The essentials of knowledge management

This book reviews the field of Knowledge Management, taking a holistic approach that includes both "soft" and "hard" aspects. It provides a broad perspective on the field, rather than one based on a single viewpoints from Computer Science or Organizational Learning, offering a comprehensive and integrated conception of Knowledge Management. The chapters represent the best Knowledge Management articles published in the 21st century in Knowledge Management Research & Practice and the European Journal of Information Systems, with contributors including Ikujiro Nonaka, Frada Burstein, and David Schwartz. Most of the chapters contribute significantly to practise as well as theory.

E-blogspot in the teaching of strategic management

E-learning and e-learning applications/tools are available to all educators thanks to the evolution of technology and the internet. Although a great variety of technologies are available it is not always obvious how these can be integrated in traditional teaching to support and enhance the learning experience. The majority of the existing literature proposes the use of blogging as an activity that students should do in order to increase their active participation in learning. This article presents the use of blogspots in the teaching of Strategic Management as a tool used to create greater linkages between theory and practice, discussing the evolution of its utilisation in my modules, the current state of use and a series of reflections on experience gained from its use so far. Overall, I have found that there is limited literature on how blogging could link to teaching activities and its utilisation should be viewed as learning by doing which is evaluated and improved by critical reflection of the user.

What is the Future of Strategic Management?

The history of planning and creating strategies has a past of over half a century. Throughout this lifetime period we have witnessed both the evolution of theory and practice. The MBA study books in the last-third of the 20th century have with predilection exhibited this very process as a complex of monetary centered budget planning, forecast-based planning, strategic planning and strategic management. There might be a controversy existing about the naming, characteristics and timing of these different sections but there is an accordance that the changes that we have taken place in the last decade as a whole without a doubt can be derived from these very changes in the business environment or in some outstanding cases (like 9/11) they can be acknowledged as the ability of corporate foreseeing and the ability to adapt to the vision of the future. The main purposes of the research is to provide a summarized picture about the changing process of this procedure during last decades as far as the planning and creating strategies are concerned and also their milestones and periods. Try to explore and systemize the very aspects of these changes. The happenings of the first decade of the new millennium are outstandingly interesting if we consider their real effect on the theory and practice of strategic management. Let us remember the euphoria around the year 2000, the predictions of „new technologies”, „new economy”, „new organization” and „new leadership”. We have implied before on the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center which meant a new era, a new quality of international terrorism and its consequences (Afghanistan, Iraq). But the „product” of this decade is the strategic aim that companies focus on, which is the social responsibility regarding the unavoidance of the effects of climate change on the long run. During the research the big question has risen concerning how did the science of strategic management do as far as the predictions of the global monetary and economic crisis are concerned? And also its solutions this very science has to offer in order to handle and get over the crisis. Does it conclude from the answers given to the questions that a change in paradigms are necessary, a new quality is needed or may be we have come to a new crossroad of the development process that will take over strategic management? (...)

A magyar hallgatók vállalkozásindító szándékát befolyásoló tényezők modellje - Ajzen tervezett magatartás elméletének kiterjesztése (Model of the Hungarian students’ business start-up intention influencing factors – Extending of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior)

A vállalkozási tevékenység a munkahelyteremtés és a gazdasági növekedés egyik döntő tényezője. Ennek a jövőbeli kedvező alakulását a fiatalok mai attitűdjei határozzák meg. Ha be tudjuk azonosítani a legfontosabb tényezőket, amelyek a fiatalok vállalkozásindítási szándékát befolyásolják, el tudjuk dönteni azt is, mely területen lehet és érdemes beavatkozni annak érdekében, hogy minél több új, életképes vállalkozás szülessen. A cikk a GUESSS kutatási projekt magyarországi adatbázisának köszönhetően közel 6000 hallgató válaszait elemezve rendszerezi a felsőoktatásban résztvevők vállalkozásindítási szándékára ható legfontosabb tényezőcsoportokat. Első lépésben Ajzen tervezett magatartás elméletének alkalmazásával vizsgálja a vállalkozásindítási szándék alakítóit, majd további tényezők, így a felsőoktatási intézmények által nyújtott szolgáltatások, a családi háttér és a demográfiai jellemzők bevonásával igyekszik minél pontosabban leírni a szándék alakulását. _____ Entrepreneurial activity is a decisive factor in the dynamics of job creation and economic growth. The future level of this activity highly depends on the attitudes of today’s youth towards this. If the most important factors influencing attitudes are identified and the entrepreneurial intentions towards entrepreneurship are determined, the fields of intervention targeting the creation of as many new and viable enterprises as possible can be defined. This article aims to systematise the most important factor groups that influence the decisions of students studying in higher education in terms of start-up activities and is based on the Hungarian database of the GUESSS research project, containing almost 6000 respondents. Firstly, it tests Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior. Then such factors as supportive services provided by higher education institutions, family background and demographic factors are analysed in order to improve the explanatory power of the model.

Examining Technology Adoption and Management Perception of Inventory Management Systems: The Case of Aruba Restaurants

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of automated inventory management systems (IMS) and identify the stage of technology adoption for restaurants in Aruba. A case study analysis involving twelve members of the Aruba Gastronomic Association was conducted using a qualitative research design to gather information on approaches currently used as well as the reasons and perceptions managers/owners have for using or not using automated systems in their facilities. This is the first study conducted using the Aruba restaurant market. Therefore, the application of two technology adoption models was used to integrate critical factors relevant to the study. Major findings indicated the use of an automated IMS in restaurants is limited, thus underscoring the lack of adoption of technology in this area. The results also indicated that two major reasons that restaurants are not adopting IMS technology are budgetary constraints and service support. This study is imperative for two reasons: (1) the results of this study can be used as a comparison for future IMS adoption, not only for Aruba’s restaurant industry but also for other Caribbean destinations and the U.S., (2) this study also provides insight into the additional training and support help needed in hospitality technology services.

Toward a unified theory of task -oriented and relationship -oriented leader behavior: A multi -country generalizability study

The theoretical foundation of this study comes from the significant recurrence throughout the leadership literature of two distinct behaviors, task orientation and relationship orientation. Task orientation and relationship orientation are assumed to be generic behaviors, which are universally observed and applied in organizations, even though they may be uniquely enacted in organizations across cultures. The lack of empirical evidence supporting these assumptions provided the impetus to hypothetically develop and empirically confirm the universal application of task orientation and relationship orientation and the generalizability of their measurement in a cross-cultural setting. Task orientation and relationship orientation are operationalized through consideration and initiation of structure, two well-established theoretical leadership constructs. Multiple-group mean and covariance structures (MACS) analyses are used to simultaneously validate the generalizability of the two hypothesized constructs across the 12 cultural groups and to assess whether the similarities and differences discovered are measurement and scaling artifacts or reflect true cross-cultural differences. The data were collected by the author and others as part of a larger international research project. The data are comprised of 2341 managers from 12 countries/regions. The results provide compelling evidence that task orientation and relationship orientation, reliably and validly operationalized through consideration and initiation of structure, are generalizable across the countries/regions sampled. But the results also reveal significant differences in the perception of these behaviors, suggesting that some aspects of task orientation and relationship orientation are strongly affected by cultural influences. These (similarities and) differences reflect directly interpretable, error-free effects among the constructs at the behavioral level. Thus, task orientation and relationship orientation can demonstrate different relations among cultures, yet still be defined equivalently across the 11 cultures studied. The differences found in this study are true differences and may contain information about cultural influences characterizing each cultural context (i.e. group). The nature of such influences should be examined before the results can be meaningfully interpreted. To examine the effects of cultural characteristics on the constructs, additional hypotheses on the constructs' latent parameters can be tested across groups. Construct-level tests are illustrated in hypothetical examples in light of the study's results. The study contributes significantly to the theoretical understanding of the nature and generalizability of psychological constructs. The theoretical and practical implications of embedding context into a unified theory of task orientated and relationship oriented leader behavior are proposed. Limitations and contributions are also discussed. ^

The international diffusion of project management

This paper examines the international diffusion of one business practice, project management, through the prism of prior literature and data on the diffusion of ISO 9000. The study took an inductive approach, building theory through the iterative collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. The findings problematise the central position accorded to the S-curve model and neo-institutional theory in explaining technology diffusion. The research posits three distinct processes driving the diffusion process: utility, institutional isomorphism, and competitive isomorphism, with the latter consisting of three primary mechanisms: competitive imitation, trendslators and fashion retailers. Contrary to prior literature, national, quasi-professional associations are found to be central to the diffusion process and play a key role in advocating and containing management technologies.

AN ENTROPIC THEORY OF DAMAGE WITH APPLICATIONS TO CORROSION-FATIGUE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY ASSESSMENT

This dissertation demonstrates an explanation of damage and reliability of critical components and structures within the second law of thermodynamics. The approach relies on the fundamentals of irreversible thermodynamics, specifically the concept of entropy generation due to materials degradation as an index of damage. All failure mechanisms that cause degradation, damage accumulation and ultimate failure share a common feature, namely energy dissipation. Energy dissipation, as a fundamental measure for irreversibility in a thermodynamic treatment of non-equilibrium processes, leads to and can be expressed in terms of entropy generation. The dissertation proposes a theory of damage by relating entropy generation to energy dissipation via generalized thermodynamic forces and thermodynamic fluxes that formally describes the resulting damage. Following the proposed theory of entropic damage, an approach to reliability and integrity characterization based on thermodynamic entropy is discussed. It is shown that the variability in the amount of the thermodynamic-based damage and uncertainties about the parameters of a distribution model describing the variability, leads to a more consistent and broader definition of the well know time-to-failure distribution in reliability engineering. As such it has been shown that the reliability function can be derived from the thermodynamic laws rather than estimated from the observed failure histories. Furthermore, using the superior advantages of the use of entropy generation and accumulation as a damage index in comparison to common observable markers of damage such as crack size, a method is proposed to explain the prognostics and health management (PHM) in terms of the entropic damage. The proposed entropic-based damage theory to reliability and integrity is then demonstrated through experimental validation. Using this theorem, the corrosion-fatigue entropy generation function is derived, evaluated and employed for structural integrity, reliability assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of Aluminum 7075-T651 specimens tested.