Examining Voluntary Engagement Barriers in Knowledge Sharing Practices for Supply Chain Innovation

Voluntary engagement (VE) creates a sense of coordination and harmonization to share knowledge. The eminence of knowledge sharing (KS) for supply chain (SC) innovation is undeniable to initiate development in products, services, and operations. However, KS process is undergoing challenges in sustaining KS engagement by SC partners. Hence, recent researchers call for the need to address this gap in the literature to assess VE barriers. This paper studies the causal relationship of VE barriers on two MNCs, i.e., Toyota and Suzuki, via the fuzzy DEMATEL approach. The case examination findings indicate culture's alignment as the prime cause of VE and leadership commitment has stronger interdependence. The core problems which need elimination are fear of losing the job, prominence and opportunistic behavior. The study concludes that companies need to instigate the natural attributes of employees’ VE by setting-up earnest guidelines to practice free information and knowledge flow.

Finding my Way Home: Knowing in the Philebus

In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates argues that human life must consist of knowledge and pleasure if it is to be good. Part of this demonstration is an account of the parts of knowledge whereby knowledge can be more or less pure, more or less blended with extraneous elements such as sensation and practice. When pure, it cleaves to truth, pure and simple. For, as we must admit, knowledge is true, whatever else it is. Knowledge may make humans good, i.e. enable them to do well, reliably and flexibly what they do, but has its good above and beyond human existence – it is not restricted to human existence. The suggestion is that Plato here in fact determines knowledge by using its end – its final cause is used to determine its formal cause: what knowledge is for tells us what it is. Instead of giving an analysis along the lines of the final, failed account of the Theaetetus (“justified true belief”), knowledge is thereby given a functional account. Part of this suggestion is that knowledge must be true, and this is what guarantees its stability: its end is internal to it. The good of knowledge is truth. This is what enables it to act as a guide to the soul. The further attributes of this clan, knowledge, flow from truth and their relation to it: exactness, clarity, and purity. For insofar as they are pure, and unmixed with extraneous elements such as practice or sensation, they are concerned simply with exact units, things that are just what they are, so their clarity is not troubled by anything. It is dialectic that investigates and establishes this.

Towards Establishing a Research Lineage via Identification of Significant Citations

Finding the lineage of a research topic is crucial for understanding the prior state of the art and advancing scientific displacement. The deluge of scholarly articles makes it difficult to locate the most relevant previous work. It causes researchers to spend a considerable amount of time building up their literature list. Citations play a crucial role in discovering relevant literature. However, not all citations are created equal. The majority of the citations that a paper receives provide contextual and background information to the citing papers. In those cases, the cited paper is not central to the theme of citing papers. However, some papers build upon a given paper, further the research frontier. In those cases, the concerned cited paper plays a pivotal role in the citing paper. Hence, the nature of citation the former receives from the latter is significant. In this work, we discuss our investigations towards discovering significant citations of a given paper. We further show how we can leverage significant citations to build a research lineage via a significant citation graph. We demonstrate the efficacy of our idea with two real-life case studies. Our experiments yield promising results with respect to the current state-of-the-art in classifying significant citations, outperforming the earlier ones by a relative margin of 20 points in terms of precision. We hypothesize that such an automated system can facilitate relevant literature discovery and help identify knowledge flow for a particular category of papers.

Knowledge Network Evolution of Smokers, Adaptive Behaviors and Enhancement of Knowledge Capability

Objectives: With the evolution of knowledge networks of smokers, we analyzed how adaptive behaviors affect the enhancement of the knowledge capability of their organization. Methods: Through the empirical analysis of 228 questionnaire data from smoker-dense zone, this paper conducts a regression analysis between the implementation of different behaviors and the capability improvement, in the context of knowledge flow evolution. Results: Conclusions show that different behavioral decisions of knowledge subjects have different influences on their knowledge capability, and the routine behaviors have a significant negative impact on their knowledge capability, while the imitative behavior and innovative behavior have a significant positive impact on the improvement of knowledge capability. These effects are also affected by the regulatory effects of the three stages of knowledge flow. Conclusion: In different stages of the functional evolution of the knowledge network of smokers, different behavioral decisions of knowledge subjects will promote or restrict their own knowledge capabilities. Based on the knowledge growth expectation, knowledge subjects can adopt different behavior strategies to achieve dynamic environment adaptation and gain competitive advantage.

Barriers to cross-disciplinary knowledge flow: The case of medical education research

Introduction The medical education research field operates at the crossroads of two distinct academic worlds: higher education and medicine. As such, this field provides a unique opportunity to explore new forms of cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. Methods Cross-disciplinary knowledge flow in medical education research was examined by looking at citation patterns in the five journals with the highest impact factor in 2017. To grasp the specificities of the knowledge flow in medical education, the field of higher education was used as a comparator. In total, 2031 citations from 64 medical education and 41 higher education articles published in 2017 were examined. Results Medical education researchers draw on a narrower range of knowledge communities than their peers in higher education. Medical education researchers predominantly cite articles published in health and medical education journals (80% of all citations), and to a lesser extent, articles published in education and social science journals. In higher education, while the largest share of the cited literature is internal to the domain (36%), researchers cite literature from across the social science spectrum. Findings suggest that higher education scholars engage in conversations with academics from a broader range of communities and perspectives than their medical education colleagues. Discussion Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and field, it is argued that the variety of epistemic cultures entering the higher education research space contributes to its interdisciplinary nature. Conversely, the existence of a relatively homogeneous epistemic culture in medicine potentially impedes cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange.

Using Denotational Mathematics for the Formal Description of Home UbiHealth Decision-Support Systems With Knowledge Flow

Home UbiHealth applications require support from decision-making and decision-support components. The decision process must possess a holistic perspective about the individual's healthcare condition and needs at home. Also, it shall consider and evaluate the available data, producing cognitive intelligence through appropriate processing. The present work describes a model for decision-making and decision-support in UbiHealth environments based on denotational mathematics. The decision-making component of the model provides the necessary actions to handle the connected devices. The decision-support component suggests actions to the user (physician). The decisions are drawn from a simulated operation of cooperating and co-existing semantic networks. The model is thoroughly described, and its positive impact is explained for all participating stakeholders including medical professionals, patients, information technology scientists, and technical personnel.