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Selected AbstractsQuality, imagery and marketing: producer perspectives on quality products and services in the lagging rural regions of the European UnionGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 1 2001Brian Ilbery A range of factors, including consumer concerns about food safety, the growing popularity of rural tourism and policy initiatives to promote endogenous rural development, is converging to promote a relocalization of food production and service provision, especially in those regions marginalized by the globalization of the food supply system. The recent outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK has starkly illustrated the fragility of localized systems which depend heavily on consumers travelling to them. Within such a context, the importance of successful marketing strategies has become even more apparent. This paper reports on a questionnaire survey which investigated promotional and marketing strategies among a diverse range of producers and service providers in marginal agricultural areas of the EU. The findings suggest that many producers are situated towards the "formal" end of a marketing continuum, whereby ability to promote quality products and services (QPS) lies with a range of intermediaries. This raises doubts about the future economic benefits of QPS, should current marketing structures persist. The discussion offers critical reflections on interdisciplinary and international research of this nature, and advocates further theoretical and methodological development in order to explore in more depth many of the aspects raised in this exploratory investigation. [source] CELLULAR TOWER PROLIFERATION IN THE UNITED STATESGEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 1 2002THOMAS A. WIKLE ABSTRACT. Since the early 1980s the growing popularity of cellular communication has wrought dramatic landscape changes on the American scene through an invasion of thousands of cellular telephone towers. Objections raised to new tower construction by local residents, interest groups, and regulatory boards range from visual impacts to perceived health risks. This essay traces the origins of wireless telephony, its proliferation across the United States, and the visual impacts associated with tower construction. Three stages in the geographical expansion of wireless networks are identified. [source] Sentinel node biopsy and head and neck tumors,Where do we stand today?HEAD & NECK: JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENCES & SPECIALTIES OF THE HEAD AND NECK, Issue 12 2006FCAP, Kenneth O. Devaney MD Abstract Background. Sentinel lymph node sampling may be studied profitably in series of patients with 1 tumor type, such as breast carcinoma, in 1 anatomic locale. The present work analyzes the efficacy of sentinel node sampling in a pathologically diverse group of lesions from an anatomically diverse region such as the head and neck; however, there are risks conflating the findings in different tumors with radically different behaviors, in the process producing muddled data. This report reviews the head and neck experience with sentinel sampling and concludes that certain tumor types that have a known propensity for aggressive behavior are the best candidates for trials employing sentinel node sampling; candidates include many cutaneous melanomas of the head and neck, oropharyngeal squamous carcinomas, and selected thyroid carcinomas. Despite the growing popularity of sentinel node sampling in a variety of regions of the body, however, at this juncture this technique remains an investigational procedure, pending demonstration of a tangible improvement in patient outcome through its use. It is recommended that studies of the efficacy of this technique strive, whenever possible, to segregate results of different tumor types in different head and neck locales from one another so as to produce more focused findings for discrete types of malignancies, and not group together tumor types that may in reality exhibit different biological behaviors. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Head Neck, 2006 [source] Enriching spaces in practice-based education to support collaboration while mobile: the case of teacher educationJOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING, Issue 4 2007E.M. Morken Abstract Practice-based education is gaining a growing popularity in fields as diverse as, for example, software engineering, pedagogy and medical studies. In practice-based education learning takes place across different learning arenas and requires cooperation among all the actors involved in the learning process. However, mobility of students across these arenas impact deeply on cooperation patterns, and therefore on the learning process. In this paper we investigate the usage of shared display systems to promote cooperation among students in practice-based education. Our focus is on teacher education and the paper is based on our experiences with the teacher education programme at our university. Based on our observations of students out in practice, we discuss the importance of common spaces and the role of bulletin boards of different types. We then define high-level requirements for a shared display system to support practice-based education and we illustrate the main concepts with a demonstrator. Strengths and weaknesses of our approach are pointed out through an evaluation of the demonstrator. [source] Life Cycle Attribute AssessmentJOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 4 2009Case Study of Quebec Greenhouse Tomatoes Summary Practitioners of life cycle assessment (LCA) have recently turned their attention to social issues in the supply chain. The United Nations life cycle initiative's social LCA task force has completed its guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products, and awareness of managing upstream corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues has risen due to the growing popularity of LCA. This article explores one approach to assessing social issues in the supply chain,life cycle attribute assessment (LCAA). The approach was originally proposed by Gregory Norris in 2006, and we present here a case study. LCAA builds on the theoretical structure of environmental LCA to construct a supply chain model. Instead of calculating quantitative impacts, however, it asks the question "What percentage of my supply chain has attribute X?" X may represent a certification from a CSR body or a self-defined attribute, such as "is locally produced." We believe LCAA may serve as an aid to discussions of how current and popular CSR indicators may be integrated into a supply chain model. The case study demonstrates the structure of LCAA, which is very similar to that of traditional environmental LCA. A labor hours data set was developed as a satellite matrix to determine number of worker hours in a greenhouse tomato supply. Data from the Quebec tomato producer were used to analyze how the company performed on eight sample LCAA indicators, and conclusions were drawn about where the company should focus CSR efforts. [source] Management Ethics and Corporate Policy: A Cross-cultural ComparisonJOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 3 2000Terence Jackson This paper reports the results of a cross-cultural empirical study that investigated differences in the clarity of corporate attitudes towards ethical ,grey areas' and their influences on managers' ethical decision making. The study encompassed managers in France, Germany, Britain, Spain and the USA working in over 200 companies operating in these countries. Comparisons are made at both individual manager level and at corporate level. At the former level significant differences are found among nationalities of managers themselves. For the latter, differences are found among companies according to the nationality of their home country rather than the host country. Despite identifying national differences in areas of gift giving and receiving, loyalty to company, loyalty to one's group, and reporting others' violations of corporate policy, the study presents evidence that clarity of corporate policy has little influence on managers' reported ethical decision making. The perceived behaviour of managers' colleagues is far more important in predicting attitudes towards decision making of managers across the nationalities surveyed. This has implications for the efficacy of the growing popularity of corporate codes across Europe. Companies should place more emphasis on intervening in peer dynamics rather than trying to legislate for managers' ethical conduct. [source] Increasing Learning and Time Efficiency in Interorganizational New Product Development Teams,THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2010Ludwig Bstieler Despite the growing popularity of new product development across organizational boundaries, the processes, mechanisms, or dynamics that leverage performance in interorganizational (I-O) product development teams are not well understood. Such teams are staffed with individuals drawn from the partnering firms and are relied on to develop successful new products while at the same time enhancing mutual learning and reducing development time. However, these collaborations can encounter difficulties when partners from different corporate cultures and thought worlds must coordinate and depend on one another and often lead to disappointing performance. To facilitate collaboration, the creation of a safe, supportive, challenging, and engaging environment is particularly important for enabling productive collaborative I-O teamwork and is essential for learning and time efficient product development. This research develops and tests a model of proposed factors to increase both learning and time efficiency on I-O new product teams. It is argued that specific behaviors (caring), beliefs (psychological safety), task-related processes (shared problem solving), and governance mechanisms (clear management direction) create a positive climate that increases learning and time efficiency on I-O teams. Results of an empirical study of 50 collaborative new product development projects indicate that (1) shared problem solving and caring behavior support both learning and time efficiency on I-O teams, (2) team psychological safety is positively related to learning, (3) management direction is positively associated with time efficiency, and (4) shared problem solving is more strongly related to both performance dimensions than are the other factors. The factors supporting time efficiency are slightly different from those that foster learning. The relative importance of these factors also differs considerably for both performance aspects. Overall, this study contributes to a better understanding of the factors that facilitate a favorable environment for productive collaboration on I-O teams, which go beyond contracts or top-management supervision. Establishing such an environment can help to balance management concerns and promote the success of I-O teams. The significance of the results is elevated by the fragility of collaborative ventures and their potential for failure, when firms with different organizational cultures, thought worlds, objectives, and intentions increasingly decide to work across organizational boundaries for the development of new products. [source] Master-planned residential developments: Beyond iconic spaces of neoliberalism?ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2009Pauline McGuirk Abstract Master-planned residential development has proliferated as a new residential phenomenon in metropolitan areas globally. The trend, the new governance mechanisms it entails and resultant forms of urban development have been critically theorised as products and vectors of neoliberalisation and iconic spaces of the neoliberal city. However, tracing the emergence and enactment of master-planned residential estate (MPRE) development in Sydney, Australia, this paper suggests that more contingent and contextualised theorisations of such spaces can reveal possibilities for animating a different politics of MPREs. Deploying theorisation sensitive to the multiple drivers, logics and political projects played out through MPRE development in situated contexts, the paper traces the political genesis of these developments in Sydney, outlines the multiple drivers and logics accounting for their growing popularity and points to the salience of the complex performance of land and housing markets in their production. The post-structural political economy approach used here to investigate MPRE development can overcome the politically constraining effects of the dominant neoliberal critique. It does so, first, by opening analysis up to the importance of logics, actions and contexts that are irreducible to neoliberalism and, second, by gesturing towards the potential for an alternative politics to be animated through mechanisms, techniques and processes of MPRE development habitually associated with neoliberalism. [source] Is Research-Ethics Review a Moral Panic?,CANADIAN REVIEW OF SOCIOLOGY/REVUE CANADIENNE DE SOCIOLOGIE, Issue 1 2001Will C. van den HoonaardArticle first published online: 14 JUL 200 Au cours des dix dernières années, nous avons été témoins de l'im-portance croissante accordée aux principes d'éthique appliqués à la recherche mais aussi de la popularité et de la pertinence grandis-santes de la recherche inductive, plus connue sous le nom de recherche et d'analyse qualitatives. Dans cet article, nous étudions le contexte social dans lequel se situe l'examen déontologique des travaux de recherche et son influence sur la recherche qualitative. Plus précisément, nous soutenons que, lorsque cet examen déontologique est fondé sur les principes et l'épistémologie de la recherche déductive, il a tendance à rogner et à entraver le dynamisme et l'ob-jet de la recherche qualitative. À l'aide de documents, de rapports de recherche formelle et d'après notre expérience personnelle et celle d'autres collègues, nous démontrons l'aspect disproportioné de l'examen déontologique de la recherche, qui semble favoriser la recherche quantitative - c'est-à-dire la recherche formelle fondée sur des hypothèses -, au détriment de la recherche qualitative. Nos exem-ples proviennent surtout du Canada, des États-Unis et d'Angleterre, en anthropologie, éducation, sciences infirmières, psychologie et so-ciologie. Nous affirmons que les processus sociaux qui sous-tendent l'analyse déontologique de la recherche s'apparentent à ceux que lon associe à une panique morale. The recent decade saw not only the rise of the importance of formal ethical research guidelines, but also witnessed the growing popularity and relevance of inductive research, better known as qualitative research and analysis. This paper addresses the social context of formal ethical review and its influence on qualitative research. Specifically, it suggests that when ethical review is based on the principles and epistemology of deductive research, it tends to erode or hamper the thrust and purpose of qualitative research. Using documents, formal research accounts, and the experiences of others and myself, the author indicates the lopsided nature of reviewing the ethics of research, which seems to work in favour of quantitative, formal hypotheses-driven research, to the serious disadvantage of qualitative research. The paper draws most heavily on evidence in Canada, the United States, and England, in the fields of anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, and sociology. The social processes underpinning research-ethics review, the author avers, are similar to those associated with a moral panic. [source] |