Task partitioning in new product development teams: A knowledge and learning perspective

R&D alliances and outsourcing elements of the new product development process are now commonplace practices among many firms. However, little previous work has examined how these organizational choices influence project knowledge and learning. Based on a comparison of three new product development projects in the software industry, this paper examines how task partitioning in the project influences learning and knowledge development within the firm. The paper suggests that internal development projects encourage synthetic learning and development of architectural and tacit knowledge; in contrast, outsourcing and joint ventures encourage analytic learning and development of component and explicit knowledge.     

Compliance Versus Risk in Assessing Occupational Exposures

Assessments of occupational exposures to chemicals are generally based upon the practice of compliance testing in which the probability of compliance is related to the exceedance [γ, the likelihood that any measurement would exceed an occupational exposure limit (OEL)] and the number of measurements obtained. On the other hand, workers’ chronic health risks generally depend upon cumulative lifetime exposures which are not directly related to the probability of compliance. In this paper we define the probability of “overexposure” (θ) as the likelihood that individual risk (a function of cumulative exposure) exceeds the risk inherent in the OEL (a function of the OEL and duration of exposure). We regard θ as a relevant measure of individual risk for chemicals, such as carcinogens, which produce chronic effects after long-term exposures but not necessarily for acutely-toxic substances which can produce effects relatively quickly. We apply a random-effects model to data from 179 groups of workers, exposed to a variety of chemical agents, and obtain parameter estimates for the group mean exposure and the within- and between-worker components of variance. These estimates are then combined with OELs to generate estimates of γ and θ. We show that compliance testing can significantly underestimate the health risk when sample sizes are small. That is, there can be large probabilities of compliance with typical sample sizes, despite the fact that large proportions of the working population have individual risks greater than the risk inherent in the OEL. We demonstrate further that, because the relationship between θ and γ depends upon the within- and between-worker components of variance, it cannot be assumed a priori that exceedance is a conservative surrogate for overexposure. Thus, we conclude that assessment practices which focus upon either compliance or exceedance are problematic and recommend that employers evaluate exposures relative to the probabilities of overexposure.     

Educational inequality across three generations in Australia

The transfer of advantage and disadvantage across multiple generations is receiving increasing attention in the international literature; however, transfers of resources across multiple generations in Australian families are less well understood. Using a longitudinal dataset of Australian children, we have the opportunity to not only investigate the transfer of educational resources across three generations in Australia, but also investigate the gendered nature of these transfers, which has been a limitation of other studies. We find no evidence of individual grandparent education effects on numeracy and reading scores for grandchildren in Year 3, independent of parent educational attainment and other covariates. However, significant effects on numeracy and reading scores were observed for children in families where both the grandmother and grandfather in maternal and paternal grandparent sets had high educational attainment (a diploma or university qualification), and where either or both the mother and father had a university qualification. These results suggest that the contribution of grandparents to the academic achievement of grandchildren cannot be fully explained by the parent generation and that the concentration of human capital in families contributes to educational inequalities across multiple generations that can be observed by eight years of age.     

Producing Contradictory Masculine Subject Positions: Narratives of Threat, Homophobia and Bullying in 11–14 Year Old Boys

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11–14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty-five group discussions ( N = 245) and two individual interviews ( N = 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys' experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in individual than in group interviews. A key theme in boys' accounts was the importance of being able to present themselves as properly masculine in order to avoid being bullied by other boys by being labeled "gay." The ways in which boys were racialized affected their experiences of school.     

Information management support for international negotiations

This paper examines the information processing requirements that surround the international negotiations process. General problem-solving models and generic task taxonomies are explored to provide insight into this process, a process that can be characterized as iterative options analysis. The paper also identifies a set of existing and emerging information technologies that can support the negotiation process, technologies that range from electronic mail to group decision support systems. The premise of the paper is that cost-effective information technology can support many important negotiation tasks and that existing technology has been vastly under-exploited by negotiators and their staffs. A program for introducing and evaluating information technology is also proposed.     

Screens in bed: visual art,sleep and handheld screen devices

This article seeks an understanding of sleeping and waking life in bed in relation to the use of handheld screen devices. The bedtime use of these devices has come to public attention through the involvement of this practice in the construction of two contemporary crises of sleep: Sleep science’s crisis of chronic sleep deprivation and the wider cultural crisis of the invasion of sleep by fast capitalism, as proposed by Jonathan Crary. Visual art is employed to gain insights into the two related understandings of sleep: one concerned with individual sleep self-regulation and the other with the corporeal commonality of sleep. The sociology of sleep, based on Michele Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’, is augmented by philosophical insights from Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze to reconfigure the sleeping body beyond the bounds of disciplinary regimes and permit a reassessment of the affective potential of sleep. Works of digital media art, together with ethnographic and cultural studies on the use of mobile devices, are employed to tease out the entanglement of these screen devices with waking and sleeping bedroom life. An ontology of sleep as a pre-individual affective state is proposed as an alternative basis for resisting the appropriation of sleep by the always-waking world accessed through the use of smartphones and tablets.     

在公共服务递送中运营共同生产：服务蓝图的贡献

本文认为,公共服务应从以产品为主导的逻辑转向服务途径。通过采取服务导向,公共服务递送的经验性、组织间和系统性,以及作为共同生产者的服务使用者角色,将一同被考虑。论文将通过服务蓝图的应用,解释共同生产如何操作。并介绍了高等教育中的一个案例。在这一案例中,蓝图的创建将师生汇聚在一起,专注于学生入学的设计,从而改善学生体验,并支持共同生产。      

Stochastically optimal bootstrap sample size for shrinkage-type statistics

In nonregular problems where the conventional \(n\) out of \(n\) bootstrap is inconsistent, the \(m\) out of \(n\) bootstrap provides a useful remedy to restore consistency. Conventionally, optimal choice of the bootstrap sample size \(m\) is taken to be the minimiser of a frequentist error measure, estimation of which has posed a major difficulty hindering practical application of the \(m\) out of \(n\) bootstrap method. Relatively little attention has been paid to a stronger, stochastic, version of the optimal bootstrap sample size, defined as the minimiser of an error measure calculated directly from the observed sample. Motivated by this stronger notion of optimality, we develop procedures for calculating the stochastically optimal value of \(m\). Our procedures are shown to work under special forms of Edgeworth-type expansions which are typically satisfied by statistics of the shrinkage type. Theoretical and empirical properties of our methods are illustrated with three examples, namely the James–Stein estimator, the ridge regression estimator and the post-model-selection regression estimator.