Disciplinary Bases Research Articles

Interfirm cooperation: a brief overview of current theoretical findings and issues for future research

Because of the high degree of technological complexity and the increasing convergence of new technologies, it is becoming more and more difficult to develop advanced products for those companies who solely rely on their own in-house "core competencies". One possible response made to these rising requirements is the consideration of cooperation with other companies. Since prior research on cooperation is extensive in its theoretical scope and diverse in its disciplinary bases, it seems appropriate to give a short overview on the literature. In this article, we pursue two purposes: firstly, we provide a brief and comprehensive picture of theoretical findings on technology-related cooperation pertinent to practitioners by using a process-oriented framework which helps us to integrate the existing literature from different academic disciplines. Secondly, while management scholars have primarily tended to focus on certain research streams, we draw attention to some issues not sufficiently covered by the literature today. We highlight the importance of the technological content (incremental vs. breakthrough and product vs. process innovations) as well as the orientation of the cooperation (horizontal vs. lateral) which should be considered in more detail in future research.

Disciplinary and Institutional Bases for Arts Policy Research Centers

Disciplinary and Institutional Bases for Arts Policy Research Centers

The Political Sociology of Education

The study of how the agenda for education is made up and translated into what goes on in schools was until very recently undertaken from a number of different and quite separate disciplinary bases. The approaches of educational administration and sociology of education differed considerably both in intensity and purpose, though they were on the whole mutually indifferent rather than mutually hostile. Political science, as Tapper & Salter pointed out in their first book (Tapper & Salter, 1978) has traditionally shown little interest in education, an omission which they set out to remedy in both that book and in the one under review here. However, over the last five to ten years, that situation has changed considerably. Expressions of doubt about the effectiveness of education as a form of social engineering began to appear. Some of these looked to the processes within policy formation and implementation for explanation of that failure; that approach is represented here by the Lodge & Blackstone book. More generally, it appears that in an era of educational contraction the political nature of educational systems is very much more apparent than in an era of expansion. Decisions about how to expand educational provision, we might be forgiven for assuming, are taken on educational grounds, while deciding where to cut is a political matter. It is certainly much harder to disguise the political nature of education in a time of contraction, and this has begun to lead all three disciplines to focus more directly on how political decisions effecting education are taken. Towards the end of the period unprecedented attention was devoted to the role of the civil service in government and its part in advancing or, more often, obstructing the implementation of party

School‐systems and Societies: recent contributions to a comparative sociology of education

Comparative studies in the sociology of education have been rare in Britain, indeed they have been rare anywhere. Comparative education has not developed firm disciplinary bases, and this has been reflected in the agonising over appropriate theory and methodology which characterises books and journals in the field. Even the very claim to comparative study may not stand too close examination. In 1968, the American Comparative Education Society re-named itself the Comparative and International Education Society, mainly because much of the research that was being undertaken was of the nature of foreign area, rather than comparative studies. The classic writers to whom comparative educationists hark back were travelling foragers, who brought home information and ideas from foreign lands, and theorised about systems of education with their 'underlying forces', or sought transferable characteristics of education to recommend to their compatriots in efforts of national betterment. In fact, most of the early work, and even much recent comparative education, has been historical, descriptive and monocultural. That is to say, it has been atheoretical and, however informative about education in a particular society, rarely actually comparative in the sense of drawing up parallels and identifying similarities and differences in the characteristics and effects of education across two or more societies. Such limited work can be considered useful