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This study concerns how intra-organizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know-how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of intra-organizational coordination for an organization's capacity for change. The first emphasizes the importance of distributing know-how evenly to potential recipient subgroups. The second emphasizes the importance of restricting know-how to flow from high know-how subgroups. We test our hypotheses with longitudinal network data in 21 schools, finding stronger support for the second hypothesis than the first. Our findings can help managers cultivate know-how flows to contribute to organizational change. The following are appended: (1) Technical Appendix; and (2) Multilevel Estimation of Main Models.

Charter schools have generated support from politicians in both major American political parties, while stimulating intense debate among interest groups. We investigate whether and how public attitudes come to mirror interest group polarization or politician consensus in order to understand what drives public attitudes as policy debates mature and citizens learn information that drives advocates to opposite sides. Using survey experiments, we assess how views change in response to policy cues. Mirroring debates among advocates, we assess whether the role of private companies and non-union teachers polarize opinion. We find that the public responds to cues linked to unions and polarizes based on liberal and conservative ideology as well as attitudes toward unions. This helps to explain how ideological polarization can grow even in the absence of strong partisan sorting among top political leaders. The report includes a bibliography.

Historically, waves of new technologies have brought Americans higher standards of living. Electrical service and hot and cold running water, for example, were once luxuries; now their absence makes a home substandard. Today, technologies for accessing the Internet are diffusing at an even faster rate than those earlier innovations once did, bringing with them commensurate transformations of Americans' way of life. Technologies that increase the speed at which data can be transmitted have had powerful effects. Most importantly, they have transformed the Internet from a tool used by a narrow group of academics and technicians into a means of interaction used by a large majority of Americans. However, Americans have not universally benefitted from better Internet access. Geography, especially the divide between rural and urban America, determines how much some Americans can benefit from the Internet. Networks have not been as extensively developed in rural areas as in urban areas. Some people in rural America still have dial-up as their best available, affordable technology, a technology that offers five percent of the capacity for what the FCC has said is the broadband threshold. Others have service that reaches the broadband level, but still does not offer the "lightning-fast" speeds advertised by Internet service providers in urban areas. Accordingly, the nation faces a "broadband gap," not only with regard to the lack of access in rural areas to service that meets the broadband threshold, but also with regard to the lack of availability of faster service between urban and rural America. This report identifies opportunity costs that arise from this gap. These costs exist today, but the pace at which data transmission capability is growing means that the inequality between the technology being newly deployed and the technology that was deployed a decade or more ago is increasing. Networks that connect research institutions in the United States can move 100,000 times more data per unit of time than the dial-up connections that some Americans still must use. The technology gap is not a fixed deficit that once filled, stays filled. The technology gap will be larger--much larger--in the future, along with the information and technology gap, unless significant action is taken to overcome it. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 19 footnotes.)

The rapid proliferation of technology can have profound effects on the evolution of teaching, learning, scholarship, and governance in higher education (Katz, 2008). However, instructors report that simply "keeping up" with new instructional technologies, let alone integrating them productively into one's teaching, can be a significant challenge (Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, & Beach, 2006; Zhu, Kaplan, & Dershimer, 2011). This Occasional Paper describes how instructors at the University of Michigan are currently using online collaboration tools (hereafter OCTs) in a variety of disciplines and teaching contexts to enhance student engagement and course management. Based on these cases and faculty interviews, the authors also outline recommendations for implementing OCTs effectively and efficiently in teaching.

This paper examines different institutional characteristics of Thai private higher education in historical-organizational perspective. The analysis applies different conceptual categories of private emergence--Catholic, elite, demand-absorbing--drawn from international literature starting with Levy (1986) to the Thai case. The societal context of Thai private higher education is rooted fundamentally in the hands of both religious foundations and the business sector. Thai diversification partly conforms to international schema but also shows varying emphases. Catholic must be expanded to religious-oriented and elite reformulated as semi-elite. Although demand-absorbing institutions are the majority in the Thai private sector--as also seen elsewhere--the demand-absorbing subsector shows great internal variations. For all the three conceptual categories, missions may be assessed accordingly. Finally, the paper discusses a growing hybrid trend within the Thai private sector. (Contains 1 table and 17 endnotes.)

The business models under which most public universities in the U.S. operate have become unsustainable. They were put in place when state economies were stronger and there were fewer programs making competing claims on state funds. The current Great Recession has made things worse, but the unsustainability of current business models derives from longer-term trends that will prevent state investment in higher education from rebounding to prior levels. States and universities are making both incremental and structural changes in response. Incremental changes work within existing financial and governance parameters to effect cost savings and/or to extend services; they stretch the use of existing or shrinking resources. Structural reforms change financial and/or governance parameters to create different incentives, which focus on performance, outcomes, and stabilizing capacity. A number of these new models are summarized including: "charter" and "public authority" models, the Virginia tiered system model, the Oregon public endowment model, and the UK income-contingent model. Current conditions create both a challenge and an opportunity for statewide higher education systems to re-define their missions and priorities to sustain their public universities for the future. Whether changes are made by drift or by design will determine how well public universities can contribute to the growth of the country in future decades. (Contains 16 endnotes.)

This paper uses panel regressions to investigate the effects of innovation policies and framework factors on business R&D intensity and patenting for a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1982- 2001. Both sets of factors are found to matter; the main determinants of innovativeness appear to be the availability of scientists and engineers, research conducted in the public sector (including universities), business-academic links, the degree of product market competition, a high level of financial development and access to foreign inventions. The effect of direct public financial support for business R&D is generally positive but modest, though it may larger for cash-constrained firms. Intellectual property rights appear to increase patenting significantly, but have little impact on R&D spending. Finally, the paper takes a closer look at the labour market for researchers, estimating jointly equations for employment and wages. Although the supply of scientists and engineers is eventually responsive to wage differentials, both with other professions and across countries, the evidence suggests that it may difficult to raise significantly the real amount of domestic R&D in the short run because the supply of researchers is relatively inelastic. (Wage Schedule and Reduced Form Coefficient Derivations are appended. Contains 93 footnotes, 4 figures, 1 box and 8 tables.)

This paper discusses routes by which HIV/AIDS money is dispersed and received. It notes that capturing accurate data on actual spending patterns of large donors can be difficult, as there is no uniform tracking or reporting system and much HIV/AIDS money is spent under the broader category of sexual and reproductive health. Most of the information contained in the first two sections is based on main reports that assess the general manner in which HIV/AIDS money as a whole is being distributed. Moving on from who is providing funds for HIV/AIDS initiatives at global level, it tracks sources and flows from governments, through bilateral and multilateral channels. It does not include estimates of household spending on care and treatment, which cannot be realistically quantified. Information follows on top US and European donors, the international business community and pharmaceutical companies. Later sections look into ways HIV/AIDS funding is being spent, with the proviso, as before, that detailed breakdowns of actual spending are rare. The broadest categories are prevention, care and treatment, orphan support and research. Within the field of ECD vis-a-vis HIV/AIDS, funds are being directed through two main areas of concern--prevention of mother-to-child transmission and the care of orphans and vulnerable children. This paper describes major players in these arenas, showing that efforts are being made by a few agencies through the amount of funding directed along these channels is minimal in contrast to other target areas. Fundamental questions are raised about current donor priorities and there follows some discussion touching areas where new or reallocated HIV/AIDS funding could be directed. Obvious gaps in the provision of money for ECD and HIV/AIDS support are then identified along with opportunities to carry out work fill such gaps. The final section examines what it would take to direct more money to support young children living in the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Including very young children in HIV/AIDS response strategies will ultimately depend on individual communities devising their own solutions. A further section highlights the critical importance of sharing knowledge through networks that communicate and disseminate evidence-based research findings and project evaluations. In conclusion, this paper calls for advocacy to urge that more funding should go to ECD-HIV/AIDS needs and that current funding approaches to dealing with the crisis need, in addition, to be tracked and evaluated, with a view to promoting more and better ways of meeting the unfulfilled needs of very young children affected by HIV/AIDS. (Contains 2 figures.)

At the request of the State of Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia, in the summer of 2002, asked three for-profit firms to assume responsibility for 30 of its lowest-performing schools and it asked four nonprofit managers to assume the management of 16 other low-performing schools. A difference-in-differences analysis is used to estimate the impact of nonprofit and for-profit management on individual student achievement. Gains in test scores at the treated schools are estimated by comparing them with gains in other low-performing schools in the district. Students at schools under for-profit management outperformed those at schools under nonprofit management in all six years in both reading and math. Most estimations are statistically significant. Impacts of for-profit management relative to district management were positive in math, but no reading impacts could be detected. At nonprofits, students appear to have learned substantially less, especially in math, at nonprofit schools, than had their school remained under regular district management. However, impacts fell short of statistical significance. (Propensity Score Analysis is appended. Contains 21 endnotes and 9 tables.)