Abstract
Editorial scholarship is once again in a state of upheaval. Digital scholarly editing, for all it has achieved, has not accommodated the increasingly digital nature of cultural production ...and consumption. The theories and practices of digital scholarly editing need to better account for born-digital cultural materials like social media content, digital fiction, and video games. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art in digital scholarly editing, and advocates for future forms of digital scholarly editing and publishing suited to the born-digital.
Measuring the performance of public agencies and programmes is essential to ensure that citizens enjoy quality services and that governments can be sure that taxpayers receive value for money. As ...such, good performance measurement is a crucial component of improvement and planning, monitoring and control, comparison and benchmarking and also ensures democratic accountability. This book shows how the principles, uses and practice of performance measurement for public services differ from those in for-profit organisations, being based on the need to add public value rather than profit. It describes methods and approaches for measuring performance through time, for constructing and using scorecards, composite indicators, the use of league tables and rankings and argues that data-envelopment analysis is a useful tool when thinking about performance. This demonstrates the importance of allowing for the multidimensional nature of performance, as well as the need to base measurement on a sound technical footing.
The Research Excellence Framework 2014 (REF 2014) was the 7th formal assessment of research in UK universities and other institutions of higher education. Participation in these assessments is ...voluntary, and institutions can decide which staff to include and under which discipline to include them. A hundred and one institutions chose to submit research in Business and Management Studies, and this work was assessed by a panel of academic researchers and research users nominated by a wide range of academic constituencies. The previous assessment exercise was conducted in 2008, and REF 2014 shows that the quality of UK research in Business and Management Studies, already high in 2008, has improved since then. The operation of the Business and Management Studies sub‐panel is described, the results are summarized, and a few caveats are discussed so as to aid the Business and Management Studies community in its endeavours to understand and evaluate the process and the results.
In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded ‘
Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions
’ project (BtM). The ...project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.
Why Modelling and Model Use Matter Pidd, M.
The Journal of the Operational Research Society,
01/2010, Volume:
61, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
When OR/MS analysts develop a model, how are they intending this model to be used? There are many different ways in which OR/MS models may be classified and one important categorisation is the ...intended use of the model. Some models are intended for routine use on a frequent basis, with little or no human intervention. Others form part of human decision process and provide support to that process. Considering model validation, data requirements, added value and possible pitfalls leads to a theory of model use based on four categories: decision automation, routine decision support, investigation and improvement, and generating insights for debate. A pilot investigation in an OR/MS group demonstrates that this categorisation could provide the basis for empirical research into a theory of model use in operational research. A theory of model use would be of value to academics, who could prioritise their work, and to practitioners, who could place their own work in a broader landscape.
This article analyses implementation barriers to lean thinking in health care, based on experience of applying lean thinking in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). It discusses the differences ...and similarities between lean thinking in manufacturing and health care and why lean implementation has been slower in health care than in manufacturing. The problems to be faced and overcome when implementing lean approaches are compared with those in other improvement programmes. The authors conclude that lean approaches do offer ways to improve health care.
It is clear that methods are mixed in practice. Problems don't come labelled as simulation, optimisation, forecasting, or with some other methodological name. In practice, there's a job to be done ...and the analyst must find a way to do it. For over 20 years, optimisation within discrete simulations has been a fertile field of research. Employing time series methods to analyse simulation output and to model input data is routine. Thus, in one sense, we should not be too exercised by the very idea that methods are usefully mixed in research either. Climbing to a higher level, it is likely to be rare that major decisions are made solely on the basis of a few simulation runs. A model is likely to be one element of a decision making process that leads people to see that a particular course of action is either desirable, or less undesirable than alternatives.
In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The ...project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.
It is increasingly common to describe organizations as sets of business processes that can be analysed and improved by approaches such as business process modelling. Successful business process ...modelling relies on an adequate view of the nature of business processes, but there is a surprising divergence of opinion about the nature of these processes. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to organize different views of business processes under four headings. It also aims at providing an integrated discussion of the different streams of thought, their strengths and limitations, within business process modelling. It argues that the multifaceted nature of business processes calls for pluralistic and multidisciplinary modelling approaches.
► Shows how behavioural factors can be incorporated into HR system modelling. ► Led to a new appraisal and promotion system in the European Commission. ► Uses novel, regression-based sampling ...methods.
Though manpower planning models have been part of OR for many years, and simulation has always been acknowledged as a potential approach, there are few reported applications of its use. In this case-based study we report on a micro-simulation model that exploits the structure of the European Commission’s appraisal and promotion rules, and includes regression-based sampling schemes which allow for non-Normal error terms to represent behavioural factors that led to the need for a new system. With a suitably parsimonious formulation the 20,000 person model runs very effectively, and the transparency associated with simulation proves an important factor in the successful use of the model as the basis for designing a promotion box system that was implemented across the Commission in 2009. The simulation modelling incorporates many Markov-type elements, and we reflect on important lessons learned from this combined use of micro-simulation and Markov-based approaches to manpower modelling.
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