Project team’s internal and external social networks and their influence on project performance

The research on project learning has recognised the significance of knowledge transfer in project based organisations (PBOs). Effective knowledge transfer across projects avoids reinventions, enhances knowledge creation and saves lots of time that is crucial in project environment. In order to facilitate knowledge transfer, many PBOs have invested lots of financial and human resources to implement IT-based knowledge repository. However, some empirical studies found that employees would rather turn for knowledge to colleagues despite their ready access to IT-based knowledge repository. Therefore, it is apparent that social networks play a pivotal role in the knowledge transfer across projects. Some scholars attempt to explore the effect of network structure on knowledge transfer and performance, however, focused only on egocentric networks and the groups’ internal social networks. It has been found that the project’s external social network is also critical, in that the team members can not handle critical situations and accomplish the projects on time without the assistance and knowledge from external sources. To date, the influence of the structure of a project team’s internal and external social networks on project performance, and the interrelation between both networks are barely known. In order to obtain such knowledge, this paper explores the interrelation between the structure of a project team’s internal and external social networks, and their effect on the project team’s performance. Data is gathered through survey questionnaire distributed online to respondents. Collected data is analysed applying social network analysis (SNA) tools and SPSS. The theoretical contribution of this paper is the knowledge of the interrelation between the structure of a project team’s internal and external social networks and their influence on the project team’s performance. The practical contribution lies in the guideline to be proposed for constructing the structure of project team’s internal and external social networks.

Social scientists don’t say titwank’

Drawing on the textual evidence of a number of referees’ reports, this article maps key differences between the humanities and social sciences approaches to the study of pornography, in order to facilitate better understanding and communication between the areas. 1. Social scientists avoid ‘vulgar’ language to describe sex. Humanities scholars need not do so. 2. Social scientists remain committed to the idea of ‘objectivity’ while humanities scholars reject the idea – although this may be a confusion in language, with the term in the social sciences used to mean something more like ‘falsifiability’. 3. Social science assumes that the primary effects of exposure to pornography must be negative. 4. More generally, social science resists paradigm changes, insisting that all new work agrees with research that has gone before. 5. Social science believes that casual sex and sadomasochism are negative; humanities research need not do so.

A 'deleterious' effect? : Australian legal education and the production of the legal identity

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship.

How do other people influence your driving speed? Exploring the 'who' and the 'how' of social influences on speeding from a qualitative perspective

Using only legal sanctions to manage the speed at which people drive ignores the potential benefits of harnessing social factors such as the influence of others. Social influences on driver speeds were explored in this qualitative examination of 67 Australian drivers. Focus group interviews with 8 driver types (young, mid-age and older males and females, and self-identified Excessive and Rare speeders) were guided by Akers’ social learning theory (Akers, 1998). Findings revealed two types of influential others: people known to the driver (passengers and parents), and unknown other drivers. Passengers were generally described as having a slowing influence on drivers: responsibility for the safety of people in the car and consideration for passenger comfort were key themes. In contrast, all but the Rare speeders reported increasing their speed when driving alone. Parental role modelling was also described. In relation to other drivers, key themes included speeding to keep up with traffic flow and perceived pressure to drive faster. This ‘pressure’ from others to ‘speed up’ was expressed in all groups and reported strategies for managing this varied. Encouragingly, examples of actual or anticipated social rewards for speeding were less common than examples of social punishments. Three main themes relating to social punishments were embarrassment, breaching the trust of others, and presenting an image of a responsible driver. Impression management and self-presentation are discussed in light of these findings. Overall, our findings indicate scope to exploit the use of social sanctions for speeding and social praise for speed limit compliance to enhance speed management strategies.

What is the relationship between social governance and schooling?

The most frequently told story charting the rise of mass schooling should be fairly familiar to most of us. This story normally centres around the post-enlightenment social changes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and details how society slowly became more caring and more humane, and how we all decided that rather than simply being fodder for the mills, all children – including those from the working-classes - had the right to an education. The more civilised we became, the more we pushed back the school leaving age, until we eventually developed schools which clearly reflected the values and ambitions of the wider community. After all, are school not simply microcosms of society at large? In addition to this, the form that modern schooling takes is regarded as an unproblematic part of the same story. Of course we should organise our learning in the way we do, with the emphasis on formalised learning spaces, graded curricula, timetables of activities, various forms of assessment, and a clear hierarchy of authority. These features of the contemporary education merely reflect the fact that this is self-evidently the best system available. After all, how else could education possibly be organised?

Towards Humane Technologies: Biotechnologies, New Media and Ethics

What are the ethical and political implications when the very foundations of life —things of awe and spiritual significance — are translated into products accessible to few people? This book critically analyses this historic recontextualisation. Through mediation — when meaning moves ‘from one text to another, from one discourse to another’ — biotechnology is transformed into analysable data and into public discourses. The unique book links biotechnology with media and citizenship. As with any ‘commodity’, biological products have been commodified. Because enormous speculative investment rests on this, risk will be understated and benefit will be overstated. Benefits will be unfairly distributed. Already, the bioprospecting of Southern megadiverse nations, legally sanctioned by U.S. property rights conventions, has led to wealth and health benefits in the North. Crucial to this development are biotechnological discourses that shift meanings from a “language of life” into technocratic discourses, infused with neo-liberal economic assumptions that promise progress and benefits for all. Crucial in this is the mass media’s representation of biotechnology for an audience with poor scientific literacy. Yet, even apparently benign biotechnology spawned by the Human Genome Project such as prenatal screening has eugenic possibilities, and genetic codes for illness are eagerly sought by insurance companies seeking to exclude certain people. These issues raise important questions about a citizenship that is founded on moral responsibility for the wellbeing of society now and into the future. After all, biotechnology is very much concerned with the essence of life itself. This book provides a space for alternative and dissident voices beyond the hype that surrounds biotechnology.

Youth, Sport and the Social Inclusion Agenda

The purpose of this paper is to assess aspects of the British Government's attempts to use sporting participation as a vehicle to re-integrate socially disadvantaged, excluded and 'at-risk' youth into mainstream society. A number of organisations, policy-makers, commentators, and practitioners with a stake in the 'sport and social inclusion agenda' were interviewed. General agreement was found on a number of points: that the field was overly crowded with policies, programmes and initiatives; that the field worked in a 'bottom-up' way, with the most significant factor determining success being effective local workers with good networks and cultural access; that the dichotomising rhetoric of inclusion/exclusion was counter-productive; that the notion of the 'at-risk youth' was problematic and unhelpful; and that they all now dealt with a marketplace, where 'clients' had to be enrolled in their own reformation. There was also disagreement on a number of points: that policy acts as a relatively accurate template for practice, as opposed to the argument that it was simply regarded as a cluster of suggestions for practice; that policy was exceptionally piecemeal in its formulation and application, as opposed to regarding policy as necessarily targeted and dispersed; and that the inclusion agenda was largely politically driven and transitory, as opposed to the optimistic view that it had become ingrained in local practice. Finally, the paper examines some issues that are the most likely points of contribution by researchers in the area: that more research needs to be done on the processes of identity formation associated with participation in sport; that more effective programme evaluation needs to be done for such forms of governmental intervention to work properly; and that the relationship between different kinds of physical activity and social and personal change needs to be more thoroughly theorised.

Applying brand equity to the social product of breastfeeding

Social marketing has successfully adopted many of the techniques of commercial marketing; however, a key commercial marketing theory that does not appear to be utilised in social marketing theory is brand equity. Given that a key outcome of brand equity is loyalty, which is also a desired outcome of many social marketing programs, brand equity appears to be a relevant theoretical framework. This study presents descriptive results of the brand equity levels of 296 Gen Y Australians for the social product of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is a desirable health behaviour with significant health and wellbeing outcomes for infants, mothers and communities. It was selected as the focus of this paper because loyalty to the behaviour is not increasing, according to the targets set by national government authorities.

Social networking : investigating the features of Facebook application

Research on social networking sites like Facebook is emerging but sparse. The exploratory study investigates the value users derive from self-described ‘cool’ Facebook applications, and explores the features that either encourage or discourage users to recommend application to their friends. Thus the concepts of value and cool are explored in a social networking setting. Our qualitative data shows that consumers derive a combination of functional value along with either social or emotional value from the applications. Female Facebook users indicated self-expression as important, while mates then to use Facebook application to socially compete. Three broad categories emerged for application features; symmetrical features can both encourage or discourage recommendation, asymmetrical features one encourage or discourage but not both, and polar features where different levels of the same feature encourage or discourage. Recommending or not recommending an application tends to be the result of a combination of features rather than one feature in isolation.

Value in Social Marketing : A Qualitative exploration within government health services

Value creation is an area with long-standing importance in the marketing field, yet little is known about the value construct itself. In social marketing, value can be regarded as an incentive for consumers to perform desirable behaviours that lead to bother greater social good and individual benefit. An understanding of customer value in the consumption of social products is an important aspect of designing social marketing interventions that can effectively change social behaviours. This paper uses qualitative data, gathered during depth interviews, to explore the value dimensions women experience from using government-provided breast screening services every two years. Thematic analysis was used in discovering that emotional functional, social and altruistic dimensions of value were present in womens’ experiences with these services as well as in the outcomes from using them.

Southern theory and its dynamics for postcolonial education

This paper discusses how the exploration of social texts and historical contexts from the global 'South', as put forward in Raewyn Connell's study 'Southern Theory' (2007), can improve the theoretical tools used in postcolonial education analysis. Connell analyses a selection of excellent and compelling social theory texts written by scholars in Africa, India, Iran, Latin America and Australia to show how they challenge and counter the silences, distortions and plain lies of dominant Western social theory. These texts of the global South do not mince words in laying bare the role of the institutions and elites of the West in the destruction, dispossession, and bloodshed involved in creating the world in which we live, and in perpetuating its catastrophes. The texts also reveal intense debates between scholars over their conceptualisations of local, national and global society. My paper argues that this kind of work is of vital importance to postcolonial studies in education. It helps education scholars to uncover the problematic assumptions and distortions of dominant education thought, and understand different ways of seeing. Postcolonial educators could use this to help both students and teacher unlearn many of our taught perceptions of the world, whether in the global North or the global South. Developing a countervailing social theory in education would sharpen our questioning of the structures of schooling as they relate to society, and tease out new dimensions of postcolonial leadership for education.

Social effects on coworker reliance and individual contributions to intercultural teams

Which social perceptions and structures shape coworker reliance and contributions to team products? When people form an intercultural team, they launch a set of working relationships that may be affected by social perceptions and social structures. Social perceptions include beliefs about interpersonal similarity and also expectations of behavior based on professional and national memberships. Social structures include dyadic relationships and the patterns they form. In this study, graduate students from three cohorts were consistently more likely to rely on others with whom they had a professional relationship, while structural equivalence in the professional network had no effect. In only one of the cohorts, people were more likely to rely on others who were professionally similar to themselves. Expectations regarding professional or national groups had no effect on willingness to rely on members of those groups, but expectations regarding teammates' nations positively influenced individual contributions. Willingness to rely on one's teammates did not significantly influence individual contributions to the team. Number of professional ties to teammates increased individual contributions, and number of external ties decreased contributions. Finally, people whose professional networks included a mixture of brokerage and closure (higher ego network variance) made greater contributions to their teams.

Entrepreneurship and family firms : growth and survival

Family businesses dominate in a majority of economies (Astrachan and Shanker, 2003; Chrisman, Chua, and Sharma, 2005; Morck and Yeung, 2004). As entrepreneurial activities have been shown to be central to economic growth it is essential that family businesses, irrespective of ownership patterns, not only survive but also grow thus growing the economy overall. While a great deal is known about entrepreneurial activities and a body of knowledge is being developed in relation to entrepreneurial processes in family firms, more needs to be understood in relation to the dynamics of entrepreneurial activities at the individual family firm level. One area of particular interest is the dynamics within the business and the family and how these dynamics impact upon entrepreneurial activities. Specifically how relationships between and among family members engaged in the business can interact with professional non-family member senior executives. The senior executives can actively use their positions in such ways that initiatives suggested by family members are less successful than they might be. This paper addresses how ‘family’ aspects of a business can assist or impede the entrepreneurial activities of individuals. It takes into account some of the unique features of family businesses – such as the importance of ‘familiness’ as a competitive advantage; the direct links between ownership and control of a business and the recognition (often implicit) that individuals in families do make a difference to how the business functions (Habbershon and Williams, 1999, Sharma, 2004; and Tokarczyk, Hansen Green, and Down, 2007). This emphasis on individuals in families fits well with the idea of entrepreneur as individual, as expressed by Schumpeter (1934), Baumol et al (2007). The theoretical approach that adopted to explore the dynamics of processes occurring within family firms is structuration theory combined with a theory of embeddeness (Dacin, Ventresca and Beal, 1999; Giddens, 1979, 1984, Jack and Anderson, 2002; and Sarason, Dean and Dillard, 2006).

Designing participation in agile ridesharing with mobile social software

Growing participation is a key challenge for the viability of sustainability initiatives, many of which require enactment at a local community level in order to be effective. This paper undertakes a review of technology assisted carpooling in order to understand the challenge of designing participation and consider how mobile social software and interface design can be brought to bear. It was found that while persuasive technology and social networking approaches have roles to play, critical factors in the design of carpooling are convenience, ease of use and fit with contingent circumstances, all of which require a use-centred approach to designing a technological system and building participation. Moreover, the reach of technology platform-based global approaches may be limited if they do not cater to local needs. An approach that focuses on iteratively designing technology to support and grow mobile social ridesharing networks in particular locales is proposed. The paper contributes an understanding of HCI approaches in the context of other designing participation approaches.