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Transitioning engineering knowledge to practice is critical for the success of a working engineer. Decision-Based learning (DBL) provides a path for developing this capability during the educational experience rather than relying on post-educational experiences in the field. In this chapter, DBL is framed in the context of an engineering educational experience, with a discussion of how certain attributes of engineering and DBL can complement each other. An overall class structure conducive to implementing DBL instruction methods is presented. A possible process for defining an expert decision model (EDM) for engineering topics is explored. This type of decision model can help communicate and teach students the small decisions that culminate to an expert conclusion on a topic, giving the student a clear way to justify analysis and design decisions. An EDM for selecting of a static failure theory with an accompanying learning module and representative assignment problems that accompany the module are presented. The implementation of a DBL approach in an engineering classroom is discussed, and reflections are given about the experience for both the instructor and the students.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

The strategic management literature emphasizes the concept of business intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well researched. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage. Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy, and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.

This research uses combination of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. The chapter presents a qualitative field study to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. The study includes a survey study with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by partial least square-based structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management have an opportunity to realize the dream of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. The most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social, and environmental issues.

This study contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

The school-to-prison pipeline is a term used to describe the pathway traveled by students from public schools to incarceration in secure juvenile detention and correctional programs. It begins with students who are marginalized by the education system because of their academic and behavioral issues. The pipeline leads from school failure and disciplinary exclusion to involvement with the juvenile justice system. Youth who are ethnic minorities (especially those who are African-American or Hispanic) as well as those with educational disabilities (especially those with learning and behavioral disorders) are significantly overrepresented in data sets representing key points along the pipeline (e.g., students with poor academic achievement, high rates of suspension, expulsion, and dropout) as well as their high rates of incarceration. From his personal perspective and experience with the juvenile justice system, the author attempts to explicate the pipeline, and to describe efforts to impact it positively.

The five-factor model (FFM), a popular personality typology that identifies five key personality traits, has been used to predict use intention in various e-commerce applications, but the role of FFM in triggering certain evaluations of the various quality dimensions of e-commerce websites has not been examined, revealing a gap, i.e. the authors do not know how the five personality traits impact evaluations of the quality dimensions of e-commerce websites. The 3Q model—which comprises system quality (SysQ), information quality (IQ), and service quality (SQ), spanning 13 quality dimensions—is helpful for evaluating website quality, but the model neglects user characteristics and their impacts on quality evaluation, posing another gap, i.e. the authors do not know how user characteristics impact the user's evaluation of quality dimensions. Thus, the authors used the FFM to extend the 3Q model to explain how user personality predicts the evaluation of websites in the 13 quality dimensions.

The authors used an online survey to collect responses from 392 online shoppers. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

The authors found that openness in a shopper predicts their favorable evaluation of a website in the quality dimensions of format and flexibility; conscientiousness predicts favorable evaluation in terms of completeness, accuracy, currency, timeliness, and service reliability; neuroticism predicts unfavorable evaluation in terms of reliability, accessibility, and assurance; and extraversion predicts favorable evaluation in terms of responsiveness; while agreeableness did not predict empathy.

In sum, the authors successfully used the FFM to theoretically extend the 3Q model, which clarifies the usefulness and pathways of personality in formulating strategies for e-commerce success.

To explain the origin of novel strategies I elaborate the managerial judgment perspective as an alternative to the serendipity and managerial foresight views on the origin of novel strategies proposed in the earlier literature. The managerial judgment perspective closely integrates resource-based theories and theories of managerial cognition. It builds centrally on the construct of “management’s theory of success” as a representation of managers’ beliefs and expectations concerning the factors that lead to desired outcomes in the light of Knightean uncertainty and that is formed through learning from small samples over time. The managerial judgment perspective may be seen as a theory that explains the formation of strategies independently from their eventual performance, but may also shed light on the cognitive antecedents of superior performance. It also argues for a conception of strategic agency in terms of ecological rationality.

Purpose – Are members of socially dominant groups aware of the privileges they enjoy? We address this question by applying the notion of hypocognition to social privilege. Hypocognition is defined as lacking a rich cognitive or linguistic representation (i.e., a schema) of a concept in question. By social privilege, we refer to advantages that members of dominant social groups enjoy because of their group membership. We argue that such group members are hypocognitive of the privilege they enjoy. They have little cognitive representation of it. As a consequence, their social advantage is invisible to them.

Approach – We provide a narrative review of recent empirical work demonstrating and explaining this lack of expertise and knowledge in socially dominant groups (e.g., White People, men) about discrimination and disadvantage encountered by other groups (e.g., Black People, Asian Americans, women), relative what members of those other groups know.

Findings – This lack of expertise or knowledge is revealed by classic cognitive psychological measures. Relative to members of other groups, social dominant group members generate fewer examples of discrimination that other groups confront, remember fewer instances after being presented a list of them, and are slower to respond when classifying whether these examples are discriminatory.

Social Implications – These classic measures of cognitive expertise about social privilege predict social attitude differences between social groups, specifically whether people perceive the existence of social privilege as well as believe discrimination still exists in contemporary society. Hypocognition of social privilege also carries implications for informal interventions (e.g., acting “colorblind”) that are popularly discussed.

This study was designed to be an agonistic encounter between two pre-service teachers from different academic disciplines and with opposing climate change beliefs. The purpose of this study was to create an opportunity for this pair of future educators to voice, acknowledge and engage their differences, rather than avoid or skirt them.

Using a paired interview approach, two pre-service teachers discussed online sources about climate change. The analysis focuses on critical literacy practices of textual critique and reader reflexivity, considering how students from different beliefs and perspectives engage in agonism and negotiated practices.

While there was evidence of the two students engaged in critical literacy practices of textual critique, most of this engagement with the sources remained more at a surface level with somewhat superficial criteria to evaluate the sources. The two students engaged reflexively during the interview discussion in terms of their academic disciplines and climate change beliefs. This reflexive work produced the most compelling exchanges during the interview discussion and pointed to two rich sites for agonistic engagement: their differing conceptions of reliability and their competing perspectives about the intersection of science and politics.

Agonism offers a lens that helps ensure we understand that all pursuits toward facts and truth are necessarily contested as we engage with respected adversaries, not enemies we need to vanquish. There is an urgent need for dialogue across difference, especially for people in the increasingly polarized USA with complex topics and challenges such as climate change.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.