Transformative innovation in peri-urban Asia

This paper draws on two case studies from India and China to discuss how and why rapidly urbanizing contexts are particularly challenging for transformative innovation but are also critical sustainability frontiers and learning environments. We argue that lack of understanding and policy engagement with peri-urbanization in its current form is leading to increasing exclusion and unrealized potential to support multiple sustainable urban development goals. Peri-urbanization is often characterized by the neoliberal reordering of space and a co-option of environmental agendas by powerful urban elites. Changing land-use, resource extraction, pollution and livelihood transitions drive rapid changes in interactions between socio-technical and social-ecological systems, and produce complex feedbacks across the rural–urban continuum. These contexts also present characteristic governance challenges as a result of jurisdictional ambiguity, transitioning formal and informal institutional arrangements, heterogeneous and sometimes transient communities, shifts in decision making to distant authorities and the rapid growth of informal market-based arrangements with little incentive for environmental management. These unique features of peri-urbanization may reinforce a lack of inclusion and hinder experimentation, but they can also present valuable opportunities for transformative innovation. This innovation is unlikely to follow the lines of niche management and upscaling but rather should take advantage of peri-urban dynamics. There are possibilities to build new alliances in order to renegotiate governance structures across the rural–urban continuum, to reframe urban sustainability debates and to reconfigure socio-technical and social-ecological systems interactions.     

Self‐efficacy,reasoning ability,and achievement in college biology

This study compared the relationships of self‐efficacy and reasoning ability to achievement in introductory college biology. Based on the hypothesis that developing formal and postformal reasoning ability is a primary factor influencing self‐efficacy, a significant positive correlation was predicted between reasoning ability and degree of self‐efficacy to complete biological tasks. Further, reasoning ability was predicted to be more highly correlated with course achievement than self‐efficacy. The study involved pre‐ and posttesting 459 introductory biology students. Both self‐efficacy and reasoning ability increased during the semester. As predicted, self‐efficacy and reasoning ability were positively correlated. Depending on the nature of the achievement measure, reasoning ability accounted for some 15 to 30 times more variance in achievement than self‐efficacy. Also, as predicted, reasoning ability was a strong predictor of self‐efficacy, but self‐efficacy was not a strong predictor of reasoning ability. Self‐efficacy estimates and achievement were higher for the concrete tasks than for the formal tasks and higher for the formal tasks than for the postformal tasks. In general, students tended to overestimate their abilities to carry out the concrete, formal, and postformal tasks. Results support the study's working hypothesis that intellectual development continues for some students during the college years, that a postformal level of intellectual development exists, and that reasoning ability is a primary factor influencing both self‐efficacy and achievement. Student overestimation of their abilities may contribute to complacency, lack of effort, and to less than optimal achievement. Consequently, it may be advantageous early in the semester to provide students with particularly challenging tasks that “shock” them out of their complacency and perhaps increase their effort, their reasoning skills, and their achievement. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 44: 706–724, 2007     

Organizational Learning: A Perspective from the Choice and Pattern of Sequential Modes of Foreign Market Entry

This study examines the choice, pattern, and timing of sequential modes of entry among multinational corporations investing in China. Specifically, we examine how earlier choices of entry modes influence decisions ahout subsequent modes of entry in a targeted host country. Six hypotheses are developed and tested using a longitudinal sample of 228 Fortune Global 500 firms that have had multiple entries in China between 1979 and 1996. The results provide supportive evidence of our hypotheses. Specifically, firms employed entry modes reflecting low commitment in early stages that were gradually escalated to higher commitment in subsequent decisions. This is consistent with the “incremental in vestment” approach that underlies traditional and contemporary theories and research in market entry decisions. An analysis of entry mode choices over time reveals different learning patterns: the logic of incremental investments (i.e., the escalation of low to high resource commitments); the logic of the “catch‐up” follower (i.e., relatively heavy commitment at later stages); and the logic of stable, consistent investments (i.e., the continuation of the same entry mode throughout the time period. There is moderate but inconclusive support for country of origin as a moderating factor. The implications of this study for theory and practice are discussed, as well as its limitations.