1,721,047 research outputs found
Clusters and pipelines, commuters and nomads: Business travel in the Irish software industry.
No full textThis paper uses research on business air travel to analyse the structure and functioning of clusters through a case study of the Irish software industry in Dublin. Whereas most cluster studies have focused on the importance of geographical proximity for knowledge creation within the cluster, the importance of extra-cluster networking has only recently began to receive some attention. Recent work for instance shows that particularly successful clusters are able to build and maintain a variety of “pipelines” with relevant hot-spots around the globe (Bathelt et. al., 2004). However this strand of work tends to “black box” the means whereby such pipelines are created.
By using interviews with a sample of software managers and professionals, our paper investigates the particular forms of business travel generated by the software cluster in Dublin. The interviews generated data on both the role of business air travel for individual firms and on the travelling of the most mobile individuals within these firms. At the firm level our findings show that although international travel is crucial for Irish-owned firms, it is more extensive for foreign-owned firms, confirming the lack of structural division between foreign and indigenous firms in the cluster. At the individual level we differentiate between travellers who are commuters, explorers and nomads. Only the commuters travel along clearly defined “pipelines”; the travelling of both explorers and nomads shows how all elements of the cluster have more complex external connections than proposed by most of the cluster research literature
Travelling and connecting, messaging and meeting: Business travel, information technology and the virtual organisation
No full textThere is now extensive research and discussion of the role of information and communication technology in organisations. Indeed, ICTs have been seen as interwoven with the emergence of a globalised economy. Thus Castells sees ICTs as now the “fibres of the organisation”, the warp and woof of global networks (Castells, 1996). Such arguments problematise electronic communication, yet take completely for granted the parallel expansion of business travel. This paper is part of an attempt to redress the balance, to examine in what way technologies of extensive physical travel are both constitutive of and shaped by contemporary organisations.
An obvious starting point for research on travel is Urry’s conception of the “mobility turn” and the claim that social sciences now need to study flows (Urry, 2000, 2003). Such arguments undermine the conventional debate about whether electronic communication and physical meeting (itself dependent on transport technologies) are substitutes or complementary (Mokhtarian, 2003). That debate is constituted by the problem of the appropriate mode of connecting two points; the mobility turn suggests that the points are connected anyway. This raises a series of empirical questions about the uses and experience of business travel. Social science research on business travel focuses on its contribution to the general erosion of the gap between work and non-work, with important implications for work life balance and family life (Kvande, 2005). However, our concern is the implication of travel for work itself: for the work place, for working time and for work people.
The paper addresses these issues through a case study of business travel in the Irish software industry. The software industry was chosen as an example of a particularly travel-intensive industry. These high levels of business travel are in one sense paradoxical, given that the industry’s essentially “weightless” product can be transmitted and meditated electronically and that workers in the industry are presumably particularly competent with electronic communication.
The research is based on interviews in a cross section of companies in the industry. At its simplest, we ask whether organisations and careers really do now occur in flows rather than in fixed spaces, if organisations and careers really have become “virtual”. This generates a series of initial contrasts between “spatial” and “virtual” organisations.
From the findings it emerges that in a spatial organisation travel time is “time out”, it is different to working time. It is time lost to work, whether it is regarded as a holiday or as simply irritating dead time. By contrast, in the virtual organisation travel time is simply working time. It is used to work and experienced as work. In a spatial organisation the business traveller goes from a “here” that is the home workplace to a “there” that is “elsewhere”; both places are distinct, with their own boundaries, but one (home) is known better than the foreign elsewhere. Between them lies a different place, the non-workplace through which travel occurs. These features of time and place mean that in the spatial organisation travel has many of the features of a rite de passage as studied by anthropologists: a movement from one condition to another, complete with an intervening liminal space.
Such contrasts are absent from the virtual organisation, in which time and space become homogenous, and the intervening space is also part of the workplace. Furthermore, in the virtual organisation the traveller is a nomad, making unstructured journeys, whereas in the spatial organisation the traveller is either a commuter (travelling backwards and forwards between distinct places) or an explorer (making a series of discrete journeys from the safety of the home to different exotic locations).
In the spatial organisation the people at the destination are “them”, as opposed to “us” who form the point of origin. I..
Flying around the globe and bringing business back home
No full textFor many managers and professional today, to work is to travel. The variety of purposes and functions that travel enables for business encompasses almost every dimension of business and management and is therefore a very complex feature of business practice. Business travel is now so interwoven with doing business that its apparent continued growth is a matter of common sense. Yet paradoxically, these same business travellers are also intensive users of communication technology (phone fax, e-mail, etc), many will use web based technologies to locate information and even do business, while some will use information technologies to work together with colleagues in distant physical locations. Why then the need for physical travel?
Rather than taking the growth of travel for granted, a sociology of business travel could explore those factors that make business more or less travel-intensive. Just as some forms of economic growth are more energy-intensive than others, just as some cities (with the same overall income levels) are more car dependent than others (Wickham, forthcoming), so some forms of business are presumably more travel-intensive than others. A few years ago such a question would have been ‘academic’, but today there is increasing awareness of the negative environmental consequences of hyper-mobility, and in particular of the contribution of air travel to global warming. Against this background, the research project from which this paper derives examines business travel from two separate angles. Firstly, we ask about the factors that generate business travel, and secondly we address the implications of business travel for the Irish software cluster in Dublin. This paper is based on preliminary work on these two topics
Individualization and Equality: Women’s Careers and Organizational Form
No full textSome feminist writings have claimed that bureaucracy is inherently patriarchal. This article challenges this argument by comparing the experience of women in Ireland in a state sector organization and in a cluster of software firms. While the bureaucratic state company has been reformed to incorporate equal opportunities, in the individualised or ‘marketized’ software companies women’s progress is at the whim of individual managers and motherhood and a career are largely incompatible. If bureaucratic organizations can be reformed in this way, it cannot be claimed that there is any inherent link between bureaucracy and patriarchy. Instead organizations can be either bureaucratic or marketized and either patriarchal or women-friendly. These are two separate dimensions which change independently of each other. On this basis the article suggests
that the contemporary ‘remasculinization’ of management occurs because earlier reforms in bureaucratic organizations are now being eroded
Business as a conduit for globalisation
No full text‘Business as a Conduit for Globalisation* is both an International research network based within Trinity College Dublin - University of Dublin, Ireland funded by the IIIS (Institute for International Integration) www.tcd.ie/iiis and a network of researchers studying international networks from a business, economic and sociological perspective. By examining the workings and consequences of specific business practices and organizations, it seeks to understand the enactment of globalization via the study of flows of people, ideas and products. Researchers from business and management disciplines as well as sociology and economics bring a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multiple methodological approaches to this area of enquiry.
Five topics are currently been pursued by the Conduits group. These cover:
1. International Supply Chains, Networks and Continuous Improvement
2. Mobile Lives – Employment Generated Travel and the Globalisation of Business Practices,
3. ICT Assimilation within international marketing practice: A holistic ICT Framework
4. Benchmarking SME Practice and Performance
5. Trade Fairs in the Context of Global Business
Business as a conduit for globalisation
No full text‘Business as a Conduit for Globalisation* is both an International research network based within Trinity College Dublin - University of Dublin, Ireland funded by the IIIS (Institute for International Integration) www.tcd.ie/iiis and a network of researchers studying international networks from a business, economic and sociological perspective. By examining the workings and consequences of specific business practices and organizations, it seeks to understand the enactment of globalization via the study of flows of people, ideas and products. Researchers from business and management disciplines as well as sociology and economics bring a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multiple methodological approaches to this area of enquiry.
Five topics are currently been pursued by the Conduits group. These cover:
1. International Supply Chains, Networks and Continuous Improvement
2. Mobile Lives – Employment Generated Travel and the Globalisation of Business Practices,
3. ICT Assimilation within international marketing practice: A holistic ICT Framework
4. Benchmarking SME Practice and Performance
5. Trade Fairs in the Context of Global Business
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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