The impact of the introduction and use of an informational website on offline customer buying behavior

Do customers increase or decrease their spending in response to the introduction of an informational website? To answer this question, this study considers the effects of the introduction and use of an informational website by a large national retailer on offline customer buying behavior. More specifically, we study a website's effects on the number of shopping trips and the amount spent per category per shopping trip. The model is calibrated through the estimation of a Poisson model (shopping trips) and a type-II tobit model (the amount spent per category per shopping trip), with effect parameters that vary across customers. For the focal retailer, an informational website creates more bad than good news; most website visitors engage in fewer shopping trips and spend less in all product categories. The authors also compare the characteristics of shoppers who exhibit negative website effects with those few shoppers who show positive effects and thus derive key implications for research and practice.

Innovation in leadership development

In the light of the financial crisis and the radically changed conditions in the market place, international leadership development is facing new demands. The Danish-based International Leadership Institute Mannaz has researched the new conditions in collaboration with the Institute of Executive Development in the United States. The research, conducted in 2008 and 2009, combines, in an innovative way, quantitative and qualitative inputs, from both current and future perspectives, from some 111 senior Corporate Executives, Heads of Human Resources and of Learning and Organisational Development in large international corporations headquartered in Europe and the United States; together with the thoughts of some 50 experienced practitioners involved in executive coaching as well as in designing, developing and facilitating leadership development programmes. Also we include a section summarising the key findings from recently published research from other leadership development surveys. Conclusions reveal that the crisis has propelled a long-awaited decline of the traditional classroom-based educational approach to leadership development. Instead, effective leadership development is suggested to build on experiential learning approaches rooted in real life, real time and allowing for more immediate impact and providing for considerably higher relevance and motivation. Coaching, leaders teaching leaders, stretch assignments, action learning, peer networking, customer insights and selective use of technology are seen as important contributors to the leadership development process going forward.

"It's not my fault - but only I can change it":counterfactual and prefactual thoughts of managers

In testing for the self-serving bias in performance evaluation, the authors propose that comparing managers' counterfactual and prefactual thoughts about subordinates' performance is more conclusive than the attributional approach and also offers practical advantages. In a study with 120 managers, a 4-way interaction of subordinate performance, temporal perspective, direction, and reference confirmed the predicted pattern. Managers' thoughts about how a weak performance could have been enhanced had external references, but thoughts about how such a performance could be enhanced in the future focused on the leader. This asymmetry was only observed for weak performance. Results are discussed with regard to biases in leaders' performance evaluations and to how counter- and prefactual thoughts could be used for leadership research and practice.

Real teams or pseudo teams? The changing landscape needs a better map

Commentary on focal article by Tannenbaum et al., Teams are changing: Are research and practice evolving fast enough?

A process view of knowledge management:it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it

Knowledge management needs to consider the three related elements of people, processes and technology. Much existing work has concentrated on either people or technology, often to the exclusion of the other two elements. Yet without thinking about process – the way people, organisations and even technology actually do things – any implementation of a knowledge management initiative is at best risky, and at worst doomed to failure. This presentation looks at various ways in which a process view has appeared, explicitly or implicitly, in knowledge management research and practice so far, and reflects on how more “thinking about process” might improve knowledge management in the future. Consistent with the presentation’s own overall viewpoint, the issues generally centre not on what a process view would suggest should be done, but on the way that it would be implemented in practice.

A case-study investigating the physicochemical characteristics that dictate the function of a liposomal adjuvant

A range of particulate delivery systems have been considered as vaccine adjuvants. Of these systems, liposomes offer a range of advantages including versatility and flexibility in design format and their ability to incorporate a range of immunomodulators and antigens. Here we briefly outline research, from within our laboratories, which focused on the systematic evaluation of cationic liposomes as vaccines adjuvants. Our aim was to identify physicochemical characteristics that correlate with vaccine efficacy, with particular consideration of the interlink between depot-forming action and immune responses. A variety of parameters were investigated and over a range of studies we have confirmed that cationic liposomes, based on dimethyldioctadecylammonium bromide and trehalose 6,6'-dibehenate formed a depot at the injection site, which stimulates recruitment of antigen presenting cells to the injection site and promotes strong humoral and cell-mediated immune responses. Physicochemical factors which promote a strong vaccine depot include the combination of a high cationic charge and electrostatic binding of the antigen to the liposome system and the use of lipids with high transition temperatures, which form rigid bilayer vesicles. Reduction in vesicle size of cationic vesicles did not promote enhanced drainage from the injection site. However, reducing the cationic nature through substitution of the cationic lipid for a neutral lipid, or by masking of the charge using PEGylation, resulted in a reduced depot formation and reduced Th1-type immune responses, while Th2-type responses were less influenced. These studies confirm that the physicochemical characteristics of particulate-based adjuvants play a key role in the modulation of immune responses.

Engaging employers as partners in work-based learning assessment:proposal for a quality enhancement framework

This paper seeks to advance research and practice related to the role of employers in all stages of the assessment process of work-based learning (WBL) within a tripartite relationship of higher education institution (HEI), student and employer. It proposes a research-informed quality enhancement framework to develop good practice in engaging employers as partners in assessment. The Enhancement Framework comprises three dimensions, each of which includes elements and questions generated by the experiences of WBL students, HEI staff and employers. The three dimensions of the Enhancement Framework are: 1. ‘premises of assessment’ encompassing issues of learning, inclusion, standards and value; 2. ‘practice’, encompassing stages of assessment made up of course design, assessment task, responsibilities, support, grading and feedback; 3. ‘communication of assessment’ with the emphasis on role clarity, language and pathways. With its prompt questions, the Enhancement Framework may be used as a capacity-building tool for promoting, sustaining, benchmarking and evaluating productive dialogue and critical reflection about assessment between WBL partners. The paper concludes by emphasising the need for professional development as well as policy and research development, so that assessment in WBL can more closely correspond to the potentially transformative nature of the learning experience.

Making memories available:a framework for preserving rural heritage through community knowledge management (cKM)

While most of the research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on business communities, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice to wider society. This paper explores the potential of KM for rural communities, specifically for those that want to preserve their social history and collective memories (what we call heritage) to enrich the lives of others. In KM terms, this is a task of accumulating and recording knowledge (using KM techniques such as story-telling and communities of practice) to enable its retention for future use (by interested people perhaps through KM systems). We report a case study of Cardrona, a valley of approximately 120 people in New Zealand's South Island. Realising that time would erode knowledge of their community a small, motivated group of residents initiated a KM programme to create a legacy for a wider community including younger generations, tourists and scholars. This paper applies KM principles to rural communities that want to harness their collective knowledge for wider societal gain, and develops a community-based framework to inform such initiatives. As a result, we call for a wider conceptualisation of KM to include motives for managing knowledge beyond business performance to accommodate community (cKM). © 2010 Operational Research Society.

Reflective journals:can they be used to identify struggling students?

The ability to identify early failure in knowledge accquisition amongst students is important because it enables tutors to put in place suitable interventions to help struggling students. We hypothesised that if a reflective learning journal is a useful learning tool, there ought to be relationship between the type of journal entries and the depth of knowledge acquisition. Our research question is: can reflectiuve journals be used to identify struggling students? Previous work with reflective journals has not related the level of reflection with module outcomes obtained by the student. In our study, we have classified journal entries written by first year students in a foundationalprogramming module based on the SOLO taxonomy and compared this against the outcomes of two module assessments. Our results suggest that there is potential for using reflective journals to identify struggling stuidents in first year programming.

Researching with, not on:using photography in researching street children in Accra, Ghana

What is discussed in this chapter is work-in-progress, an opportunity for reflection upon elements of an on-going research project examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. Street children have received much research in recent years but our project is, we believe, distinctive in two respects. The first of these is that access to reliable data on the growing presence of children on the streets of African cities is often problematic. Available research is often diffuse and hard to access, it is more often than not driven by the short-term requirements of specific programmes and interventions and as a consequence can be lacking in depth, rigour and innovation. Without the means to provide a sufficiently self-conscious and critical engagement with accepted understandings of the lives of street children, consideration of the experience of street children in Africa continues to rely heavily on the more capacious and better disseminated research from the Americas (e.g., Mickelson, 2000). At the very least, Africa's specific experience of large population displacements, diversity of family forms, rapid urbanisation, vigorous structural adjustment and internal conflict raise important questions about the appropriateness of such ready generalisations. Judith Ennew (2003, p. 4) is clear that caution is needed in an uncritical endorsement of the “globalisation of the street child based on Latin American work”. She is equally mindful, however, that as far as Africa is concerned the absence of reliable evidence continues to hinder debate.

Enhancing competitive advantage with radio-frequency identification (RFID) enabled returnable transport equipment (RTE)

Fierce competition within the third party logistics (3PL) market has developed as providers compete to win customers and enhance their competitive advantage through cost reduction plans and creating service differentiation. 3PL providers are expected to develop advanced technological and logistical service applications that can support cost reduction while increasing service innovation. To enhance competitiveness, this paper proposes the implementation of radio-frequency identification (RFID) enabled returnable transport equipment (RTE) in combination with the consolidation of network assets and cross-docking. RFID enabled RTE can significantly improve network visibility of all assets with continuous real-time data updates. A four-level cyclic model aiding 3PL providers to achieve competitive advantage has been developed. The focus is to reduce assets, increase asset utilisation, reduce RTE cycle time and introduce real-time data in the 3PL network. Furthermore, this paper highlights the need for further research from the 3PL perspective. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Estimation of transportation battery second life for use in electricity grid systems

This paper presents research from part of a larger project focusing on the potential development of commercial opportunities for the reuse of batteries on the electricity grid system, subsequent to their primary use in low and ultra-low carbon vehicles, and investigating the life cycle issues surrounding the batteries. The work has three main areas; examination of electric vehicle fleet data in detail to investigate usage in first life. Batteries that have passed through a battery recycler at the end of their first life have been tested within the laboratory to confirm the general assumption that remaining capacity of 80% after use in transportation is a reasonable assumption as a basis for second-life applications. The third aspect of the paper is an investigation of the equivalent usage for three different second-life applications based on connection to the electricity grid. Additionally, the paper estimates the time to cell failure of the batteries within their second-life application to estimate lifespan for use within commercial investigations. © 2014 IEEE.

Grades do have a bearing

I am afraid that I need to challenge the assertion made by Rachel Airley in her letter (PJ, 10 March 2012, p308) that “there is no clear cut evidence that UCAS points obtained at school have any bearing on final degree performance”. Research from the Higher Education Funding Council for England — the body responsible for the distribution of funding to universities in England — shows that educational attainment before entry to higher education (ie, A-level grades) is the most important factor in determining academic success on undergraduate degree programmes.1,2 Indeed, research I have recently conducted on a cohort of MPharm students at Aston University (which will hopefully be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal shortly) demonstrates a strong positive correlation between UCAS Tariff points per A-level and final degree classification. As Dr Airley highlights in her letter, competition for places on MPharm programmes remains fierce and, in response to high levels of demand, her own institution has increased its standard entry offer. If UCAS Tariff points have little predictive ability of performance on the MPharm programme then, aside from minimising the administrative burden that the admissions process places on an institution, what is the logic behind increasing standard entry offers?

Special Functions and Pathways for Problems in Astrophysics: An Essay in Honor of A.M. Mathai

The paper provides a review of A.M. Mathai's applications of the theory of special functions, particularly generalized hypergeometric functions, to problems in stellar physics and formation of structure in the Universe and to questions related to reaction, diffusion, and reaction-diffusion models. The essay also highlights Mathai's recent work on entropic, distributional, and differential pathways to basic concepts in statistical mechanics, making use of his earlier research results in information and statistical distribution theory. The results presented in the essay cover a period of time in Mathai's research from 1982 to 2008 and are all related to the thematic area of the gravitationally stabilized solar fusion reactor and fractional reaction-diffusion, taking into account concepts of non-extensive statistical mechanics. The time period referred to above coincides also with Mathai's exceptional contributions to the establishment and operation of the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, India, as well as the holding of the United Nations (UN)/European Space Agency (ESA)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States/ Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Workshops on basic space science and the International Heliophysical Year 2007, around the world. Professor Mathai's contributions to the latter, since 1991, are a testimony for his social con-science applied to international scientific activity.

Children, health and well-being:policy debates and lived experiences

This book brings together new and leading scholars, who demonstrate the importance of research with children and from a child perspective, allowing for a fuller understanding of the meaning and impact of health and illness in children’s lives. •Demonstrates the importance of research with children and research from a child perspective, in order to fully understand the meaning and impact of health and illness in children’s lives •Encourages critical reflection on contemporary health policy and its relationships to culturally specific ways of knowing and understanding children’s health •Brings together new and leading scholars in the field of children’s health and illness •Moves the highly important issue of children’s health into the mainstream sociology of health and illness