Toward an “Awareness” of the Relationship between Task Performance and Own Verbal Accounts of that Performance

The existence of learning without awareness has been debated for many years. Learning without awareness is said to occur when an individual''s behavior has been affected without that individual being aware of the conditions affecting the behavior, of the relationship between those conditions and the behavior, or of the fact that the behavior has changed. This paper describes a series of experiments investigating this phenomenon. The findings support the existence of “learning without awareness.” However, it is argued that the term “awareness” should be discarded as it is misleading. Instead, the results of the experiments are discussed in terms of behavior for which the individual does not provide a complete verbal account.     

Sociotechnology and the Environment

The founders of the sociotechnical modelperceived its relevance at the macro level of thecommunity, at the meso level of whole organizations, aswell as at the micro level of the primary work systems, but it is at the primary work system that mostapplications have been carried out. An efficient microlevel sociotechnical solution may still cause thetechnology to have a harmful impact on the environment. An increasing popular awareness ofenvironmental damage due to certain technologies leadsone to consider an extension of the important jointoptimization concept to a systemic heuristic devicecalled the socioecotechnical model in which the intra-and extra-organizational factors can be jointly assessedand optimized.     

THE IMPACT OF R&D INVESTMENT ON PRODUCTIVITY–NEW EVIDENCE USING LINKED R&D–LRD DATA

This paper uses confidential Census longitudinal microdata to examine the association between R&D and productivity for the period 1972–1985. These data allow for significant improvements in measurement and model specification, yielding more precise estimates of the returns to R&D. Our results confirm the findings of existing studies: 1) positive returns to R&D investment 2) higher returns to company-financed research 3) a productivity "premium" on basic research These results are robust to adjustments for "influential outliers." Also, our evidence suggests that the return to company-financed R&D is an increasing function of firm size.