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Informal Mechanisms (informal + mechanism)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Collaborative Processes and Knowledge Creation in Communities-of-Practice

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2002
Karin Breu
This paper challenges the view of employees' reluctance to share what they know, thus, attributing the ,stickiness' of knowledge to motivational factors. The study investigated informal mechanisms for knowledge sharing, taking a community-of-practice (CoP) perspective as a point of departure. A large-sized organisation in the utilities sector provided the context of the research. Existing CoP theory is advanced by surfacing the motivations for participation in CoPs, by eliciting the contributions informal, self-organising communities achieve in a commercial context and by documenting the process by which informal community activities become absorbed into the formal organisation. [source]

Creating Democracy's Good Losers: The Rise, Fall and Return of Parliamentary Disorder in Post-war Japan*

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 1 2004
Eugene L. Wolfe
ABSTRACT ,Good losers', legislators willing to play by parliamentary rules, even at the cost of defeat, are a microfoundation of democracy. Yet how they are created has not been adequately explained. Theories focusing on institutions, evolving norms, electoral incentives and ideology do not account for the case of post-war Japan, where deliberate disorder was common in the 1950s and 1960s, absent in the 1970s and 1980s, and returned in the 1990s. This paper highlights the importance of the legislative majority's behaviour in encouraging procedural compliance through the provision of informal mechanisms of consultation and compromise. The lack of such mechanisms also explains periods of parliamentary disorder in other countries. [source]

The State Connection in China's Rural-Urban Migration,

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 2 2005
Lei Guang
This study explores the role of China's rural local state-owned and urban state-owned units in its rural-urban migration process. Most studies on Chinese migration have focused on migrants moving from rural to urban areas through informal mechanisms outside of the state's control. They therefore treat the Chinese state as an obstructionist force and dismiss its facilitative role in the migration process. By documenting rural local states' "labor export" strategies and urban state units' employment of millions of peasants, this article provides a corrective to the existing literature. It highlights and explains the state connection in China's rural-urban migration. Labor is , a special kind of commodity. What we do is to fetch a good price for this special commodity. Labor bureau official from Laomei county, 1996 If we want efficiency, we have to hire migrant workers. Party secretary of a state textile factory in Shanghai, 1997 [source]

Gender, social capital and information exchange in rural Uganda

JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Issue 1 2008
Enid Katungi
Abstract Changing agricultural research and extension systems mean that informal mechanisms of information diffusion are often the primary source of information about improved seed and practices for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates the interactions between gender, social capital and information exchange in rural Uganda. Within the framework of farmer-to-farmer models, we conceptualise the informal information diffusion process to comprise social capital accumulation and information exchange. We assume that each agent participates in information exchange with a fixed (predetermined) level of social capital and examine how endowments of social capital influence information exchange, paying close attention to gender differences. A multinomial logit model is used to analyse multiple participation choices of information exchange facing the farmer. Findings demonstrate that social capital is an important factor in information exchange, with men generally having better access to social capital than women. We also find strong evidence in support of group-based technology dissemination systems. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]