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Gender Inclusivity: A Preliminary Guide for Jewish Studies Scholars
Get PDFJewish Studies needs to do better when it comes to gender inclusivity. Here, as a complement to critiques of gender imbalance in Jewish Studies, we offer a brief list of constructive moves for scholars seeking to make Jewish Studies a more inclusive field. Our list includes several interlocking dimensions: the presence of women and nonbinary scholars; the study of topics related to women, gender, and sexuality; and analytical and theoretical tools that help us ask new questions about old topics. Although gender inclusivity does not get to all of the roots of patriarchal norms in our field, we see it as one basic goal that complements other methodological and epistemological goals. We hope that it will foster conversation about common problems incubated by patriarchy and potential strategies for change
Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The Geo-Graphing of South Asia
No full textThis article builds on postcolonial geography’s concepts of imaginative geographies, worlding, and subaltern geopolitics by applying them to an examination of South Asia’s regional formation in the mid-twentieth century. Following a review of debates in postcolonial geography, I analyze the mutations of colonialism as they shaped the dynamics of South Asia in the wake of formal decolonization. First, the Indian subcontinent’s partition inscribed colonial knowledge onto the imaginative geographies of postcolonial nation-states. Second, South Asia was symptomatic of the Cold War’s process of worlding, as reflected in the division of global space and the forms of knowledge generated by American area studies. Third, decolonization and postcolonial migrations provided subaltern geopolitical configurations of the region in tension with the nation-state. This analysis emphasizes postcolonial geography’s value in tracking colonialism’s shifts across networks of empire and in the passage from anti-colonial movements to post-colonial state territorialization
Entrepreneurship and knowledge spillovers from the public sector
No full textA compelling body of research has found that investments in knowledge from other firms and universities spill over to enhance the performance of entrepreneurial firms. This literature has shown that firm performance is positively related to investments in new knowledge by other firms and research universities. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by positing that public sector knowledge is also conducive to enhancing performance by knowledge intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Our findings suggest that the public sector provides a fertile source of knowledge for enhancing KIE firm performance
MOOC instructor designs and challenges: what can be learned from existing MOOCs in Indonesia and Malaysia?
No full textThe purpose of this study was to explore Indonesian and Malaysian instructors’ perceptions of massive open online course (MOOC) design and how they deal with the design challenges. Surveys, email interviews, and course reviews are the main data collection methods employed in this sequential mixed methods study. Forty-six instructors participated in the survey, and nine of them voluntarily participated in an email interview. The findings revealed that half of the courses were delivered using a hybrid/blended type of MOOC. Personal motives, institutional encouragement, and altruism were among the main reasons for instructors to offer MOOCs. Preparation, attraction, participation, and assessment were the categories used to explain the design strategies used by these instructors in designing their courses. The survey also revealed that collaboration encouragement, participant engagement, video development, and time constraints were the primary design challenges that the instructors experienced during the design process. Furthermore, most instructors sought advice from other MOOC instructors, MOOC providers, their institutions, video tutorials, and open education resources (OER) to surmount their design challenges
Accounting for diverse missions: can classification systems contribute to meaningful assessments of institutional performance?
No full textAlthough they have been developed for a variety of purposes, classification systems for tertiary or postsecondary education institutions offer a foundation for recognizing diverse institutional missions in policy, research, and practice. Diverse missions, in turn, are important to achieving broad societal goals of educating an increasingly diverse array of learners, contributing to scientific, technological and professional development, and addressing increasingly complex social issues in an increasingly interconnected global community. After reviewing the purposes and consequences, intended and unintended, of several popular classifications, this article addresses the potential for current or future classification systems to promote and support institutional differentiation. Specifically, we consider how appropriately designed classifications can properly recognize mission differentiation and assess the future prospects for contextualizing performance and accountability assessments through the lens of classification
Spatial Analysis of Bureaucrats’ Attempts to Resist Political Capture in a Developing Democracy: The Distribution of Solar Panels in Ghana
No full textCan civil servants in a developing democracy successfully resist political capture in the distribution of public goods? Existing research tends to highlight political patronage logics of distribution, and scholarship focuses primarily on politicians’ motivations. But service decisions are often made by bureaucrats, who sometimes explicitly try to avoid capture and allocate on the basis of need. Using qualitative interviews and spatial regressions with geo-coded data from a solar panel program in Ghana, we examine such a situation. We show that, despite considerable efforts to thwart it, national-level civil servants were unable to fully resist political capture. While solar panel distribution partially corresponded to need for electricity, we find that panels also went to areas where voter turnout was historically inconsistent, likely to motivate voter turnout. The direction of these relationships was consistent across subnational space, but the magnitudes varied considerably and were strongest in districts adjacent to Lake Volta. Qualitative data analysis reveals that this subnational variation reflects the logistics of space and the historical politics of place. The article contributes to theories of distributive politics and of voting behavior, and highlights the need for subnational disaggregation across space
Environmental Instrument Choice in a Non-linear World
No full textThe substantial literature on environmental instrument choice under uncertainty has provided valuable insights using simplifying assumptions of linear marginal cost and benefit curves and additive error terms to determine when and why a price or quantity instrument should be preferred. But empirical analysis has shown that linearity and additivity are not the norm. This paper explores the formal properties of instrument choice when the marginal benefit and marginal cost curves are non-linear; the error term is multiplicative and assumed to be exponential; and the choice is expanded to include comparisons among different price and different quantity regimes, as well as choices between these types. In this more realistic environment, we show that small changes in variance and parameter values can have a significant impact on optimal instrument choices
Speak their Language: Designing Effective Messages to Improve Employees' Information Security Decision Making
No full textEmployee disinterest in information security remains one of the greatest impediments to effective information security management programs. How can organizations enhance the persuasiveness of the information security messages used to warn employees of threats and encourage employees to take specific actions to improve their security? We use fear appeal theory and the elaboration likelihood model to argue that security messages presented using more personally relevant language are more likely to induce employees to engage in the recommended protective security behaviors. Our strategy uses organization identification theory to segment employees into two groups and then develops security messages that use language aligned with each of the two segments. We tested this strategy within a large U.S. organization, and found that employees were more likely to consider and act upon messages that used language aligned with their organizational identification than messages using language not aligned. The effect size was large. Our results show that subtly changing less than a dozen words in the way a security message was presented without changing its substantive content (e.g., using “our” instead of “your”) has both significant and meaningful effects on how employees think about and respond to it
Visual Background Music: Creativity Support Systems with Priming
No full textDeveloping creative solutions to problems is often a key element of organizational decision making. Much research has been done on systems to support individual creativity, called Creativity Support Systems (CSS). Commercially available CSS and past CSS research have offered either a structured approach to the problem or provided stimuli to help the user think about the problem in a different way. We conducted two experiments testing an approach that builds on priming research by providing stimuli related to achievement on the screen as users worked, as what we call visual background music. Our findings show that this approach increased an individual’s creative output by 10-40% depending upon the experiment and outcome measure. Under the conditions of our studies, the priming stimuli we used had the strongest effect on the flexibility pathway by broadening the user’s consideration of the solution space, rather than the persistence pathway of encouraging more ideas within a topic category. A key implication of this study for CSS design is to add a banner that has rotating pictures about achievement to existing CSS
Integrating coproduction theory into voluntary sector theories: approaches and implications for Chinese governance
No full textThis article argues for a fuller and more integrated application of coproduction theory into explanations for social and voluntary sector activity around the globe. Coproduction also has potential value for understanding some aspects of an emerging and somewhat turbulent Chinese nonprofit sector. This article uses a literature review of voluntary sector theories to first offer three reasons for more emphasis on coproduction research to explain social sector behavior: its consumer- and systems-oriented perspective, its emphasis on citizen initiative, and its temporal flexibility. We then demonstrate the value of the coproduction theory for Chinese governance by employing a systematic literature review of Chinese coproduction and related collaboration scholarship. The articles produced, although quite limited in number, offer promising examples of all three of these ways in which the concept of coproduction has been used to date in Chinese contexts. We conclude with some suggestions for future China-oriented research to better integrate coproduction theory into voluntary sector theories