Institutional Boundaries Research Articles

The Right Job and the Job Right: Novelty, Impact and Journal Stratification in Science

Though Science is traditionally associated with creative behavior, concerns have been raised on its professional procedures being sufficiently open to innovative research. Thanks to a new measurement of novelty based on the frequencies of pairwise combinations of article keywords calculated on the set of all research articles published from 1999 to 2013 in the journals referenced by the WoS (more than ten million papers), we find no evidence of shrinking novelty in science over that period. Novel contributions are more often performed in larger teams that span more institutional boundaries and geographic areas. High novelty increases citations by more than forty percent and the odds of a “big hit” by about fifty percent. High novelty simultaneously reduces citational risk conditioned on being published to a large extent because it rises the odds of the problem remaining active in the future. As we document that novel papers match preferentially with top journals (even controlling for journal quality), the risk induced by novel research is more likely to materialize through the publication process.

Veterans’ Adjustment to College: A Qualitative Analysis of Large-Scale Survey Data

Student veterans are not monolithic, but many have shared experiences. As higher education considers ways to serve this growing population, it is important to recognize the rich data that comes from location-specific, branch-specific, and program-specific qualitative studies, in addition to patterns that emerge across geographical and institutional boundaries. The current study explores the transition from military life to student life using two open-ended questions in a survey of 391 student veterans to examine the complexity and ubiquity of student veteran perceptions of their adjustment to college. Data from this study were derived from these items: “what, if anything, has been the most helpful in transitioning to college?” and “what, if anything, has made it challenging to transition to college?” The analysis was framed using Vacchi and Berger’s Combined Ecological Model of veteran adjustment to college. Veterans cited financial support, campus veteran support staff, family, and support from other veterans as helpful. Challenges included a multi-faceted understanding of difference and balance.

The formation and structure of cleantech clusters: Insights from San Diego, Dublin, and Graz

ABSTRACTIn recent years cleantech (clean technology) clusters have emerged in many industrialized regions. Cleantech clusters are heralded as a key solution in the transformation toward a greener economy, with the potential to foster regional economic growth while simultaneously mitigating environmental challenges. Despite witnessing a growing tendency for cleantech activities to be organized in clusters, the research literature remains rather vague on what cleantech clusters are and how they emerge. The author therefore explores these questions with the use of empirical data from three internationally recognized cleantech clusters: (1) Cleantech San Diego, in Southern California, USA, (2) Green Tech Valley, located in the province of Styria, Austria, and (3) Sustainable Nation Ireland, located in the Dublin region, Ireland. The data and information used in the article were derived from empirical accounts sourced from existing literature, secondary data sources, on-site observations, and face-to-face interviews carried out between October 2015 and June 2016. The findings show that the cleantech clusters can be perceived as knowledge, innovation, and collaboration clusters that span industrial and institutional boundaries. The formation of the cleantech clusters is largely the outcome of strategic leadership on the one hand, and place-specific conditions and local capabilities on the other hand.

КРИТИЧНА ПЕДАГОГІКА \ НАРОДНА (ПОПУЛЯРНА) ОСВІТА: ВІД ДЕМАРКАЦІЇ ДО КОАЛІЦІЇ

КРИТИЧНА ПЕДАГОГІКА \ НАРОДНА (ПОПУЛЯРНА) ОСВІТА: ВІД ДЕМАРКАЦІЇ ДО КОАЛІЦІЇ

Medical Education on the Blockchain

The traditional Medical Education ecosystems are largely centralised and confined to the boundaries of academic institutions. Rather than promoting efficiency and global forward thinking, a number of medical institutions have become inwardly focused, confining themselves to their own institutional rules and frameworks. In the past two years, the utility of blockchain in the higher education setting has been extensively studied. A blockchain is essentially a distributed, immutable, trustworthy, decentralised database that keeps an irreversible, time-stamped record of transfer of value between users for every operation that has ever been carried out on its network. This has traditionally been used in cryptocurrency transactions, however, with the rise of blockchain based Decentralised Applications (DApps), the potential benefits of this ground-breaking technology in higher education are now being explored. Although still in the early developmental stages, blockchain holds promising potential for use in medical education. Some of these are budding hypothesis while in other areas, we have witnessed real, tangible progress. This article analyses the potential use cases for blockchain deployment in medical education ecosystems, to improve the efficiency, security, functionality and effectiveness of existing infrastructures. We conclude the essay by proposing how blockchain can eliminate the growing problem of fraudulent academic accreditations

Shifting boundaries of water, ice, flora, fauna, people, and institutions in the Arctic and Subarctic

Abstract An international Open Science Meeting entitled Moving in, out, and across the Subarctic and Arctic marine ecosystems: shifting boundaries of water, ice, flora, fauna, people, and institutions, took place 11–15 June 2017 in Tromsø, Norway. Organized by the Ecosystem Studies of Subarctic and Arctic Seas programme and cosponsored by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea and the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, the primary aim of the meeting was to examine past, present, and future ecosystem responses to climate variability and ocean acidification (OA) and their effect on fishing communities, the fishing industry and fisheries management in the northern Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Arctic. This symposium issue contains several papers from the meeting covering topics from climate and OA, ecosystem responses to environmental change, and fisheries management including: a synthesis of the ecosystem responses to the AMO-linked cold period of the 1970s and 1980s;a novel approach to understand responses to OA in northern climes using natural carbonate chemistry gradients, such as CO2 vents, methane cold seeps, and upwelling area;the possibility that warm temperatures are allowing two generations of Calanus finmarchicus per year to be produced;a new hypothesis suggesting that in areas where sea ice disappears there could be an increase of fish species with swim bladders;results from laboratory experiments on the effects of temperature and food on Arctic and boreal fish larvae;the application of ecosystem-based management in northern regions; anda description of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration approach to marine conservation and how it affects fish populations and fisheries.

A call for promoting ownership, equity, and agency in faculty development via connected learning

For transformation to occur in learning environments and for learners, higher education must first consider how such transformation will occur for the designers and facilitators of learning experiences: the university teachers or educators we call faculty (in the US), instructors, lecturers or professors or, in some instances, university staff. For the purpose of this article, we will refer to them as educators or faculty, and the process of their professional development as educational development or faculty development (more historically common in the US context). We aspire towards universities in the future that cultivate connected, participatory educational development that crosses institutional and national boundaries, and which takes equity, social justice and power differences into consideration, promoting educator agency. We propose theoretical underpinnings of our approach, while also highlighting some examples of recent practice that inspire this direction, but which are small in scale, and can provide springboards for future approaches that may be applied on a wider scale and become more fully integrated, supported and rewarded in institutions. Our theoretical underpinnings are influenced by theories of heutagogy and self-determined learning, transformative learning, connectivist and connected learning, and an interest in equity.We share models of alternative approaches to educator development that take advantage of the latest advances in technology, such as #DigPINS, Virtually Connecting, collaborative annotation, and dual-pathway MOOCs. We then share a semi-fictional authoethnography of our (the authors’) daily connected lives, and we end by highlighting elements of the models we shared that we feel could be adapted by institutions to achieve educator professional development that is more transformative, participatory, and equitable.

Looking Beyond Institutional Boundaries: Examining Adults’ Experience of Choosing Online as Part of Their Post-Secondary Studies

This research focused beyond the student, course, program, or institution by examining the conceptions of adults at the moment in time that they evaluated their choice to engage in furthering their post-secondary education by examining the possibilities provided through online learning. To capture their experience, not as students but as members of society, a practice of care framework, adapted from Tronto’s (1993) work, was utilized as a theoretical framework. The use of this framework acknowledges that the practice of care is present in the lives of every human being and that each human being has received and/or provided care as part of their lived experience. A phenomenographical qualitative approach was the basis for the design of this project which allowed for the identification of the commonalities and variations of the described experience. All described experiences illustrated the balancing of needs, wants, and responsibilities, these descriptions included recognition of care of one’s self, one’s family, and one’s community. The variation could be described as an expansion of the recognition of care, that is the focus of care expanded from self to family and then from family to community. This expansion occurred only in those described experiences that showed a strong conception of themselves within the previous category. The findings show that the choice to access online courses and/or programs provides possibilities for many adults that wish to continue their education but only if the educational environment can move away from its institutional centric perspective.

Equidad de género en la gran minerí­a del cobre de Chile. Experiencias de inserción laboral femenina en espacios masculinizados

Este artí­culo analiza los alcances y obstáculos de las polí­ticas de inserción femenina en la gran minerí­a del cobre en Chile. La incorporación de las mujeres se realiza en un sector estratégico de la economí­a, tradicionalmente dominado por varones, con remuneraciones y prestigio sobre la media nacional. Nuestra hipótesis es que, pese a la eliminación de fronteras institucionales que limitaban la participación de las mujeres, subsisten fronteras simbólicas (Lamont y Bail, 2005) que dificultan el alcance de la equidad de género. Así­, analizamos dos fronteras que operan como obstáculos a la incorporación efectiva de las mujeres: estereotipos laborales asociados a lo masculino y femenino, y asociación entre mujer y madre.

Wealth differences across borders and the effect of real estate price dynamics: Evidence from two household surveys

Crossing institutional or regulatory boundaries often goes together with discontinuities, be it price, wage or indeed wealth discontinuities. This paper identifies substantial wealth differences between Luxembourg resident households and cross-border commuter households. The average (median) net wealth difference is estimated to be €367,000 (€129,000) and increases for higher percentiles. Using several different regression and decomposition techniques, spatial (regional) differences in real estate price developments, and thus differences in accumulated nominal capital gains, are shown to be the main driving factor for these wealth differences. Other contributing factors are differences in age, income, education and other household characteristics.

The complex spaces of co‐production, volunteering, ageing and care

The care of older people is being radically reformulated by placing the individual at the centre of care process through the introduction of individual care plans. This marks a significant transition for the care of older people away from acute responsive clinical care towards a greater emphasis on co‐produced preventative health and social care and relations of care “with” older people. Geographies of volunteerism are yet to consider the effect of co‐production as a dominant rhetoric in UK health and social care. In this paper we show that the Health and Social Care Act (2012) and the Care Act (2014) has the potential to fundamentally alter discourses of care by introducing new spatialities to older people's care. New spatialities of care will not only rely on the reciprocity and interdependence of care between individuals and organisations but also the mobilisation of a voluntary care‐force to be attentive to individuals. Spatialising co‐production reveals the institutional and professional boundaries that prevent the type of open partnership that sits at the heart of the rhetoric. Our ethnographic and qualitative methodology was developed to understand how our case study of Living Well (Cornwall, UK), as a philosophy of care, is realised in practice and to consider the main collaborators’ views of different methods of co‐production involving volunteers. We discuss two principal spaces of co‐production, highlighting the opportunities provided for, and barriers to, co‐production expressed by volunteers and other partners by attending to the relations of care that are recognised through: (1) formal meetings and coffee mornings, which provide spaces for volunteers to contribute, and (2) multi‐disciplinary team (MDT) meetings, in which volunteers are largely absent.

The gCube system: Delivering Virtual Research Environments as-a-Service

Important changes have characterised research and knowledge production in recent decades. These changes are associated with developments in information technologies and infrastructures. The processes characterising research and knowledge production are changing through the digitalisation of science, the virtualisation of research communities and networks, the offering of underlying systems and services by infrastructures. This paper gives an overview of gCube, a software system promoting elastic and seamless access to research assets (data, services, computing) across the boundaries of institutions, disciplines and providers to favour collaboration-oriented research tasks. gCube’s technology is primarily conceived to enable Hybrid Data Infrastructures facilitating the dynamic definition and operation of Virtual Research Environments. To this end, it offers a comprehensive set of data management commodities on various types of data and a rich array of “mediators” to interface well-established Infrastructures and Information Systems from various domains. Its effectiveness has been proved by operating the D4Science.org infrastructure and serving concrete, multidisciplinary, challenging, and large scale scenarios.

Towards new Triple Helix organisations? A comparative study of competence centres as knowledge, consensus and innovation spaces

This contribution explores new organisational forms facilitating Triple Helix relations. Analysts have pointed to the blurring of institutional boundaries and the emergence of hybrid organisations at the interface between university, industry and government. Starting out from the notion that Triple Helix organisations develop and maintain knowledge, consensus and innovation spaces, we explore four cases of competence centres that operate in this context. Comparing them, we identify Finnish SHOK centres as the most radical departure from more traditional forms of university–industry collaboration. These can be characterised as independent legal entities that are involved in integrating a large, possibly cluster‐level or technology‐focused network, defining the agenda for specific specialisation areas by engaging in all or most of the Triple Helix spaces. We argue they could be better positioned than existing intermediary organisations to deliver the Triple Helix concept.

The Societalization of Social Problems: Church Pedophilia, Phone Hacking, and the Financial Crisis

This article develops a theory of “societalization,” demonstrating its plausibility through empirical analyses of church pedophilia, media phone-hacking, and the financial crisis. Although these strains were endemic for decades, they had failed to generate broad crises. Reactions were confined inside institutional boundaries and handled by intra-institutional elites according to the cultural logics of their particular spheres. The theory proposes that boundaries between spheres can be breached only if there is code switching. When strains become subject to the cultural logics of the civil sphere, widespread anguish emerges about social justice and concern for the future of democratic society. Once admired institutional elites come to be depicted as perpetrators, and the civil sphere becomes intrusive legally and organizationally, leading to repairs that aim for civil purification. Institutional elites soon engage in backlash efforts to resist reform, and a war of the spheres ensues. After developing this macro-institutional model, I conceptualize civil sphere agents, the journalists and legal investigators upon whose successful performances the actual unfolding of societalization depends. I also explore “limit conditions,” the structures that block societalization. I conclude by examining societalization, not in society but in social theory, contrasting the model with social constructionism, on the one hand, and broad traditions of macro-sociological theory, on the other.

Matchbox: An open-source tool for patient matching via the Matchmaker Exchange

Rare disease investigators constantly face challenges in identifying additional cases to build evidence for gene-disease causality. The Matchmaker Exchange (MME) addresses this limitation by providing a mechanism for matching patients across genomic centers via a federated network. The MME has revolutionized searching for additional cases by making it possible to query across institutional boundaries, so that what was once a laborious and manual process of contacting researchers is now automated and computable. However, while the MME network is beginning to scale, the growth of additional nodes is limited by the lack of easy-to-use solutions that can be implemented by any rare disease database owner, even one without significant software engineering resources. Here, we describe matchbox, which is an open-source, platform-independent, portable bridge between any given rare disease genomic center and the MME network, which has already led to novel gene discoveries. We also describe how matchbox greatly reduces the barrier to participation by overcoming challenges for new databases to join the MME.

Democratizing Global ‘Bodies Politic’: Collective Agency, Political Legitimacy, and the Democratic Boundary Problem

This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance.

Non-stick science: Sixty years of research and (in)action on fluorinated compounds.

Understandings of environmental governance both assume and challenge the relationship between expert knowledge and corresponding action. We explore this interplay by examining the context of knowledge production pertaining to a contested class of chemicals. Per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) are widely used industrial compounds containing chemical chains of carbon and fluorine that are persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic. Although industry and regulatory scientists have studied the exposure and toxicity concerns of these compounds for decades, and several contaminated communities have documented health concerns as a result of their high levels of exposure, PFAS use remains ubiquitous in a large range of consumer and industrial products. Despite this significant history of industry knowledge production documenting exposure and toxicity concerns, the regulatory approach to PFASs has been limited. This is largely due to a regulatory framework that privileges industry incentives for rapid market entry and trade secret protection over substantive public health protection, creating areas of unseen science, research that is conducted but never shared outside of institutional boundaries. In particular, the risks of PFASs have been both structurally hidden and unexamined by existing regulatory and industry practice. This reveals the uneven pathways that construct issues of social and scientific concern.

‘Mind the Gap’ between ecosystem services classification and strategic decision making

Ecosystem services (ES) are increasingly embedded in policy agendas, but if and how policy actors are considering them is not often reported. This study assesses the extent to which ES were considered by key policy actors involved in the strategic decision-making process leading to an innovative large-scale Dutch coastal management project. We analysed retrospective interviews to ascertain which ES were considered and how they were described by policy actors. Over half of the quotes (118/228) and 16 out of the 17 interviewees referred to three broad ES categories, with high degrees of adoption: coastal safety, recreation and cognitive development (learning by doing). The broad terms ‘nature’ and ‘spatial quality’ were also referenced often (36 times). Our findings suggest that broad, unspecified ecosystem services were adopted highly by the policy actors, while specific ecosystem service categories were rarely considered. Relatable and comprehensible cultural ecosystem services also constituted critical arguments for policy actors in their strategic decision making. We reflect that ambiguous, broad terms can help to garner support and unite efforts across disciplinary and institutional boundaries. For ES to align with relevant aspects of decision making, a ‘translation step’ between ES research and decision making might be required and ambiguity should be acknowledged.

Anglicization of hospital information systems: Managing diversity alongside particularity

ContextDespite widespread efforts to improve the quality and safety of healthcare through use of hospital information systems (HIS), many healthcare organizations face challenges in implementation and effective use of these applications, in particular when systems have been developed internationally (mainly in the US). Suppliers of these technologies also find it challenging to produce systems that work effectively across a range of geographical, cultural and institutional boundaries. In this paper, we seek to understand the strategies used by suppliers and adopters of HIS to overcome the challenges involved in the development and adoption of generic overseas systems. MethodsWe conducted a qualitative study, by interviewing 176 individuals (eight organizations), observing two user groups, and running a supplier focus group. We used inductive thematic analysis to assess emerging strategies in developing and implementing overseas packaged HIS in English settings. FindingsThe health sector in England has entered a period of potentially transformative change with many international HIS suppliers entering the market. This has provoked call for the ‘Anglicization’ of generic systems. This endeavor, has resulted in emergence of more or less aligned supplier and user strategies to overcome the difficulties in the process. This includes a continuous process of identification and classification of requests (by suppliers), and unification and voicing of needs (by adopters). ConclusionsThe complexity of health service provision, drives calls for customization of technologies in this sector. Consequent tensions between ‘standardization’ and ‘localization’ are requiring suppliers of generic solutions to develop more sophisticated strategies as they pursue international growth of their market.

Community-Based Reform Efforts: The Case of the Aging at Home Strategy.

This paper considers one of Ontario's largest reform efforts: the Aging at Home Strategy (AHS). The AHS was initiated in 2007 to enable people to live independent lives in their own homes. A document review was conducted on relevant government materials to assess the goals and objectives of the AHS as it was rolled out over the course of three years. The findings identify that by the third year of the AHS, there was a reduction in the discretionary powers of the regional health authorities to allocate funds based on local priorities. These findings also highlight that the “mainstream” subsectors of the healthcare system – medical and hospital services – and those outside the mainstream (or the “marginal” subsectors) face different institutional boundaries, policy legacies, political actors and policy agendas. While interests within the mainstream subsector are organized and institutionalized, the marginal subsectors are fragmented, creating a power imbalance where the priorities of the mainstream subsector dominate.