Development Literature (development + literature)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Sustainable Development and the Sustainability of Competitive Advantage: A Dynamic and Sustainable View of the Firm

CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2002
Miguel A. Rodriguez
Does the need for sustainable development hinder businesses' ability to create value? Is a firm's competitiveness negatively affected by considering that need? After quickly reviewing the main literature contributions on the relationship between business and society, and drawing from resource-based view of the firm and sustainable development literature, this paper presents a proposal for a dynamic and sustainable view of the firm. It shows how considering the changes introduced into the competitive landscape by sustainable development influences the way in which companies develop their resources, capabilities and activities, fostering the persistence of competitive advantages based on knowledge and innovation. [source]


Making a Difference in the Lives of Youth: Mapping Success with the "Six Cs"

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL, Issue 4 2007
Jessica J. Luke
Many museums offer specialized programs for young people during out-of-school time, yet the consequences of such programs are not well documented. This article explores the potential utility of borrowing a conceptual framework from the youth development literature as a tool for assessment. The authors map findings from three studies of museum youth programs onto the youth development framework as an exercise in understanding the extent to which this model may be useful in developing museum youth programs. Results from this preliminary analysis demonstrate that the framework could serve as a viable tool for program design, and could offer a clear, grounded framework with common language for articulating program impacts often known intuitively and/or anecdotally but not formalized. [source]


,Scaling-up' in Emergencies: British NGOs after Hurricane Mitch

DISASTERS, Issue 1 2001
Sarah Lister
This article examines research on NGO ,scaling-up' in a disaster context and links it to a broader discussion on whether scaling-up is a useful concept for understanding NGO processes in an emergency. Using concepts of scaling-up from development literature, research findings from a study of the responses of British NGOs to Hurricane Mitch in Central America are presented. The article assesses the extent and type of scaling-up that occurred, constraints faced by the agencies and the impact of scaling-up on support to partners. Broader issues relating to scaling-up post-Mitch are also explored. The conclusion suggests that while the concept of scaling-up is useful, the tendency for its use to refer to organisational growth has limited a wider understanding and evaluation of the role of Northern NGOs in humanitarian crises. [source]


Rural Economic Development: A Review of the Literature from Industrialized Economies

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2010
Laura Ryser
Over the past 30 years, accelerating change has been one of the defining attributes of rural landscapes around the world. In response, there has been an increasing volume of rural economic development research and public/policy interest in that research. The purpose of this review article is not to provide a ,state of the literature' summary, but rather to highlight thematic directions, opportunities, and trends in the rural economic development literature over the past decade in industrialized economies. We review many of the longstanding research themes in rural economic development research: social and economic restructuring, barriers and challenges to economic development, community economic development, community capacity, governance, and policies and programs. We also explore a range of research issues that have (re-) emerged over the past decade focusing on new approaches to understanding rural change and the deployment of development strategies in the context of the new rural economy. [source]


Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ,Southern City' and Urban Theory

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
Colin McFarlane
We may be witnessing a ,Southern turn' in urban studies, but the implications for urban theory are only beginning to be worked through. In this article, I argue the need for urbanists to engage with a variety of ,shadows' on the edges of urban theory. The article engages with literature that theorises the interactions between urban materiality and social change, from community development literature to more expansive sociomaterial theorisations of the urban fabric. I invoke an expansive conception of the relations between the urban fabric and social change, and draw on a variety of examples through which infrastructures come to matter politically in the creative destruction of capitalist redevelopment. The article ends with consideration of how comparison might be conceived as a strategy of indirect and uncertain learning that entails the possibility of transformation in a predominantly Euro-American-orientated urban theory. [source]


Training corporate managers to adopt a more autonomy-supportive motivating style toward employees: an intervention study

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2009
Patricia L. Hardré
Management style is treated in a variety of ways across the training and development literature. Yet few studies have tested the training-based malleability of management style in a for-profit, authentic work context. The present research tested whether or not training intervention would help managers adopt a more autonomy-supportive motivating style toward employees and whether or not the employees of these managers would, in turn, show greater autonomous motivation and workplace engagement. Using an intervention-based experimental design, 25 managers from a Fortune 500 company received training consistent with self-determination theory on how to support the autonomy of the 169 employees they supervised. Five weeks after the managers in the experimental group participated in the training, they displayed a significantly more autonomy-supportive managerial style than did nontrained managers in a control group. Further, the employees they supervised showed, 5 weeks later, significantly more autonomous motivation and greater workplace engagement than did employees supervised by control-group managers. We discuss the malleability of managers' motivating styles, the benefits to employees when managers become more autonomy supportive, and recommendations for future training interventions and research. [source]


The Organizational Life of an Idea: Integrating Social Network, Creativity and Decision-Making Perspectives*

JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 6 2007
Bob Kijkuit
abstract Existing theories on the influence of social networks on creativity focus on idea generation. Conversely, the new product development literature concentrates more on the selection of ideas and projects. In this paper we bridge this gap by developing a dynamic framework for the role of social networks from idea generation to selection. We apply findings from creativity and behavioural decision-making literature and present an in-depth understanding of the sociological processes in the front-end of the new product development process. Our framework builds on the importance of mutual understanding, sensemaking and consensus formation. The propositions focus on both network structure and content and highlight the need to have strong ties and prior related knowledge, to incorporate decision makers, and to move over time from a large, non-redundant and heterogeneous to a smaller and more cohesive network structure. We conclude with a discussion on empirical validation of the framework and possible extensions. [source]


The Dynamics of Ethnic Fragmentation

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2005
A Proposal for an Expanded Measurement Index
This paper identifies problems associated with the current empirical measurement of ethnic diversity in economic development literature. An expanded index of ethnic diversity is proposed to include variables such as religion and race, and the results are compared to the prevailing index utilized in empirical literature. The mean of the proposed index is significantly larger and the standard deviation is significantly smaller than that of the prevailing index. This would suggest that disparities in ethnic diversity among countries are not as wide as previously assumed. Further, these results confirm that a comprehensive and more accurate measure of ethnic diversity requires more than a linguistic measurement, which is the primary factor utilized in the prevailing index. [source]


On a proposal for a generic package development process

PACKAGING TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
C. Bramklev
Abstract Globalization pressures have now caused significant changes in the way industrial enterprises are organized and how products are developed, manufactured and brought to market. In global enterprises, the handling, transportation and storage of parts, sub-assemblies and final products demand for an efficient and effective development of the product,package-system (PPS). The objective set in this paper is to present the development of a generic package development process that facilitates the establishment of integrated product and package development and also provides a more proactive and holistic approach to the development of new and innovative packages for the global market. In an extensive review of the package development literature and through five multiple case studies within the package manufacturing industry, results on the package development process are generated and, in this paper, presented and synthesized into an updated version of the package development process. The process consists of the phases package planning, package system development, package concept design, package design, production ramp-up, package system integration and package system production ramp-up. The package development model proposed here takes its starting point in the development of the package system, thus providing the holistic perspective needed for being truly generic. Being generic in the given context assures or at least facilitates the possibility to support the development of the new and innovative package systems and package designs needed in the product manufacturing industry to enhance competitiveness. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Why did we make that cheese?

R & D MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2000
An empirically based framework for understanding what drives innovation activity
In the more recent product development literature the interplay between R&D skills and competencies and market skills and competencies is seen as a major determinant of successful innovation. The study reported in this article was done in order to cast more light on these two constructs in an industry with low R&D expenditures, but where product development is nevertheless considered to be strategically important. That industry is the food processing industry. The results of a series of case studies indicate that constructs other than R&D and market orientation may be more appropriate for understanding innovation and explaining innovation success in the case material. A new set of constructs focusing on what causes specific innovation activities to occur is proposed and a revised framework is developed. [source]


Understanding fire fighting in new product development,

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 5 2001
Nelson P. Repenning
Despite documented benefits, the processes described in the new product development literature often prove difficult to follow in practice. A principal source of such difficulties is the phenomenon of fire fighting-the unplanned allocation of resources to fix problems discovered late in a product's development cycle. While it has been widely criticized, fire fighting is a common occurrence in many product development organizations. To understand both its existence and persistence, in this article I develop a formal model of fire fighting in a multiproject development environment. The major contributions of this analysis are to suggest that: (1) fire fighting can be a self-reinforeing phenomenon; and (2) multiproject development systems are far more susceptible to this dynamic than is currently appreciated. These insights suggest that many of the current methods for aggregate resource and product portfolio planning, while necessary, are not sufficient to prevent fire fighting and the consequent low performance. [source]


Power over, power to, power with: Shifting perceptions of power for local economic development in the Philippines

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 3 2008
Amanda Cahill
Abstract Power has long been recognised as crucial to the sustainability of community development interventions; however, the way in which space affects power relations within such interventions has remained relatively under-theorised in the development literature. Many practitioners continue to regard power as located centrally and as embedded in particular institutions, networks, knowledge and resources. According to this logic, processes of empowerment involve the redistribution of these resources to marginalised groups through their participation in development interventions such as microfinance and sustainable livelihood initiatives. The danger inherent in such development approaches is that they can discourage the potential for participants to use their own agency by overemphasising an existing lack of resources locally and inadvertently feeding a sense of dependency on formal development interventions initiated by external agencies. This paper suggests that a post-structural conceptualisation of power as dynamic, multiple and mediated at the local level offers a more productive starting point for thinking about approaches to empowerment. Drawing on data from an action research project designed to initiate community enterprises in a small rural municipality in the Philippines, I suggest how a post-structural approach to power can be enacted by building on the existing local resources and practices of everyday life. [source]


A Quasi-Market Framework for Development Competition

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2002
Richard C. Feiock
This article describes a quasi-market framework to integrate the diverse perspectives on local government development competition found in the economic development literatures. Within this framework local governments seek to obtain positive externalities associated with economic growth through the provision of services and inducements to private firms in exchange for commitments of employment and investment. Efficient pursuit of economic development is impeded by market and government failures. Better understanding of how the quasi-market for economic development works promises to enhance our understanding of the relationships between economic and political demands and local development with important implications for evaluation of local growth policy and development competition. [source]