Investigating the development of the internal and external service tasks of non-executive directors: the case of the Netherlands (1997-2005)

During the last decade, globalisation and liberalisation of financial markets, changing societal expectations and corporate governance scandals have increased the attention for the fiduciary duties of non-executive directors. In this context, recent corporate governance reform initiatives have emphasised the control task and independence of non-executive directors. However, little attention has been paid to their impact on the external and internal service tasks of non-executive directors. Therefore, this paper investigates how the service tasks of non-executive directors have evolved in the Netherlands. Data on corporate governance at the top-100 listed companies in the Netherlands between 1997 and 2005 show that the emphasis on non-executive directors' external service task has shifted to their internal service task, i.e. from non-executive directors acting as boundary spanners to non-executive directors providing advice and counselling to executive directors. This shift in board responsibilities affects non-executive directors' ability to generate network benefits through board relationships and has implications for non-executive directors' functional requirements.

Spaces of possibility in pre-service teacher education

Pre-service teacher education is a spatialized enterprise. It operates across a number of spaces that may or may not be linked ideologically and/or physically. These spaces can include daily practices, locations, infrastructure, relationships and representations of power and ideology. The interrelationships between and within these (sometimes competing) spaces for pre-service teachers will influence their identities as teachers and learners across time and space. Pre-service teachers are expected to make the connections between these often-contradictory spaces with little or no guidance on how to negotiate such complex relationships. These are difficult spaces, yet the slippages and gaps between these spaces offer generative possibilities. This paper explores these spaces of possibility for pre-service teacher education, and uses the spatial theories of Lefebvre (1991) and Foucault (1977, 1980) to argue that critical reflective practice can be used to create a ‘thirdspace’ (Soja, 1996) for reconstructing future practice.

Media as creative industries : conglomeration and globalization as accumulation strategies in an age of digital media

This chapter will begin by considering some of the distinctive features of media as creative industries, including their assessment of risk and return on investment, team-based production, the management of creativity, the value chain of production, distribution and circulation, and the significance of intellectual property in their revenue strategies. It will then critically appraise three strategies to capture new markets and revenue streams in the context of the rise of the Internet, digital media and globally networked distribution. The three strategies to be considered are conglomeration, networking and globalization, and the focus will be on the media giants such as News Corporation, Disney and Time-Warner. It will be argued that all three present considerable challenges in their application, and digital media technologies are weakening rather than strengthening their capacity to control the global media environment. The chapter will conclude with consideration of some implications of this analysis for questions of media power.

Culture and creative industries in Australia

It has been argued that the origins of modern creative industries policies can be found in Australia. The Creative Nation national cultural policy statement released by the Labor government headed by the Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1994 sought an original synthesis of arts and media policies that was outwardly looking, identifying the opportunities presented by what were then new digital media technologies, and clearly stated the economic opportunities presented by promotion of what were referred to at the time as the cultural industries. Several commentators have identified the influence that Creative Nation had on the Blair Labour government when it came to power in the United Kingdom in 1997. Faced with the question of how to revitalise the once-mighty industrial cities of the U.K. after the Conservative government, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport drew upon policy documents such as Australia’s Creative Nation, as well as the experience of local governments in these cities, in looking to the cultural sectors to spearhead new jobs growth, as well as re-branding the cities as cultural or creative cities in a post-industrial economic landscape. This growing alignment of culture and economics, that has been a characteristic of creative industries policies as they have developed in Australia, Britain, East Asia and Europe, marks an interesting shift in the traditional focus of arts and cultural policy as compensatory to the economic domain. The first Chair of what would become the Arts Council of Great Britain (now the Arts Council of England) was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes. In the First Annual Report of the Arts Council for 1945-1946, prepared in the latter stages of the Second World War, Keynes proposed that “the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion”. 中文摘要 1994年工黨執政時期澳洲總理基挺（Paul Keating）發表創意的國家（The Creative Nation）的文化政策聲明堪稱是澳洲現代創意產業的起源，該聲明試圖將藝術與媒體政策結合在一起，其目的在面向海外，為新數位媒體技術尋找機會。聲明中明確指出要推動文化產業為經濟帶來機會。「文化政策也是經濟政策。文化創造財富與附加價值，對創新、行銷與設計有重要貢獻，是我們工業的標誌（badge）。我們創意的層次實際上決定了我們適應新經濟imperatives的能力。文化本身就是項重要出口，是其他產品出口的主要附件（essential accompaniment）。文化吸引觀光與學生，也是我們經濟成功之關鍵。」 創意產業的策略是構建藝術、媒體與資訊電信科技的網絡以利文化產業在國家創新政策策略中擁有一席之地。此一策略最早是由1990年代末英國布萊爾（Tony Blair）的新工黨政府所採行，其後歐洲聯盟、澳洲、紐西蘭、新加坡、台灣、南韓與中國。

Parametric differences between a real-world distributed denial-of-service attack and a flash event

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be one of the most pernicious threats to the delivery of services over the Internet. Not only are DDoS attacks present in many guises, they are also continuously evolving as new vulnerabilities are exploited. Hence accurate detection of these attacks still remains a challenging problem and a necessity for ensuring high-end network security. An intrinsic challenge in addressing this problem is to effectively distinguish these Denial-of-Service attacks from similar looking Flash Events (FEs) created by legitimate clients. A considerable overlap between the general characteristics of FEs and DDoS attacks makes it difficult to precisely separate these two classes of Internet activity. In this paper we propose parameters which can be used to explicitly distinguish FEs from DDoS attacks and analyse two real-world publicly available datasets to validate our proposal. Our analysis shows that even though FEs appear very similar to DDoS attacks, there are several subtle dissimilarities which can be exploited to separate these two classes of events.

A social marketing approach to value creation in a Well-Women’s health service

Understanding consumer value is imperative in health care as the receipt of value drives the demand for health care services. While there is increasing research into health-care that adopts an economic approach to value, this paper investigates a non-financial exchange context and uses an experiential approach to value, guided by a social marketing approach to behaviour change. An experiential approach is deemed more appropriate for government health-care services that are free and for preventative rather than treatment purposes. Thus instead of using an illness-paradigm to view health services outcomes, we adopt a wellness paradigm. Using qualitative data gathered during 25 depth interviews the authors demonstrate how social marketing thinking has guided the identification of six themes that represent four dimensions of value (functional, emotional, social and altruistic) evident during the health care consumption process of a free government service.

Towards a service framework for remote sales support via augmented reality

Real-time sales assistant service is a problematic component of remote delivery of sales support for customers. Solutions involving web pages, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with transactions revolving around physically complex artefacts. This process involves a number of services that are often complex in nature, ranging from physical compatibility and configuration factors, to availability and credit services. We propose the application of a combination of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments suitable for remote sales of physical artefacts, right in the home of the purchaser. A high level description of the service structure involved is shown, along with a use case involving the sale of electronic goods and services within an example augmented reality application. We expect this work to have application in many sales domains involving physical objects needing to be sold over the Internet.