Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Knowledge Creation And Sharing In Project Contexts: The Situated Impact Of Our Learning Relationships, Andrew J. Sense

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper contributes to better understanding the dynamics of practically supporting the knowledge creation processes within a project management context. The case study findings presented in this paper describe and theorize about how the ‘learning relationships’ between project team participants present significant impacts on the immediate situated learning activity of a project team and ultimately also, for individual and team performance and development. As is argued in this paper, through project team participants publicly exploring and communally reflecting on this sociological element (amongst others), they aid their situated knowledge creation processes and help develop their skills in ‘learning how to …

The Development Of A User Self-Help Knowledge Management System For Help Desk: Deployment Of Knowledge Management Approach And Software Agent Technology, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Most help desks have admitted their call volume has increased in the past decade while “help unavailable when needed” is the major reason for service delivery failure and user dissatisfaction. The habit of calling help desk for simple problems has prompted the investigation of transferring part of first-level troubleshooting duty from help desk to user. This research proposes the development of user self-help knowledge management system that allows user to solve simple and routine technical enquiries. The proposed approach incorporates software agent to allow autonomous handling of enquiries so that the most appropriate solution and user communication can be facilitated.

Knowledge Management In Information Technology Help Desk: Past, Present And Future, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Information technology has changed the way organizations function. This resulted in the reliance of help desks to deal with information technology related areas such as hardware, software, and telecommunication. Besides, the adoption of business process reengineering and downsizing have led to the shrinkage of the size of help desk. The shorter information technology product life cycle has worsened the situation by increasing the already sizeable help desk’s user base. Consequently, the help desk has to cover more information technology products and resolute more technical enquiries with less staff. Thus, the outcome is clear that users have to wait comparably longer …

Articulating Knowledge Work: The Contributions Of Activity Theory And Task-Based Knowledge Management, Henry Linger, Frada Burstein, Helen M. Hasan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This chapter addresses issues of knowledge work in organisations with a concern that mainstream knowledge management (KM) has fallen short of expectations. The real nature of knowledge work remains hidden, and thus inaccessible, to those who are trying to improve organisational outcomes through KM practices. The authors have conducted independent research within a new discourse on knowledge work in the context of modem complex organisations, the results of which are converging to a common understanding of this critical phenomenon. Their two theoretical frameworks, one task-based and one activity-based, are described here as eminently suited to this research. Two sets of …

Measuring The Impact Of Knowledge Loss, Peter R. Massingham

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The impact of knowledge loss on the firm is a largely unexplored area of strategic management. This paper reports the findings of an in-depth case study of an organisation within the Australian Department of Defence. The study examines the nature and impact of knowledge loss within the construct of social capital. Of particular interest were the relationships between individuals’ activities, their levels of knowledge, and their motivation and ability to share this knowledge. The paper proposes a method to parameterise the knowledge resource variable. Findings suggest that the impact of knowledge loss may be traced directly to reduced capability in …

The Impact Of National Culture On The Standardization Versus Adaptation Of Knowledge Management, Zhi Ang, Peter R. Massingham

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper examines the affect of national culture on knowledge management for multinational companies (MNCs). MNCs often have to decide whether to standardise or adapt their operations. Previous research has found that national culture has an effect in a range of MNC operations, e.g. human resources, marketing. However, there has been limited research on the influence of culture on knowledge management. We combine these perspectives to develop a conceptual framework that explores the decision to standardise or adapt knowledge management practices based on differences in national culture. The study extends current theoretical perspectives on knowledge management by exploring the cultural …

Towards Executive Information Systems Adoptions By Knowledge Workers: An Extension Of The Technology Acceptance Model To Account For Social-Cultural Factors, Emmanuel Ikart

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

In recent years a number of organisations have implemented executive information systems (EIS) in order to improve the performance gains on their executives’ job. Although the use of EIS is important to executives, majority of executives are unwilling to use EIS because of their design failures. By using social factors, habits and facilitation conditions variables from Triandis’ framework, this paper extends the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to derive useful variables to address the problem of the low usage of EIS by executives. This paper reports on the research in progress in Australia on the adoption and usage of EIS by …

The Customization Of Knowledge Management Techniques In Information Technology Help Desk, Kar Yin Leung, Sim K. Lau, Geng Liang

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Information Technology (IT) has converted a majority of organizational activities to automatic and electronicbased. This conversion greatly increases Help Desk (HD)'s coverage on IT related areas. Alternatively, the adoption of business process reengineering and downsizing has led to the shrinkage of the size of HD. This not only leads to the loss of priceless knowledge, but also coerces HD to provide more service with less staff - the outcome is clear that users have to wait comparably longer before HD staff is available. This paper describes how generic Knowledge Management process can be customized to improve support process in HD.

Knowledge Of Iodine Nutrition In The South African Adult Population, Pieter Jooste, Nicola Upson, Karen E. Charlton

Faculty of Science, Medicine and Health - Papers: part A

Objectives To determine the level of knowledge regarding iodine nutrition and its relationship with socio-economic status in the South African population. Design A cross-sectional population survey collecting questionnaire information on knowledge of iodine nutrition and sociodemographic variables in a multistage, stratified, cluster study sample, representative of the adult South African population. Setting Home visits and personal interviews in the language of the respondent. Subjects Data were collected from one adult in each of the selected 2164 households, and the participation rate was 98%. Results Only 15.4% of respondents correctly identified iodised salt as the primary dietary source of iodine, 16.2% …

Knowledge Structures And The Vocabulary Of Engineering Novices, Anita Coleman

Faculty Publications

This presentation is based on the refereed paper published in the ISKO 8 proceedings (see References for citation). It describes a study of the language used by undergraduate engineering students engaged in a civil engineering laboratory. Learnerâ s concepts and relationships in the area of soil consolidation were elicited in order to provide an understanding of the structural knowledge of novices and compare it with the knowledge structures of a human expert and a thesaurus tool. Concept maps and pathfinder networks were used to visualize and analyze the resultant knowledge structures of novice learners, expert, and tool. Results show that …

Slides: Nepa And Adaptive Management, Denise A. Dragoo

Best Management Practices and Adaptive Management in Oil and Gas Development (May 12-13)

Presenter: Denise A. Dragoo, Partner, Snell & Wilmer L.L.P., Salt Lake City, UT

22 slides

Studying Scholarly Communication: Can Commons Research And The Iad Framework Help Illuminate Complex Dilemmas?, Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom

Libraries' and Librarians' Publications

"This paper presents a framework for analyzing the complex resource of scholarly communication as a commons. Previously we have argued that the dilemmas associated with managing shared information are quite similar to those associated with managing natural and human-constructed common-pool resources (CPRs), where we can observe how the development of new technologies has changed the structure and processes involved in managing these types of resources over time. We concluded that collective action and institutional design play key roles in shaping economic and social aspects of information. "However, applying insights from the CPR literature on physical resource management to information management …

Learning And Doing In Communities: Understanding Knowledge Management Through The Lens Of Activity Theory, Helen M. Hasan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

No abstract provided.

Review Of: "Anatomy Of A Conflict: Identity, Knowledge, And Emotion In Old Growth Forests", Steven E. Daniels

Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology Faculty Publications

I am very glad this book was written, and equally pleased to have read it. But having done so, I am not sure I would buy it. I will use this review to explore the seeming contradiction between my enthusiasm and ambivalence. The book focuses on the regional conflict over the management of federally-managed forests in the Pacific Northwest Region of the United States. The controversy played out predominantly from 1988–1996, and the book reports the results of research undertaken from 1992–1996. The research is ethnographic, with the major data drawn from participant observation of events and from a series …

A Documentary Of Innovation Support Among New World Wine Industries, D. K. Aylward

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

During the past two decades, the international wine industry has undergone a ‘seismic shift’. Old World producers no longer dominate production, export and marketing of wine to the extent that they once did. Instead, New World producers such as California, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand have successfully married production, management, marketing and innovation to emerge as a new force on the global wine landscape. It is the innovation supports within these selected New World industries that this paper seeks to document, in order to highlight different approaches and outcomes and how they may or may not contribute to an …

Constructionisme Social Et Nouvelles Parentalités, Kenneth J. Gergen

Psychology Faculty Works

My concern in this paper is with the breakdown in the traditional family structure, and the simultaneous emergence of new patterns of parenthood. Increasingly we find instances of “blended families,” gay and lesbian families, daycare dependent families, grandparent-centered families, “collaborative families,” and more. While family therapists may attempt to restore traditional “family values,” the greater challenge is helping the new family patterns to flourish. In this paper I propose that social constructionist theory provides a useful resource for new ideas and practices relevant to the new parentalities. Social constructionism centers on the way in which our ideas of the real …

Activity As A Unit Of Analysis For Knowledge Management Frameworks, Leoni Warne, Irena Ali, Helen Hasan

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

The authors of this paper take the view that knowledge management is a set of practices for systematically adding value to the knowlege of individuals, which is generated and shaped through interaction with others. It is therefore appropriate that knowledge management research be conducted in the context of particular organisations, focusing on local activities. To that end two of the authors have conducted a four-year research program investigating the factors in organizations that enhance and enable the assimilation, generation, sharing and building of knowledge that transfonns an organization into a learning organization. Human activities in organisational contexts have been analysed …

A Literature Review On The International State Of Knowledge Of Drug Testing At Work, With Particular Reference To The U.S, Peter Francis, Natalia K. Hanley, David Wray

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Over the last forty years there has been a substantial growth in workforce drug testing. Most notably, this proliferation has occurred across U.S. industry and federal organisations. Developments in the U.S. have become the catalyst for an international debate on the issue of substance use in the workplace and ways of responding to it.

Replacing Traditional Lectures, Tutorials And Exams With A Knowledge Building Community (Kbc): A Constructivist, Problem-Based Approach To Pre-Service Primary Teacher Education, Brian L. Cambourne, Julie Kiggins, Brian Ferry

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

This paper reports on a journey that begun in 1997 when a small group in the Faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong agreed to trial an alternative model of teacher education known as the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) Project. This alternative model of teacher education was based upon three learning principles, community learning, school-based learning and problem-based learning. Since the first students began in 1999 the original model has undergone several revisions and is now best described as a ?negotiated-evaluation-of-a-non-negotiable-curriculum-based-on-a-constructivist-model-of-learning-and-knowledge-building?. The aim of the KBC Program has been to deal with the perennial problem of contextualising students' professional …

Environmental (Re)Education And Local Environmental Knowledge: Statutory Ground-Based Monitoring And Pastoral Culture In Central Australia, Nicholas J. Gill

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Ground-based monitoring of rangeland condition is common in Australian pastoral administration systems. In the Northern Territory, such monitoring is officially seen as a key plank of sustainable pastoral land use. In the NT and elsewhere, these monitoring schemes have sought to increase participation by pastoralists. Involvement of pastoralists in monitoring is theoretically an educative process that will cause pastoralists to more critically examine their management practices. Critical perspectives on the relationship between rangelands science/extension and pastoralist knowledge systems and concerns, however, suggest that pastoralists’ reception of such monitoring schemes will be influenced by a range of social contexts, including the …

A Framework For Case-Based Reasoning Integration On Knowledge Management Systems, Seung Hwan Kang, Sim K. Lau

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

To support the sharing and reusing of well-defined knowledge among knowledge management systems, it is useful to use standardised formalisation. It is also common effort to difficulty of knowledge acquisition known as knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In this paper investigates the feasibility of using techniques in case-based reasoning of artificial intelligence for the knowledge acquisition phase in knowledge management systems. The need of an ontological approach of the semantic web for well-defined set of domain knowledge is proposed in order to avoid knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Our viewpoint of this approach is that the ontology-driven mechanism allows us to provide standardised structured …

Derrida's Debt To Milton Friedman, Michael Tratner

Literatures in English Faculty Research and Scholarship

This article draws on Derrida's account of economic history in Given Time I: Counterfeit Money to show that he is indebted to an economist he does not mention at all, Milton Friedman. Derrida calls for an investigation of the literary consequences of the "dematerialization of money" and proceeds to give his own version of this history by examining a Baudelaire story from 1864 and an economic treatise from 1925. Those texts may mark moments in economic history, but the dematerialization of money which Derrida sees in them is almost entirely a middle twentieth-century development, finalized in the demise of the …

Evaluating The Knowledge Assets Of Innovative Companies, Helen M. Hasan, Maen Al-Hawari

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

In the current post-industrial society, knowledge is recognised as a primary source of a company's wealth. However knowledge assets are much more difficult to identify and measure than are the physical assets with which we are much more familiar. (Boisot 1998) As a company's innovative capacity may be dependent upon its ability to take advantage of its knowledge assets, it is important to be able to identify and measure those assets. While large companies can afford extensive knowledge management projects, there is a acute need for a method by which managers in smaller organisations can easily and reliably locate and …

Strengthening The Knowledge Economy, Samuel Garrett-Jones

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

What is knowledge ecomony? The knowledge economy could be defined as one where "comparative advantage [is] much less a function of natural resource endowments and capital-labour ratios and much more a function of technology and skills". ¹³ Its development is the product of two forces: a rise in the knowledge intensity of economic activities and an increasing globalization of economic affairs. It is driven by the revolution in information and communications technology, the increasing pace of technological change and by national and international deregulation. ¹⁴

The Organisation Of Knowledge: Optimising The Role Of Universities In A Western Australian 'Knowledge Hub', Tim Turpin, Jane Marceau, Samuel Garrett-Jones, Reg Appleyard, Dora Marinova

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

A feature of globally competitive knowledge-based economies is that governments, universities and industry work together in these economies to create regional ‘knowledge hubs’. A knowledge hub is essentially a “region” with an ensemble of knowledgeintensive organisations located in both public and private sectors. Knowledge hubs have three major functions: to generate knowledge; to transfer and apply knowledge; and to transmit knowledge to others in the community through education and training. The present study was commissioned by TIAC with a view to developing options to optimise the role of WA’s universities in supporting a WA Knowledge Hub. Universities have an important …

Knowledge About Typical Source Output Influences Perceived Auditory Distance, John W. Philbeck, Donald H. Mershon

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Vocal effort is known to influence the judged distance of speechsound sources. The present research examined whether this influence is due to long-term experience gained prior to the experiment versus short-term experience gained from exposure to speech stimuli earlier in the same experiment. Speech recordings were presented to 192 blindfolded listeners at three levels of vocal output. Even upon the first presentation, shouting voices were reported as appearing farthest, whispered voices closest. This suggests that auditory distance perception can be affected by past experience in a way that does not require explicit comparisons between individual stimuli.

Don't Abandon The Model Penal Code Yet! Thinking Through Simons's Rethinking, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Many Voices: Medical Anthropologists Explore The Meaning Of Health, Illness, And Cure, Michael Hass

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Lindenbaum, Shirley and Margaret Lock, eds. Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine in Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xvii + 242 pp. including notes, references, and indices. $50.00 cloth, $15.00 paper.

Etkin, Nina L. and Michael L. Tan, eds. Medicines: Meanings and Contexts. Quezon city, Philippines and Amsterdam: Health Action Information Network and the University of Amsterdam, 1994. v + 305 pp. $15.00 paper.

Good, Byron J. Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: an Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. $54.95 Cloth, $17.95 paper.

School Geometry: Focus On Knowledge Organisation, Mohan Chinnappan, Michaell Lawson

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Given that geometry is an area of mathematics that has a firm and obvious basis in the real environment, senior secondary students have surprising difficulties in geometric problem-solving. One distinct difficulty appears to be in activating the particular concepts among those previously acquired that are applicable to the problem at hand. A model is presented for analysis of student understanding, based on five levels of geometric knowledge.

The Mission Of Metropolitan Universities In The Utilization Of Knowledge: A Policy Analysis, Ernest Lynton

New England Resource Center for Higher Education Publications

In the ecology of knowledge in modern society, efforts to enhance the utilization of knowledge are every bit as essential and as challenging as activities toward the creation of knowledge. An emphasis on the utilization of knowledge provides the defining mission of comprehensive or metropolitan universities. It demands a broadened conception of scholarship, and a high degree of interaction. In order to fulfill their mission, these institutions must develop appropriate internal and external bridging mechanisms, and make appropriate adaptations in the preparation, evaluation, and rewards of their faculty.