Information quality assessment in Korean manufacturing organization

Information quality is a complex problem. Issues relating to information quality are strongly embedded in the context of the operations of information systems. Information quality issues, therefore, have qualitative as well as quantitative underpinnings, which affect on the various dimensions of information quality. In order to improve information quality, it is essential to assess its various dimensions. This assessment provides the gaps that work as the building blocks for improving quality of information. However, assessing information quality dimensions is extremely intricate because each dimension depends upon other dimensions, which makes it difficult to objectively assess these dimensions. This research utilizes a product perspective of information and applies Six-Sigma methodology to assess information quality. It describes a case study of a Korean manufacturing organization where analytical hierarchy process and quality function deployment was utilized to determine the mutual relationships of information quality dimensions and critical to information quality factors.

A good chat - are online forums fit for PLT? - a review

The effectiveness of asynchronous Online Discussion Forums (ODF) as a teaching medium in Practical Legal Training (PLT) is dependent on factors affecting student satisfaction with the learning task.
A literature review was undertaken as part of a proposed research project to: (a) investigate the relationship between the use of ODF as a teaching medium in PLT, students’ learning behaviours, and student satisfaction; (b) ascertain students’ perceptions of their own learning behaviours during the ODF activities and to compare those perceptions with learning behaviours identified in the Community of Inquiry Framework; and (c) make recommendations that might improve the fit between the use of ODFs, positive learning behaviours, and student satisfaction. The research project is still underway.
The review and the proposed study is framed by a constructivist learner-centred approach informed by the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky and others, together with Marzano and Kendall’s ‘New Taxonomy of Education Objectives’, and the ‘Community of Inquiry Framework’ described by Archer, Garrison, Arbaugh, Gunawardena and others.
A search for articles with abstracts including the terms ‘satisfaction’ and ‘online’ on ERIC and online peer-reviewed journals during September 2010 produced 76 relevant articles for this review; these disclosed that factors involving student satisfaction with ODFs as a teaching medium include: students’ contexts; students’ perceptions of self-efficacy and of the importance and relevance of the learning task; learning and personality styles; technological self-efficacy; student-student and lecturer-student interactions; flexible learning environments; instructional design; online learning management systems; and the blend of online and face-to-face instruction delivery.
These factors are likely to be significant for framing the proposed research and the design, implementation, and evaluation of instruction involving online forums in practical legal training.

Light the towel : narrative and the negotiated unconscious

This investigation is a practice-based inquiry. It takes place in the context of writing and editing a novel manuscript: The earth does not get fat (Prendergast 2012). The unpublished novel manuscript is a fractured narrative, a tale told in multiple first-person voices. One of the problems the writer encountered, as the novel developed, was a problem from the perspective of logic and continuity: the stories did not fit together in a linear way. As a result, the writer felt estranged from the writing and, at the same time, strangely familiar with it. Despite having produced the narrative, the writer felt that it was ‘other’. This paper summarises the writer's methodology; it explains the writer's attachment to this fractured style of telling. This fractured style is assessed within the context of the mind's ability to produce its effects without full consciousness. The analysis of authorial intention therefore focuses upon the influence of altered states of consciousness upon narrative material. In particular, the writer uses Andreas Mavromatis’ (1987) work on hypnagogia: described as ‘the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep’ to describe the experience of the operation of the unconscious in authorial intention.

Using strategic philanthropy to improve heritage tourist sites on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey : community perceptions of changing quality of life and of the sponsoring organization

This paper examines the “Respect for History” project on Turkey's Gallipoli Peninsula sponsored by a Turkish oil company, OPET. The project sought to enhance and protect the cultural and historical experiences of tourists visiting Gallipoli, and to bring direct and indirect benefits to local communities through enhancing tourism-related business opportunities and improving community infrastructure. This research investigates the project's impact on residents’ perceived social and economic wellbeing, using a quality of life framework, and also ascertains residents’ views of the sponsoring firm. The context illustrates key differences between pure philanthropy and strategic philanthropy; the latter defined as doing good by purposefully achieving corporate and civic benefits. The role of strategic philanthropy as a sustainable tourism development tool, and its impact on tourism governance, are considered. Data were collected from 674 residents on the Turkish Gallipoli Peninsula in areas impacted by OPET's investment program. The results, using structural equation modelling (SEM), identify that respondents generally believe that both their economic and social quality of life have improved. This, in turn, has positively influenced respondents’ views of the sponsoring organization. The concept of strategic philanthropy appears valuable as a private sector, non-tourism, sustainable tourism development tool in some circumstances.

The ethical difference of Organization

Noting that from its very inception Organization laid claim to having a central interest in the ethics and politics of organization, in this article we review contributions to the Journal over the past 20 years in order to consider the ethical thinking that has developed. We suggest that there is a common thread of ethical interest that characterizes much of this work—one that clearly differentiates it from more conventional approaches to business ethics. While business ethics has as its locus of interest the ethicality of organizations themselves, central issues that have emerged in Organization concern how individuals might (or might not) maintain a valued experience of themselves as ethical subjects despite the behaviour of organizations, and how organizational arrangements might be politically contested in the name of ethics. We explore this in relation to a question that unites much of the study of ethics in Organization: how do we live (and work) together in a world beset by difference? We consider this question in terms of the issue of ethical subjectivity and the relation between an ethics of consensus and an ethics of difference. The article concludes much as the Journal started—with the proposal that ethics remains a pressing challenge for critical scholarship and practice.