R&D intensity, value appropriation and integration patterns within organizational boundaries

Complementary insights from Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm are combined to predict the relationship between firm specific technological knowledge and patterns of integration within organizational boundaries. The findings show that the level of Research and Development (R&D) intensity (representing the creation of firm specific technological knowledge) has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the propensity of firms to integrate activities within organizational boundaries. At low levels of R&D intensity, firms’ propensity to integrate their activities is low, but increases with escalating levels of R&D intensity in order to avoid the misappropriation of value generated by technological knowledge. However, beyond a certain R&D intensity level, the propensity to integrate activities declines, since the level of technological knowledge is high enough to prevent imitation by third parties. As expected we further find that firms which follow this integration pattern outperform those which do not. As the level of R&D intensity increases, the integration of production and marketing activities enables firms to improve performance until a certain R&D intensity threshold, after which such integration negatively affects performance.     

Leaving a Choice for Others: Children’s Evaluations of Considerate,Socially-Mindful Actions

People value those who act with others in mind even as they pursue their own goals. Across three studies (N = 566; 4- to 6-year-olds), we investigated children’s developing understanding of such considerate, socially-mindful actions. By age 6, both U.S. and Chinese children positively evaluate a character who takes a snack for herself in a way that leaves a snack choice for others over a character who leaves no choice (Study 1), but only when the actors had alternative possible actions (Study 2) and when a clear beneficiary was present (Study 3). These results suggest an emerging ability to infer underlying social intentions from self-oriented actions, providing insights into the role of social-cognitive capacities versus culture-specific norms in children’s moral evaluations.     

I Witness: Re-presenting Trauma in and by Cinema

This article considers how film helps reconcile a traumatic collective past through representation of a personal trauma. It focuses on the role of witnesses in conveying their experiences regarding events that have traumatized them. The author suggests that a witness to a traumatic event performs the excess of an event that has transformed him or her. By framing the witness as a performer rather than a mere conduit for transferring knowledge to the uninformed, the article underscores the communicative dimension of witnessing by studying this process as an ongoing interplay between addressers and addressees who undergo mutual transformations in and by this action. These arguments are presented through an examination of the film Waltz With Bashir (2008), in which its director documented his struggle to come to terms with his personal trauma surrounding the part he played in the Lebanon War. The author suggests that by performing this loss of experience, the director turns the audience into witnesses, thus transforming a personal loss of experience into a collective experience of loss.     

Staging peace: Televised ceremonies of reconciliation

The visit of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem was the model for Dayan and Katz's conceptualization of the genre of media events, as live programs which have the power to transform history. Fifteen years later, a series of televised reconciliation ceremonies, which marked the stages of the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors (the Palestinians and the Jordanians), are used to re‐examine the model. We demonstrate (1) how the effectiveness of these ceremonies depends on the type of contract among the three participants—leaders, broadcasters and public—each of whom displays different kinds of reservations, and (2) how the aura of the ceremonies draws on the prior status of the participants (Hussein), but also confers status (Arafat).     

Still waters run deep

This study aims to compare girls' performance with that of their boy peers, in a special program called a “research class.” Eighteen eleventh-grade students who excelled in math and science volunteered for a special research class in biology. The program consisted of three supplemental hours of biology per week at school, plus one full day per week at a research institute. At the institute the students were required to conduct individual research projects under the guidance of a scientist as well as the supervision of their biology teacher. The data about the participating students was collected through qualitative methods. Nonparticipant observations were conducted, primarily in the classroom and less frequently at the research institute, over a long period of time. These observations yielded information regarding each gender's quality of work. Following these observations, all of the participating adults and students were interviewed, and questionnaires were completed by the students. The main findings of the study indicated that the boys were significantly more active in classroom discussions than were the girls. This observation was reconfirmed by an analysis of verbal interventions in classroom discussions. However, in both the teacher's evaluation and the students' self-evaluation of their achievements, the girls' ratings were at least as high as the boys, with an average of 9 on a scale of 10. Moreover, the scientists indicated in their evaluations that the girls exhibited ability, intellectual curiosity, and a sense of responsibility, and were definately as able as were the boys. In other words, the vociferous monopoly of the boys during classroom discussion turns out to be relatively insignificant when examining the more covert qualities of the participating male and female students.     

Home visits: A child-centered approach to an old concept

Making home visits is not a new technique for helping children by improving family-school relationships. It is certainly not new that cooperation between parents and teachers is essential in the education of the very young: the whole adult population is friendly, and the nursery holds them by strong ties through the love both places have in common for their children (McMillan, 1919). Beller (1969), for example, found that the teacher's respect for the family was associated with a child's readiness to gain from educational experiences in the classroom. As one of the means of involving parents in the educational process of the child, teachers have visited in homes.Tamar Meyer is Clinical Supervisor, Early Childhood Research Center, State University of New York at Buffalo.     

Morphological processing during visual word recognition in Hebrew as a first and a second language

The present study examined whether sublexical morphological processing takes place during visual word-recognition in Hebrew, and whether morphological decomposition of written words depends on lexical activation of the complete word. Furthermore, it examined whether morphological processing is similar when reading Hebrew as a first language (L1) or as a second language (L2), and whether L1’s morphological background, Semitic or Indo-European, modulates morphological processing in L2 Hebrew (a Semitic language), among proficient readers. To reveal the sublexical processing of the Hebrew morphemes, the Root (R) and the Pattern (P), a lexical-decision task was conducted, in which all critical stimuli were non-word letter-strings manipulated to include or exclude real Hebrew morphemes. Different combinations of real (+) and pseudo (?) morphemes yielded four types of non-words (+R+P; +R?P; ?R+P, ?R?P). Three groups of proficient Hebrew readers were tested: L1 Hebrew, L1 English-L2 Hebrew, and L1 Arabic-L2 Hebrew. Results demonstrated significant differences in latency and accuracy of responses to the four morphological conditions, indicating that sublexical morphological processing occurs during visual word-recognition of morphologically structured letter-strings in Hebrew. Importantly, the activation of real Hebrew morphemes occurred in non-word stimuli, indicating that morphological processing in Hebrew is separable from lexical activation. Moreover, the same pattern of results was observed in all three L1 groups, indicating that proficient L2 readers exhibit morphological processing strategies that are tuned to the L2 morphology, regardless of their L1 background.     

Roles of academic department chairpersons at the university level

The study presents an attempt at investigating the role perceptions of academic chairpersons of departments at the University level, the fulfillment of these roles, and the desirability to fulfill them.A group of 90 chairpersons in six universities responded to a questionnaire that was especially developed for the present study. Factor analysis yielded five main factors: 1) Curriculum and Instruction, 2) Initiation, 3) Staff Development, 4) Democratic Leadership Style and 5) Departmental Status. Significant differences were found between the actual fulfillment and the extent of the desire to fulfill all the roles. Several background variables and role factors were found to explain the variance in chairpersons' satisfaction with role fulfillment. Findings shed some light on a relatively neglected subject - the role perceptions and satisfaction of department chairpersons. The information gained on this subject is expected to initiate attempts at making the role more satisfying in the direction desired by chairpersons.