Isomorphic effects of managerial and directoral career paths

The extensive array of interlocking directorate research remains near-exclusively cross-sectional or comparative cross-sectional in nature. While this has been fruitful in identifying persistent structures of inter-organisational relationships evidence of the impact of these structures on organisational performance or activity has been more limited. This should not be surprising because, by their nature, relationships have strong longitudinal and dynamic qualities that are likely to be difficult to isolate through cross-sectional approaches. Clearly, managerial practice is inevitably strongly conditioned by the specific contingencies of the time and the information available through networks of colleagues and advisers (particularly at board level) at the time. But managerial and directoral capabilities and mental sets are also developed over time, particularly through previous experiences in these roles and the formation of long-lasting 'strong' and 'weak' relationships. This paper tests the influence of three longitudinal dimensions of managers and directors' relationships on a set of indicators of financial performance, drawing from a large dataset of detailing historic board membership of UK firms. It finds evidence of isomorphic processes through these channels and establishes that the longitudinal design considerably enhances the detection of performance effects from directorate interlocks. More broadly, the research has implications for the conception of collective action and the constitution of 'community'.

Journal citation among heterodox economists 1995-2007: Dynamics of community emergence

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the pattern among 17 heterodox economic journals over a prolonged period to provide evidence about the social dynamics among the group of researchers who publish in them and the extent to which they hold or develop a collective identity as heterodox economists. Design/methodology/approach – Traditional approaches to citation analysis are extended by the use of techniques from social network analysis. In addition to citation counts, measures of network position and clique membership are used to identify key journals and turning points in a longitudinal analysis. Findings – Important shifts in the nature of citation within the network of journals are identified in the 1998-2001 period and evidence is found of the emergence of a collective identity. Research limitations/implications – The methods prove a valuable extension of citation analysis and also focus greater consideration on the social relationships that citations represent. They are well suited to addressing the principal limitation of the study, its restriction to journals within the defined community rather than journals in general. Originality/value – This extends traditional approaches to citation analysis, provides an important new technique in identifying emergent collective identities and provides insight into the history and nature of the heterodox economic community.

Global research collaboration: the UKIERI India-UK initiative – lessons from practice for sustainable international partnerships

As knowledge development is claimed to underpin the development of globalisation, interest in research collaboration and its internationalisation has become more widespread. This paper looks at the motivations behind, and development of, higher educational collaborations with a focus on research collaboration, and also compares some of the key issues surrounding academic collaborations. It employs current thinking on strategic alliances and in particular on social network and social capital theories to judge how collaborations can best be encouraged and managed. The paper uses the specific case of India-UK relationship as an example and looks at the context and motivation for collaboration in these two countries. It presents the UK India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) and reviews how this initiative deals with the issues discussed by current writers in relation to collaboration, as well as drawing lessons from the initiative for research collaboration more widely.

ReaderBench: An Integrated Cohesion-Centered Framework

Dascalu, M., Stavarache, L.L., Dessus, P., Trausan-Matu, S., McNamara, D.S., & Bianco, M. (2015). ReaderBench: An Integrated Cohesion-Centered Framework. In G. Conole, T. Klobucar, C. Rensing, J. Konert & É. Lavoué (Eds.), 10th European Conf. on Technology Enhanced Learning (pp. 505–508). Toledo, Spain: Springer.

De la cooperativa agroalimentaria a la "learning netchain". Hacia un planteamiento teorico interorganizativo e interpersonal

Se propone un planteamiento teórico/conceptual para determinar si las relaciones interorganizativas e interpersonales de la netchain de las cooperativas agroalimentarias evolucionan hacia una learning netchain. Las propuestas del trabajo muestran que el mayor grado de asociacionismo y la mayor cooperación/colaboración vertical a lo largo de la cadena están positivamente relacionados con la posición horizontal de la empresa focal más cercana del consumidor final. Esto requiere una planificación y una resolución de problemas de manera conjunta, lo que está positivamente relacionado con el mayor flujo y diversidad de la información/conocimiento obtenido y diseminado a lo largo de la netchain. Al mismo tiempo se necesita desarrollar un contexto social en el que fluya la información/conocimiento y las nuevas ideas de manera informal y esto se logra con redes personales y, principalmente, profesionales y con redes internas y, principalmente, externas. Todo esto permitirá una mayor satisfacción de los socios de la cooperativa agroalimentaria y de sus distribuidores y una mayor intensidad en I+D, convirtiéndose la netchain de la cooperativa agroalimentaria, así, en una learning netchain.

Community Relations in Northern Ireland: a shift in Attitudes?

The paper presents an analysis of Northern Ireland Social Attitudes data available at the time of writing. Its significance lay in emerging disparities in the responses, over time, of Protestants and Catholics to key social issues such as integrated education. The data, made public just one year after the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, generated intense media interest. Findings were reported in 400 outlets worldwide (UU media monitoring). Hughes was also interviewed for local and national news programmes (including BBC World Service). The data informed a decision by Government to undertake a major review of community relations policy, and Hughes was invited to advise the Head of the Northern Ireland review team. She was also invited to Chair the Community Relations Panel of the ESRC Devolution

Recent advances in the analysis of behavioural organization and interpretation as indicators of animal welfare

While the incorporation of mathematical and engineering methods has greatly advanced in other areas of the life sciences, they have been under-utilized in the field of animal welfare. Exceptions are beginning to emerge and share a common motivation to quantify 'hidden' aspects in the structure of the behaviour of an individual, or group of animals. Such analyses have the potential to quantify behavioural markers of pain and stress and quantify abnormal behaviour objectively. This review seeks to explore the scope of such analytical methods as behavioural indicators of welfare. We outline four classes of analyses that can be used to quantify aspects of behavioural organization. The underlying principles, possible applications and limitations are described for: fractal analysis, temporal methods, social network analysis, and agent-based modelling and simulation. We hope to encourage further application of analyses of behavioural organization by highlighting potential applications in the assessment of animal welfare, and increasing awareness of the scope for the development of new mathematical methods in this area.

Mass media and polarisation processes in the bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics

This paper presents a social simulation in which we add an additional layer of mass media communication to the social network 'bounded confidence' model of Deffuant et al (2000). A population of agents on a lattice with continuous opinions and bounded confidence adjust their opinions on the basis of binary social network interactions between neighbours or communication with a fixed opinion. There are two mechanisms for interaction. 'Social interaction' occurs between neighbours on a lattice and 'mass communication' adjusts opinions based on an agent interacting with a fixed opinion. Two new variables are added, polarisation: the degree to which two mass media opinions differ, and broadcast ratio: the number of social interactions for each mass media communication. Four dynamical regimes are observed, fragmented, double extreme convergence, a state of persistent opinion exchange leading to single extreme convergence and a disordered state. Double extreme convergence is found where agents are less willing to change opinion and mass media communications are common or where there is moderate willingness to change opinion and a high frequency of mass media communications. Single extreme convergence is found where there is moderate willingness to change opinion and a lower frequency of mass media communication. A period of persistent opinion exchange precedes single extreme convergence, it is characterized by the formation of two opposing groups of opinion separated by a gradient of opinion exchange. With even very low frequencies of mass media communications this results in a move to central opinions followed by a global drift to one extreme as one of the opposing groups of opinion dominates. A similar pattern of findings is observed for Neumann and Moore neighbourhoods.

Creating a spontaneous conversational speech corpus

Speech recognition and language analysis of spontaneous speech arising in naturally spoken conversations are becoming the subject of much research. However, there is a shortage of spontaneous speech corpora that are freely available for academics. We therefore undertook the building of a natural conversation speech database, recording over 200 hours of conversations in English by over 600 local university students. With few exceptions, the students used their own cell phones from their own rooms or homes to speak to one another, and they were permitted to speak on any topic they chose. Although they knew that they were being recorded and that they would receive a small payment, their conversations in the corpus are probably very close to being natural and spontaneous. This paper describes a detailed case study of the problems we faced and the methods we used to make the recordings and control the collection of these social science data on a limited budget.

Design and Analysis of an Independent, Layer 2, Open-Access WiFi Monitoring Infrastructure in the Wild

While WiFi monitoring networks have been deployed in previous research, to date none have assessed live network data from an open access, public environment. In this paper we describe the construction of a replicable, independent WLAN monitoring system and address some of the challenges in analysing the resultant traffic. Analysis of traffic from the system demonstrates that basic traffic information from open-access networks varies over time (temporal inconsistency). The results also show that arbitrary selection of Request-Reply intervals can have a significant effect on Probe and Association frame exchange calculations, which can impact on the ability to detect flooding attacks.

Evaluating the effectiveness of community-based dementia care networks:The Dementia Care Networks' Study

Purpose: The Dementia Care Networks' Study examined the effectiveness of four community-based, not-for-profit dementia networks. The study involved assessing the relationship between the types of administrative and service-delivery exchanges that occurred among the networked agencies and the network members' perception of the effectiveness of these exchanges. Design and Methods: With the use of a case-study method, the evolution, structure, and processes of each network were documented. Social network analysis using a standardized questionnaire completed by member agencies identified patterns of administrative and clinical exchanges among networked agencies. Results: Differences were found between the four networks in terms of their perceptions of service-delivery effectiveness; perceptions of administrative effectiveness did not factor significantly. Exchanges between groups of agencies (cliques) within each of the four networks were found to be more critical than those between individual agencies within each network. Implications: Integration-measured by the types of exchanges within as opposed to across networks-differentiated the four networks studied. This research contributes to our understanding of the use of multiple measures to evaluate the inner workings of service delivery and their impact on elder health and elder health care. Copyright 2005 by The Gerontological Society of America.

Unique Challenges in WiFi Intrusion Detection

The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a common means of protecting networked systems from attack or malicious misuse. The deployment of an IDS can take many different forms dependent on protocols, usage and cost. This is particularly true of Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS) which have many detection challenges associated with data transmission through an open, shared medium, facilitated by fundamental changes at the Physical and MAC layers. WIDS need to be considered in more detail at these lower layers than their wired counterparts as they face unique challenges. The remainder of this chapter will investigate three of these challenges where WiFi deviates significantly from that of wired counterparts:

• Attacks Specific to WiFi Networks: Outlining the additional threats which WIDS must account for: Denial of Service, Encryption Bypass and AP Masquerading attacks.

• The Effect of Deployment Architecture on WIDS Performance: Demonstrating that the deployment environment of a network protected by a WIDS can influence the prioritisation of attacks.

• The Importance of Live Data in WiFi Research: Investigating the different choices for research data sources with an emphasis on encouraging live network data collection for future WiFi research.

Development of small and medium-sized enterprise horizontal innovation networks: UK agri-food sector study

Within the management literature, there is an emergent discourse on horizontal collaboration among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), whereby individual rivalries are overcome by the need for more resources and innovation, leading to increased competitiveness through joint product development. In particular, a number of these horizontal collaborations between SMEs have occurred within the agri-food sector. As a consequence, this article aims to explore the longitudinal development of horizontal innovation networks within an artisan bakers’ network as part of the UK SME agri-food sector. An interpretivist research approach was used, whereby the development and evolution of an artisan bakers’ horizontal network was studied over a 27-month period. The findings, as summarised in conceptual models which draw upon knowledge-based open innovation and social network constructs, illustrate that a complex three-stage life cycle development occurred within the bakers’ horizontal network.

Location-Awareness for Radios and Networks: Part I

The papers in this special issue focus on the topic of location awareness for radio and networks. Localization-awareness using radio signals stands to revolutionize the fields of navigation and communication engineering. It can be utilized to great effect in the next generation of cellular networks, mining applications, health-care monitoring, transportation and intelligent highways, multi-robot applications, first responders operations, military applications, factory automation, building and environmental controls, cognitive wireless networks, commercial and social network applications, and smart spaces. A multitude of technologies can be used in location-aware radios and networks, including GNSS, RFID, cellular, UWB, WLAN, Bluetooth, cooperative localization, indoor GPS, device-free localization, IR, Radar, and UHF. The performances of these technologies are measured by their accuracy, precision, complexity, robustness, scalability, and cost. Given the many application scenarios across different disciplines, there is a clear need for a broad, up-to-date and cogent treatment of radio-based location awareness. This special issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in technology, regulation, and theory. It also presents a holistic view of research challenges and opportunities in the emerging areas of localization.