptions about climate change. Educational levels: Graduate or professional, Undergraduate upper division, Undergraduate lower division, General public

SUCCESS FACTORS OF CHANGE IN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

The goal of our study is to examine, how the logic of change management implementation and analysing raster of success factors helps to lay the foundation of building up knowledge management system. We led our research first of all along theoretical basis building upon technical literature. We present a generally utilized changing logic extracting those essential elements that get similar importance in the course of building up a learning organizational culture. As a result of our work we established that the utilization of change management logic is indispensable for the successful formation of corporate knowledge management system. Accordingly with the appearance of the demand on continuous learning and putting the individual in the centre both on individual- group- and organizational level simplify work. Comparing the two logics confirms our hypothesis.organization, change management, knowledge, learning organization, knowledge management.

Sectoral Structural Change in a Knowledge Economy

The sectoral composition of the US economy has shifted dramatically in the recent decades. At the same time, knowledge and information capital has become increasingly important in modern production processes. This paper argues that a ready explanation for the recent sectoral structural change lies in the difference of intangible capital accumulation across sectors. In the two-sector model of the paper, as the importance of intangible capital increases, labor is shifted from direct goods production to creating sector-specific intangible capital. In the process, the real output and employment shares of the high-intangible sector increase. The model generates sectoral composition change and labor productivity trend that reasonably match the data. It also shows that conventional labor productivity calculation understates the "true" productivity in sectoral goods production. The underestimation is greater for the growing sector. The empirical regressions of the paper indicate a positive and significant association between intangible capital investment intensity and firms' future output and employment growth. The correlation is higher for firms in the growing sector. At the industry level, controlling for industry human capital intensity, physical capital intensity and IT investment level, intangible capital intensity is positively correlated with future industry real output and employment share growth. These findings are consistent with the implications of the model. The paper also presents evidence suggesting that most growing service industries are intangible capital intensive. Thus the theory developed here can also help to reconcile the expansion of the service sector and the seemingly low productivity of the sector.Intangible Capital; Structural Change; Knowledge Economy; Firm Investment;

Physical-World Knowledge and Public Views on Climate Change

Climate change is a formidable topic, challenging the research efforts of countless scientists across many different fields. Surveys find surprisingly high levels of confidence among nonscientists, however, regarding their own understanding of climate change. More than threefourths of the respondents on recent U.S. surveys claimed to understand either a moderate amount or a great deal about climate change. Follow-up questions testing actual knowledge suggest that self-assessments are high relative to physical-world knowledge. For some people, self-assessments reflect confidence in their political views rather than geographical or science knowledge. This paper replicates and extends previous research using new data: an October 2018 survey that included a four-item test of basic, climate-relevant but belief-neutral geographical or physical knowledge, such as locations of the North and South Pole. Mean knowledge scores are higher among younger, male, and college-educated respondents, and also differ significantly across political groups. Relationships between physical/geographical knowledge and selfassessed understanding of climate change, or between knowledge and agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change, are sometimes positive as expected — but in both cases, these relationships depend on political identity

Climate change, the media and the knowledge-inaction paradox

The historical era in which we live has been designated as the Anthropocene such is the degree of human intervention on the planet. At a time when the world population has reached 7 billion, we are witnessing a rapid environmental degradation, as suggested by indicators of biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, water scarcity and distribution of pollutants. As a systemic and multi-dimensional problem, climate change stands as a strong symbol of human impact on the environment. Scientific research has shown unambiguously both the anthropogenic nature and the severity of the problem (e.g., IPCC, 2007a), and several recent studies suggest that its impacts could be more devastating than what is indicated by the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the possibility of approaching irreversible „tipping points‟ (e.g. Hansen, 2007; Kiehl, 2011; Shakhova et al., 2010). While the likelihood of large-scale negative impacts of climate change continues to rise and consensus increases around this, various social forces, and policymakers in particular, continue to stall effective transformations to abate GHG emissions

Knowledge management during radical change: Applying a process oriented approach

During periods of radical organisational change two elements - namely the organisation's strategy and its people - are affected profoundly. Strategic change involves refocusing the organisation in a direction that has little bearing on its past. People are affected by changes, as they are displaced to other parts of the organisation in different roles, or perhaps, are removed under the euphemism of de-layering, rightsizing and re-engineering. Hence, rather than enhance knowledge, senior managers inadvertently destroy knowledge during a radical organisational change. Yet pressures to change and the pace of change are unrelenting. Senior managers are forced to take an approach that can be summarised as ''change first - limit the damage to knowledge later''. Thus, this paper argues that organisations need a process to manage knowledge during periods of radical organisational change. The paper proposes such a process through case study evidence. It highlights actions managers take to ensure that they navigate the paradox of leading the organisation through radical change and nurture knowledge

On Capital Dependent Dynamics of Knowledge

We investigate the dynamics of growth models in terms of dynamical system theory. We analyse some forms of knowledge and its influence on economic growth. We assume that the rate of change of knowledge depends on both the rate of change of physical and human capital. First, we study model with constant savings. The model with optimised behaviour of households is also considered. We show that the model where the rate of change of knowledge depends only on the rate of change of physical capital can be reduced to the form of the two-dimensional autonomous dynamical system. All possible evolutional paths and the stability of solutions in the phase space are discussed in details. We obtain that the rate of growth of capital, consumption and output are greater in the case of capital dependent rate of change of knowledge.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures; presented at 2nd Polish Symposium on Econo- and Sociophysics, Krakow, Poland, 21-22 April 2006; to be published in Acta Phys. Pol.

Internet and the flow of knowledge: Which ethical and political challenges will we face?

The term “knowledge” is used more and more frequently for the diagnosis of societal change (as in “knowledge society”). According to Bell (1973), since the 1970s we have been experiencing the ?rst phase of such a change towards a knowledge society, consisting of a rapid expansion of the academic system and a growth of investments in research and development in many countries. In this phase, as Castells (1996) points out, information technology has been rapidly changing the workplace as well as the composition of social organisations. In this first phase, the focus has been on scienti?c knowledge, its production and application in expert cultures. Since the Mid-1990s, however, this focus has been widening, such that one can speak of a second phase of the knowledge society (Drucker 1994a, 1994b; Stehr 1994; see also Knorr-Cetina 1998; Krohn 2001). Now it is no longer only scientific knowledge that is seen as driving the change, but also ordinary knowledge and practical knowledge, as know-how. The change is, as I would put it, autocatalytic, for typical of knowledge societies is “not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation“ (Castells 1996: 32). Science has also been changing to be part of this loop, as shown in the rise of applied sciences and in the acknowledgement of uncertainty and ignorance issues (cf. Heidenreich 2002: 4 ff.; see also Hubig 2000 and Böschen & Schulz-Schaeffer 2003). The most significant change in this second phase however is the popularization of the Internet, that is seen as a key factor that governs societal change today. So what exactly is this “knowledge” that is driving present knowledge societies? Can we rely on the philosophical analysis of the term to get some insight here