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Voor goed onderzoek zijn niet alleen getalenteerde onderzoekers nodig, ook de kwaliteit van hun werkomgeving is belangrijk. Het scheppen van een goede inbedding voor onderzoekers is een managementtaak, zowel op het niveau van de onderzoeksgroep als op het niveau van de onderzoeksinstellingen. Maar over welke mogelijkheden beschikken onderzoeksleiders, bestuurders, stafmedewerkers en beleidsmakers nu precies om hun groepen te organiseren en aan te sturen op betere prestaties? In dit artikel beschrijven de auteurs de belangrijkste uitkomsten van een langlopende studie naar onderzoeksmanagement in het Nederlands gezondheidsonderzoek.

Bird flu, otherwise known as avian influenza, has attracted widespread public and global attention. The H5N1 avian influenza virus was first documented as infecting humans in Hong Kong in 1997 and many of those infected died subsequently from the virus that had been transmitted from poultry to humans. It took several years, however, before a hyped up type of public debate about bird flu began in around 2004. This article examines the hype surrounding public debates about bird flu in medical journals, newspapers and public discussion forums from 1997 to 2006. The article focuses on the development of the frequencies of published texts, and the terminology used in the three databases. The quantitative results will be accompanied by a hermeneutic interpretation of the main sub-topics within the debates. These (preliminary) results contribute to research dealing with the emergence of hypes and the spread of public debates more generally.

Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs has been a heavily contested issue over the past decade, touching on several issues of responsibility facing the pharmaceutical industry. Much research has been conducted on DTCA, but hardly any studies have discussed this topic from a corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspective. In this article, we use several elements of CSR, emphasising consumer autonomy and safety, to analyse differences in DTCA practices within two different policy contexts, the United States of America and the European Union (EU). Doing so results in an alternative analysis of the struggle between proponents and opponents of DTCA from a CSR perspective, adding an alternative view on this debate. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

This chapter examines lecturers’ perceptions of the balance between quality assurance and quality enhancement in three case study higher education institutions in different European countries. Where quality initiatives emphasised assurance rather than enhancement, this was taken to indicate a significant limitation on a lecturer’s autonomy in the quality management process. In-depth interviews using a semi-structured schedule were conducted with 20 randomly selected academic staff in each of the three higher education institutions. The results from the interviews demonstrated a very wide range of views among the interviewees. However, generally, it was found that there was a high level of disappointment with only limited transformation of teaching and learning through quality enhancement. This sense of disappointment was particularly acute in the UK and Dutch institutions where many interviewees expressed concern that quality assurance approaches tended to dominate. In the Finnish higher education institutions, there was a more positive attitude towards quality initiatives with a far higher proportion of interviewees considering that lecturers had significant control over the quality management process and they felt that there was an appropriate balance of quality assurance and quality enhancement.

Contains fulltext : 87108.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) This study examined cross-national invariance of Meyer and Allen's three-component model of organizational commitment using samples of university faculty from six European countries. The analysis revealed strict factorial measurement invariance of affective, continuance, and normative organizational commitment constructs (AC, CC, and NC, respectively). While the samples failed to differ in AC and CC, substantial cross-national differences were found for NC. Results showed an invariant zero correlation between AC and CC, and NC associated positively with affective and continuance components. Procedural justice predicted AC and less strongly NC, but it had no effect on CC. A positive link with job performance was found for AC, a negative one for CC, and no association for NC. Results by and large support the generalizability of the tripartite organizational commitment model to the European context. 33 p.

Stochastic actor-based models are models for network dynamics that can represent a wide variety of influences on network change, and allow to estimate parameters expressing such influences, and test corresponding hypotheses. The nodes in the network represent social actors, and the collection of ties represents a social relation. The assumptions posit that the network evolves as a stochastic process 'driven by the actors', i.e., the model lends itself especially for representing theories about how actors change their outgoing ties. The probabilities of tie changes are in part endogenously determined, i.e., as a function of the current network structure itself, and in part exogenously, as a function of characteristics of the nodes ('actor covariates') and of characteristics of pairs of nodes ('dyadic covariates'). In an extended form, stochastic actor-based models can be used to analyze longitudinal data on social networks jointly with changing attributes of the actors: dynamics of networks and behavior.This paper gives an introduction to stochastic actor-based models for dynamics of directed networks, using only a minimum of mathematics. The focus is on understanding the basic principles of the model, understanding the results, and on sensible rules for Model selection. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Europeans have tried for decades to find a way to take a mutual stance on issues of higher education and its development. In terms of taking on the challenge of such a mutual commitment with respect to higher education, the Bologna process is a giant step for the European Union. It involves a large number of countries, representing a great variety of higher education systems, which are currently engaged in a process of striving for certain common, converging goals. The question is whether this is also the 'right step' in terms of the actual organisational goals of higher education institutions: teaching students to the best of their abilities, carrying out good-quality research, and serving a constructive societal role. Is the Bologna process as such helpful in achieving these goals, or do we need to acknowledge peripheral forces that are affecting the (Bologna) process to a much higher degree than we bargained for? The purpose of this article is to explore both mainstream and more tangential issues in order to cast a more critical spotlight on the outcomes of the Bologna process and its construction(s). The article attempts to contribute to the Bologna debate, with emphasis on three contradictions, by placing these issues in a broader perspective.

This paper focuses on the way lecturers observe, feel restrained by and cope with quality management systems that have been implemented in the higher education systems of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. As two sides of the same coin, quality enhancement and quality control are of increased significance in European Higher Educaction Institutions (HEIs), particularly through the Bologna Process. We are interested in the way that both enhancement and control blend into the current systems, and we are concerned for too much dominance of control, as has been suggested in recent managerial literature. Analysis of 40 interviews in both countries among researchers and lecturers in traditional and universities of applied sciences showed many similarities. It is not so much the general idea of quality management that is being turned down by the respondents. They see the benefits quite clearly. Still, the general belief is that quality management in its current shape and character does not fit with the work of the individual academic, neither their teaching nor their research. The respondents worry for and resent the consequences of increased emphasis on quality assurance and control. The developments concerning the quality management of their HEIs are perceived in terms of quality assurance by the UK respondents. Instead, the Dutch are more occupied with finding ways to "how to deal with" such developments. © 2009 European Higher Education Society.

This paper considers STS aspirations to engage with the field of Organization and Management Studies (OMS). It does so by investigating the employability of the concept of boundary object in OMS. Through an extensive literature review, the paper shows that rather than a simple engagement between STS and OMS the relation between the two consists of multi-layered (non-)engagements. The paper shows that the 'successful' uptake of and the active engagement with the concept of boundary object in OMS cannot simply be regarded as a (successful) engagement of STS with OMS. The situated and contingent character of what counts as successful engagement explains the tensions that arise when a concept is taken up in a new field. Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications.

Contains fulltext : 76751.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) To achieve efficient and effective quality improvement, European universities have gradually adopted organizational strategies, structures, technologies, management instruments, and values that are commonly found in the private business sector. Whereas some studies have shown that such managerialism is beneficial to the quality of job performances of university employees, others have argued that managerialism is largely counterproductive and that it results in lower performances. The latter situation is called a 'managerialism contradiction'. This paper tests two lines of reasoning underlying a potential contradiction governing the relationship between managerialism and job performances, while using university employee survey data from six European countries (Belgium, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, UK). The results tend to support the assumption that managerialism, in these six countries at least, has a positive effect, albeit a modest one, on the quality of performances. The most important conclusion is therefore that there is no managerialism contradiction at work in European universities. 19 p.

Leadership often serves as an explanatory category for performance outcomes (i.e., failure and success). This process can strengthen or weaken leadership effectiveness, because contingent on their performance leaders may gain or lose follower endorsement - the basis of leadership. Drawing on the social identity analysis of leadership, we hypothesized that leader group prototypicality and performance information interact to predict followers' perceptions of leadership effectiveness. Because group prototypical leaders are more trusted by their followers, we hypothesized that group prototypical leaders are evaluated as more effective after failure information than non-prototypical leaders. In contrast, we predicted that both prototypical and non-prototypical leaders should receive similar evaluations of leadership effectiveness after success. We found support for our predictions in a scenario experiment, a cross-sectional field study, and a laboratory experiment. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.