Pollution prevention and business management : curricula for schools of business & public health /

"HWRIC TR-024."

Sudden infant death syndrome : identification and case management : conference proceedings.

Cover title.

A longitudinal study of employee adaptation to organizational change: The role of change-related information and change-related self-efficacy

This study examined the role of information, efficacy, and 3 stressors in predicting adjustment to organizational change. Participants were 589 government employees undergoing an 18-month process of regionalization. To examine if the predictor variables had long-term effects on adjustment, the authors assessed psychological well-being, client engagement, and job satisfaction again at a 2-year follow-up. At Time 1, there was evidence to suggest that information was indirectly related to psychological well-being, client engagement, and job satisfaction, via its positive relationship to efficacy. There also was evidence to suggest that efficacy was related to reduced stress appraisals, thereby heightening client engagement. Last, there was consistent support for the stress-buffering role of Time I self-efficacy in the prediction of Time 2 job satisfaction.

The knowledge transfer anomaly

Knowledge transfer between units within MNC’s and between independent organisations involved in international business is an important element of performance. Researchers have shown that generally cultural differences place difficulties in the way of both information and knowledge transfer across national borders, both within MNC’s and across organisations. This study examines the knowledge transfer process between different cultural groups in a particular setting and concludes that in this situation cultural differences do not hinder knowledge transfer. Explanations are provided for this anomaly and implications for international business managers are drawn.

Actor-network theory as a theoretical lens and research strategy for investigating firm internationalisation

Totally generalisable theories of firm internationalisation in the post-industrial era of international business, where national barriers are becoming less significant and technology becoming more influential, appear to be illusory. Stepwise or evolutionary models that predict gradual internationalisation are under challenge from empirical evidence of rapid internationalisation such as the phenomenon of the “born global” firm. Similarly, equilibrium models such as the eclectic paradigm have been criticised for being static and unable to account for process and path dependency. In this paper, the information and knowledge assumptions implied in theories of firm internationalisation are outlined and discussed. From this discussion, we suggest that actor-network theory, with its balance between description and explanation, may be a useful theoretical and empirical tool for investigating the complex and heterogeneous process of firm internationalisation whilst creating opportunities for further theory building.

Using HLT for acquiring, retrieving and publishing knowledge in AKT:position paper

AKT is a major research project applying a variety of technologies to knowledge management. Knowledge is a dynamic, ubiquitous resource, which is to be found equally in an expert's head, under terabytes of data, or explicitly stated in manuals. AKT will extend knowledge management technologies to exploit the potential of the semantic web, covering the use of knowledge over its entire lifecycle, from acquisition to maintenance and deletion. In this paper we discuss how HLT will be used in AKT and how the use of HLT will affect different areas of KM, such as knowledge acquisition, retrieval and publishing.

Techniques for automated taxonomy building: towards ontologies for knowledge management

Ontologies have become widely accepted as the main method for representing knowledge in Knowledge Management (KM) applica-tions. Given the continuous and rapid change and dynamic nature of knowledge in all fields, automated methods for construct-ing ontologies are of great importance. All ontologies or taxonomies currently in use have been hand built and require consider-able manpower to keep up to date. Taxono-mies are less logically rigorous than ontolo-gies, and in this paper we consider the re-quirements for a system which automatically constructed taxonomies. There are a number of potentially useful methods for construct-ing hierarchically organised concepts from a collection of texts and there are a number of automatic methods which permit one to as-sociate one word with another. The impor-tant issue for the successful development of this research area is to identify techniques for labelling the relation between two candi-date terms, if one exists. We consider a number of possible approaches and argue that the majority are unsuitable for our re-quirements.

Background and foreground knowledge in dynamic ontology construction

Ontologies have become a key component in the Semantic Web and Knowledge management. One accepted goal is to construct ontologies from a domain specific set of texts. An ontology reflects the background knowledge used in writing and reading a text. However, a text is an act of knowledge maintenance, in that it re-enforces the background assumptions, alters links and associations in the ontology, and adds new concepts. This means that background knowledge is rarely expressed in a machine interpretable manner. When it is, it is usually in the conceptual boundaries of the domain, e.g. in textbooks or when ideas are borrowed into other domains. We argue that a partial solution to this lies in searching external resources such as specialized glossaries and the internet. We show that a random selection of concept pairs from the Gene Ontology do not occur in a relevant corpus of texts from the journal Nature. In contrast, a significant proportion can be found on the internet. Thus, we conclude that sources external to the domain corpus are necessary for the automatic construction of ontologies.