Home  About us  Contact
 

Core Competence (core + competence)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting50%
Humanities and Social Sciences33%

Selected Abstracts

Using OXSIM for path planning

JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS (FORMERLY JOURNAL OF ROBOTIC SYSTEMS), Issue 8 2001
Stephen Cameron
We address the issue of building scalable and reusable path planners for realistic robot manipulators working in three-dimensional space amid complex geometry, by presenting the latest version of our robot manipulator planning toolbox, OxSIM. OxSIM is designed to greatly simplify the building of planners by providing core competence in three-dimensional geometry. This is done by the provision of efficient routines for computing the distance between parts of the robot and its environment. A new version of OXSIM, written in C++, provides an object-oriented interface to the basic system, which increases its ease of use. Here we give an overview of OxSIM and how it works and describe a modified version of the probabilistic road map planner that we have implemented under the framework. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source]

The symbolic state: a British experience

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2003
Nicholas O'Shaughnessy
Abstract This paper aspires to introduce a new word into the political lexicon. It argues that Britain's ,New' Labour Government embodies a phenomenon for which the word ,spin' is descriptively inadequate. New Labour actually represents something much more radical and important than this,an entire regime whose core competence has lain in the generation of imagery. Its directors recognise that, in a sense, words speak louder than actions, and that the production of the correct imagery is politically more significant than the creation and execution of policy, the old concept of governing. While the paper discusses the ethical and the social consequences of this evolution, it also suggests that such symbolic government is the almost inevitable response of governing elites to an inquisitorial and relentless modern media. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications [source]

Rethinking Research Ethics in Contemporary Applied Linguistics: The Tension Between Macroethical and Microethical Perspectives in Situated Research

MODERN LANGUAGE JOURNAL, Issue 4 2008
MAGDALENA KUBANYIOVA
The prominent current tendency in applied linguistics to situate its theory and research has seen parallel shifts in the type of research methodologies being employed. Increasingly, decontextualized laboratory methodologies are giving way to more holistic approaches, and these, in turn, involve a significant shift in the researchers' roles, relationships, and ethical responsibilities. By providing examples of specific ethical dilemmas that arose in the process of a longitudinal classroom-based research project, I aim to illustrate that adherence to general "macroethical" principles established in professional codes of ethics may be inadequate for ensuring ethical research in the situated era, which warrants the expansion of the ethical lenses and consideration of alternative microethical models. I conclude with a call for developing a more contextualized code of practice that would integrate both perspectives and recognize the ability to reflect on the ethical consequences of research practice as a core competence of applied linguists. [source]

Sustainable supply chain management and inter-organizational resources: a literature review

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2010
Stefan Gold
Abstract On the basis of a content analysis, this paper explores the role of sustainable supply chain management as a catalyst of generating valuable inter-organizational resources and thus possible sustained inter-firm competitive advantage through collaboration on environmental and social issues. Drawing on the resource-based view and its extension, the relational view, this paper highlights that partner-focused supply management capabilities evolve to corporate core competences as competition shifts from an inter-firm to an inter-supply-chain level. The ,collaborative paradigm' in supply chain management regards strategic collaboration as a crucial source of competitive advantage. Collaboration is even more essential when supply chains aim at ensuring simultaneously economic, environmental and social performance on a product's total life-cycle basis. Inter-firm resources and capabilities emerging from supply-chain-wide collaboration are prone to become sources of sustained inter-firm competitive advantage, since they are socially complex, causally ambiguous and historically grown and hence particularly difficult to imitate by competitors. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]

Country-of-origin, localization, or dominance effect?

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2007
An empirical investigation of HRM practices in foreign subsidiaries
This article contributes to two recurring and very central debates in the international management literature: the convergence vs. divergence debate and the standardization vs. localization debate. Using a large-scale sample of multinationals headquartered in the United States, Japan, and Germany, as well as subsidiaries of multinationals from these three countries in the two other respective countries, we test the extent to which HRM practices in subsidiaries are characterized by country-of-origin, localization, and dominance effects. Our results show that overall the dominance effect is most important (i.e., subsidiary practices appear to converge to the dominant U.S. practices). Hence, our results lead to the rather surprising conclusion for what might be considered to be the most localized of functions,HRM,that convergence to a worldwide best practices model is clearly present. The lack of country-of-origin effects for Japanese and German multinationals leads us to a conclusion that is of significant theoretical as well as practical relevance. Multinationals might limit the export of country-of-origin practices to their core competences and converge to best practices in other areas. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source]

Knowledge Accession and Knowledge Acquisition in Strategic Alliances: The Impact of Supplementary and Complementary Dimensions

BRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2009
Peter J. Buckley
This paper advances the concepts of knowledge accession and knowledge acquisition in strategic alliances by identifying supplementary and complementary dimensions to these knowledge transfer modes. Complementary knowledge transfer reflects the similarity of knowledge that the partners have and is conducted in pursuit of higher efficiency and productivity to enhance partner firms' existing competitiveness. Supplementary knowledge transfer occurs when partners each possess distinctive core competences and the information that is acquired or accessed increases the business scope of partners. As knowledge accession entails knowledge amalgamation that does not involve organizational learning, costs associated with the transfer process are lower and trust is easier to establish than in the case of knowledge acquisition. The paper reviews the implications of these transfer modes on trust building in alliances and their costs implications and presents a number of propositions for further exploration. [source]