L’objet de cette thèse est l’analyse des caractéristiques des pays en développement face à l’économie de la connaissance. Ce travail aborde des questions à la fois théoriques et épistémologiques ayant trait à l’économie de la connaissance. Nous procédons dans une première partie à l’analyse des théories existantes sur la question de l’économie de la connaissance en combinant des références aux interprétations diverses, tout en mettant en illustration l’idée selon laquelle l’accumulation des connaissances est aujourd'hui plus que jamais un puissant levier de la croissance économique des économies développées. La deuxième partie est consacrée à l’étude des pays en développement, particulièrement celle des pays les moins avancés. Cette étude fait ressortir des trajectoires technologiques divergentes au sein de ces économies et permet l’identification des modalités d’acquisition du savoir dans les pays les moins avancés par la mise en place d’un système national d’innovation. / The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the characteristics of developing countries to the knowledge economy. This work addresses issues on both theoretical and epistemological related to the knowledge economy. We proceed in a first part the analysis of existing theories on the issue of the knowledge economy by combining references to various interpretations, while putting in illustration the idea that the accumulation of knowledge is now more than ever a powerful lever for economic growth in developed economies. The second part is devoted to the study of developing countries, particularly the least developed countries. This study highlights the differing technological trajectories within these economies and allows the identification of ways of acquiring knowledge in the least developed by the establishment of a national innovation system countries.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T16:44:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernando Fukunaga.pdf: 2511386 bytes, checksum: 8e20064abbd68ed281efd6d275f4dea2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-16 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The perception of knowledge as an economic good and the strategic importance of organizational culture has been suggested and studied by several authors. This research has as main objective to analyze the influence of the attributes of organizational culture, from the theoretical model of Quinn and Cameron (2006), to the success of knowledge management cycle based on the model suggested by Lawson (2002). As strategy and methodological principles was selected the single case study method. The methodological procedure had a quantitative approach and qualitative approach defining it as a method of triangulation. Research was conducted on a large national company in the engineering and infrastructure segment. The quantitative approach had a final sample of 14 leaders as participants valid online survey respondents, qualitative approach with participants of the three levels of the organization studied: strategic, tactical and tactical-operational. The main results showed a strong relationship between organizational culture and knowledge management. Several evidence was found and it is estimated that these can be generalized and help other organizations to seek successful implementation or support of knowledge management / A percepção do conhecimento como um bem econômico e importância estratégica da cultura organizacional tem sido sugerida e estudada por diversos autores. Nesta pesquisa, tem-se como principal objetivo analisar a influência dos atributos da cultura organizacional, a partir do modelo teórico de Quinn e Cameron (2006), para o sucesso do ciclo de gestão do conhecimento com base no modelo sugerido por Lawson (2002). Como estratégia e princípios metodológicos selecionou-se o método de estudo de caso singular. O procedimento metodológico contou com abordagem quantitativa e abordagem qualitativa definindo-o como um método de triangulação. Foi conduzida uma pesquisa em uma grande empresa nacional do segmento de engenharia e infraestrutura. A abordagem quantitativa contou com uma amostra final de 14 líderes como participantes válidos respondentes do questionário on-line e a abordagem qualitativa com participantes dos três níveis hierárquicos da organização estudada: estratégico, tático e tático-operacional. Os principais resultados apontaram para uma forte relação entre cultura organizacional e gestão do conhecimento. Diversas evidências foram encontradas e estima-se que estas podem ser generalizadas e ajudar outras organizações a buscarem sucesso na implementação ou na sustentação da gestão do conhecimento

Computer technologies have increased the opportunities for employees to engage in cyberloafing by using the Internet at work for personal purposes. Uncontrolled cyberloafing is a threat to organizational effectiveness because it affects organizational productivity. The purpose of this single case study was to explore successful strategies functional managers use to control cyberloafing behaviors of their employees at an e-learning organization located in the northeastern United States. The theory of planned behavior, which emphasized behavioral, normative, and control beliefs as key elements to predict individuals' intentions to behave was the conceptual framework. Data collection included semistructured face-to-face interviews with 11 functional managers and an exploration of organizational policies, procedures, and handbooks. Data analysis included examination of word frequencies, keyword coding, and theme identification. Using Yin's 5 steps for data analysis, 3 themes emerged: create engaging jobs, communicate clear expectations, and promote a positive work environment. Functional managers in the e-learning organization in this study may control cyberloafing by ensuring that social norms convey disapproval, combining deterrence policies and performance metrics; and showing attitudes that promote citizenship behaviors. The implications for positive social change include the potential to provide the e-learning organization in this study with best practices that support employees' needs for work-life balance, thus promoting employee satisfaction while maximizing employee productivity. As a result, the findings of this study can decrease stress, increase morale and positively impact the overall well-being of the organization's workforce.

A private, nonprofit university in Mexico invested millions of U.S. dollars in a strategic initiative to build and operate technology-knowledge transfer parks (TKTP) with the mission of supporting the development of Mexican society's entrepreneurial capabilities. The university, however, lacked an assessment policy for gauging the effectiveness of the TKTP initiative. The purpose of this study was to explore stakeholder values about TKTP effectiveness in order to inform future assessment of TKTPs. The triple helix conceptual framework of collaboration between universities, business and industry, and government informed the design of this study. The central question for this study sought to clarify what stakeholders perceive to make TKTPs effective. The study employed stratified random sampling and cross-sectional stakeholder survey data (N = 129). Data analysis included descriptive statistics to present common themes about TKTP stakeholder values, as well as ANOVA to discern significant differences in TKTP valuations between the stakeholder groups. A key finding was that stakeholder groups lack enough information to assess whether the university achieved its original objectives by using the TKTP initiative. Other findings revealed that the stakeholder groups agreed on several criteria for TKTP assessment. A policy recommendation for TKTP assessment, based on the research findings, is provided as part of the project component of this study. This project study supports positive social change by encouraging the region's transformation into a more entrepreneurial, innovative, and knowledge-based economy through continued but more accountable use of TKTPs in Mexico.

Calls continually are made to provide economic assessments of research program achievements and efficiency. Yet little effort has been given to develop an assessment framework that would focus on the research discovery itself, treating the research manager as a producer and the research technology as a knowledge production function. The present dissertation develops such a framework and uses it, with a variety of analytical approaches, to evaluate a two-phase international aquacultural research program consisting of 55 distinct studies. A Bayesian knowledge measure is developed for this purpose, allowing close examination of each of two knowledge creation pathways ��� the extent of new findings (mean surprise) and the extent of uncertainty reduction (precision). Factors affecting each of these two pathways are estimated in decomposed form, their total effects on knowledge achievement then combined to form an aggregate knowledge production function. Team workload, education level, and scientist travel distance strongly affect knowledge creation as postulated, although exhibiting varying effect magnitudes and significances across the two program phases. A research study's analytical approach significantly affects its knowledge acquisition pathways, accounting partially for the newness of its scientific discoveries. Survey studies tend, in contrast, to have greater potential for new findings, but yield greater uncertainty than do experimental studies. In each of the two program phases, fish market trading and water quality are, in my output-elasticities-based approach, respectively the least productive topic area and research-outcome dimension. Asian researchers appear ��� compared to their colleagues in South America and Africa ��� to achieve the highest predictive precision but the least mean surprise, probably because of the greater maturity of their projects. In both program phases, estimated output elasticities imply increasing knowledge returns to scale, although the elasticities decline from 3.52 in Phase I to 1.07 in Phase II. The dual cost function approach provides indirect insight into the program manager���s investment decisions and to the returns to knowledge output, complementing the primal approach. In my cost-based approach, knowledge cost elasticities are below unity, estimated at 0.49 in Phase II and 0.37 in Phase I, consistent with the increasing returns to scale found in the output-elasticities-based approach. Given the increasing returns to scale estimated with both approaches, the aquacultural program appears to have a substantial incentive to enlarge its knowledge investments. Also consistent with duality, the least-output-productive fish-trade topic area, water-quality outcome, and Asian research are found in my cost analysis to be the most cost-consuming. The technical efficiencies of the aquacultural program's individual studies are also examined, relative to both one another and to their own potentially best practices. The examination is conducted using, successively, the Farrell input technical efficiency measure and the directional sum-distance measure. Results are consistent across these two efficiency instruments, confirming the conclusions about output and cost elasticities in the previous chapters and providing a completeness to the overall research evaluation. / Graduation date: 2013 / Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from Dec. 27, 2012 - Dec. 27, 2014

This study contributes to theory and public policy in Canada and globally. It uses mixed methodology and triangulation of evidence through policy documents(Bovey,Rae,Drummond),empirical studies and surveys(ranking,NSSE data,regression), CAUT/AUCC and Statistics Canada sources and qualitative sources - writings of university presidents (Bok,Kerr,Fallis),researchers (Rajagopal, Clark et al.)as well,talks with sessionals,teaching assistants and administrators. The framework consists of Altbach's four factors - democratization, the knowledge economy, globalisation and competition and three ideal types for university development - entrepreneurial, liberal education and deliberative. The thesis contrasts classical college with the modern university system. The results show strong evidence for research domination, mission drift and shift towards the entrepreneurial model. Quality is compromised by lowering requirements, compressed courses, less study time, large classes taught by sessionals and TAs, grade inflation and consumerist behaviour, while critical thinking and moral development are neglected.

This study contributes to theory and public policy in Canada and globally. It uses mixed methodology and triangulation of evidence through policy documents(Bovey,Rae,Drummond),empirical studies and surveys(ranking,NSSE data,regression), CAUT/AUCC and Statistics Canada sources and qualitative sources - writings of university presidents (Bok,Kerr,Fallis),researchers (Rajagopal, Clark et al.)as well,talks with sessionals,teaching assistants and administrators. The framework consists of Altbach's four factors - democratization, the knowledge economy, globalisation and competition and three ideal types for university development - entrepreneurial, liberal education and deliberative. The thesis contrasts classical college with the modern university system. The results show strong evidence for research domination, mission drift and shift towards the entrepreneurial model. Quality is compromised by lowering requirements, compressed courses, less study time, large classes taught by sessionals and TAs, grade inflation and consumerist behaviour, while critical thinking and moral development are neglected.

Since the mid-1990s, New Zealand has become a popular study destination for international students. In its neo-liberal knowledge economy policies including an export education policy, international education agenda, and skilled immigration policy, international students are conceptualised as ideal policy subjects: free, rational and self-interested knowledge consumers and globally available human resources. International postgraduates are expected to contribute to New Zealand’s knowledge economy with their knowledge and skills. However, both the statistics and empirical research suggest that these students’ experiences do not always coincide with the policy expectations owing to the involvement of multiple political and non-political factors and actors including international students themselves. Cultural differences in particular, generate extra challenges for these policies to recruit and serve international students and retain international graduates from non-Western cultural backgrounds including those from Mainland China. The gap between the policy intentions and these students’ experiences draws our attention to the roles of multiple regimes of government and individual students as active agencies in overseas study and raises the question of how the two aspects can converge to achieve a ‘good’ overseas study in a complicated culture-crossing policy environment. This thesis takes a post-structuralist approach and uses an adapted Foucauldian conceptual framework that develops the concept of governmentality to explore the experiences of a group of postgraduate Chinese international students studying at two New Zealand universities. It combines documentary research, an online survey and 56 in-depth interviews for data collection with culturally informed discursive, Foucauldian descriptive statistical and Foucauldian narrative analyses of data. The findings show that the convergence between New Zealand’s knowledge economy policies and Chinese students’ experiences of ‘good’ overseas study is not straightforward. This thesis argues that Chinese international students are not made and governed by a singular political power like the New Zealand Government but by multiple regimes of practices through which these students are assembled. Chinese cultural mechanisms such as filial piety, reciprocity and loyalty, play a crucial role in constituting the field of international education and assembling regimes of subjectification. Moreover, these cultural mechanisms are not only embodied in governmental technologies themselves as technical means, but also activated through the coexistence of multiple rationalities, the hybridisation of regimes of subjectification and cross-cultural applications of these technologies. This thesis helps explain both ways in which Chinese students get ‘made into’ subjects who are willing to constitute themselves as international students obliged to come to New Zealand and contribute to the knowledge economy and also the constellations of factors motivating them to move away from on-going, constant and regular engagement with New Zealand as a knowledge economy. With its findings, the thesis attempts not only to provide valuable policy recommendations but also to contribute to sociological understandings of the global governance of border-crossing population movements and comparative studies in the sociology of education.

This study contributes to theory and public policy in Canada and globally. It uses mixed methodology and triangulation of evidence through policy documents(Bovey,Rae,Drummond),empirical studies and surveys(ranking,NSSE data,regression), CAUT/AUCC and Statistics Canada sources and qualitative sources - writings of university presidents (Bok,Kerr,Fallis),researchers (Rajagopal, Clark et al.)as well,talks with sessionals,teaching assistants and administrators. The framework consists of Altbach's four factors - democratization, the knowledge economy, globalisation and competition and three ideal types for university development - entrepreneurial, liberal education and deliberative. The thesis contrasts classical college with the modern university system. The results show strong evidence for research domination, mission drift and shift towards the entrepreneurial model. Quality is compromised by lowering requirements, compressed courses, less study time, large classes taught by sessionals and TAs, grade inflation and consumerist behaviour, while critical thinking and moral development are neglected.

Thesis (MPhil (Information Science))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / The knowledge economy is regarded by many authorities and policymakers as a significant and burgeoning aspect of the global economy. Yet there is no adequate theory of the production and exchange of knowledge; there is no adequate microeconomics of knowledge. In his 1995 work, titled Information Space, Max Boisot responds to this theoretical challenge by undertaking a bold and insightful project to lay the groundwork for just such an economics of knowledge. Boisot’s project entails two outcomes: an interwoven set of paradigmatic-ontological antecedents as a philosophical foundation; and a general theoretical framework, the Information-space (I-space), for understanding the economising principles that underlie the creation and distribution of information and knowledge. Boisot does not put forward an economics of knowledge per se. Rather, he sets out to lay the philosophical and general theoretical foundations for such an economic theory. Among Boisot’s paradigmatic-ontological antecedents is a commitment to evolutionary thinking. This is extended and adopted as a more specific commitment in the explication of the I-space. Thus, Boisot’s commitment to evolution is not trivial, and the I-space should be evolutionary in a strict sense. This thesis focuses on the I-space as an evolutionary framework and is a conceptual assessment of the I-space in relation to generalized Darwinism as the dominant contemporary conception of what it means to be evolutionary. The I-space is taken seriously as an explanatory framework, but it is assessed on its own terms as a general theory that is not amenable to a Popperian refutationist assessment. Thus, the I-space is construed as a putative evolutionary explanatory framework for an economics of knowledge. Contemporary evolutionary thinking has a long history, and is both pluralistic and polemical. However, a generalized Darwinian framework is discernable in the various applications of Darwinism in biology, evolutionary economics and evolutionary epistemology, and in the discourse of generalized Darwinism. The derivation – or extraction – of such a framework and its set of criteria is, nevertheless, a challenging task since it is not always clear what evolution and Darwinism entail conceptually, and there is no unanimity of opinion in the literature. This thesis is an attempt to identify the core logical criteria of generalized Darwinism that may be used to assess the I-space as a putative global evolutionary explanation. Though it does incorporate, or satisfy, many of the criteria identified, the I-space fails to satisfy two of them, and this thesis therefore concludes that the I-space is not a global generalized Darwinian framework. Firstly, and most importantly in terms of the conceptual hierarchy of generalized Darwinism, the I-space defines ex ante a finite set of attributes – degree of abstraction and degree of codification – as constitutive of global fitness. In other words, it regards the traits of abstraction and codification to be both necessary and sufficient to explain the differential diffusion of knowledge. Although evolutionary theory is of predictive value in local evolutionary situations, it is argued in this thesis that it is inadmissible in a global Darwinian evolutionary situation to specify ex ante the selection criteria in terms of a finite set of traits and to predict global evolutionary outcomes on that basis. In doing so, the I-space ignores the inherent contingency of the evolutionary process. More specifically, it ignores the contingency of knowledge creation and diffusion in a varied and changing environment, and makes exogenous to the I-space other factors that may also be of selective significance. Secondly, and closely related, is that the I-space does not define populations according to shared exposure to selection pressure; rather, knowledge is stratified according to shared attributes along the I-space dimensions of abstraction and codification. This presents a conceptual problem for the I-space, since it is conceivable that knowledge objects of the same degree of abstraction and codification may be directed at entirely different phenomenal domains and thus cannot be taken to be competing; conversely, knowledge objects of different degrees of abstraction and codification may be directed at the same phenomena and should thus be taken as competing. The primary implication of this outcome is that, from a Darwinian point of view, the I-space, as a local evolutionary explanation, cannot serve as a general theory for an evolutionary economics of knowledge. It may give rise to other local theories, but it will not support the development of an economics of knowledge that would operate at a higher level of generality than the I-space. A second implication, also from a strict Darwinian point of view, is that evolutionary general theory may be explanatory, but it may not be predictive; evolutionary theories may indeed predict at the local level, but not at the global level. The final implication is that the search for a microeconomics of knowledge continues, and will become more urgent as the knowledge economy unfolds, and as our ability to quantify it improves.