Showing papers on "Dilemma published in 2002"

Knowledge-Sharing Dilemmas:

Abstract: The exchange of information among organizational employees is a vital component of the knowledge-management process. Modem information and telecommunication technology is available to support such exchanges across time and distance barriers. However, organizations investing in this type of technology often face difficulties in encouraging their employees to use the system to share their ideas. This paper elaborates on previous research, suggesting that sharing personal insights with one's co-workers may carry a cost for some individuals which may yield, at the aggregate level, a co-operation dilemma, similar to a public-good dilemma. A review of the research on different types of public-good dilemmas provides some indications of the specific interventions that may help organizations encourage the kind of social dynamics that will increase overall knowledge sharing. These interventions can be classified into three categories: interventions aimed at restructuring the pay-offs for contributing, those that tr...

The Great Leap: Driving Innovation From the Base of the Pyramid

Abstract: As multinationals unrelentingly seek new growth to satisfy shareholders, they increasingly hear concerns from many quarters about environmental degradation, labor exploitation, cultural hegemony and local autonomy. What is to be done? Must corporations' thirst for growth and profits serve only to exacerbate the antiglobalization movement? On the contrary, the authors say, a solution to this dilemma does exist. Companies can generate growth and satisfy social and environmental stakeholders through a "great leap" to the base of the economic pyramid, where 4 billion people aspire to join the market economy for the first time. This is not a question simply of doing the right thing in order to lift people out of poverty ? although that will surely be a result of the leap the authors have in mind. From a senior executive's point of view, it's a matter of finding the most exciting growth markets of the future. It is also where the technologies that are needed to address the social and environmental challenges associated with economic growth can best be developed. The authors illustrate their point with examples of companies that are already profitably disrupting such industries as telecommunications, consumer electronics and energy production.

Defining ‘Life’

Abstract: There is no broadly accepted definition of ‘life.’ Suggested definitions face problems, often in theform of robust counter-examples. Here we use insights fromphilosophical investigations into language to argue thatdefining `life' currently poses a dilemma analogous to thatfaced by those hoping to define `water' before the existenceof molecular theory. In the absence of an analogous theoryof the nature of living systems, interminable controversyover the definition of life is inescapable.

US hegemony and the World Bank: the fight over people and ideas

Abstract: Hegemony refers to a dominant group's ability to make others want the same thing as it wants for itself. It rests upon (1) a substantive pillar of belief that the system of rule created by the dominant group brings material and other benefits to all or most participants and that the feasible alternatives are worse, and (2) a procedural pillar of belief that the processes and procedures of the dominant system of rule are fair and appropri1ate and will be enforced on the dominant group as well as the subordinate group. But the requirements of (1) and (2) may undermine each other - this is the hegemon's dilemma. US intervention in multilateral organizations to strengthen the substantive pillar - the organizations' commitment to the idea of mutual benefits from free markets - may come at the expense of the procedural pillar, by breaking collectively legitimated rules of, for example, personnel selection or research independence; and vice versa. This paper explores US-World Bank relations in the context of US ...

Critical Skills of IS Professionals: A Model for Curriculum Development

Abstract: Introduction Revolutionary changes are occurring across the United States and throughout the world in information systems technology. "The number of workers in the computer and software industries has almost tripled in the past decade." (Freeman and Aspray, 1999. p. 35.) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for the period 2000-2010, of the 10 fastest growing occupations, computer-related occupations occupy eight of the top ten positions: software applications engineers, support specialists, systems software engineers, network and systems administrators, network systems and data communications analysts, desktop publishers, database administrators, and systems analysts. (BLS, Table 3b). Computer and data processing services is projected as the industry with the fastest wage and salary employment growth (BLS, Table 3a). Every sector of the American economy employs information systems workers in every geographic region of the country. This projected growth in information systems related occupations is reflected in the need for well-educated IS professionals. Currently, the demand for trained professionals far exceeds qualified applicants. The State of Illinois Citizens Agenda (1999) specifically calls for an increase in the number of graduates with skills and knowledge needed to meet new or emerging occupational demand. The State of Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) Workforce Issues Paper (1999) calls for the number of baccalaureate computer and information science graduates from public universities to be doubled by 2006. Information Technology Association of America (2000) reports that "... employers will create a demand in this country for roughly 1.6 million IT workers this year. With demand for appropriately skilled people far exceeding supply, half of these positions--843,328--will likely go unfilled. In a total U.S. IT workforce of 10 million, that shortfall means one job in every dozen will be vacant." (Information Technology Association of America, [paragraph]1, 2000). These circumstances create an atmosphere whereby Information Systems programs need to be reevaluated and changed to meet the demand. Educators have the overwhelming responsibility of designing a curriculum that prepares future IS professionals for this dynamic field. Researchers have struggled with the issue of implementing curriculum models in various ways. Kim, Shim, and Yoon (1999) asked IS practitioners and educators to rate the importance of key IS issues. They found that practitioners perceive managerial and organizational issues as more important than educators do. They also indicate that educators consider emerging issues such as e-commerce, more important than practitioners do. They recommended that educators and practitioners should have a shared vision of key IS issues and collaborate on curriculum development. Lightfoot (1999) describes the dilemma of IS curriculum design as a problem of balance between the fundamentals of IS and the current "fad" applications. He suggests that students and businesses (employers) have short-term perspectives, while educators have a long-term perspective; legislators (public) are somewhere in between. He recommends modifying curriculum to satisfy the goals of the stakeholders. Srinivasan, Guan, and Wright (1999) describe a process of developing a new curriculum working with corporate partners. They also suggest using the corporate partners as "clinical": faculty to help teach the courses. Maier, Clark, and Remington (1998) reviewed the content of job advertisements over a 15-year period to explore the changes in the MIS job market and found a growing diversity in the MIS job market. Hingorani and Sankar (1995) surveyed perceptions of graduates' skills and compared the results with skills required in industry. They found that students were aware of the needs of industry. They also made specific recommendations for their specific program. The foundation of the curricula revision process is to review the literature related to expected workplace skills and knowledge for IS professionals. …

Heuristics and Biases: When Predictions Fail: The Dilemma of Unrealistic Optimism

Abstract: One of the most robust findings in the psychology of prediction is that people's predictions tend to be optimistically biased. By a number of metrics and across a variety of domains, people have been found to assign higher probabilities to their attainment of desirable outcomes than either objective criteria or logical analysis warrants. Yet the very prevalence of optimistic biases presents an intriguing dilemma: Given that many of the decisions people make, most of their choices, and virtually all plans are based on expectations about the future, it would seem imperative that people's predictions and expectations be free from bias. If the majority of predictions, expectations and performance-relevant perceptions are optimistically biased, how can people make appropriate decisions, or choose effective courses of action? We review research on optimistic biases in personal predictions and address the question of how people can maintain these biases when doing so would seem to be maladaptive. We begin by reviewing empirical evidence that has shown optimistic biases to be a common feature of people's predictions and expectations. EVIDENCE OF OPTIMISTIC BIAS IN PERSONAL PREDICTIONS Henrik Ibsen maintained “that man is in the right who is most clearly in league with the future” (in Sprinchorn, 1964). By similar logic, one might argue that the clearest demonstrations of optimistic biases are those that have revealed systematic discrepancies between people's predictions and the outcomes they ultimately attain.

Moral Dilemmas, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender Lessons from Two Generations of Work and Family Change

Abstract: Modern societies have reconciled the dilemma between self-interest and caring for others by dividing women and men into different moral categories. Women have been expected to seek personal development by caring for others, while men care for others by sharing the rewards of their independent work achievements. Changes in work and family life have undermined this framework but have failed to offer a clear avenue for creating new resolutions. Instead, contradictory social changes have produced new moral dilemmas. Women must now seek economic self-sufficiency even as they continue to bear responsibility for the care of others. Men can reject the obligation to provide for others, but they face new pressures to become more involved fathers and partners. Facing these dilemmas, young women and men must develop innovative moral strategies to renegotiate work-family conflicts and transform traditional views of gender, but persisting institutional obstacles thwart their emerging aspirations to balance personal aut...

Alasdair MacIntyre on Education: In Dialogue with Joseph Dunne

Abstract: This discussion begins from the dilemma, posed in some earlier writing by Alasdair MacIntyre, that education is essential but also, in current economic and cultural conditions, impossible. The potential for resolving this dilemma through appeal to ‘practice’, ‘narrative unity’, and ‘tradition’(three core concepts in After Virtue and later writings) is then examined. The discussion also explores the relationship of education to the modern state and the power of a liberal education to create an ‘educated public’ very different in character from the electorates of contemporary democratic regimes. It concludes with some remarks on the role of education in combating prejudice against certain kinds of human difference.

The Practice of Deliberative Democracy: A Study of 16 Deliberative Organizations

Abstract: This article investigates 16 organizations that attempt to foster better public deliberation in local and national communities. It develops a typology of these organizations and discusses them in the context of the scholarly literature on deliberative democracy. It particularly focuses upon the contributions these organizations may make to debates within the literature between advocates of relational and rational modes of deliberation. It finds that, much like the literature, practitioners of deliberative democracy wrestle with the competing demands of inclusiveness and group cohesion. Organizations attempt to solve this dilemma by stressing group action. However, this emphasis on action raises another dilemma associated with the relation between deliberative and representative models of politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that these organizations have accepted the challenge of improving public life through discourse that has been laid down by deliberative democratic theory. As such, they represen...

The Recognition Game: Soviet Russia Against the West

Abstract: The problem with traditional explanations of relations between states is that they focus on matters of interests and pay insufficient attention to matters of identities. This article seeks to improve on this situation by providing a formal discussion of the role of recognition. World politics is best described as a recognition game rather than as a prisoner's dilemma. To prove the applicability of this argument, an analysis is made of the relations that obtained between Soviet Russia and the West. From the perspective of the alternative, identity-based, model, a number of the most important events of the twentieth century are explained in quite a new fashion.

The Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma and the Evolution of Cooperation through Reciprocal Altruism with Variable Investment

Abstract: Understanding the evolutionary origin and persistence of cooperative behavior is a fundamental biological problem. The standard “prisoner’s dilemma,” which is the most widely adopted framework for studying the evolution of cooperation through reciprocal altruism between unrelated individuals, does not allow for varying degrees of cooperation. Here we study the continuous iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in which cooperative investments can vary continuously in each round. This game has been previously considered for a class of reactive strategies in which current investments are based on the partner’s previous investment. In the standard iterated prisoner’s dilemma, such strategies are inferior to strategies that take into account both players' previous moves, as is exemplified by the evolutionary dominance of “Pavlov” over “tit for tat.” Consequently, we extend the analysis of the continuous prisoner’s dilemma to a class of strategies in which current investments depend on previous payoffs and, hen...

Accounting for risk aversion in repeated prisoners’ dilemma games: an experimental test

Abstract: We apply experimental methods to study the role of risk aversion on players’ behavior in repeated prisoners’ dilemma games. Faced with quantitatively equal discount factors, the most risk-averse players will choose Nash strategies more often in the presence of uncertainty than when future profits are discounted in a deterministic way. Overall, we find that risk aversion relates negatively with the frequency of collusive outcomes.

Classifying periodontal diseases--a long-standing dilemma.

Abstract: Any attempt to group the entire constellation of periodontal diseases into an orderly and widely accepted classification system is fraught with difficulty, and inevitably considerable controversy. No matter how carefully the classification is developed, and how much thought and time are invested in the process, choices need to be made between equally unsatisfactory alternatives. Despite this dilemma, in the past hundred years, experts have periodically assembled to develop a new classification system for periodontal diseases, or to refine an existing one (1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 19, 58, 80, 81, 86, 91, 106, 122, 139).

Ethics and Purchasing Dilemma: A Singaporean View

Abstract: Emergence of purchasing as a strategic function has not only broadened the scope of purchasing, it has also changed the responsibilities of the purchasing managers by empowering them to spend large sums of money in procuring goods and services. However, this has also presented them with an array of ethical dilemmas involving questionable purchasing practices. This study proposes a framework to examine ethicality of decision making when faced with such dilemmas and presents the results of a survey conducted to assess the ethical inclinations of purchasers operating in Singapore. The results give credence to the notion that ethicality of behavior is culture-specific and reconfirms the existence of ethical relativism.

Motivations to Resolve Communication Dilemmas in Database-Mediated Collaboration:

Abstract: In organizational settings, a communication dilemma exists whenever the interests of a collective (i.e., team, organization, interorganizational alliance) demand that people share privately held information, but their individual interests insteadmotivate them to withholdit. This article develops andtests an expectancy model that predicts specific conditions under which collective benefits can be made to converge with private ones, thus resolving communication dilemmas and motivating voluntary contributions to a collectively shared database. In the model, motivation is a multiplicative function of individual-level attitudes and beliefs: (a) organizational commitment; (b) organizational instrumentality, an instrumentality that links successful collective information sharing to broader organizational gain; (c) connective efficacy, an expectation that information contributedto the database will reach other members of the collective; and(d) information self-efficacy, the self-perceivedvalue of a contributor's ...

Strategies for survival in the war of talent

Abstract: One‐third of employees plan to resign from their jobs within the next two years, according to a new international report, The Retention Dilemma, by Hay Group. However, with economists forecasting a downturn, this is not good news for companies struggling to stay successful. This article explores why people are moving jobs and identifies some of the ways in which a company can retain its best people.

Local States of Emergency: The contradictions of neo-liberal governance in education in New Zealand

Abstract: In the present paper, we argue that neo-liberal governance regimes are deeply contradictory and that these contradictions are increasingly evident within the education sector. Drawing on a case study of the consequences of restructuring in education in New Zealand, arguably a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance, we suggest the state is faced with a dilemma about how best to manage these tensions and contradictions within the framework of the political rationality itself. One strategy is to isolate and localise these problems in order to contain and manage the risks associated with them. We identify five variants we argue can broadly be viewed as local states of emergency.

Asian Medicine in America: The Ayurvedic Case

Abstract: Ayurveda, the classical South Asian medical tradition, was first introduced to American audiences in the mid-1980s as a holistic alternative to biomedical orthodoxy. This article argues that transplanted Ayurveda is shaped not only by aspects of American medical culture, but by millennial, heterodox elements of American religious culture, such as the loose cluster of beliefs and practices known as the New Age. Because New Age Ayurvedic practices occupy the ideological and statutory middle ground between medicine and metaphysics, they face a unique professionalizing dilemma: whether to present themselves as healing religions or as practicing branches of medicine. Drawing on an ethnographic study of this professionalizing dilemma in legal, clinical and popular arenas, this article shows that New Age Ayurveda--far from being a monolith--reveals a wide-ranging plurality of sub-traditions in practice. Taken together, they suggest multiple modes of reinvention and a variety of professionalizing routes that Ayur...

Defining Security: A Subaltern Realist Perspective

Abstract: Recent attempts at broadening the definition of the concept of security beyond its traditional realist usage have created a major dilemma for students of International Relations. On the one hand, it is clear that the traditional definition of security that has dominated the Western literature on the subject is inadequate to explain the multifaceted and multidimensional nature of the problem of security as faced by the majority of members in the international system. On the other, the often indiscriminate broadening of the definition of security threatens to make the concept so elastic as to render it useless as an analytical tool.1

Cognitions and behavior in asymmetric social dilemmas: a comparison of two cultures.

Abstract: This study investigated whether cognitions and behavior in an asymmetric social dilemma can be predicted by national culture. Results indicated that, as predicted, groups of decision makers from Japan--a collectivist, hierarchical culture-were more cooperative, expected others to be more cooperative, and were more likely to adopt an equal allocation distribution rule to resolve the dilemma than were groups of decision makers from the United States-an individualist, egalitarian culture. An opportunity for communication had a greater impact on expectations of others' behavior in groups of U.S. decision makers than in groups of Japanese decision makers.

It's never as easy as ABC: Understandings of AIDS in Botswana1.

Abstract: This paper argues for the importance of examining the way the messages of Government AIDS educational campaigns in Africa are interpreted at the local level. One of the striking features of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Botswana is that it is not universally seen as a 'new' disease syndrome but as an 'old' one. HIV/AIDS has been interpreted by traditional healers as a manifestation of old 'Tswana' diseases, acquiring new virulence because of the increasing disrespect for the mores of traditional culture, or as a result of 'old' diseases mutating as they have 'mixed together'. This alternative discourse of AIDS is set first in the context of official Health Education programmes and policy. It is argued that the fact that these programmes and policies have been couched exclusively in biomedical terms, and in apparent ignorance of other conceptualisations, has been detrimental to public education and understanding. Further, it has encouraged the development of a powerful and coherent counter discourse, based in the common understandings of Tswana society and cosmology. The main concern of this paper is to contextualise this counter discourse in order to understand why there has been a move to 'claim' the disease, turning it thus from a global problem into a local one. It is argued that it allows not only for a trenchant critique of current morality but also of the Government and the west. In turn, this raises a more general policy dilemma with regard to the dissemination of medical information in societies with plural health care systems, each operating on the basis of different truth claims. Where, as in southern Africa, these coincide with entrenched social divisions, educational interventions carry an inevitable political load, operating to locate the Government and its spokespeople on one or other side of the social (and epistemological) divide.

The dilemmas of pendulum politics: balancing paid work, care and citizenship

Abstract: The relationship of paid work and care to citizenship is a central issue in feminist citizenship theory, echoing the longstanding dilemma between ‘equality’ or ‘difference’-based claims to full citizenship. The implications for feminist politics are discussed in the UK context where such politics can be characterized as a pendulum swinging away from an ‘equality’ towards a ‘difference’ model, in reaction to New Labour’s fetishism of paid work. The article explores the dilemmas this raises. It proposes an alternative model, which promotes both a more equitable gendered distribution of time and work (paid and unpaid) and also a more balanced way of life, which allows women and men time just to be. Social policies, it is argued, are crucial to the achievement of such a model.

Situational ethics across borders: A multicultural examination

Abstract: Managers throughout the world regularly face ethical dilemmas that have important, and perhaps complex, professional and personal implications. Further, societal consequences of decisions made can be far-reaching. In this study, 210 financial services managers from Australia, Chile, Ecuador and the United States were queried about their ethical beliefs when faced with four diverse dilemmas. In addition, the situational context was altered so the respondent viewed each dilemma from a top management position and from a position of economic hardship. Results suggest a complex interaction of situation, culture and issue when individuals make ethical judgments. Specifically, Chileans were found to have different beliefs about sex discrimination and child labor dilemmas when compared to their colleagues from the other three nations. Chileans and Australians also disagreed on the bribery dilemma. Anglo managers were more likely than Latin American managers to change their ethical responses when the situation was altered. For multinational firms interested in maintaining healthy ethical climates, the findings suggest that culturally contingent ethical guidelines, or policies adapted to the local customs, must be considered. Further, managers must remain aware of issues related to specific situations, both internal and external, that would cause subordinates to alter their moral judgment.

Children's Wild Animal Stories: Questioning Inter-Species Bonds

Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the contemporary dilemma of animals disappearing from the minds and direct experiences of many human beings in Western culture, and the implications of this dilemma for the fields of child development, environmental education and biological conservation. As part of a larger research project, I explored kindergarten and grade 5 children’s (N = 177) ideas and stories about three common, familiar and wild, Canadian animals—bats, frogs, and raccoons. In the research process, I attempted to attend to the methodological decisions I made along the way. I reflect upon trends in the children’s wild animal stories, and questions they raise about anthropomorphism, kinship, and inter-species bonds. Resume