Search

The notion of institutional entrepreneurship has become very popular in the last decade. Starting from a review of the literature on the topic, I first focus on the use of the idea of individual entrepreneurs and point out three theoretical incongruities it produces. I then discuss notions of collective entrepreneurship and institutional work to see if they can overcome these incongruities. I conclude that although they can remedy some of the problems, these notions run the risk of describing everything until they describe nothing. In order to limit and enable the entrepreneurship literature to discuss agency meaningfully, I argue, it needs to develop analytical frames of agency derived either from existing sociological theories or from further developing its own brand of agency theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-based research (CBR) represents a particularly timely approach to rural research. Rural areas in industrialized nations are undergoing dramatic and rapid processes of economic, social and political restructuring. These forces, combined with a trend towards place-based development and territorial policy make CBR an appropriate rural method given its flexibility and sensitivity to local context. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the use and methods of CBR in the rural setting, drawn from our collective research experience in northern British Columbia. There has been increased attention paid to CBR, signalling a form of acceptance within the academy towards community-based and participatory methods. However, gaps exist in addressing the various approaches to conducting CBR and in considering the relevance of CBR in different contexts. Researchers also note the need for better training in the use of community-based methods. We reflect upon our rural CBR experience to offer insights and pragmatic lessons on effective methodological practices using a simplified framework of the key research process stages: preparing for community engagement, doing community-based research and after the fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined average-, high- and top-performing US fourth graders' rational number problem solving and their understanding of rational number representations. In phase one, all students completed a written test designed to tap their skills for multiplication, division and rational number word-problem solving. In phase two, a subset of students sorted cards that showed part-whole, ratio, quotient, measure, and operator perspectives of rational number representations. Each perspective was shown in numerical notational, word-problem, and visual formats. The results indicated that top-performing students scored significantly higher in problem solving and showed more effectively linked rational number representations than the other groups. The results imply that successful rational number problem solving is intertwined with representational knowledge for a wide range of rational numbers and that the bulk of US students do not possess effective skills for working with rational number representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we distinguish between top-performance and lower-performance groups in the analysis of statistical properties of bibliometric characteristics of two large sets of research groups. We find intriguing differences between top-performance and lower-performance groups, and between the two sets of research groups. These latter differences may indicate the influence of research management strategies. We report the following two main observations: First, lower-performance groups have a larger size-dependent cumulative advantage for receiving citations than top-performance groups. Second, regardless of performance, larger groups have fewer not-cited publications. Particularly for the lower-performance groups, the fraction of not-cited publications decreases considerably with size. We introduce a simple model in which processes at the microlevel lead to the observed phenomena at the macrolevel. Next, we fit our findings into the novel concept of hierarchically layered networks. In this concept, which provides the “infrastructure” for the model, a network of research groups constitutes a layer of one hierarchical step higher than the basic network of publications connected by citations. The cumulative size advantage of citations received by a group resembles preferential attachment in the basic network in which highly connected nodes (publications) increase their connectivity faster than less connected nodes. But in our study it is size that causes an advantage. In general, the larger a group (node in the research group network), the more incoming links this group acquires in a nonlinear, cumulative way. Nevertheless, top-performance groups are about an order of magnitude more efficient in creating linkages (i.e., receiving citations) than lower-performance groups. This implies that together with the size-dependent mechanism, preferential attachment, a quite common characteristic of complex networks, also works. Finally, in the framework of this study on performance-related differences of bibliometric properties of research groups, we also find that top-performance groups are, on average, more successful in the entire range of journal impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]