Über innovationsverhindernde und innovationsfördernde DenkweisenAbout Innovation Impeding and Innovation Facilitating Mindsets

This article examines the question why large organizations, despite skillful employees and available resources, are seldom the driver of innovations. Subsequently, we highlight possibilities to overcome this current situation. It is argued that organizations have a distinct focus on an analytic-deductive mindset that undermines the acquisition of new knowledge. Therefore, organizations miss to recognize and react according to the needs of clients, as well as their employees. As a possible solution, an abductive-hypothetical mindset is presented, which supports organizations to create innovations. In order to illustrate the differences between these mindsets, we compare these approaches and examine the reasons and structures that lead to the dominance of the deductive mindset within the majority of organizations. Building on this discussion, we identify possibilities how consultants could establish abductive, innovation enhancing elements within the organizational structure. These suggestions are based on the five discovery skills (questioning, observing, experimenting, networking, and associating) of the Innovator‘s-DNA-model and are supplemented by examples how these skills can be implemented into the organization’s routine.     

Women,reindeer herding and the Internet: an innovative process in northern Sweden

This research note deals with an innovation initiative involving women, reindeer herding and the Internet. It shows how women reindeer herders from a Swedish Sámi village were a driving force in the development of several innovative, EU-funded projects focusing on information and communications technology. The article shows how the innovation initiative involved a wide range of actors, ascribing stakeholders from civil society important roles besides the public and private sectors. The innovation initiative involved several different strategies. One of these strategies was internationalization – both at the European and worldwide levels. This strategy was employed to prevent rigid political hierarchies blocking the prospects of gaining support from local and regional authorities. Another strategy was the continuous exchange of knowledge between engineers and potential end users, adapting the initiative results to the needs of the local context. As a result, the innovation initiative has produced several kinds of outcomes. It has generated new technology as well as economic and social benefits.     

Recombinant Family Formation Strategies1

Abstract In contrast to the 'modernization' model of demographic change, popularized by the publications of the European Fertility Project, this paper sets the revolution in family life in an historical perspective. First, I briefly consider the creation of a distinctly north-west European system of production and reproduction; second, I discuss how this regime led to the emergence of a revolutionary solution to the population/resources squeeze in early modern England; third, I consider how it came to be severely dis-equilibrated in the period of industrialization, urbanization and improvements in life-expectation which became generalized in the age of the Industrial Revolution; and, fourth, I propose that the re-equilibration that we celebrate within the rubric of the Demographic Transition can perhaps be more effectively understood as both an innovation and an adjustment which occurred in response to the historical ruptures - demographic and economic, cultural and political - engendered by the twin processes of material change and state formation.     

国际大都市科技创新特点及其对上海的启示

科技企业作为上海经济快速发展的生力军,其研发水平的大力提升将有效实现产业转型与技术升级.与纽约科技创新、东京小微企业发展、伦敦的创新氛围以及巴黎竞争簇群相比,上海需要适度调整引资政策,改变外资独大的局面;减小单纯追求研发人员数量的增长,改变过度依赖引进技术的格局,真正走出一条自主创新之路.     

Geopolitical-economic conflict and network infrastructures

This article explicates three basic aspects of the conflicted history of transnational communications networks: How extraterritorial communications have functioned since the nineteenth century as a primary axis of expansion for a transnationalizing capitalism; how geopolitical pressures and rivalries have helped break down and reconstitute network infrastructures; and how contemporary US–China relations in respect to the Internet may be set within this historical framework. The longstanding dominance of the United States over extraterritorial networks was itself a historical outcome, and today it faces escalating – but still far from successful – challenges.     

Americans’ Perceptions of Commitment to Strong Families Across Race and Ethnic Groups

Theories of prejudice examining perceptual differences of in-groups and out-groups, such as social dominance and group threat perspectives, have found them to be important in generating hegemonic identity formations. This study uses data from the General Social Surveys to explore how these hegemonic group perceptions influence attitudes toward stronger families using race and ethnic groups as proxy measures where Whites are considered the in-group. A modified ecosystemic-interactionist approach along with elements from group threat and social dominance theories as support was used to investigate the underlying premise that group membership influenced respondents’ perceptions of their own family vis á vis others. Overall, the study found support for the underlying premise that membership influenced group perceptions, group knowledge, and group beliefs about commitment to strong families. Additionally, these findings suggest that groups develop most of their beliefs and subsequently their attitudes from limited interaction with those they perceived to be in the out-groups. Other social factors, including media portrayals, geographic propinquity, and education, also play a role in group perceptions, group knowledge, and group beliefs about commitment toward strong families. They support the social dominance and group threat theories that give rise to hegemonic structure within the United States.     

Modernism,the City and the “Domestic Interior”

This article argues that the overwhelming critical and historical focus on the figure of the flâneur in readings of literary modernism has led to the marginalization of key aspects of the experience of living and writing in the modern city: the marginalization, in fact, of the domestic interior. Having situated the reasons for the dominance of this critical paradigm, the article then explores whether we might be able to generate a comparably historicized cultural project, based on readings of Woolf, of Richardson, and of Pound and his circle, that engages with the more confined, and the more static terrain of the room as a way of reading the modern city. It analyzes some of modernism's key interiors, beginning with rooms in a number of Virginia Woolf's texts, and considering how they figure as a space of memory, as a framework for identities, and as a locus of security. It then examines the hierarchies of domestic spaces, the relations between the boundaries of the self and the boundaries of the room, and the troubling landscape of the suburban in Dorothy Richardson's novel Pilgrimage. Finally, in examining the cultural milieu of Ezra Pound, it considers how London interiors provide the physical and the metaphorical landscape for particular forms of modernist innovation in the early years of the twentieth century.     

Outsourcing public relations pedagogy: Lessons from innovation, management futures, and stakeholder participation

In this article, we advocate for innovation in public relations pedagogy by importing ideas and practices from four areas. The first area involves work on disruptive technology and education that applies lessons from Silicon Valley innovations to high school education. The second area considers how knowledge management and project management findings confirm the value of teaching as the cocreation of knowledge. The third draws parallels between the challenges of moving from traditional to future management and moving from traditional to future education. All three areas offer models for innovation by adopting a more improvisational, experimental, and risk-taking ethos in education. In the fourth area, we shift from theoretical advocacy to look at how these innovations feed into an example of public relations pedagogy as co-created stakeholder participation.     

The morphogenesis of disability policies and the personalisation of social services. A case study from Italy.

Across Europe, and particularly since the 2008 Financial Crisis, new demands for tailor-made services came from different actors and perspectives: user-led organizations, intellectuals, policy makers, social workers, advocacy organizations, which call for a new way of programming, realizing and evaluating social policies. Personalization became a relevant part of the so called ‘welfare innovation narrative’, which concerns – to name but a few – English personalization agenda, Scottish self-directed support, Finnish education system, Norwegian cash-for-care policies. Even the European Commission is addressing new social services, reshaped through users’ capabilities. The aim of this paper is to critically explain, through a case study focused on the Sardinian disability policy, how social policy's morphogenetic cycles influence the governance of personalized disability plans and, consequently, the possibility of their implementation.     

Identifying social innovations in European local rural development initiatives

Social innovation is attracting increasing attention in research and policy, heightened by continuing austerity across Europe. Therefore, this paper examines earlier research into community-led local development (CLLD) initiatives in rural areas of Europe to develop our understanding of the meaning and scope of rural social innovation. We draw on a Schumpeterian view where innovations emerge from new combinations of resources that bring about positive changes and create value in society. A Schumpeterian social innovation framework is derived as the basis for re-analysing data from previous evaluations of LEADER policy in five different national contexts. This elicits a clearer understanding of social innovation in a rural development context, identifying different processes and outcomes that create social value. As the CLLD agenda and the demand for innovation in Europe gather pace, our aspirations are to inform future research and other initiatives on how to integrate social innovation into the design and evaluation of new rural development policies and programmes.     

Relationship Power Among Same-Sex Male Couples in New York and San Francisco: Laying the Groundwork for Sexual Risk Reduction Interventions Focused on Interpersonal Power

Research is clear that power differentials between women and men shape women’s human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) risks; however, little research has attempted to examine power differentials within same-sex male (SSM) couples and whether these influence sexual risk outcomes. To produce the first quantitative scale that measures power in SSM relationships, the current work was a Phase 1 qualitative study that sought to understand domains of relationship power and how power operated in the relationship among 48 Black, White, and interracial (Black–White) SSM couples recruited from San Francisco and New York. Interview domains were focused on definitions of power and perceptions of how power operated in the relationship. Findings revealed that couples described power in three key ways: as power exerted over a partner through decision-making dominance and relationship control; as power to accomplish goals through personal agency; and as couple-level power. In addition, men described ways that decision-making dominance and relationship control could be enacted in the relationship—through structural resources, emotional and sexual influence, and gender norm expectations. We discuss the implications of these findings for sexual risks and HIV care and treatment with SSM couples that are focused on closing gaps in power.     

Psychodynamic theory within the politics of social work theory

Abstract

It is argued that social work theory has a politics in which supporters of theoretical perspectives are in discourse. The political position of psychodynamic theory has varied in each of three phases of social work theoretical development: the pre-influence, dominance and alternatives phases. In the dominance phase social work theories usually derived from psychoanalysis, psychodynamic ideas permeated basic social work practices and non-psychodynamic perspectives were influenced by it. In the alternatives phase, these influences continued, psychodynamic theory became a player in a wider discourse, was incorporated into or incorporated other perspectives and continued its dominance in specific settings. However, intensity of criticism of it, non-therapeutic approaches in much of social work, restricted training programmes, poor media of professional communication, the novelty of newer perspectives and poor transfer of new developments in psychodynamic theory have implied an insecure position for psychodynamic theory. But many of these problems are shared by alternative perspectives and its historical strength, strength in related occupations its adaptiveness and inclusiveness and the development of post-qualifying training offer continuing avenues to strengthen its political position within social work theory     

Characterizations of egalitarian binary relations as transitive closures with a special reference to Lorenz dominance and to single-crossing conditions

This article considers, in the context of the fixed-population constant-sum comparison of income distributions, a number of intransitive binary relations smaller than Lorenz dominance. We determine their transitive closure, and we study how they relate to each other and to other relations that have appeared in the literature. Among other results, we provide alternative characterizations of Lorenz dominance.     

The Human Habitat: a Systemization and Critique of Park’s Theory from a Radical Interactionist Perspective

When Park died, he left his theory of the human habitat not only incomplete, but in considerable disarray. Although few present-day scholars have demonstrated much interest in building on this critical body of Park’s work, which he based on dominance, it probably represents his most important contribution to American sociology. I argue that the key to systemizing his highly discursive account of the human habitat is to view it from an emergent social evolutionary perspective, which makes it possible to differentiate his notion of “community” from “society,” as well as explain how the two concepts can logically be viewed as both separate and unified entities. A community is not only a necessary stage in the social evolutionary process of producing a society, but it also provides the habitat needed for a society’s later emergence. Among other things, Park’s theory of the human habitat is also criticized for its failure to (1) distinguish dominance from domination, (2) identify the reciprocal relationship existing between power and domination, (3) accurately characterize the nature of the economic order operating in communities, and (4) demarcate a pre-lingual, lingual and literate communal stages that precedes in the social evolutionary process the possible development of a society. In passing, I also point out critical, but often overlooked aspects of Park’s theory of the human habitat that contradict popular characterizations of his work as being purblind to the operation of dominance and power, social Darwinist, conservative, sexist, and racist. Finally, I deduce the implications of his theory for the future emergence of a “world society.”     

Is India better off today than 15 years ago? A robust multidimensional answer

This paper provides a robust multidimensional normative evaluation of the growth episode that India has experienced in the last 15 years. Specifically, the paper compares the evolution, between 1987, 1995 and 2002, of the distribution of several individual attributes on the basis of ethically robust dominance criteria. The individual attributes considered are real consumption (measured at the individual level), literacy rate, under 5 mortality and violent crime rates (all measured at the district levels). District level variables are interpreted as (local) public goods which, along with consumption, contribute to individual well-being. The robust criteria used are generalizations, to more than two attributes, of the first and second order dominance criteria of Atkinson and Bourguignon (Rev Econ Stud 49:183–201, 1982) and coincide with the unanimity of utilitarian value judgements taken over a specific class of individual utility functions. The main result of the empirical analysis is that all utilitarian rankings of distributions of the four attributes that assume that individual utility functions satisfy the assumptions of second order dominance agree that India is better off in 2002 than in 1987 or 1995 but that these rankings disagree as to how to rank 1987 and 1995. Furthermore, if one removes crime from the list of attributes, the dominance is shown to apply steadily over the whole period.     

The Influence of Facial Emotion Displays, Gender, and Ethnicity on Judgments of Dominance and Affiliation

Facial expressions of emotions convey not only information about emotional states but also about interpersonal intentions. The present study investigated whether factors known to influence the decoding of emotional expressions—the gender and ethnicity of the stimulus person as well as the intensity of the expression—would also influence attributions of interpersonal intentions. For this, 145 men and women rated emotional facial expressions posed by both Caucasian and Japanese male and female stimulus persons on perceived dominance and affiliation. The results showed that the sex and the ethnicity of the encoder influenced observers' ratings of dominance and affiliation. For anger displays only, this influence was mediated by expectations regarding how likely it is that a particular encoder group would display anger. Further, affiliation ratings were equally influenced by low intensity and by high intensity expressions, whereas only fairly intense emotional expressions affected attributions of dominance.     

Quo vadis public procurement of innovation?

Governments are actively looking for ways to use public procurement so that it would become more effective in facilitating innovation across public and private sectors. However, a shift towards public procurement of innovation (PPI) has proven to be difficult. Whereas the contemporary debate has mostly focused on how to reduce the barriers of PPI through re-conceptualizing the procurement process, there is a need to take into account also wider strategic factors through which governments create capacity to undertake PPI. By revisiting historic and contemporary policy initiatives, four strategies for the future can be envisioned: PPI as experimental innovation policy, from fiscal policy under austerity to PPI, mission-oriented PPI and shifts in administrative culture towards PPI. Each of the strategies demands different capacities from the entrepreneurial sector, as well as state, policy and administrative capacities from the public sector. These issues should be an inherent part of future policy-making and offer new avenues for PPI-related policy analysis and academic research.     

Spaces enabling game-changing and sustaining innovations: why space matters for knowledge creation and innovation

Abstract

Innovation has become one of the key drivers for growth. However, how do we bring about innovation which is both radical and respects the limits of the world? One of our key assumptions is that we have to take into consideration the epistemological and cognitive processes leading to (radically) new knowledge first. We propose an approach that establishes spaces enabling such processes of knowledge creation we refer to them as Enabling Spaces.

This article is concerned with the question of how innovation, and more specifically, profound, radical and sustainable innovation can be brought about in a more qualitative manner. What are the necessary concepts and attitudes which facilitate the processes of innovation? The notion of enabling as opposed to 'managing' or controlling innovation is to be developed. Furthermore the concept of situated/extended cognition is discussed as a key ingredient for Enabling Spaces.

The second part gives an overview of the concept of Enabling Spaces and of the design process leading to such spaces. Finally the concrete case of a knowledge-creating university is discussed.     

Rethinking Family Patriarchy and Women's Positions in Presocialist China

Grounded in the patrilineal family system in presocialist China, this study explores the intersection between generation and gender dimensions of family patriarchy in influencing marital power relations. Data come from the life stories of 80 elderly married individuals, collected during the 2000–2001 period in the city of Beijing. Patterns of male dominance in marital relations were found to be incomplete, inconsistent, and even countervailing in the presence of generation patriarchy. Consequently, women's experience with family patriarchy was mixed over the life course. They were particularly disadvantaged as daughters‐in‐law, but their lives were improved as they became fully integrated into the patrilineal system through reproduction and their husband's growing reliance on their contributions to family continuity.     

Open Innovation in Nonprofit Sports Clubs

This research paper investigates open innovation—that is, the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge in order to innovate—in the context of nonprofit sports clubs, and is based on the content analysis of semi-structured interviews held with representatives of eleven sports clubs. The study develops a framework that describes open innovation activities in nonprofit sports clubs as facets of four superordinate dimensions, namely permeability of the club’s boundary, application and implementation of open innovation practices, managerial competencies, and the environmental and organizational surroundings in which the club operates. Within these dimensions, subordinate facets such as commitment of the club’s president and the strategic use of coopetitive environments explain how and why sports clubs are successful at implementing innovations and how their nonprofit status (e.g., volunteer work) contributes to (or is in conflict with) innovation. The findings provide implications for nonprofit organizations inside and outside the sports sector.