The Grounding of a Discipline: Cognition and Instruction in Technology Education

Technology education has long struggled to establish itself as an equal partner in general education and often struggled to gain recognition for the value of its instruction. Frequently technology educators tout the effectiveness of their programs based on anecdotal evidence gathered from their classroom experiences on how their instructional methods empower students to learn. Although technology education originated without any meaningful input from cognitive science research, it appears that technology education instruction methods are remarkably consonant with findings from cognitive science that define good instruction. Specifically, there is considerable accord between how instruction in technology education and cognitively based instructional models such as collaborative learning, socially distributed expertise, design/engineering, and project-based instruction can be connected. The role of the cognitive research findings on instruction could inform a long over-due theoretical grounding of instruction in technology education. The absence of research on learning and instruction in technology education could be attributed to a lack of theoretical grounding in this relatively new field. This paper examines four cognitively based models of instruction and reviews the relationships between research in the cognitive sciences on learning and instruction in technology education. The consonance between the research recommendations from the cognitive sciences and practice in technology education instruction could serve to stimulate debate on the theoretical grounding of an emerging field of study.     

The effect of new product development techniques on new product success in Spanish firms

The rate of market and technological changes has accelerated in the last years. This turbulent environment requires new methods and techniques to bring successful new products to the marketplace. Much attention has focused on new development techniques, but little empirical research has been conducted to validate these techniques. In this study, the relationship between popular new development techniques and new product success is examined. Our findings suggest that only a subset of these popular techniques is significantly related with new product success in Spanish firms. The study also identifies the main contributors to new product development (NPD) effectiveness in Spanish firms.     

Globalisation and Obesity

The WHO has recently announced the global obesity epidemic. An economic model is developed in which globalisation factors generate health externalities and contribute to global obesity growth. The unbalanced panel data set contains the information for 79 countries over the period 1986–2008. Fixed‐effects panel data estimation and quantile regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The fixed‐effects panel model results indicate that the impact of trade openness and the globalisation social index (GSI) on global obesity rates is positive and significant, which is consistent with prior expectations, while surprisingly the foreign direct investments (FDI) has no impact on global obesity. While these results are interesting, they are hiding the effect of globalisation processes across the conditional distribution of the obesity variable. The use of quantile regression uncovered that the impact of the FDI and the GSI on low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates in our sample) is positive and significant, while high quantiles are not affected. Since low and average quantiles (low and average obesity rates) are representative of the less‐ and medium‐developed countries, this result implies that social globalisation and FDI adversely impact obesity in less‐to‐medium developed countries. Trade openness generally has no impact on changes in obesity rates across quantiles.     

Globalization drives strategic product switching

Using firm-level panel data for Estonia, we analyse the impact of international competition on firm dynamics, considering both firm closedown and product switches. We contribute to the literature in two important ways: first, this is the first paper to study the determinants of exit and product switching in an emerging market; and second, we consider explicitly the role of export opportunities. Our results indicate that globalization does not affect firm exit significantly but it is an important factor explaining why firms choose a different core product. Previous studies on industrial countries have shown that product switching has been a defensive strategy against low-cost imports. In contrast, our results suggest that Estonian firms change their core products as an offensive strategy to take advantage of the export opportunities created by a globalized economy.     

Coping with Crisis Risk in European Agriculture

Coping with Crisis Risk in European Agriculture
This article summarizes the major findings of an international workshop on coping with crisis risk in European agriculture. The workshop took place as part of an EU sixth framework project entitled: Income stabilisation: Design and economic impact of risk management tools for European agriculture. The meeting focused on ex ante crisis risk, which is defined as a foreseeable and predictable risk that potentially hits many farms at the same time. More specifically, the workshop focused on technology risks - such as food safety and livestock epidemic risks - and weather risks. State of the art discussions pointed towards little attention being paid to crisis risk management in EU agriculture and the incompleteness of risk management instruments available. Proposed solutions, although not entirely agreed upon by all workshop participants, envision some form of public–private partnership. For technology risks, which are rather'manageable' by individual farmers, partnerships are recommended to be a mix of regulation, risk mitigation and non-subsidised market instruments with a clear focus on incentives for risk prevention. For weather risks, these partnerships include financial aspects whereby governments offer free cover for the catastrophic part of losses. The Income Stabilisation project will integrate workshop recommendations with wider research project activities and will eventually advise on prospective risk management instruments for various farm types and regions throughout the European Union.     

Assessing primary healthcare services quality in Spain: managers vs. patients perceptions

This paper measures the perceptions of the service quality by both the users and the health centre managers in Spain. With this information, it was possible to calculate the size of Gap-6, proposed by Lewis of discrepancy among the customers' perceptions and the perceptions of health centre managers. Using factor analysis and multiple regressions, significant associations were found between the service quality dimensions and patient satisfaction. Implications and future research issues are discussed.     

Characteristics of research on green marketing

This paper aims to describe and analyze the main characteristics of articles on green marketing published in the most relevant journals within the period 1993–2003, in order to determine the evolution of this current issue of research over recent years and improve our understanding of this subject. We built up a database with 112 articles on green marketing and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. In order to complete this analysis, we made a review of articles published in two journals specializing in environmental management: BSE and CSREM. In this way, this paper offers practical help to those who are beginning research on this topic because the results will help us to determine what still needs to be investigated in this topic and hence propose a research agenda for the coming years. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Consumers’ Behaviors and Attitudes toward Doggy Bags: Identifying Barriers and Benefits to Promoting Behavior Change

ABSTRACT

This study identifies barriers and benefits of consumers’ current doggy bag behaviors and provides the information required to run an effective community-based social marketing campaign encouraging consumers to take their uneaten restaurant and café food home. This is done by applying a two-stage methodology, including quantitatively analyzing existing survey data and qualitatively investigating focus group discussion. Multiple barriers to widespread doggy bag participation were common and varied for different individuals and included both convenience and social stigma-related factors. The rational appeal of “saving money” was found to be the most effective motivator for encouraging doggy bag usage, especially for women, young people, students/unemployed, and low-income earners. Social marketing strategies and behavior change tools can be developed to remove the barriers and enhance the benefits of using doggy bags, such as developing positive social norms around using doggy bags and highlighting the financial incentive of using them. This research contributes to a limited but growing literature on out-of-home food waste and provides practicable insights for both public policy and for the food service sector for future initiatives aiming to reduce food waste.     

Content Analysis of the ‘Clean Your Plate Campaign’ on Sina Weibo

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of 2013, a Beijing non-profit group launched a ‘Clean Your Plate Campaign’ on Sina Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like microblogging site, with aims to reduce food waste. This paper examines social media users’ reactions during two periods of the first three years of the campaign. Upon examination of topic content, supporting participation was the most popular topic in January 2013 and showcasing individual achievement was the most frequently discussed topic in March 2016, with socialising as the common purpose for posting in both months. Users mentioning the campaign most in January 2013 belonged to private organisations, with posts from ordinary people becoming more predominant by March 2016. This study sheds light on the use of social media to raise public awareness regarding food waste in China. The findings will help campaigns aiming to promote food waste reductions or other social movements that use social media as a platform for citizen involvement.     

Entrepreneurship as the structuration of individual and opportunity: A response using a critical realist perspective : Comment on Sarason,Dean and Dillard

Sarason et al. [Sarason, Y., Dean, T., Dillard, J.F., 2006. Entrepreneurship as the nexus of individual and opportunity: a structuration view. J. Bus. Venturing, 21, 286-305] build upon Shane and Venkataraman’s [Shane, S., Venkataraman, S., 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Acad. Manage. Rev., 25, 217–226] framework of the interrelationship between opportunity and the entrepreneur, by proposing Giddens’ structuration theory as the ‘lens through which to view the entrepreneurial process’ (2006: 286). In this comment we make four points. Although we agree that the nexus of entrepreneur and opportunity is one that requires understanding within the context of social structure and the individual agency. Our view of structure differs substantially from Giddens and by implication Sarason et al. (2006). We discuss the implications. Second, since strata in social reality have different ontologies we propose it follows that they are viewed as a dualism. Third, agents have causal power, and ultimate concerns which they try to fallibly to put into practice. We propose entrepreneurship as the study of the interplay between the structures of a society and the agents within it, the implications of fallibility is made explicit. Finally, we take issue with Sarason et al.’s argument for an interpretist epistemology.