不发达地区新本信息类院系为当地服务问题探索与实践——以三明学院信息工程学院为地方服务为例

本文以三明学院信息工程学院为地方服务为例,较全面地阐述了地处经济不发达地区,地方本科院校信息类二级学院如何面临当地经济不发达,IT产业发展滞后的困难,解放思想,突破专业禁锢,走校企合作、政产学研一体化推进的道路,推进"两化"融合,为当地服务探索和实践过程和体会。     

Do lenders discriminate against minority and woman entrepreneurs?

This paper draws on a conceptual analysis of discrimination to improve the methodology for estimating discrimination in small-business credit markets and to provide some evidence about the possible causes of discrimination in these markets. Using a variety of statistical enhancements to existing studies, we find statistically significant evidence of substantial discrimination in loan approval against black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses in 1998. We also find some hints that this discrimination takes the form of statistical discrimination, driven by lenders' stereotypes about the ability of black- and Hispanic-owned businesses to succeed under some circumstances. Although we find no discrimination, on average, in interest rates on approved loans, we also find that black-owned businesses do face discrimination in interest rates when they borrow from finance companies and businesses, such as mutual fund companies and leasing companies, with a primary mission other than lending. These findings suggest that federal financial regulatory agencies should re-double their efforts to uncover and prosecute lenders who discriminate against black- and Hispanic-owned businesses and that new tools may be needed to find discrimination by firms not well covered by the existing fair-lending enforcement system.     

全球应用开发外包项目特点及对接包商项目招聘人员的要求

随着精细化分工的发展,由专业人员或机构来从事专门的业务的方式已经渗透到各个行业,服务外包的发展在各个领域内日趋成熟。IT业务外包作为这股潮流中一个非常重要的部分,在全球内发展迅猛。     

品牌战略在我国物流企业管理中的应用

当今我国物流企业正处在快速发展阶段,在发展中存在很多问题，物流企业规模小，营销意识薄弱。要想在激烈的市场中取得长足的发展，只有科学地、合理地、有效地制定和实施品牌战略，才能使物流企业在国际竞争中占有有利地位，快速进入可持续发展的道路。     

Indirect Reciprocity and Corporate Philanthropic Giving: How Visiting Officials Influence Investment in Privately Owned Chinese Firms

This study examines how privately owned firms that are listed on Chinese stock exchanges and often surrounded by Buddhist or Taoist temples use money to bind themselves to officials who can mitigate their underinvestment problems. Philanthropic giving is a traditional way of achieving this task. Based on social‐exchange theory, we consider the potential for indirect reciprocity, in which visiting officials do favours for local businesses that do favours for other social actors. We analyse whether China’s Buddhist and Taoist cultures influence how philanthropic giving induces visiting officials to do favors. We also examine temple locations and the behaviours of privately owned firms listed on Chinese stock exchanges from 2001 to 2012 in an empirical study that provides strong support for our arguments. Results show that philanthropic giving initiates and amplifies indirect reciprocity between visiting officials and local businesses, thereby increasing corporate investment. The magnitudes of these effects depend on the magnitude of religious norms. Our study thus illuminates the influence of visiting officials on corporate investment.     

The Role of State‐Owned Enterprises in an Artificial Monopoly Market: The Case of Turkey

State‐owned enterprises (SOEs) benefit from many privileges based on their unique structure, their substantial capital, and their position in the economic system. Like all business corporations, they have no fixed duration, which makes them effectively immortal. In addition, they are adjuncts of the state, which enables them to survive in noncompetitive markets with little effort. Therefore, under today's ruthless global market conditions, SOEs engage in unfair competition with privately financed businesses. By relying on their identity as state operations, they do not follow the rules of the market—they define those rules. In addition to SOEs, which are direct arms of the state, some privately financed businesses dominate markets in which the state allows them to develop an artificial monopoly and thus increase their power day by day. These artificial monopolies distort market processes and create conditions that frequently give rise to corruption. This study examines the problems associated with monopolies, with a special emphasis on establishing more efficient market structures for SOEs in Turkey. The original mission of SOEs was to balance markets through regulation and to be transparent and accountable to the public. Simply striving to meet those criteria would go a long way toward preventing the abuse of power and unfair competition. In addition, SOEs and artificial monopoly markets distort public institutions by promoting rent‐seeking behavior that corrupts politics and blocks innovation from potential competitors. Privatization has been employed by international financial institutions in recent decades, but it has mostly transferred monopolies from the public sector to private owners, which has made the problem worse and done little to enhance competition. Establishing genuinely competitive economies will require a new political culture around the world.     

Maximizing the potential of your systems

In the last two decades, manufacturing businesses throughout the United States have learned that the most important way to ensure the maximum potential of their manufacturing systems when implementing manufacturing resource planning is how they approach the implementation itself--not just their choice of or expenditure for software.     

A quality-oriented framework with QoS management using Bluetooth as a case

In a modern society that is inundated with cell phones, laptops, PDAs and other IT facilities, it is little wonder that digital handheld tools and facilities have followed suit in the wireless trend. Services in Bluetooth promise to allow industries and businesses to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment and to the needs of IT users. Nevertheless, the dramatic changes of services in Bluetooth also result in undesirable interactions that negatively influence quality of service and customer satisfaction regarding Bluetooth. Consequently, it is important to discuss the service quality, service feature interaction and service recovery about Bluetooth and their influence on user satisfaction and trust. Due to particular properties of wireless communication services, there exist software testing models and methodologies in the domain of wireless communication services. Based on the previous literature that defines the overall quality of wireless communication services, this study proposes a quality-oriented framework that may be effectively applied to the area of wireless communication.     

Patterns underlying required HR and IT competencies: a content and cluster analysis of advertisements of HR manager positions

Abstract

Despite the pervasiveness of Information Technology (IT) in organizations, IT competencies for non Information Systems professionals such as Human Resource (HR) managers have been overlooked and limited attention has been paid to the interrelationships between IT and non-IT competencies. Building upon signaling theory and the configurational approach, this study characterizes actual IT and HR competencies that firms signal when recruiting for HR manager positions. A content analysis of 207 online job advertisements of HR manager positions is first conducted. Using factor analysis, three bundles of competencies are unveiled: IT, strategy, and employee and workplace well-being. Then, a cluster analysis approach that combines hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering algorithms is applied, followed by discriminant function analysis for validation. The study uncovers three strongly separated clusters of recruiting organizations based on required IT and HR competencies for HR manager positions. The clusters are labeled according to their dominant required competencies: (1) strategy proponents ?10% (2) technology proponents ?30%, and (3) basic proponents ?60%. The proposed classification goes beyond the normative understanding of IT competencies for HR managers and the way they combine with HR competencies: it provides a well-structured and parsimonious lens that is useful for recruiters, applicants, and educators.     

Consultation and communication in family businesses in Great Britain

Nationally representative data on family businesses are available in the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, alongside comparable information for other types of firms. We use these data to compare differences in the use of different consultation and communication procedures. We cover such practices as the use of direct communication schemes (e.g. briefings; the provision of information on financial performance to the workforce) as opposed to indirect methods such as the use of joint consultative committees. There is an a priori expectation in the literature that family-owned businesses are either more likely to use direct forms of communication (vis-à-vis indirect forms) or that they will not be involved in direct communication or consultation with their employees, and we test this using multivariate techniques. Finally, we consider whether the type of consultation/communication structure matters in terms of establishment performance, and what differences exist with respect to family-owned businesses. In particular, this paper tests if those firms that consult directly with staff, as opposed to those that consult through joint consultative committees or trade unions, have higher productivity and/or other measures of performance. Concurrently we test whether there are separate ‘family business’ effects or whether it is generally establishment size that ‘matters’, by estimating a model for family-owned and non-family-owned establishments. In general, our results show that not only do family-owned establishments have lower levels of communication and consultation, but, when the latter is present, this does not generally translate into greater economic benefits (as is the case in non-family-owned firms).     

职业院校学生顶岗实习期间的权益保护

学生顶岗实习是职业教育的一种重要方式,然而,由于实习学生身份定位的缺陷、相关法律法规缺失、学生维权意识和能力缺乏等原因,导致实习学生遭受人身伤害及劳动权益损害时权利难以实现,不利于我国职业教育的顺利发展。文章分析了实习学生权益保护的突出问题及原因,并提出加强实习学生权益保护的若干建议和对策。     

Crowdworkers,social affirmation and work identity: Rethinking dominant assumptions of crowdwork

Crowdwork is becoming increasingly popular as evidenced by its rapid growth. It is a new way of working that is conducted through global digital platforms where money is exchanged for services provided online. As it is digitally grounded, it has been assumed to be context-free, uniform and consisting of a simple exchange of tasks/labour from a global workforce for direct monetary pay. In this study, we examine these dominant, largely Western assumptions from crowdworkers' perspective and turn to a non-Western context to destabilise them. We adopt an inductive research approach using multiple sources of qualitative data including interviews, participant observations, documents review, observation of social media chat rooms and online forums. The study reveals that as they lack organisational, occupational and professional context and referent, crowdworkers rely on social affirmation in the construction of their work identity. They construct a work identity of who they are that cuts across the boundaries between themselves, the digital work they do and their social environment. This constructed work identity then frames how they do crowdwork and their relationships with digital platforms and employers. This study advances theories about crowdwork contesting the dominant assumptions and showing that it is not context free, neither it is a simple exchange of labour. Further, it shows that the construction of a crowdwork identity in context plays a significant role in shaping the way this digitally-grounded work is conducted and managed.     

Scheduling-capable autonomic manager for policy-based IT change management system

Managing large IT environments is expensive and labour intensive. Maintaining and upgrading with minimal disruption and administrative support has always been a challenging task for system administrators. One challenge faced by IT administrators is arriving at schedules for applying one or more change requests to one of the system components. Most of the time, the impact analysis of the proposed changes is done by humans and is often laborious and error-prone. Although this methodology might be suitable to handle changes that are planned way ahead in time, it is completely inappropriate for changes that need to be done sooner. In addition, such manual handling does not scale well with the size of the IT infrastructure. In this article, the focus is on the problem of scheduling change requests in the presence of organisational policies governing the use of its resources. The authors propose two approaches for change management scheduling and present the implementation details of two prototypes that prove the feasibility of the proposed approaches. Their implementation is integrated with an autonomic manager which they had described in their earlier work.     

Environmental Management in SMEs in the UK: Practices,Pressures and Perceived Benefits

Environmental management represents a significant challenge for small businesses, and prior research has shown that they are typically less engaged with environmental issues than their larger counterparts. At the same time, prior research has seldom explored engagement among small and medium‐sized companies (SMEs) with the wide variety of practices that are encompassed by environmental management, nor has it sought to explore heterogeneity among SMEs. In this study, we analyse the extent of SME involvement in a wide range of environmental management practices and the differences between small and medium‐sized businesses. We also explore SME perceptions of pressures for, and benefits of, engagement with environmental issues. Our findings show that most small businesses are engaged in some environmental initiatives but that there is significant heterogeneity in the engagement of small and medium‐sized businesses. Consistent with this, we show that the smallest companies perceive significantly fewer benefits of engagement with environmental issues. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Evaluating business value of IT towards optimisation of the application portfolio

Information technology has become heavily embedded in business operations. As business needs change over time, IT applications are expected to continue providing required support. Whether the existing IT applications are still fit for the business purpose they were intended or new IT applications should be introduced is a strategic decision for business, IT and business-aligned IT. In this article, we present a method that aims to analyse business functions and IT roles and to evaluate business-aligned IT from both social and technical perspectives. The method introduces a set of techniques that systematically supports the evaluation of the existing IT applications in relation to their technical capabilities for maximising business value. Furthermore, we discuss the evaluation process and results that are illustrated and validated through a real-life case study of a UK borough council and followed by discussion on implications for researchers and practitioners.     

企业信息技术实用培训策略

文章指出,企业信息技术培训的目标是使员工在工作中熟练运用信息技术,但现有的培训缺乏行之有效的培训策略,导致培训与实际应用脱节,员工学习后往往不能灵活运用,在工作中还是问题重重。为解决这种现状所设计的“三环节螺旋渐进”策略,让员工在“做中学”,使培训与企业需要和员工需要紧密结合,使理论学习与实践紧密结合,这一策略能够提高培训的效果与效率,是一个实用的、值得推广的企业信息技术培训策略。     

Maximizing the potential of your systems

In the last two decades, manufacturing businesses throughout the United States have learned that an important factor affecting the productivity of their manufacturing systems when implementing manufacturing resource planning is the way they approach the implementation itself. Eighty percent of an implementation effort needs to be devoted to preparing people in the organization to use the system and only 20 percent should be devoted to purchasing the system.     

Turn to the material: Remote diagnostics systems and new forms of boundary-spanning

To learn and adapt, organizations engage widely in Information Technology (IT)-mediated boundary-spanning. This involves making sense of a swath of peripheral information made available by digital means so as to expand local knowledge. Prior research on boundary-spanning has paid scant attention to material differences between IT systems in enabling or constraining such activity. In this article, we argue that material features do matter: features afforded by IT systems have a significant impact on the form and content of boundary-spanning. We analyze material features and related affordances provided by remote diagnostics systems – a family of ubiquitous IT systems. These features allow remote diagnostics systems to collect, store, and continuously analyze data about the state of machinery and related production processes across space, time and organizational boundaries. Organizations use these systems to determine when maintenance intervention is needed, or to improve their production processes. Often, these systems are run by external service providers at remote sites, which become the new ears and the eyes of a focal organization’s production processes. Building on a longitudinal multi-site case study of two organizations, we explore the impacts of remote diagnostics systems on boundary-spanning. We observe that material features afforded by the remote diagnostics led the organizations to change their boundary-spanning in contradictory ways. On one hand, they reinforced existing boundaries. On the other hand, they crossed or cut down others, or created new ones. This suggests that the material features of these systems, when combined with new knowledge creation and sharing practices, within and between the local and the remote sites generate richer, multi-faceted inter-organizational knowledge flows. We surmise that IT’s new material features will continue to significantly shape organizing logics that determine where and when organizational boundaries are drawn and crossed. Future boundary-spanning will increasingly be shaped by socio-technical assemblages brought together by increasingly pervasive IT capabilities.     

Walking the line: Mindfulness with IT in hospital medication routines

This paper addresses the dilemma that organizations face when they introduce information technology (IT) to standardize and guide operations and improve performance, while also supporting staff mindfulness in using IT and questioning it, to safeguard against errors. People are warned to be mindful in using the information provided by IT, yet IT may contribute to their mindlessness. Organizational operations involve routine work, where work is distributed across roles, in space and time. To fully understand mindfulness or mindlessness with IT at work it is necessary to consider the routines in which they are embedded. We sought to investigate what factors might influence mindfulness or mindlessness with IT in the context of organizational routines. We carried out an in-depth study of clinicians using technology during medications routines in a UK hospital. The IT in this context aimed to guide and standardize clinical work to improve medication safety. The study uncovered several factors influencing mindfulness and mindlessness with IT: not only the IT design but also task design, individual experience and history of IT use, distribution of work, and the situation at hand. These are interacting influences on mindfulness and mindlessness with IT, each embodying a tension, as each may influence both mindfulness and mindlessness. The distribution of work and the dynamics of the routine over time mean that individuals in the routine may (mindlessly) entrust mindfulness in using IT to others, or to other moments in time. The study highlights the complexity of achieving mindfulness with IT in organizations, and a nuanced relation between mindfulness and IT in a routine work context.     

Integrated thinking and sustainability reporting assurance: International evidence

Recently, there has been increasing demand by stakeholders for firms to demonstrate how they create value within the context of their operating environment. Consequently, a new reporting approach, integrated reporting (IR), was conceptualised with its development linked to the firm's integrated thinking (IT). Yet very little is known about the effects of IT on firms' reporting decisions. Hence, we investigate whether IT influences firms' decision to publish an assured sustainability report. Using an international dataset, we find that IT is positively associated with sustainability reporting assurance. We also find that this association is moderated by the type of legal system such that for firms in code law countries, the IT effects are reduced. Nevertheless, the effects of IT remain strong, indicating that IT is important for reporting decisions regardless of the firm's contextual setting. These findings have implications for policymakers and organisations interested in promoting high-quality sustainability reporting.