Mobile self-fashioning and gendered risk: rethinking Chinese students’ motivations for overseas education

This article complicates dominant instrumentalist understandings of international student motivation by focusing on Chinese female tertiary students in Australia. Based on longitudinal fieldwork with 56 such students, it analyses motivations described by students and their parents in interviews, showing that these far exceed instrumentalism and engage tactics of both gendered risk management and cosmopolitan self-fashioning. Discussion of the gendered risks in post-socialist China that students seek to mitigate through study abroad illustrates the complexity of students’ motivations, and underlines the limitations of western European sociological theories of risk society which assume that gender inequality tends to decrease in late modernity.     

Online Schooling in the United States: A Response to Saultz and Fusarelli

In this paper, we discuss some concerns and recommendations of Saultz and Fusarelli (2017), offering nuanced and detailed views of online schooling from a different perspective. This includes addressing challenges regarding online learning such as fluctuating enrollments, financial concerns, quality assurance, and accountability. In addition, we propose recommendations related to funding, better quality data, and oversight and monitoring. We conclude with a short discussion of the need for differentiated research for specific online learning contexts.     

Cooperative R&D and firm performance

We analyse the impact of R&D cooperation on firm performance differentiating between four types of R&D partners (competitors, suppliers, customers, and universities and research institutes), and considering two performance measures: labour productivity and productivity in innovative (new to the market) sales. Using data on a large sample of Dutch innovating firms in two waves of the Community Innovation Survey (1996, 1998), we examine the impact of R&D cooperation in 1996 on subsequent productivity growth in 1996–1998. The results confirm a major heterogeneity in the rationales and goals of R&D cooperation. Competitor and supplier cooperation focus on incremental innovations, improving the productivity performance of firms. University cooperation and again competitor cooperation are instrumental in creating innovations generating sales of products that are novel to the market, improving the growth performance of firms. Furthermore, customers and universities are important sources of knowledge for firms pursuing radical innovations, which facilitate growth in innovative sales in the absence of formal R&D cooperation.     

Environment and Policy Factors Shaping Global E-Commerce Diffusion: A Cross-Country Comparison

This article examines the key global, environmental and policy factors that act as determinants of e-commerce diffusion. It is based on systematic comparison of case studies from 10 countries--Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. It finds that B2B e-commerce seems to be driven by global forces, whereas B2C seems to be more of a local phenomenon. A preliminary explanation for this difference is that B2B is driven by global competition and MNCs that "push" e-commerce to their global suppliers, customers, and subsidiaries. This in turn creates pressures on local companies to adopt e-commerce to stay competitive. In contrast, B2C is "pulled" by consumer markets, which are mainly local and therefore divergent. While all consumers desire convenience and low prices, consumer preferences and values, national culture, and distribution systems differ markedly across countries and define differences in local consumer markets. These findings support the transformation perspective about globalization and its impacts. In terms of policy, the case studies suggest that enabling policies such as trade and telecommunications liberalization are likely to have the biggest impact on e-commerce, by making ICT and Internet access more affordable to firms and consumers, and increasing pressure on firms to adopt e-commerce to compete. Specific e-commerce legislation appears not to have as big an impact, although inadequate protection for both buyers and sellers in some countries suggests that mechanisms need to be developed to ensure greater confidence in doing business online.     

The Concept of Information Overload: A Review of Literature from Organization Science, Accounting, Marketing, MIS, and Related Disciplines

Based on literature from the domains of organization science, marketing, accounting, and management information systems, this review article examines the theoretical basis of the information overload discourse and presents an overview of the main definitions, situations, causes, effects, and countermeasures. It analyzes the contributions from the last 30 years to consolidate the existing research in a conceptual framework and to identify future research directions.     

An experimental study evaluating professional development activities within a state funded pre-kindergarten program

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation for scaling up a comprehensive early childhood teacher professional development program into 11 communities across 2 years with funding through state legislative actions. The comprehensive program had four major components based on results from a previous multi-condition random assignment study across four states. The previous results demonstrated that the most optimum approach for supporting children??s school readiness included: (1) teacher on-line professional development with facilitation, (2) classroom mentoring, (3) implementation of a research-based curriculum, and (4) technology-driven progress monitoring that informed instruction. The comprehensive professional development program was evaluated in a new state program designed to bring childcare, Head Start, and public school pre-kindergarten together into integrated partnerships. In Year 1, 220 teachers serving 3834 children were randomly assigned to either receive the comprehensive program or not. Teachers who served as controls in Year 1 received the program in Year 2, and those who received the program in Year 1 participated for an additional year in Year 2, allowing for examination of the effects of one versus 2 years of participation. The program improved teachers instructional practices relative to controls, and a second year of participation resulted in greater gains in children??s language and literacy. Results support the need for well-integrated, comprehensive professional development for early childhood educators.     

Instructional design of a distance education cultural awareness course to enhance currency and authenticity

This paper describes the development of a virtual learning environment using a blend of collaborative technologies and human resources to provide US preservice teachers with an authentic experience of another culture. A core design component is the use of ‘embedded instructors’ who are natives of and living in the target country (N. Ireland) while delivering the course in the USA. The wider issue of the potential depersonalisation of online learning is also addressed, and effective strategies for promoting the human dimension and sustaining learner engagement are described. In the context of globalisation, as well as of the constantly increasing provision of online courses, the course model could be of interest to both the academic and the corporate world.