Consensual Knowledge Research Articles

Knowledge sharing behaviors of industrial salespeople

Purpose – This paper extends the sales literature by moving beyond salespeople ' s role as knowledge gatherers to their role as knowledge sharers with personnel outside the sales unit. The aim is to develop and test a conceptual model to establish how pay-for-performance (economic factor) affects knowledge sharing behaviour under the contingency roles of coworker relationship quality (social psychological factor) and knowledge sharing norms (sociological factor). Design/methodology/approach – Using the Dun & Bradstreet database, the authors collected responses from 374 salespeople in 51 Canadian industrial firms through an on-line survey. The authors used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) as multiple salespeople were nested within the organization and the data were comprised of individual- and organizational-level constructs. Findings – When there is misalignment between rewards and knowledge sharing behavior, motivational loss hampers knowledge sharing. However, when employees are provided with an environment that fosters high coworker relationship quality and consensual knowledge sharing norms, the motivational loss resulting from the incongruence between pay-for-performance and knowledge sharing behavior is mitigated. Research limitations/implications – Implications regarding how salespeople ' s knowledge sharing contributes to relationship marketing along with practical ramifications for how sales managers can encourage knowledge sharing are discussed. Originality/value – This study contributes to the sales literature (e.g. control, key account management, expanding role of sales) by testing a model that integrates different theoretical perspectives to examine what types of control mechanisms and which combinations of these controls affect salespeople ' s engagement in knowledge sharing behaviors.

Transmural palliative care by means of teleconsultation: a window of opportunities and new restrictions.

BackgroundAudio-visual teleconsultation is expected to help home-based palliative patients, hospital-based palliative care professionals, and family physicians to jointly design better, pro-active care. Consensual knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of teleconsultation in transmural palliative care is, however, largely lacking.This paper aims at describing elements of both the physical workplace and the cultural-social context of the palliative care practice, which are imperative for the use of teleconsultation technologies.MethodsA semi-structured expert meeting and qualitative, open interviews were deployed to explore professionals’ assumptions and wishes, which are considered to contain latent presumptions about the practice’s physical workplace and latent elements of the cultural-social context, regarding (1) the mediating potential of audio-visual teleconsultation, (2) how the audio-visual teleconsultations will affect medical practice, and (3) the design and usage of the teleconsultation technology. We used a qualitative analysis to investigate how palliative care professionals interpret the teleconsultation package in preparation. The analysis entailed open and axial coding techniques developed in a grounded theory approach.ResultsRespondents assume: 1. teleconsultation will hinder physical proximity, thereby compromising anamnesis and diagnosis of new or acutely ill patients as well as “real contact” with the person behind the patient; 2. teleconsultation will help patients becoming more of a pivotal figure in their own care trajectory; 3. they can use teleconsultation to keep a finger on the pulse; 4. teleconsultations have a healing effect of their own due to offered time and digital attention; 5. teleconsultation to open up an additional “gray” network outside the hierarchical structures of the established chain of transmural palliative care. This network could cause bypassing of caregivers and uncertainty about responsibilities; 6. teleconsultations lead to an extended flow of information which helps palliative care professionals to check the stories of patients and medical specialists.ConclusionsProfessionals assume teleconsultation co-defines a new patient–professional relationship by extending hospital-based caregivers’ perceptions of as well as attention for their patients. At the cost, however, of clinical and personal connectedness. Secondly, a hermeneutics is needed to carefully interpret teleconsultation images. Thirdly, teleconsultations transform caregiving cultures as formerly separated care domains collide, demanding a redefinition of roles and responsibilities.

Board editorial: Psychological therapies and or as transformational research?

In research cultures there is, I believe, a pervasive fear of anything lacking intellectual precision. In this context accounts of research into mental health and illness, and health in general for that matter, tend towards a cautious and defensive stance, giving the reader the impression of a practitioner/researcher who is more organised and coherent than is actually the case (Freshwater, 2003). Mental illness is not a neutral, value free, scientifically precise term, which begs the question: How can it be researched as such? Research is often invoked as a method of establishing whether or not it is necessary to provide a service, which service to provide, or how to measure the efficacy of a service. However, the huge amount of research conducted into areas such as psychological therapy over and during the last 40 years has, to a large extent, at least until recently, failed to influence the design of services or treatments. Where research has demonstrated that a particular type of treatment would benefit patients, NHS service providers have not always ensured that the necessary skill base is developed and appropriate funding ring fenced. One such example of this is the strong evidence that the therapeutic relationship is the sine qua non of successful therapy; a relationship that requires time, energy and effort to cultivate. And yet, most often, the focus of psychological therapies research centres around the effectiveness of short-term interventions such as cognitive behavioural and psychosocial skills. Proponents of such therapies now usefully contest the long held belief that short-term psychological therapeutic interventions do no prize or emphasise the importance of the relationship continues to be challenged by such research studies as presented in this focus issue on contemporary psychological therapies research. We are all, by now, familiar with the idiom ‘what counts cannot always be counted’. It is of course rightly argued that evidence for advanced practice must be based on research, and that this research must be scientific, which means that it should be objective, ideally assuming a quantitative approach. Furthermore, anything worthwhile that is subjective is covered by qualitative approaches, which might be included as research evidence – if they can prove they are scientific. The philosopher Kierkegaard (1941) argued that objective thought translates everything into results and helps all mankind to cheat, by copying these off and reciting them by rote. Public consensual knowledge of mental illness is based, by and large,

The nature, scope, and development of the global tobacco control epistemic community.

Over the past 50 years, tobacco control has been transformed from a national to a global issue, becoming institutionalized in the World Health Organization (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the first international public health treaty negotiated under the auspices of the WHO. The global tobacco control epistemic community, a worldwide network of professionals with a common interpretation of the science in tobacco use and control, has contributed to this transformation. We investigated the development, structure, and function of this community through interviews and archival documents. Professionals in the community are bound by values and consensual knowledge developed after years of contentious debates undergirded their activities. Although these professionals play multiple roles, they recognize that scientific evidence should inform advocacy and policy activities. Public health professionals should continue to strengthen the links between science and advocacy for policy while being vigilant against industry efforts to undermine the scientific evidence on tobacco use and control.

Security risk management: A psychometric map of expert knowledge structure

The security industry operates within a diverse and multi-disciplined knowledge base, with risk management as a fundamental knowledge domain within security to mitigate its risks. Nevertheless, there has been limited research in understanding and mapping security expert knowledge structures within security risk management to consider if parts of security risk management are unique from more general risk management. This interpretive study applied a technique of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to develop and present a psychometric map within the knowledge domain of security risk management, validated with expert interviews. The psychometric MDS security risk management concept map presented the expert knowledge structure of security risk management, demonstrating the inclusive and spatial locality of significant security risk concepts, conceptual complexity, uniqueness of the domain and the importance of the concept threat. Understanding security experts’ consensual knowledge of security risk may allow improved understanding of threat-based risk, the issue with applying probabilistic risk analysis against antagonist events, and improved teaching and learning within this knowledge domain.

Measuring the semantic integrity of scientific fields: a method and a study of sociology, economics and biophysics

The paper introduces a concept for measuring the interpretive fragmentation of scientific fields by the analysis of their citation networks. Transitive closure in two-mode networks is the basis of the proposed measurement. To test the validity of the concept two analyses are presented. One compares the integrity of two social sciences, sociology and economics, and a natural science, biophysics. The results are in line with the widely held opinion, that because of the lack in cumulative and consensual knowledge production mechanisms the social sciences are more disintegrated. Sociology is considerably more fragmented then economics, as the different paradigm structure of these disciplines would predict. As a second test, the fragmentation of scholarly communication inside and between the sub-fields of sociology is measured. The results correctly indicate that meaning making processes are taking place inside invisible colleges.

Enabling Intelligence in Web-Based Collaborative Knowledge Management System

This paper presents an approach to enhance various intelligent services of a Web-based collaborative knowledge management system. The proposed approach applies the two widely-used argumentation technologies, namely IBIS and Toulmin’s argumentation schemes, to structurally capture the deliberation and collaboration occurred during the consensual knowledge creation process. It employs RDF and OWL as its underlying knowledge representation language with well-defined semantics and reasoning mechanisms. Users can easily create knowledge using a simple corresponding graphical notation with machine-processable semantics. Derivation of implicit knowledge, similar concept discovery, as well as semantic search, are also enabled. In addition, the proposed approach incorporates the term suggestion function for assisting users in the knowledge creation process by computing the relevance score for each relevant term, and presenting the most relevant terms to users for possible term reusing or equivalence concepts mapping. To ensure the knowledge consistency, a logical mechanism for validating conflicting arguments and contradicting concepts is also developed. Founded on the proposed approach, a Web-based system, namely ciSAM, is implemented and available for public usage.

Analyzing Community Deliberation and Achieving Consensual Knowledge in SAM

This paper presents a novel approach to harnessing collective intelligence that will allow a community to create, collaborate, and share knowledge based on the Semantic Argumentation Model (SAM). It encourages multiple users to express ideas or positions on complex issues, and to submit arguments that support or oppose the ideas of the other members. In principle, ideas considered possible solutions to an issue are those that contain high content quality and achieve great community agreement. Therefore, the authors define several useful measures to analyze the deliberation for determining the content quality, community preference, and achieving quality-assured consensual knowledge. Finally, a web-based prototype system founded on the proposed approach is developed and made available for public use. A preliminary study on the system usability shows that the system is practical and can enhance the collaborative knowledge creation and sharing process.

Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space

This article explores the use of scenario analysis as a methodology to rigorously analyze potential space futures, particularly with respect to space security challenges, in the context of rapid and uncertain change across several dimensions of human space activities. The successful use of scenario analysis in other (e.g. corporate and military) sectors is described and results of an initial scenario analysis workshop are presented. Scenario analysis is recommended as a promising approach to evaluating the long-term consequences of various policy choices in the context of uncertainty, and as a process well-suited to fostering communication and building consensual knowledge among diverse stakeholders.

OntoCAPE—A (re)usable ontology for computer-aided process engineering

This article gives an overview on OntoCAPE, a formal ontology for the domain of computer-aided process engineering. An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization (Gruber, 1993), typically involving classes, their relations, and axioms for clarifying the intended semantics. A formal ontology, in particular, captures the consensual knowledge of an application domain in such a way that it can be reused and shared across software applications (Gómez-Pérez et al., 2004). OntoCAPE formally represents domain knowledge about CAPE, with the intention of supporting the construction of software tools for different tasks such as knowledge management, mathematical modeling, or plant design. We argue that a useful ontology must simultaneously strive for usability and reusability and explain how these goals are achieved by OntoCAPE.

Epistemic communities and the global alliance against tobacco marketing

AbstractThe World Health Organization's (WHO's) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) is a major blow to the worldwide expansion strategies and marketing practices of transnational tobacco companies. As expected, the industry vehemently opposed the treaty, lobbying instead for voluntary agreements and regulation by the market. However, in spite of bitter and persistent opposition by the tobacco industry, the FCTC was adopted by WHO. If the tobacco industry “lost” its battle to prevent FCTC from being institutionalized, who “won” and how? Our research suggests that the efforts of the epistemic community—a like‐minded network of professionals whose authoritative claim to consensual knowledge provides them with a unique source of power in public policy decision making—won the battle by being able to better convince the decision makers as to the needs of the FCTC by relying on, and successfully disseminating, its knowledge, expertise, and ideas. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Revisiting the politics of expertise in light of the Kyoto negotiations on land use change and forestry

This paper examines the close links between knowledge-making authority and decision making authority in the multilateral negotiations on terrestrial sinks of greenhouse gases. Drawing upon social constructivist science studies and public sphere theories in international relations, the paper traces the communicative contexts in which state actors have struggled to bring meaning to the sink concept and hereby translated the production and validation of knowledge claims into political authority. In particular focus are instances of “epistemic chaos” when the lack of consensual knowledge and shared normative commitments has forced states to publicly interpret and justify what counts as credible carbon cycle expertise and good terrestrial carbon management. The empirical tracing of such justificatory arguments begins at the third conference of the parties (COP3) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto in 1997, and ends at COP 10 in Buenos Aires in 2004. Although scientific expertise emerges a central avenue for political bargaining in this negotiation process, the paper does not interpret expert politics as a mere reflection of material power and dominant state interests. Rather, when approaching authoritative knowledge as a product of social relations, the course and outcome of global climate governance appear more inclusive and open-ended.

The Asia-Pacific security lexicon

ending of the Cold War opened new debate across the Pacific about the meaning of and the new regional multilateral institutions that were beginning to emerge.The first edition of the The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon, published in 2002, identified and defined the key concepts and ideas central to discourse in the region.This second edition updates all of the entries and examines the origins and meanings of some of the new terms in common usage in different historical setting, among them terrorism, pre-emption, preventive war, a la carte multilateralism, coalition of the willing, and China's peaceful rise. And it looks at how concepts such as human security and non-traditional security have evolved and found new adherents.Both diplomatic handbook and theoretical exploration, the Lexicon is based on the analysis of more than 3,000 books, articles, conference reports, and speeches. It does not aim to resolve the disagreements about how words are used. Rather, it makes their evolution clearer for academics and practitioners seeking consensual knowledge.

DXA in vivo BMD methodology: An erroneous and misleading research and clinical gauge of bone mineral status, bone fragility, and bone remodelling

The seemingly unqualified reliance and near-universal dependence upon in vivo dual-energy X-ray absorptiometric (DXA) methodology to provide accurate, quantitative, and meaningful in vivo ( in situ cadaveric) bone mineral areal density (“BMD”) determinations are proven to be unwarranted and misplaced. The underlying systematics of sizable, inherently unavoidable and un-correctable inaccuracies in the DXA output values of in vivo “BMD” are shown to be quantitatively consistent with being the root cause of unreliable, misdirected, and misinterpreted aspects of consensual knowledge of bone fragility, osteoporotic diagnostics/prognostics, and remodelling therapies. The “BMD” label that DXA ascribes to the output values of in vivo ( in situ cadaveric) bone densitometry scans is shown to be a misnomer and an erroneous and invalid measure of bone mineral material. The DXA-derived “BMD” value does not correctly represent the areal density of bone mineral material, as it is contaminated by sizable, unavoidable, inextricable, independent soft tissue contributions. Due to intra- and extra-osseous soft tissue X-ray absorptiometric effects, it is unknown (and unknowable) exactly what DXA in vivo “BMD” is a measure of in any given case, or what proportion of the “BMD” value represents the actual bone mineral material areal density present in the DXA scan region of interest (ROI) of any predominantly trabecular bone-site ( e.g., lumbar vertebrae, proximal femora). This inherent fundamental defect in DXA in vivo bone mineral areal density methodology adversely compromises both the validity and reliability of patient-specific diagnostic/prognostic evaluations, cross sectional and prospective studies, and DXA-based interpretations of bone quality and bone fragility. It further undermines the WHO characterizations (and definitions) of ‘normal’, ‘osteopenic’, and ‘osteoporotic’ classifications. It is also seen to make equivocal the qualitative and quantitative epidemiological estimates of the proportion of the population that is, or is deemed to become, osteoporotic. The present quantitative exposition shows DXA-measured in vivo “BMD” methodology to be an intrinsically flawed and misleading indicator of bone mineral status and an erroneous gauge of relative fracture risk.

Occupational therapy using a sensory integrative approach for children with developmental disabilities

This article provides an introduction and overview of sensory integration theory as it is used in occupational therapy practice for children with developmental disabilities. This review of the theoretical tenets of the theory, its historical foundations, and early research provides the reader with a basis for exploring current uses and applications. The key principles of the sensory integrative approach, including concepts such as "the just right challenge" and "the adaptive response" as conceptualized by A. Jean Ayres, the theory's founder, are presented to familiarize the reader with the approach. The state of research in this area is presented, including studies underway to further delineate the subtypes of sensory integrative dysfunction, the neurobiological mechanisms of poor sensory processing, advances in theory development, and the development of a fidelity measure for use in intervention studies. Finally, this article reviews the current state of the evidence to support this approach and suggests that consensual knowledge and empirical research are needed to further elucidate the theory and its utility for a variety of children with developmental disabilities. This is especially critical given the public pressure by parents of children with autism and other developmental disabilities to obtain services and who have anecdotally noted the utility of sensory integration therapy for helping their children function more independently. Key limiting factors to research include lack of funding, paucity of doctorate trained clinicians and researchers in occupational therapy, and the inherent heterogeneity of the population of children affected by sensory integrative dysfunction. A call to action for occupational therapy researchers, funding agencies, and other professions is made to support ongoing efforts and to develop initiatives that will lead to better diagnoses and effective intervention for sensory integrative dysfunction, which will improve the lives of children and their families.

On the Convergence of Formal Ontologies and Standardized E-Learning

Current efforts to standardize e-learning resources are centered on the notion of a learning object as a piece of content that can be reused in diverse educational contexts. Several specifications for the description of learning objects — converging in the LOM standard — have appeared in recent years, providing a common foundation for interoperability and shared semantics. At the same time, the Semantic Web vision has resulted in a number of technologies grounded in the availability of shared, consensual knowledge representations called ontologies. As proposed by several authors, ontologies can be used to provide a richer, logics-based framework for the expression of learning object metadata, resulting in the convergence of both streams of research towards a common objective. In this article, we address the practicalities of the representation of LOM metadata instances into formal ontologies, discussing the main technical and organizational issues that must be addressed for an effective integration of both technologies, and sketching some illustrative examples using modern ontology languages and a large knowledge base.

Design Requirements Management using an Ontological Framework

The specification activity is a critical enabler for collaborative product development through an extended enterprise. Often this activity involves numerous iterations before a shared understanding of the product requirements is achieved since various omissions, ambiguities and assumptions have to be resolved. This paper will present a framework for the electronic-enabling of the requirements founded on ontology-based constructs to provide a shared conceptualisation of the knowledge needed for the specification of a product. The application of ontology is a means to establish the consensual knowledge about the needs of a product and to then apply this shared understanding for its specification.

Creating user networks for technology-market linking: an action research report

User networks are a network-based approach for facilitating the generation of knowledge of customers and markets required to achieve technology-market linking. Over time, user networks serve to transform the dispersed, tacit, and conflicting knowledge of individuals into accessible, explicit, and consensual knowledge that can be utilised by technology development organisations to identify research priorities and design technology development projects that have a high likelihood of eventual commercial success. This paper presents an action research report on the efforts of Precarn, a leading Canadian industrial research consortium, to create user networks in several vertical markets.

Ritualisations in Parent-Child Interactions

AbstractThe article focuses on how a dialectical relationship between empirical research and theological normativity can and should influence the design of an empirical study at important points of the planning process. It draws on a systems view of scientific activity proposed as a working model for family research by Lavee & Dollahite (1991). Many decisions, each connected with norms and values, have to be taken with regard to the selection of the research topic, the theoretical and methodological approaches and the application of research findings. Besides normativity rooted in consensual knowledge of the scientific community, reflective theological normativity can deploy a critical and disclosive power as is demonstrated in the article with regard to a research project centering on the theme of bedtime ritualisations in parent-child interactions, their intergenerational transmission and their relationship to the institutionalised ritual of baptism.

In Defense of Liberal Nationalism

The book advocates liberal values and celebrates nationalism's historic achievements against conservative pessimism and primordialism-reflected in Samuel Huntington's (1996) Clash of Civilizations-as well as postmodern relativism. In this sense, Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress harkens back to the earlier literature nation-building, particularly Karl Deutsch's (1953) pioneering Nationalism and Social Communication, from which some of the key concepts are taken, and Haas's (1986) own contributions to the subject. Nationalism, Liberalism, and Progress is also about social learning, defined as the questioning and revising of means and ends on the basis of consensual knowledge that has become available (p. 17). Haas explores how collective learning-as opposed to mere adaptation-have shaped the rise and the character of modern nation-states as well as their capacity to deal with major social, political, and economic problems. This book is the first of two volumes. It deals empirically with old nation-states: Great Britain, the United States, France, Germany, andJapan. A second volume will be devoted to studying late-comers, whose nationalism was largely the result of the former's modernizing force and imperialism. The first two chapters of the book set the conceptual and theoretical agenda. In chapter 1, Haas defines his metatheoretical position as that of a social constructivist who nevertheless believes in the instrumentalist tradition of scholarship in which individuals are considered able to choose an identity for themselves without being fated by history to occupy ordained slots (p. 2). He also introduces his concept of social learning based consensual knowledge. This part largely builds his earlier work (Haas 1990). Finally, the chapter defines Haas's understanding of liberalism, conceptualized primarily in procedural terms as democratic governance that enables the representation of major social interests and deliberative processes (p. 20).