The book market in European countries is different than the U.S. market for various political, geographical, and cultural reasons. The authors outline these differences and provide background on the move to electronic commerce and future. The article includes many electronic and print sources of and bibliographic tools for locating books in the European market. 相似文献
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, is the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Its construction (1995–2008) required frontier technologies and close collaboration between CERN scientists and contracting firms. The literature on “Big Science” projects suggests that this collaboration generated economic spillovers, particularly through technological learning. CERN granted us access to its procurement database, including suppliers of LHC from 35 countries for orders over 10,000 Swiss Francs. We gathered balance-sheet data for more than 350 of these companies from 1991 to 2014, which include the years before and after that of the first order received. The study assesses, in quantitative terms, whether becoming a CERN supplier induced greater R&D effort and innovative capacity, thus enhancing productivity and profitability. The findings – which controlled for firms’ observable characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, and unobserved time, country, industry and firm-level fixed effects – indicate a statistically significant correlation between procurement events and company R&D, knowledge creation and economic performance. The correlation is chiefly driven by high-tech orders; for companies receiving non-high-tech orders, it is weaker, or even statistically not significant. 相似文献
The impact of cognitive and emotional factors on the customer's decision to adopt a new technology has long been at the core of innovation and marketing literature. Today, the proliferation of personal technologies makes the understanding of the adoption process of such innovations a vital issue. This article, moving from long-established technology adoption theories, integrates affective factors to propose a comprehensive framework to interpret and orient innovation and marketing approaches of companies. To do this, we review a rich literature from the domains of management, information systems, marketing and cognitive psychology, identifying six possible sources of perceived value for personal technologies, hence attitude to adopt them: functional value, monetary value, social value, entertainment value, epistemic value and aesthetic value. After defining and framing them in the extant literature, we discuss how the framework may be adopted in practice to support Companies' strategies in the surprisingly under-explored industry of personal technologies. 相似文献
The development of higher education in Colombia is discussed in terms of its recent quantitative expansion and the accompanying qualitative differentiation. Beginning in 1980 with the University Reform of that year, the state sought to give shape to the system by policies intended (i) to improve its organization (ii) to expand it on more democratic lines and (iii) to improve its quality. The authors discuss the developments which marked attempts to implement these aims. Two critical policy areas emerged—the funding of the system and the administration of the public sector part of it. Current debates are analysed and the authors provide pointers to possible future developments including the development of a highly stratified system with little interaction between the top and the bottom. 相似文献
Abstract This article discusses the design, development, and implementation of a collaborative learning environment for online training ‘Infoshare on the Web’ It was designed to teach participants how to use and/or improve their use of Web search engines to access information on the Web. Participants collaborated in completing group tasks using asynchronous communication provided by Simon Fraser's Virtual‐U, a Web‐based environment that supports distance education, information sharing, and training. The module was delivered in four weeks, and participants found both advantages and limitations in the use of asynchronous environments for training. 相似文献
The dominant organizational form of vocational education and training in Switzerland is the dual-track system, in which trainees sign an apprenticeship contract with a training company. Notably, 10 % to 40 % of those contracts are terminated prematurely each year, depending on region and occupational category, which is an important topic of concern for politics, practice and research. Thus, premature contract terminations (PCTs) are associated with high costs for society, companies, and young people. This study of 335 companies involving cooks and painters from German-speaking Switzerland aims to investigate the relationship between training quality and PCT. Of these companies, 136 had been affected by a PCT, and 199 had not. The results indicate that training at the workplace is universally of rather high quality. In line with the previous literature, trainees evaluate quality significantly lower than trainers. Furthermore, there are considerable differences between the two occupations: cooks evaluate their training quality more positively than painters. Moreover, cluster analyses indicate that high quality training can help companies avoid PCTs. 相似文献
Home-based therapy has become an ongoing trend within the mental health field. This transcendental phenomenologically designed study explored the lived experiences of clinical mental health counseling internship students (N=8) who provided home-based therapy as their primary method of gaining required clinical experience for the completion of their master’s degree. The overall personal and professional development of the students providing therapy in this setting was explored. Insights of the internship students regarding their experiences and challenges in providing home-based therapy were revealed. Recommendations based on the experiences of the students providing home-based therapy were offered. Implications to students, counselor educators, and supervisors have also been provided.
This paper presents the results of a research project on the impact of word processing on faculty writing behaviour. A case study methodology was used to conduct the research. Data from 120 faculty members (N = 150) were collected through questionnaires and interviews. Final results indicate that faculty are increasingly adopting word processing for writing (69%) and are changing their writing behaviour in this process: they do more revisions, write most of their works online, use computer‐mediated communication to support their writing and use spelling checkers on a regular basis. The major Expected Benefit identified by respondents is the ease of text revision: this feature is the primary cause for the adoption of word processing among faculty. The major Expected Disadvantages are the amount of learning required at the time, both initially and on an on‐going basis, that is consumed. Unexpected Outcomes of word processing were also identified, such as more concern with page layout, reusing previously written text, and excessive writing. The existence of “personal side effects”, linked to the use of computers for word processing, calls for a flexible approach to the introduction of this technology. In particular, those who have not yet adopted the technology may be more likely to experience negative side effects. Therefore, the study concludes, rather than a bandwagon gathering momentum, a better analogy might be that of a train easing into the station, decreasing its speed to maximize comfort for the passengers. 相似文献