Research Agenda

The presidential politics literature depicts presidents either as all-powerful actors or figureheads and seeks to explain outcomes accordingly. The president and the executive branch are nonetheless usually treated as black boxes, particularly in developing countries, even though the presidency has evolved into an extremely complex branch of government.

Although interactive advertising is not new, its scale, scope and immediacy has increased substantially with the diffusion of new technologies such as the Internet. The growth of interactive advertising highlights the role of the consumer in the determining the effects and effectiveness of advertising, while challenging traditional assumptions about how advertising works. The active role of the consumer in determining the effects of advertising has important implications for how the effects and effectiveness of advertising are measured and how various measures are interpreted. The present paper offers a discussion of these issues and compares and contrasts traditional notions regarding the measurement of advertising effects with notions that recognize the active role of the consumer in interacting with advertising and the advertiser. Implications for future research are discussed.

This paper reviews the progress of the research agenda initiated by The Future of the Multinational Enterprise (1976). Focusing initially on the problem of explaining the existence of the multinational enterprise, the agenda soon broadened to encompass the analysis of alternative modes of foreign market entry, the role of international joint ventures, the impact of innovation on corporate growth, and the role of culture in international business. The core philosophy-based on the Coasian nature of the firm and on rational action modelling-has remained constant, while the widening range of applications has encouraged synthesis with theories developed in other fields of research. Success in answering any one question invariably generates new questions, which must in turn be answered through a further extension of the theory, and this dynamic continues to drive the development of the theory today. Internalisation theory has retained its validity and its vitality over the past 30 years, and is currently being extended into new fields of international business research.

Dobing & Parsons 111 Chapters Understanding the Role of Use Cases in UML: A Review and Research Agenda1 Brian Dobing University of Lethbridge, Canada Jeffrey Parsons Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada A use case is a description of a sequence of actions ...

In the largest sense, global strategy amounts to (1) the optimal disaggregation or slicing of the firm's value chain into as many constituent pieces as organizationally and economically feasible, followed by (2) decisions as how each slice should be allocated geographically ('offshoring') and organizationally ('outsourcing'). Offshoring and outsourcing are treated as strategies that need to be simultaneously analysed, where just 'core' segments of the value chain are retained in-house, while others are optimally dispersed geographically, as well as dispersed over allies and contractors. This amounts to a reconsideration of the nature of the firm that captures the dynamic changes in global configuration and a reconsideration of what constitutes 'core' activities that need to be retained internally. The article proposes a new research agenda that searches for each firm's optimal degree of disaggregation and global dispersion given that further scattering of value chain activities entail benefits as well as increased complexity and costs.

Though we speak about transformation, we know little about even the most rudimentary aspects of organizational change. This is less a gap and more of an abyss: we have practically no quantitative information on transformation, except in some cases, an approximation of the total cost. This article is a list of the principal areas of knowledge that we lack and the impact of that lack. The list becomes a research agenda for transformation.

The challenge for this task force was to outline potential contributions of psychology to address the cancer problem, the second major cause of death and disability in the United States. The first section of this report provides general directions for behavioral and psychological research. These contributions span description, the study of mechanisms underlying psychological and behavioral responses, and efforts to reduce incidence, morbidity, and mortality. (For the reader unfamiliar with the literature, an accompanying article-Andersen, this issue-reviews previous accomplishments.) The present discussion is organized into disease-relevant intervals. Although the majority of topics fit within this division, certain themes (e.g., the importance of theory for the understanding and integration of empirical findings) are relevant to all. A second section addresses two important contexts for research and development: research training and funding. A final section provides a brief discussion of dissemination of psychological and behavioral findings. We have undoubtedly overlooked important topics; however, the overriding principle of this report is to provide a stimulus for discussion and future programmatic research efforts.

This article examines the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and regional integration as a pathway to socioeconomic development in Africa and South America. Both regions share a colonial legacy often characterized by stronger economic ties to the developed world than within the regions. In recent decades, regional organizations have been involved in efforts to strengthen the infrastructure for ICTs, as well as the enhancement of economic and political integration as strategies to achieve development. However, the literature continues to show distinct research agendas that unwittingly overlook the connections between these areas. This article proposes a theoretical framework combining research on integration, ICTs, and development. It provides a brief analysis of each region and its ICT initiatives, the potential impact on regional integration, and how this relates to development. We suggest possible applications of the framework to identify and research the processes of integration and expected outcomes of development.

Having explained the need for a research program such as we call for in this paper, the following section presents a framework for an information ecosystem in SSA that can serve as a guide for research on ICT in this region. Subsequent sections discuss different aspects of this

Cross-cultural research is dominated by the use of values despite their mixed empirical support and their limited theoretical scope. This article expands the dominant paradigm in crosscultural research by developing a theory of cultural tightness-looseness, the strength of social norms and degree of sanctioning within societies, and advancing a multilevel research agenda for future research. Through an exploration of the

The aim of this paper is to identify the relevance and implications of ancient accounting practices to the contemporary theorizing of accounting. The paper provides a synthesis of the literature on ancient accounting particularly in relation to issues of human accountability, identifies its major achievements and outlines some of the key challenges facing researchers. We argue that far from being an idiosyncratic research field of marginal interest, research in ancient accounting is a rich and promising undertaking that holds the promise of significantly enhancing our understanding of the roles of accounting in organizations and society. The paper concludes by considering a number of implications of ancient accounting practices for the theorizing of accounting and identifies a number of possible avenues for future research.

With the ever-increasing amount of data, the world has stepped into the era of ''Big Data''. Presently, the analysis of massive and complex data and the extraction of relevant information, have been become essential tasks in many fields of studies, such as health, biology, chemistry, social science, astronomy, and physics. However, compared with the development of data storage and management technologies, our ability to gain useful information from the collected data does not match our ability to collect the data. This gap has led to a surge of research activity in the field of visual analytics. Visual analytics employs interactive visualization to integrate human judgment into algorithmic data-analysis processes. In this paper, the aim is to draw a complete picture of visual analytics to direct future research by examining the related research in various application domains. As such, a novel categorization of visual-analytics applications from a technical perspective is proposed, which is based on the dimensionality of visualization and the type of interaction. Based on this categorization, a comprehensive survey of visual analytics is performed, which examines its evolution from visualization and algorithmic data analysis, and investigates how it is applied in various application domains. In addition, based on the observations and findings gained in this survey, the trends, major challenges, and future directions of visual analytics are discussed.

Lean thinking has become pervasive in manufacturing, but its use in sales remains exploratory. In this paper, we demonstrate the sales application of an essential tool for lean management called value stream mapping. We conceptualize sales as a process in which a buyer and seller jointly participate in creating value, and using a case study, we demonstrate how this process can be mapped and analyzed. Finally, we discuss opportunities and challenges for future research, particularly the importance of customer-centric value metrics. Both authors contributed equally, and their names are listed in alphabetical order.

This paper sets out an argument for moving forward research on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within developnment studies. The body of research on NGOs that emerged from the late 1980s onwards focused primarily on NGO roles as development actors and their organisational attributes, but paid less attention to theory and context. While such research had many positive strengths, it was also criticised for its normative focus, and for its vulnerability to changing development fashions and donor preoccupations. Today, attitudes to NGOs have grown more complex and ambiguous, and the institutional landscape in which NGOs are embedded is undergoing rapid change. A new wave of NGO-related research is underway which gives particular emphasis to theory, agency, method and context. Such approaches have the potential to consolidate the field of NGO research within development studies as a more stable and theoretically-grounded subject area.

In this paper we suggest that the study of attempts to secure headquarters level change may now be of increasing sigdicance. Evidence of a wave of H Q level change is beginning to accumulate and requires further investigation. The twin purposes of this paper are: (1) in descriptive terms, to gather such evidence as is already available about the nature and extent of HQlevel change; to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the extant literature; to suggest where further descriptive work needs to take place; and (2) in explanatory terms, to build some initial and alternative organizational and managerial theories that could inform the study of H Q change; to propose a medium-term research agenda that can be tested in the field. 515 does exist (BIM, 1992) is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. There remains the danger that we may be extrapolating from a few well publicized cases to the whole population.

Most data involving organizations are hierarchical in nature and often contain variables measured at multiple levels of analysis. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) is a relatively new and innovative statistical method that organizational scientists have used to alleviate some common problems associated with multilevel data, thus advancing our understanding of organizations. This article presents a broad overview of HLM's logic through an empirical analysis and outlines how its use can strengthen sport management research. For illustration purposes, we use both HLM and the traditional linear regression model to analyze how organizational and individual factors in Major League Baseball impact individual players' salaries. A key implication is that, depending on the method, parameter estimates differ because of the multilevel data structure and, thus, findings differ. We explain these differences and conclude by presenting theoretical discussions from strategic management and consumer behavior to provide a potential research agenda for sport management scholars.

SERVQUAL: a primer SERVQUAL provides a technology for measuring and managing service quality (SQ). Since 1985, when the technology was first published, its innovators Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, have further developed, promulgated and promoted the technology through a series of publications (Parasuraman et al.

Priority research needs determined by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for the agencys top-ranked hazardous substances are being filled via regulatory mechanisms, private sector voluntarism, and university-based research. To date, 17 studies have been completed, 12 are ongoing, and 12 are currently planned. Under the direction of the Substance-Specific Applied Research Program (SSARP), ATSDR-supported research has filled research needs that significantly improved the information base available for making appropriate public health decisions. With the knowledge and understanding gained from this research, health professionals are better able to identify and interdict significant exposure and mitigate toxicity when exposure occurs. Thus, the SSARP has played, and continues to play, a vital role in contributing towards improving ATSDR's efforts to meet its mission and goals in environmental public health. In addition to addressing research needs of interest to ATSDR, findings from the program have contributed to the overall scientific knowledge about the effects of toxic substances in the environment.

Scholars and practitioners have recently devoted considerable attention to boards of directors, but far more research is needed. We still know little about how boards actually work and how their behavior may be improved to contribute to value creation. During more than two decades agency theory has been the dominant theory in studies about boards of directors. When relaxing some of the assumptions in agency theory several new pathways for new research arise. To present new perspectives on board research we follow in this essay some of the pathways arising from relaxing agency theory assumptions about complete contracts. Alternative theoretical approaches, research questions and methods are suggested. KeywordsBoards of directors–Research issues–Research methods–Board processes–Behavioral theory–Team production theory–Social identity theory

Prostate cancer chemoprevention represents a relatively new and promising strategy for reducing the immense public health burden of this devastating cancer of men in the United States and Western societies. Chemoprevention is defined as the administration of agents (drugs, biologics, and natural products) that modulate (inhibit) one or more steps in the multistage carcinogenesis process culminating in invasive adenocarcinoma of the prostate. In 2000, there were an estimated 170,000 new cases of prostate cancer and 31,000 deaths in the United States. During the past decade, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) organized the chemoprevention research program and began testing the first generation of promising agents (eg, 4-(hydroxy)-fenretinide [4-HPR], difluoromethylornithine [DFMO], antiandrogens) in high-risk cohorts and launched the first-large scale US phase 3 primary prevention trial, known as Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT-1), in 18,000 average-risk men (age more than 55 years and prostate-specific antigen [PSA] less than 3 ng/mL) treated for 7 years with finasteride or placebo. In the summer of 1998, the NCI Prostate Cancer Progress Review Group (PRG) Report to the director of NCI was published in response to the leadership of the prostate cancer advocacy community in conjunction with Congress. To further elucidate and address critical issues identified in this report and to develop a research agenda for the newly created Prostate and Urologic Cancer Research Group in the Division of Cancer Prevention at NCI, the NCI organized the workshop "New Clinical Trial Strategies for Prostate Cancer Chemoprevention." The major objectives were to promote understanding and cooperation among the NCI, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), academia, pharmaceutical industry, and the public regarding new opportunities for clinical prevention trials for prostate cancer. The workshop was divided into three concurrent breakout panels and a fourth joint integrative panel. The workshop addressed multiple key areas identified in the PRG report in the following panels: (1) Molecular Targets and Promising Agents in Clinical Development; (2) Intermediate Endpoint Biomarkers for Prevention Trials; (3) High-Risk Study Populations for Prevention Trials, and (4) Preventive Clinical Trial Designs and Regulatory Issues. Expert panelists were drawn from leading academic, pharmaceutical, and government scientists in basic research and clinical investigation. Key pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, and National Institutes of Health scientists presented overviews of their new agents and products in clinical development (representing the next generation of promising agents). Senior FDA physicians from the Center for Drugs and Center for Biologics presented on current standards for new drug and biologic approval for chemoprevention efficacy. Some of the key topics included recent advances in the state of knowledge of promising agents in the clinic based on molecular targets as well as bottlenecks in drug development for pharmaceutical sponsors; strategic modulable biomarkers that can serve as primary endpoints in phase 1/2 trials to assess preventive efficacy; high-risk cohorts with precancer (high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia) and representative clinical trial designs that are ready for immediate translation into efficient prevention trials, such as Bayesian sequential monitoring for early assessment of biologic activity and factorial designs for assessment of multiagent combinations. Finally, each expert panel generated recommendations for areas of future research emphasizing opportunities and infrastructure needs.

Smartphones are both green technologies and an integral parts of green information systems that are beginning to make serious contributions toward a sustainable environment. We trace the rise of the smartphone, with particular attention given to the iPhone and its many applications. The fundamental differences between smartphone-based and more common Internet applications, and how these might enhance sustainable strategies for organizations with a green agenda are highlighted. U-Commerce is suggested as a theoretical framework that best explains this, and the four dimension of U-Commerce are employed to illustrate how innovative organizations are using the unique characteristics of smartphones to pursue environmentally sound strategies. A process that might be followed for indentifying applications for sustainable issues, making sure that the applications take advantages of a smartphone's unique features, and that contribute to sustainability by using fewer resources, protecting resources, and improving our use of current resources. The paper concludes by identifying a research agenda for information systems scholars to pursue studying the use of smartphones in search of a sustainable information technology agenda.

The overexploitation of natural resources and the increasing number of social conflicts following from their unsustainable use point to a wide gap between the objectives of sustainability and current resource management practices. One of the reasons for the difficulties to close this gap is that for evolving complex systems like natural and socioeconomic systems, sustainability cannot be a static objective. Instead sustainable development is an open evolutionary process of improving the management of socialecological systems, through better understanding and knowledge. Therefore, natural resource management systems need to be able to deal with different temporal, spatial and social scales, nested hierarchies, irreducible uncertainty, multidimensional interactions and emergent properties. The co-evolutionary perspective outlined in this paper serves as heuristic device to map the interactions settled in the networks between the resource base, social institutions and the behaviour of individual actors. For this purpose we draw on ideas from complex adaptive systems theory, evolutionary theory and evolutionary economics. Finally, we outline a research agenda for a co-evolutionary approach for natural resource management systems.

Over the past years, one of the most discussed topics in policy debates on genetics has been the use of genetic testing in insurance. Many of these debates have been rather speculative and abstract. In a recent contribution to this journal, Kaufert therefore urged for "a proper research agenda" to study the issue, arguing for the need of anthropological and sociological research of the insurance world. This article will make a start with this. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Belgium insurance companies, this study analyses the ways insurers account for predictive medicine (lifestyle, genetics) during underwriting. We demonstrate how insurers highlight predictive lifestyle health information and how this articulates with a fault based approach in underwriting. Individual responsibility for health risks becomes the golden standard for assessing one's fitness for membership of the insurance pool. Moreover, these developments imply a changed concept of "normal standard" in insurance, increasing the conditions to fulfil to be part of the insurance group. Predictive medicine constitutes new ground in the old debates about individual control, responsibility and blame for health. This goes to the heart of the basis for citizenship and how this articulates with membership--or, if you want, exclusion--of the insurance pool.

Winning the right to host the Olympic Games is widely regarded as the most significant prize on offer in the never-ending contest between the world's leading cities for prestige and investment. This essay explores the implications and significance of being an Olympic city. After recognising the Olympics as a mega-event with inherent mega-project tendencies, it provides a chronological survey that shows the changing agendas that host cities have brought to bear on staging the Games. The increasing scale of their ambitions is noted, particularly with respect to urban regeneration and city rebranding, while also recognising the financial and human costs involved. The next part throws light on contemporary practice through a study of the proposals for the Lower Lea Valley in London's East End-the site of the future Olympic Park for the 2012 Summer Games. The conclusion suggests an evolving research agenda, framed particularly around the London 2012 Games and the notion of legacy.

This documents states the research agenda for the future of cryptology. We show which areas deserve more research bridging the gap between applications and research. For more detailed problems see the STORK document "D6-Open Problems in Cryptology".

Much of contemporary research in Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) has partitioned into either algorithmic machine learning and optimisation, or modelling biologically plausible dynamical systems, with little overlap between. Although the balance is latterly beginning to be redressed (e.g.

We aim to highlight important issues in the study of dysfunctional customer behavior and to provide a research agenda to inspire, guide, and enthuse. Through a critical evaluation of existing research key issues are highlighted and potentially worthy avenues for future study presented.

This paper contributes to the rethinking project management agenda in relation to the information technology (IT) sector. Our analysis of the evolution of thinking and practice among leading IT project managers across four countries elicits nine principles and four personal qualities that constitute the core of a mindset that facilitates rethinking the practice of IT project management.

The field of CSCW research emerged with the development of distributed computing systems and attempts to understand the socially organized ('collaborative' or 'cooperative') nature of work in order to embed such systems in the workplace. As a field of interdisciplinary inquiry CSCW was motivated by technological developments and the need to understand the particular contexts within which those developments were intended to resonate. In other words, it is no mere accident that CSCW took work as its topic and resourcethe historical nature of IT research from which the field emerged meant that for all practical purposes it could not be otherwise. Yet times change. IT research moves on. Today mobile, ambient, pervasive, ubiquitous, mixed reality and wearable computing, et cetera, are of fundamental concern to the contemporary computing research community. Furthermore, these developments are accompanied by a movement away from the workplace to focus on diverse settings in everyday life: homes, games, museums, photography, tourism, performances, indeed diverse bodies of people and pursuits that generally fall under the conceptual rubric of the 'ludic'. Accompanying this shift away from work is a call for new approaches and concepts that will enable researchers to better understand the ludic and inform design appropriately. In this paper we seek to address the boundaries of CSCW and the ability of CSCW to respond to contemporary research agendas. We present an ethnomethodological study of a locationbased mixed reality game to demonstrate the continued relevance of CSCW approaches and concepts to contemporary agendas in IT research.

Manuel Santos Trigo Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, Cinvestav-IPN [email protected] La resolución de problemas es dominio de estudio que ha influido notablemente en las agendas de investigación en educación matemática y en las propuestas del ...

Impact of findings on practice • An understanding of the dimensions of organisational culture that improve community pharmacy effectiveness will assist the profession to deliver stakeholder expectation. • Few cultural frameworks or instruments are available to apply to pharmacy practice research. • Our paper provides a robust approach to the development of a culture survey instrument with a method which can be applied internationally within the context of community pharmacy.

In nearly half of the heart valve replacement surgeries performed annually, surgeons prefer to implant bileaflet mechanical heart valves (BMHV) because of their durability and long life span. All current BMHV designs, however, are prone to thromboembolic complications and implant recipients need to be on a life-long anticoagulant medication regiment. Non-physiologic flow patterns and turbulence generated by the valve leaflets are believed to be the major culprit for the increased risk of thromboembolism in BMHV implant recipients. In this paper, we review recent advances in developing predictive fluid-structure interaction (FSI) algorithms that can simulate BMHV flows at physiologic conditions and at resolution sufficiently fine to start probing the links between hemodynamics and blood-cell damage. Numerical simulations have provided the first glimpse into the complex hemodynamic environment experienced by blood cells downstream of the valve leaflets and successfully resolved for the first time the experimentally observed explosive transition to a turbulent-like state at the start of the decelerating flow phase. The simulations have also resolved a number of subtle features of experimentally observed valve kinematics, such as the asymmetric opening and closing of the leaflets and the leaflet rebound during closing. The paper also discusses a future research agenda toward developing a powerful patient-specific computational framework for optimizing valve design and implantation in a virtual surgery environment.

Background: Understanding how environmental attributes can influence particular physical activity behaviors is a public health research priority. Walking is the most common physical activity behavior of adults; environmental innovations may be able to influence rates of participation.

Water is a scarce resource in many parts of the developed world. Two solutions are possible to address water scarcity: conservation of existing resources, or the further production of water from new sources e.g. through recycling of wastewater or desalination of seawater. However, the main hurdle to implementation of many of these solutions is often viewed as a lack of public willingness to adopt these alternative water behaviours. Research in this area is therefore crucial. Yet, and possibly due to the interdisciplinary nature of such research, there is currently no comprehensive overview of what has been done before. This study fills this gap by (1) choosing a general consumer behaviour perspective as a starting point, (2) developing a conceptual model of research required in the area of water-related public acceptance studies, (3) identifying eight key water-related behaviours which require future research attention, and (4) reviewing which areas of the conceptual model have been investigated in the past by conducting an extensive literature review of water-related social science research.

This paper explores the applicability of sophisticated models and techniques for spare parts inventory management within a highly technology-driven environment, viz. the Royal Netherlands Navy. In particular, we discuss the structure of the so-called VARI-METRIC models, a set of tools that has been designed for decision support in spare parts management, initially in a military organization. These tools aim at a high availability of complete technical systems, as opposed to more classical inventory management approaches, that are primarily directed towards a high availability of individual items. Unfortunately, the VARI-METRIC models su!er from a series of limiting assumptions that are not satis"ed in most technology-based large organizations. We identify these shortcomings and suggest a research agenda to deal with these issues. Important extensions include the study of capacitated systems, and the study of hybrid product structures, consisting of both repairable and consumable parts. When consumption and condemnation occur (i.e. not every broken part can be repaired), the operational availability of systems during their exploitation period becomes a function of the allocated resupply budgets. This highly important "eld, relating issues such as maintenance policies, spare parts repair and resupply, to concepts of life cycle management, seems unexplored so far.

International political economy (IPE) originated in the early 1970s. For almost 20 years it has been dominated by separate, largely non-communicating schools, one centred on scholarly institutions in Britain, the other associated with the US journal, International Organization (IO). In terms of the evolving norms of both economics and political science, both schools are surprisingly heterodox. Rather than developing strong systematic data collections and systematic theory, the IO school has been characterised by a shifting set of conceptual and metatheoretical debates. The British school, which has tended to take a deliberately critical position, has been characterised by an ever-widening set of concerns topical concerns fuelled by a desire to include more and more voices in the study of IPE. These outcomes are explicable only by tracing the specific historical developments of the two schools.