If you build it,will they come? Student preferences for Makerspace environments in higher education

The Maker Movement inspires people to express their creativity by making things in a self-directed and, often, collaborative learning endeavor. The excitement of the movement has spurred the development of various types of Makerspaces across the United States and the World to further enable people to make and innovate. The education community has recognized the potential for Makerspaces as learning environments that can foster interdisciplinary collaboration and self-directed learning. As such, there is much excitement to create Makerspaces within K-12 schools, libraries, colleges and universities. However, contrary to the formal design process used to build many school facilities, successful grass-roots makerspaces are most often created when those with like-minded interests come together and adapt the building around them to fit their needs. The research in this paper focuses on the design of such spaces by applying the environmental preferences predictors psychology construct. The study surveyed 276 students from art and design, engineering, and liberal arts majors to better understand their preferences as related to images of eight different Makerspaces. The results are broken down by the four predictors of preference, major, and gender. The results highlight differences among the images along with design considerations for creating spaces that welcome a broader audience.     

Exploring a possible route through which training affects organizational performance: the case of a Greek bank

Despite the dithyramb on training found throughout the literature, its impact on organizational performance still remains a ‘black box’ yet to be unlocked. Indeed, neither the intervening process nor the factors that mediate training effectiveness have been substantively explored or linked together in a framework. In this paper, gaining insights from the concept of the balanced scorecard and using the service profit chain as a strategy map, an attempt is made to formulate a casual linkage value chain that highlights one possible route through which training can impact organizational performance. Using a predictive design, data were collected from multiple sources (employees, customers, and the bank's financial records) and raters from a sample of 30 branches of a Greek bank. The findings confirmed a framework illuminating a value exchange process ignited by training. More precisely, the results suggested that a formal, structured, and long-term approach to training, as well as certain pre- and post-training conditions and activities, improve training effectiveness by creating positive perceptions about the training's value. The generated for employees value results to higher levels of job satisfaction which boosts employee loyalty, creating in this sense value for the organization. This value is reflected to customers, in terms of better service quality, and reciprocated to the organization through higher customer satisfaction and branch loyalty leading to improved profitability at the branch level.     

The Effect of Business Education on the Ethics of Students: An Empirical Assessment Controlling for Maturation

This study empirically assesses the relative impact of business education on students' ethics while accounting for the potentially confounding effects of maturation and starting position. It finds that business education does not negatively effect the ethical development of students relative to the effect caused by non-business education.     

Video conferencing meetings: Changing patterns of business communication

Electronic mediated communication is an increasingly popular form of communication within and across organisations. This paper presents research on the implementation, training and use of video-conferencing systems on different sites of a multi-national oil company. We find that error, delay but mainly social costs influence the choice and use of this communication medium.     

Models of Site‐choice for Walks in Rural Ireland: Exploring Cost Heterogeneity

Farmland can confer significant public good benefits to society aside from its role in agricultural production. In this article, we investigate preferences of rural residents for the use of farmland as a recreational resource. In particular, we use a choice experiment to determine preferences for the development of farmland walking trails. Our modelling approach uses a series of mixed logit models to assess the impact of alternative distributional assumptions for the cost coefficient on the welfare estimates associated with the provision of the trails. Our results reveal that using a mixture of discrete and continuous distributions to represent cost heterogeneity leads to a better model fit and lower welfare estimates. Our results further reveal that Irish rural residents show positive preferences for the development of farmland walking trails in the Irish countryside.     

The role of voluntary sport organisations in leveraging the London 2012 sport participation legacy

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to understand the perceptions of national Voluntary Sport Organisations (VSOs) managers towards a mega sports event and identify the components they felt enhanced or inhibited their organisations capacity to implement a sport participation legacy. London 2012 was the first Olympic Games to explicitly attempt to deliver this type of legacy, and an exploratory, online mixed-method survey examined the perceptions of 105 senior managers from 37 VSOs, post-event. Principal Component Analysis identified four distinct factors: ‘objectives, standards & resources’, ‘event capitalisation & opportunities’, ‘monitoring & evaluation’ and ‘club engagement & implementation’, explaining 51.5% of the variance. Also, relevant organisational characteristics such as sport type, funding and sport size were examined to investigate the influence this had on their capacity. From these findings, the main recommendations are that future mega sport event hosts should: 1) Engage and consult with multiple stakeholders to engender sustained sport participation. 2) Set clear and monitorable objectives. 3) Establish funding and support mechanisms relevant to each sport. 4) Engage non-competing sports in the leveraging process. 5) Finally, event organisers should try to ensure personnel consistency.     

Tax competition for FDI: China’s exceptional approach

International Tax and Public Finance - In this Policy Watch study, we explore the different approaches to corporate income tax (CIT) setting in three economically significant regions: USA, EU, and...