Knowledge Management: Concepts, Practices and Effects

Knowledge Management: Concepts, Practices and Effects Abstract Today Information Technology is gaining new heights with greater leaps. This enables new age managers to develop newer tools to manage business better. IT has not only expedited the intra and inter organizational communication but also enabled us to manage a lot of data effectively. Knowledge management is emerging as a key management tool for the new century. Although it can be defined in a variety of ways, the process of organizing knowledge in order to get a sustainable development can be termed as Knowledge management. It consists of identification, representation, distribution, application and utilization of available knowledge to get improved performance. Knowledge Management in a company is carried out by systematically organizing the intellectual capital to achieve its business goals. The intellectual capital means the companys intangible assets which increase its valuation. The Core competencies of a company go together with the sustainable competitive advantage. This report explains the process of Knowledge Management to bring in Competitive advantage in the Indian IT industry. It also elaborates on the methods on how innovation can be encouraged in the company. Further, the challenges for KM like resistance to culture change and tacit knowledge sharing are discussed. In India companies have started taking knowledge management as an important aspect as it not only gives a good working culture but also improves the return on investments eventually. However, there is still a good scope of improvement in the field of Knowledge management for the Indian IT industry. The research uses questionnaires and interpretations from interviews to collect primary data .Though it gives a comprehensive analysis, it leaves a further scope for research in the field. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION Knowledge Management is relatively new buzz in the corporate world. It is a tool developed to safeguard the organization from competition in future. Apparently, the physical assets and tangible capacities are not sufficient to sustain a competitive advantage in todays market place. What make difference in the long run are the intangible assets, such as Brands, Intellectual property, knowledge etc. These assets can not be bought but have to be created within organization, by the members of organization over a period of time. Aim The aim of this report is to identify and analyse the concepts and current practices of Knowledge management in order to recommend ways of propelling innovation and competitive advantage within the companies. Objective The Research Objective is to Get a comprehensive idea of the current Knowledge Management practises. Identify and analyse the challenges faced by the organizations in implementing Knowledge Management Know the ways of how companies can propel innovation and competitive advantage. Recommendations in order to improve the company culture. Suggest the methods to attain sustainable competitive advantage handling the challenges faced. Key Questions The guiding principal of my research is as follows How do companies integrate KM with their company policies? How change should be initiated? What are the levels of hierarchy? When the change does actually happen? Is KM just for innovation, competitive advantage or more? Are rewards and recognition the way to drive KM? What are the basic challenges for KM? Research Approach The research philosophy is Positivism Philosophy that involves working with an observable social reality. The emphasis is on highly structured methodology to facilitate replication, and the end product can be law-like generalisations similar to those produced by the physical and natural scientists. (Saunders, 2000) This research contains mainly qualitative data collection methods for both primary and secondary data. Primary data was obtained by interviewing the key people of some of the IT companies in India. Questionnaire was designed to get the views of the employees working in the IT industry. Questionnaires were also designed and used to obtain primary data. The response of these questionnaires is being used in order to obtain a particular result in the form of percentage. The secondary data has been collected through books, journals, websites, etc. All of the research methods will be discussed in further detail in the relevant chapter. Research Outcomes The key outcome of this research would be a perfect understanding of the knowledge management practises and to know how companies use it in India for competitive advantage and innovation. Thus using this knowledge the researcher expects to identify main problems in the current trends and evaluate solutions for them. Finally, it also determines the difference between being a multinational corporation (MNC) and small to medium enterprise (SME) with respect to knowledge management. CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY This chapter describes the research methodology adopted for the report. To start with, this report elaborates on the research philosophy Positivism, moving on towards the various stages of research like primary and secondary data collection methods. The reasons behind selecting the particular method are also explained in the report. 2.1 Approach This report includes both primary and secondary data collected from various sources. Secondary data refers to data already collected by someone else and primary data is collected for a specific purpose by the researcher (Saunders, 2000).The research philosophy is Positivism Philosophy that involves working with an observable social reality. The emphasis is on highly structured methodology to facilitate replication, and the end product can be law-like generalisations similar to those produced by the physical and natural scientists. (Saunders, 2000) 2.1.1 Research Strategy: This research is based on the quantitative research strategy which involves collection of data from various sources. It also proposes to collect some primary data through interviews and questionnaires from people from the IT industry in India. A survey is a method whereby a sample of subjects is drawn from a population and studied to make analysis about the population. The survey strategy enables the researcher to collect a large amount of data in a highly efficient way. 2.1.2 Sample Size: For the interviews there was no such constraint of number of questions. The interviewees were asked questions in order to know the KM practices in their organization. In case of the questionnaires due to restrictions of time and access, only 500 questionnaires were distributed to various IT company employees. The reason for distributing the questionnaires to the employees from all the levels and department was to get a clear idea of how employees take the concept of Knowledge management at their workplace. 2.2 Research Stages 2.2.1 Secondary Data Collection: The first stage of the research was a critical literature review to obtain the secondary data. Secondary data collected includes the information and concepts from books, journals and websites based on Knowledge management, Organisational behaviour, Knowledge Integration etc. The list of various sources referred can be viewed from the relevant chapter of the report. Access to the books and journals was through Coventry University Library and electronic library databases like FAME, Engineering Village2 etc. Case studies of various companies as mentioned in the appendices were analysed by the researcher in order to get the relevant information and to decide on certain concepts considering them as the evidences. 2.2.2 Interviews: The second stage of the research was to interview some key people of various IT companies in India. Selection of these companies for the interview was done on the basis of how KM practices are being carried out there. These vary from the Market leaders to the new entrants in the IT industry. Many companies are such that they have been practising good KM processes since a long time, but a few have just started to get into it. This was done so because it gave researcher a clear idea of the current scenario in the Indian IT industry. Selecting the best companies alone would not have helped in introducing the scope of improvement for the research. The interviews were face to face interviews and the researcher has written down the important points from the session. The people who have been interviewed were mainly the Knowledge Management Executives in the companies. These were the people who knew exactly what processes are being practised in the company, so interviewing them was the best way to get the details about the KM practices in the companies. Their designations were like senior knowledge officers, Chief knowledge officers etc. Confidentiality was requested by the interviewees so company names are not mentioned anywhere. 2.2.3 Questionnaires: The final stage for primary data collection was through questionnaires. The questionnaires designed were distributed to the employees of junior level in the IT companies. It had just 10 questions but they were selected in such a way that the they would serve the main purpose of the survey to understand the current scenario in Indian IT industry among that class of employee by whom the KM practices are expected to follow. Questions selected were simple to answer so that the respondents are interested in answering till the end of the questionnaire. This also makes it possible to collect maximum responses. These questionnaires were not passed on to the management level or the KM people as the interviews were carried out with them. The researcher wanted to extract information from the employees in the Indian IT companies regarding their views about the Knowledge Management processes in their companies. This was also helpful in getting an overview of the facts about the how aware the Ind ian corporate world is in regards with knowledge management. CHAPTER 3: CRITICAL LITRATURE REVIEW 3.1 Introduction 3.1.1. What is knowledge? Definition of knowledge provided by Schulz (2001) beginning with the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary: ‘knowledge is what has been learned from experience or study. Knowledge is a broad concept that usually includes insights, interpretations, and information. Organizational knowledge refers to knowledge and information that all, part, or parts of the organization share, and that is frequently stored in standard operating procedures, routines, or rules. Today, knowledge has emerged and is accepted as the most critical resource available to an organization (Bartlett and Ghosal 1993, Davenport and Prusak 1995, Drucker 1993, Leonard-Barton 1992, Nonaka 1991, Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995, Nonaka et al. 2001, Stewart 1997 and 2001, Toffler 1990 and World Bank 1998). Knowledge can be defined as the understanding of a concept gained by education, experience or even by mere observation. To acquire knowledge means processing of information with the help of learning, communication, perception, reasoning and linking. It is the theoretical or practical understanding of information and facts which is obtained by correctly processing the raw data. Here arises the need to understand the difference between data, information and knowledge. Data is the collection of certain facts or values about a particular concept. Information is the processing done on data using relevant theory. The organization of data is nothing but information. The extraction of information on the basis of proper understanding is Knowledge. This can be further explained by considering an example of solving a quadratic equation. The variables are in the form of information, a value of the variable is data and the operation we carry out with them for calculating the answer is our knowledge. The following figure shows the DIKW (Data Information Knowledge Wisdom) hierarchy as stated by Clark, 2004. Figure 1: The DIKW hierarchy (Clark, 2004) Knowledge is generally personal, subjective and inherently local it is found â€Å"within the heads of employees† (www.ichnet.org/glossary.htm 2004) 3.1.2 Classification of Knowledge: Knowledge can be classified as: 1. Tacit Knowledge This type of knowledge is hard to formulate and communicate because it is gained by experience. Tacit knowledge is personnel and context specific. People carry tacit knowledge in their brain, thus it is not easy to share it. There is no systematic approach to store tacit knowledge as people are many times unaware of their tacit knowledge. However it is the most valuable form of knowledge as it is can be acquired only by experience and is not easily found written anywhere. 2. Explicit Knowledge Explicit knowledge is transmittable into a formal systematic language with the help of tacit knowledge. Thus, the codification of ones tacit knowledge results into explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be in the form of books, manuals, notes, documents etc. The definition of some phenomenon is the explicit part whereas the practical understanding behind the phenomenon is tacit. 3. Embedded Knowledge The knowledge contained in some kind of physical form is known as embedded knowledge. For example the design of an artefact gives us the basic idea of where it can be used. 3.1.3 Knowledge Management. Knowledge management is defined as the process of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge and share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of organization and its partners. This means providing access to information at the time people need it to make the best decisions possible for mission safety and success. According to Wally Block of The Intranet Journal, the following points make up the generalized term: Knowledge Management. Knowledge management is the way that organizations create, capture and reuse knowledge to achieve organizational objectives. Knowledge management can also be defined as a process with four parts that comprise a loop. Knowledge is created. This happens in the heads of people. Knowledge is captured. It is put on paper in a report, entered into a computer system of some kind or simply remembered. Knowledge is classified and modified. The classification can be the addition of keywords; it may be indexing. Modification can add context, background or other things that make it easier to reuse later. The test of this steps success is to determine how easily people in the organization will be able to find and use the knowledge when they need it. Knowledge is shared. When knowledge is shared and used, its modified by the folks who use it. This takes us back to knowledge creation. The process of organizing knowledge in order to get a sustainable development can be termed as Knowledge management. It consists of identification, representation, distribution, application and utilization of available knowledge to get improved performance. Knowledge Management in a company is carried out by systematically organizing the intellectual capital to achieve its business goals. The intellectual capital means the companys intangible assets which increase its valuation. 3.2. Knowledge Creation: According to Nonaka â€Å"the key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge†. The process of Knowledge creation is done my transformation of tacit and explicit forms thus giving rise to four forms of transformations. This can be further explained with the help of the following diagram: Fig: Nonakas Spiral model. Source: Nonaka, I.   (1991)   The knowledge creating company. Harvard Business Review, 69, (Nov-Dec) Tacit to Tacit: Socialization Team meetings are held to share the experiences of the team members. This provides everyone to share their ideas and also solution of similar problem in the past can be used. Tacit to Explicit: Externalization This can be done by having question answer sessions. Here the senior employees are capable of solving the queries of their juniors. Explicit to Explicit: Combination Sharing of documents is the best example of this type of transformation. The case studies, notes etc can be exchanged in order to have a faster creation of knowledge. Explicit to Tacit: Internalization Internalization can be done by reading and understanding documents prepared by others. Extracting knowledge from an e-mail received from a colleague is the best example of this. 3.3 Knowledge Capture 3.4 Knowledge Sharing The World Bark (1998) identifies and discusses the most important decisions that an organization must make in establishing its knowledge management program. These are: Deciding with whom to share; deciding what to share; deciding how to share; and deciding to share. 3.5 Learning Organization: A Learning Organization is one in which people at all levels, individually and collectively, are continually increasing their capacity to produce results they really care about. The learning organization focuses on enhancing its systems (including people) to continually increase the organizations capacity for performance. The concept of learning organization can be better understood by considering the following points: Development An organization learns many important aspects of business, skills and technology during the process of learning. For an organization to grow in a competitive world, it is very important to never let the learning process end. 3.5.2 Levels of learning: Aligning learning with corporate priorities Designing learning for maximum impact Using e-business technologies to enable formal and informal interactions Obtaining recognition by the entire organization that learning is a critical enabler to success Community of Practice Ardichvili, Page and Wentling (2003) study community of practice at Caterpillar Inc and find that when employees view knowledge as a public good belonging to the whole organization, it flows easily. However, even when individuals give the highest priority to the interest of the organization and of their community, they tend to shy away from contributing knowledge out of fear of criticism or misleading the community members. Trust increases knowledge sharing. Essex (2000) discusses a study titled .Beyond knowledge Management: New ways to Work and Learn undertaken by the Conference Board in New York in early 2000. It says that management support and corporate culture, not technology, drive successful KM projects. CHANGE what draws people to share varies from organization to organization and matches the core values and other processes. Alignment with the current culture and a practical purpose to share is, specifically, what draws people most strongly to share knowledge. (Blue http://gbr.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/7/1/119) The concept of a community of practice (often abbreviated as CoP) refers to the process of social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem collaborate over an extended period to share ideas, find solutions, and build innovations Communities of Action Communities of Circumstance Communities of Interest Communities of Position Communities of Purpose (Source: Shin and Bickel (2008) in Chris Kimble and Paul Hildreth (2008). Communities of Practice: Creating Learning Environments for Educators. Information Age Publishing) Obstacles Performance Management NECESSITY OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT A systematic capture, transfer, and use of internal and external know-how are a vital part of any business strategy. With no common processes for sharing information among employees, partners, and customers, limited information exchange will occur among suppliers and the engineering, manufacturing, and service functions. Consequently, the organization will experience ineffective design reuse, and product launch mistakes will be repeated. If there is no company standard expertise locator or people finder, then the inability to locate subject matter experts will result in lost opportunities, lost time, and being incapable of applying the right resources to significant problems. And with too many different systems, proposals, and pricing sheets, sales representatives cannot have access to information they need when they need it. This can prolong the sales cycle and lead to less-than-best sales solutions offered to the client With retirement and turnover, knowledge is walking out the door everyday. New hires do not have the benefit of past experiences and lessons learned, yet their time-to-competence needs to be compressed. Mergers and acquisitions result in two bodies of knowledge and expertise and two cultures that must assimilate quickly. Portals and e-business are drivers of knowledge management. People want information they can use and trust from a single point of access. Also, an often neglected point is that customers want access to your knowledge and to their business transactions with you. Another driving factor is e-learning. Firms now must know where and how knowledge is really being created and acquired. Knowledge management can set the framework for how learning fits into the overall picture of developing employees and making them productive. The key component of a good knowledge management system is the content itself. If the knowledge management system does not provide users with timely, accurate information, inform them of best practices, and link them to expertise, organizations will not realize the full value of their investment in the system. One of the key steps in the strategic design of knowledge management systems is identifying the information already in use within an organization.   Although, in theory, an effective knowledge management system is a central database of data, information, and knowledge contained within the organization, the act of actually creating, maintaining, and using such a central repository is a challenge in practical terms. One of the many benefits of knowledge management is the learning that occurs when a user takes a piece of information from one place, personally transforms it, and creates something new. Although the designers and developers of the knowledge management system can facilitate this type of learning by encouraging those who have the knowledge to capture it, and by designing a system that links end users to information that they might find helpful, neither the designers nor the developers could have planned or predicted such this particular act of learning. It happened informally, without the guidance of an instructor and without the suggestion of a designer.† (Carliner, section 1) Knowledge Management takes advantage of a companys information experience and expertise to serve customers better and respond quickly to changing marketing conditions. Successful companies build a corporate environment that fosters a desire for knowledge among their employees and that ensures its continual application, distribution and creation.   Less successful companies tend to take a top down approach: pushing knowledge to where it is needed.   Besides creating an environment that encourages knowledge pull, successful companies excel in applying, distributing, and creating knowledge.   (Hauschild, 2001) Companies link all their information together and build models that improve processes, product and customer relations.   Such companies understand that true knowledge management requires them to develop ways of making workers aware of those links and goes beyond infrastructure to touch almost every aspect of business. COMPONENTS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM â€Å"The key component of a good knowledge management system is the content itself. If the knowledge management system does not provide users with timely, accurate information, inform them of best practices, and link them to expertise, organizations will not realize the full value of their investment in the system. One of the key steps in the strategic design of knowledge management systems is identifying the information already in use within an organization.   Although, in theory, an effective knowledge management system is a central database of data, information, and knowledge contained within the organization, the act of actually creating, maintaining, and using such a central repository is a challenge in practical terms. One of the many benefits of knowledge management is the learning that occurs when a user takes a piece of information from one place, personally transforms it, and creates something new. Although the designers and developers of the knowledge management system can facilitate this type of learning by encouraging those who have the knowledge to capture it, and by designing a system that links end users to information that they might find helpful, neither the designers nor the developers could have planned or predicted such this particular act of learning. It happened informally, without the guidance of an instructor and without the suggestion of a designer.† Knowledge Management takes advantage of a companys information experience and expertise to serve customers better and respond quickly to changing marketing conditions. Successful companies build a corporate environment that fosters a desire for knowledge among their employees and that ensures its continual application, distribution and creation.   Less successful companies tend to take a top down approach: pushing knowledge to where it is needed.   Besides creating an environment that encourages knowledge pull, successful companies excel in applying, distributing, and creating knowledge. Companies link all their information together and build models that improve processes, product and customer relations.   Such companies understand that true knowledge management requires them to develop ways of making workers aware of those links and goes beyond infrastructure to touch almost every aspect of business. ENTERPRISE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Enterprise knowledge management entails formally managing knowledge resources in order to facilitate access and reuse of knowledge, typically by using advanced information technology. KM is formal in that knowledge is classified and categorized according to a prespecified—but evolving—ontology into structured and semi structured data and knowledge bases. The overriding purpose of enterprise KM is to make knowledge accessible and reusable to the enterprise. Knowledge resources vary for particular industries and applications, but they generally include manuals, letters, summaries of responses to clients, news, customer information, competitor intelligence, and knowledge derived from work processes. A wide range of technologies are being used to implement KM systems: e-mail; databases and data warehouses; group support systems; browsers and search engines; intranets and internets; expert and knowledge-based systems; and intelligent agents. In artificial intelligence, knowledge bases are generated for consumption by so-called expert and knowledge-based systems, where computers use rule inference to answer user questions. Although knowledge acquisition for computer intervening is still important, most recent KM developments make knowledge available for direct human consumption or develop software that processes that knowledge. Historically, KM has been aimed at a single group—managers—through what has been generally referred to as an executive information system. An EIS contains a portfolio of tools such as drill-down access to databases, news source alerts, and other information— all aimed at supporting managerial decision making. More recently, however, KM systems are increasingly designed for entire organizations. If executives need access to information and knowledge, their employees are also likely to have an interest in and need for that information. In addition, KM technology is ideally suited for non management groups—such as customer support, where customer service requests and their solutions can be codified and entered into a database available to all customer service representatives. IMPLEMENTING KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT As organizations store an increasing amount of information and knowledge in data and knowledge warehouses and in data and knowledge bases, they are attempting to manage that knowledge in more efficient ways. Historically, organizational knowledge has been stored on paper and in peoples minds. Unfortunately, paper has limited accessibility and is difficult to update. And when people leave, they take most of their knowledge with them, so reuse is not always feasible. Thus, firms have moved to data and knowledge warehouses and to data and knowledge bases to improve accessibility, updatability, and achievability of data and knowledge. Data warehouses In many companies, one of the first KM tools is a data warehouse. A data warehouse acts as a central storage area—a warehouse—for an organizations transaction data. Data warehouses differ from traditional transaction databases in that they are designed to support decision making rather than simply efficiently capturing transaction data. Typically, data warehouses contain multiple years of transaction databases stored in the same database. Data warehouses are not updated on a transaction-by-transaction basis. Instead, the entire database is updated periodically. The size of data warehouses can be substantial. A leading bank in US has a 560-Gbyte data warehouse, for example, and MasterCard On-Line is a 1.2- Tbyte database available to member companies for a fee. With all the data accessible in one place, relationships between data elements can be more effectively explored. Users can browse the data or establish queries, though this type of analysis generally results only in knowledge for particular individuals. An alternative approach is to use a process called knowledge discovery to determine whether there is additional knowledge hidden in the data. Knowledge warehouses Rather than the kind of quantitative data typical of data warehouses, knowledge warehouses are aimed more at qualitative data. KM systems generate knowledge from a wide range of databases including Lotus Notes databases, data warehouses, work processes, news articles, external databases, Web pages (both internal and external), and people. Thus, knowledge warehouses are likely to be virtual warehouses where the knowledge is dispersed across a number of servers. In some cases, a Web browser can be used as an interface to a relational database. For example, Ford Research and Development uses a browsable Oracle database. The database contains manuals and design rules, specifications, and requirements. A

Linguistics and Language

1. The underlying assumptions, theories, and methods used by psychologiest, linguists, and researchers are believed to strongly affect the way each defines psycholinguistics. Please discuss some different conceptions of psycholinguistics in its relation to other branches of linguistics. Then, define yours. One of your reference should be â€Å"fundamentals of Pyscholinguistics by Fernandez and Cairns (2010)†OPsycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study in which the goals are to understand how people acquire language, how people use language to speak and understand one another, and how language is represented and processed in the brain. Psycholinguistics is primarily a sub-discipline of psychology and linguistics, but it is also related to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, and speech science (Fernandez: 2011). OPsycholinguistics examines the psychology of language; psycholinguistics is the name given to the study of the psychological processes involved in language.Psycholinguists study understanding, producing, and remembering language, and hence are concerned with listening, reading, speaking, writing, and memory for language. (Harley, Trevor A. 2001. The Psychology of Language. ) O†Psycholinguistic studies have revealed that many of the concepts employed in the analysis of sound structure, word structure, and sentence structure also play a role in language processing. However, an account of language processing also requires that we understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other aspects of human processing to enable language production and comprehension. ( William O'Grady, et al. , Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001 O†Psycholinguistics, there is a constant exchange of information between psycholinguists and those working in neurolinguistics, who study how language is represented in the brain. There are also close links with studies in artificial intel ligence. Indeed, much of the early interest in language processing derived from the AI goals of designing computer programs that can turn speech into writing and programs that can recognize the human voice. (John Field, Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2003) OPsycholinguistics refers to the efforts of both linguists and psychologists to explain whether certain hypotheses about language acquisition and language competence as proposed by contemporary linguistic theories (e. g. : transformational generative grammar) have a real basis in terms of : perception, memory, intelligence, motivation, etc. (Hartmann and stork: 1973) Oâ€Å"†¦.. psycholinguists are interested in the underlying knowledge and abilities which people must have in order to use language in childhood.I say â€Å"underlying knowledge and abilities† because language, like all systems of human knowledge, can only be inferred from the careful study of overt behavior. † (Dan Isa ac Slobin: 1979) OBased on my reading, Psycholinguistics is study about language acquisition, language used one another, and study how language is represented and processed in the brain. Psycholinguistics is primarily a sub-discipline of psychology and linguistics, but it is also related to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, and speech science. . Linguistic analysis might use similar language data or language corpuses as the object of analysis. Please give an example of language use which can be analyzed from different point of view, particularly from semantics, pragmatics, socialinguistics, discourse analysis, and psycholinguistics. Support your answer in term of their focuses of analysis. How are they similar, different, and how are they related one other. Linguistics study about human language as communication. In other hand, linguistics as fild of study that the object is language. Semantics is one of study that hand-in-hand with pragmatics. specia lizing in semantics studies, languageis study about the meaning of words, that is influenced by the context in which the words are presented. Semantics study how words are given meaning by their structure, tone, and the situation in which they are used.  ·Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.  ·Pragmatics and semantics is different parts but the same general study. Both semantics and pragmatics are concerned with people’s ability to use language meaningfully.While semantics is concerned with a speaker’s competence to use the language system in producing meaningful utterances and processing (comprehending).  ·Sociolinguistics a close neighbour of psycholinguistics, can be defined as the linguistic study dealing with the functioning of language in society. Sociolinguitics has to do with the study of language from the viewpoint of how social, regional, individual and historical aspects influence the language and its use i n society which is specifically called speech community. OPsycholinguistics is the study of language acquisition and linguistic behavior.Psycholinguistics refers to the efforts of both linguists and psychologists to explain whether certain hypotheses about language acquisition and language competence as proposed by contemporary linguistic theories (e. g. : transformational generative grammar) have a real basis in terms of : perception, memory, intelligence, motivation, etc. (Hartmann and stork: 1973)  ·Discourse Analysis is approaches to analyzing written, vocal, or sign language use. discourse analysis is, like descriptive linguistics, a way of studying language.It may be regarded as a set of techniques, rather than a theoretically predetermined system for the writing of linguistic ‘rules'. (Yule, George. 1983. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). ‘Doing discourse analysis certainly involves doing syntax and semantic, but it primarily consists o f doing pragmatics. In discourse analysis, as in pragmatics, we are concerned with what people using language are doing, and accounting for the linguistic features in the discourse as the means employed in what they are doing. . The objects of psycholinguistic studeis are addressed to language production, acquisition, and comprehension. Could you explain how are the processes of the three language uses in term of psycholinguistics analysis.  ·Language production based on Levelt, speech production divided into four stage; I. Conceptualization and formulation Primitive linguistic concept about first conceptualized in human mind by David Mcneill stated that linguistic concepts are formed as two current and parallel modes of taught. These are syntactic thinking and imagistic thinking.Then syntactic thinking and imagistic thinking ellaborate to conceptualize conversation in which speech utterance and gestures to be tied together in time. But this concept has gone record. Formulation as the output of the process language production. Lashely stated that production and comprehension of speech is linear process. Based on tradition od examining speech production, sleep tangue as a window of the formulation process. II. slips of the tongue Slip of the tongue is normal mistake, it happen to catch the goof ourselve. Then we can immediately correct. Slip the tongue as the production process . ut this concept has gone record too. III. Articulation In this stage we consider about what happens when all of he information go from our brain to articulation. IV. Self-Monitoring Self – monitoring seems that as final stage. It is not only produce speech and listen one to another, but also to keep one ear open on what they themselve saying.  ·Language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words[-;0] and sentences[-;1] to communicate. Language acquisition began the same with the cognitive science at 1950’s.Chomsky argued that language acquisition falsified these beliefs in a single stroke: children learn languages that are governed by highly subtle and abstract principles, and they do so without explicit instruction or any other environmental clues to the nature of such principles. While Hence stated language acquisition depends on an innate, species-specific module that is distinct from general intelligence. Chomsky believes that every child has a ‘language acquisition device’ or LAD which encodes the major principles of a language and its grammatical structures into the child’s brain.In other point of view There are five stages in language acquisition stated by Chumbow and Adegbija (1984) such as babbling stage, the holophrastic stage, the two-word utterances, the telegraphic stage and recursive stage.  ·Language comprehension Clark and Clark argue that language comprehension is mental process by listeners ta ke in the sounds uttered by speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey. (Clark and Clark: 1977)In sum up, language comprehension is building the meaning from sounds.While Language comprehension is generally viewed in cognitive theory as con-sisting of active and complex processes in which individuals construct meaning from aural or written information (Anderson 1985; Byrnes 1984; Call 1985; Howard 1985; Pearson 1985; Richards, 1983). An-derson (1983, 1985) proposes that the mental processes necessary for comprehending aural and written texts are sufficiently similar that comprehension of both can generally be discussed as a common phe-nomenon. 4. Following Clark and Clark (1977), comprehension involves two processes-construction and utilization processes.The first is concerned with the way listeners construct an interpretation of a sentence from the speakers’ words. The second deals with how listeners utilize this int erpretation for further purposes for registering new infromation, answering questions, following orders, and registering promises. What really happens in our cognitive domains (memory) for both processes? Examplify your answer that the first happens earlier than the second OClark and Clark (1977) say that short-term memory is roughly related to the working memory in the construction process; long term memory is dealt with the process of utilization.In other word In short, short-term just focus on the surface of the utterance (how the sentence is constructed) while the long one concern on the meaning more (how the sentence is properly utilized). Outilization, consists of relating a mental represen-tation of the text meaning to declarative knowledge in long-term mem-ory. This process is referred to as elaboration in other descriptions of the reading process. Utilization is the key to comprehension and the basic determinant that facilitates it. In any mes-sage, there may be an interpla y between information we already know and information that is entirely new. . Production of a speech requires speakers to plan what to say before its execution. Theoritically, the plan begins firstly with discourse plan followed by sentence plan and, at last, constituent plan. What should be the underlying concepts of this order? In the execution of a speech plan, several mental activities happen, what are they? Explain your answer OSpeech production is the process by which spoken[-;2] words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics[-;3] formulated and then finally are articulated by the motor system[-;4] in thevocal apparatus[-;5].Speech production can be spontaneous such as when a person creates the words of a conversation[-;6], reaction such as when they name a picture or read[-;7] aloud a written word[-;8], or a vocal imitation such as in speech repetition[-;9]. Speech production is not the same as language production since language[-;10] can also be produced manually by signs[-;11]. The production of spoken language[-;12] involves three major levels of processing. The first is the processes of conceptualization[-;13] in which the intention[-;14] to create speech links a desired concept to a particular spoken word to be expressed.The second stage is formulation in which the linguistic[-;15] form required for that word's expression is created. This process involves such processes as the generation of a syntactic[->16] frame, and phonological[->17] encoding which specifies the phonetic[->18] form of the intended utterance, the third stage is articulation[->19] which involves the retrieval of the particular motor phonetics[->20] of a word and the motor coordination[->21] of appropriate phonation[->22] and articulation by the lungs, glottis, larynx, tongue[->23], lips[->24], jaw[->25], and other parts. Levelt, WJ (1999). â€Å"Models of word production. â€Å"[->26]. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3 (6): 223–232) 6. Children acquire language fas ter than adults’. Please give your arguments to agree or disagree to this statement. How do children use their utterance compared to adult. You should refer to, at least, four references. OChomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult’s speech is often broken up and even sometimes ungrammatical.In ways understanding and establish meaning in words, children and adults are different. Children tend to focus more on the superficial physical characteristics of an object when defining the prototype for an object and when comparing a stimulus to that prototype. Thus, children will gradually their understanding of an object. Steinberg at all (2001) conclude the progress started from vocalization to babbling, babbling to speech, naming and using holophrastic for one word utterances, and using telegraphic speech for two and three words utterances.Another exper t Mc Neill in Steinberg at all (2001:36) gives another opinion that the child who is learning language can compare the language that they have in their mind with what they hear from his parents. Children give priority to collocational links between words. For example, a child might respond with the word ‘night’ when told the word ‘dark’, whereas an adult more likely to respond with the word ‘light’ when presented with the same word ‘dark. Children may take time to discover the criteria by adult classify item as co-ordinates. 7.Language structure and language function can be seen differently by different scholars from the side of the meaning of an utterance. Please discuss your opinion about the function approach to meaning (the procedures and uses) Outterances has different meaning in context (including the situation, condition, location and the time in which the utterances are produced). For example : †Masak begitu saja jadi gila s ih? † this utterance May be in giving support or motivate somebody who just got disappointed or depressed. 8. Please quote a mass demonstrant’s discourse (at least consisting of ten sentences).Please analyze psycholinguisticly the discourse of the demonstrant by considering his/her mass psychology. ODemo guru bantu : ‘angkat kami jadi PNS. Kami telah lama mengabdi untuk negri ini. Kalau kami tidak diangkat jadi PNS, gaji kami tidak cukup untuk memenuhi kebutuhan primer kami. Yaitu kebutuhan hidup keluarga dan kebutuhan pendidikan anak-anak kami. Guru bantu perlu diperhatikan kesejahteraan hidupnya. Dari demo guru di atas terlihat semua individu memiliki kepentingan menjadi satu yaitu meminta kenaikan Gaji yang tidak sesuai standar untuk memenuhi kebutuhan utama.Dari kalimat demo di atas, setiap idividu guru lebih memiliki power yang lebih besar untuk meminta kenaikan gaji dikarekan mereka bersatu menjadi satu. OMass psychology is a branch of social psychology[->27 ]. Mass psychology is concerned with the behaviour and thought processes of individual mass members and the mass as a whole. The main idea of Sigmund Freud[->28]'s crowd behavior theory is that people who are in a crowd act differently towards people from those who are thinking individually.The minds of the group would merge to form a way of thinking. Each member's enthusiasm would be increased as a result, and one becomes less aware of the true nature of one's actions. Other major thinkers of crowd psychology include Rene Girard[-;29], Gustave Le Bon[-;30], Wilfred Trotter[-;31], Gabriel Tarde[-;32],Sigmund Freud[-;33], Elias Canetti[-;34], Steve Reicher[-;35] and Julia Constintine. 9. How do you agree (support) or disagree to the following ideas: a. language need not be taught, nor can it be suppressedOI agree that language need to be taught nor can be suppressed, Fernandez stated that language acquisition in the child is a naturally unfolding process, Every normal human acquires alinguistic system, and failure to do so is evidence for some sort of pathology. that children need to experience social, interactive language in order to acquire language. In fact, people acquire language at about the same speed during about the same age span, no matter what kind of cultural and social situation they grow up in. b. hildren everywhere acquire language on a similar developmental schedule OI agree that children everywhere acquire language on a similar developmental schedule. Based on (Fernandez: 2011) state that babies coo in the first half of their first year and begin to babble in the second half. The first word comes in the first half of the second year for just about everyone. In all societies, babies go through a one-word stage, followed by a period of early sentences of increasing length; finally, complex sentences begin. By the age of 5 the basic structures of the language are in place, although fine-tuning goes on until late child-hood.Children all over the wo rld are sensitive to the same kinds of language properties, such as word order and inflection. They make remarkably few errors, but their errors are of a similar type. While there is much individual variation in the age at which children acquire aspects of language, that variation is conditioned by individual char-acteristics of the child rather than by the language being acquired or the culture in which the language is used. c. language is universal in human being OI agree with that statement about there are close to 7,000 languages spoken in the world today and, on the surface, they differ greatly.However, there are profound similarities among the languages of the world – so many similarities, in fact, that human language can be thought of as a single entity. Language universals result from the way the human brain organizes and processes linguistic information: language universals are a product of human neurology. Thus, a person’s ability to acquire and use language is natural These universals do not derive from social, cultural, or general intellectual characteristics of humans. Instead, List of references: Clark, H. H. and E. V. Clark (1977): Psychology and Language, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.Fernandez, Eva M. (2011). Fundamental of psycholinguistics. Oxford. Wiley-Blackwell Steinberg, at all (2001): Psycholinguistic: Language, Mind, and World. Malaysia, Pearson Education. Scovel, T (2001): Psycholinguistics. Hong Kong, Oxford University Press. Yasin, Anas. (2010). Tindak Tutur: sebuah model gamatika komunikatif. Padang: Sukabina Press [-;0] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Word [-;1] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Sentence_(linguistics) [-;2] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Spoken [-;3] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Phonetic [-;4] – http://en. wikipedia. rg/wiki/Motor_system [-;5] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Vocal_apparatus [-;6] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Conversati on [-;7] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Reading_(process) [-;8] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Writing [-;9] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Speech_repetition [-;10] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Language [-;11] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Sign_language [-;12] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Spoken_language [-;13] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Conceptualization [-;14] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Intention -;15] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Language [-;16] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Syntactic [-;17] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Phonological [-;18] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Phonetic [-;19] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Manner_of_articulation [-;20] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Phonetics [-;21] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Motor_coordination [-;22] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Phonation [-;23] – http://en. wikip edia. org/wiki/Tongue [-;24] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Lip [-;25] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Jaw -;26] – http://www. columbia. edu/~rmk7/HC/HC_Readings/Levelt. pdf [-;27] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Social_psychology [-;28] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud [-;29] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard [-;30] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon [-;31] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Wilfred_Trotter [-;32] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Gabriel_Tarde [-;33] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud [-;34] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Elias_Canetti [-;35] – http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Steve_Reicher

Corning Glass

Case Studies Corning Glass Background Corning Glass is a large, multinational organization involved in glass and related products with an increasing emphasis on high-value, technologically-specialized products, many of which are now part of joint-venture programmes and developments. Innovation ‘Claim to Fame’ This firm is another of the ‘100 club’, having been founded back in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a pioneer in process innovation enabling high-volume manufacture of glass, but in the twentieth century moved into developments of specialized glasses which led through to a variety of product/process innovation links.It has successfully managed to avoid the commoditization of its core products by repeatedly climbing up the technological ladder to enter new and more difficult fields in which it can preserve competitive advantage. Its consistent investment in R&D has meant it has a ‘technology till’ into which it has been able to dip each t ime the company has faced crisis. At first perhaps by accident but in more recent times as a function of strategic design, they have built a capability for reinventing themselves – moving from a glassmaker to a fibreglass pioneer to a key player in photonics, fibre optics and moving into Internet services.How Do They Manage Innovation? Corning’s history is one of continuous innovation, much of it around process, but one which is also punctuated by breakthrough shifts into new and key areas. They have increasingly come to use external partners bringing new and often very different knowledge sets and have learnt to let go of their earlier reliance on doing it all in-house. Similarly they began life as a technology push company but some big mistakes, such as their expensive failure in trying to create a technology-driven market for automotive safety glass, led them to rethink and shift to a much more market-linked organization.A key stage came in the 1980s when they recog nized that growth and increasing diversification of innovation options required that they systematize their approach to its management – prior to that it had been a classic culture of individual champions driving a technology system. They identified their ability to ‘dance’ as being key to their innovation success – that is, getting different and complementary knowledge sets to come together around a new product concept and turn it into reality at high speed once the core principle had been articulated. Innovation Strategy and LeadershipThe company has always held innovation as a core strategic value, and they link this strongly to generating and managing intellectual property – their knowledge bank. ‘What really matters for innovation †¦ is continuous generation, management and deployment of intellectual property as a strategic asset’. This has been a boardroom issue on a number of occasions when the company has faced crisis †“ for example, when the market for television tubes declined and they were forced to make significant cutbacks  ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. om/college/tidd 1 Case Studies and changes – but it has helped them move forward each time into new technological and market fields . Their strategy until recently can be described as strongly technologyled but there has been a marked shift in the late-twentieth century, first to a marketoriented approach and most recently to a network-based model which sees key alliances as the way forward. A number of key strategic enablers are worth flagging: †¢ Consistent support for 150 years for the core values of innovation through knowledge generation and application Willingness to let go – to reinvent themselves by moving on from their proud heritage and into new fields †¢ Consistent commitment to R&D funding – typically it has run between 8 and 10% ever since the founding of the compan y when it was one of the first to set up an R&D lab . †¢ The use of ‘deep dive’ sessions – essentially strategic review meetings where the role as well as direction of R&D within the organization is explored and through which a close integration between this strong resource and key application domains can be achieved.These sessions helped shift the focus from a largely responsive, market-led business to one which was trying to set the pace through deploying key strategic technologies. Enabling the Process The company has a fairly ‘standard’ process for steady state innovation – using a version of a stage gate model to funnel development ideas through a well-resourced system designed to generate customized solutions to particular market needs. This has worked well for them in their traditional markets where the pace of change is relatively slow and where the envelope within which product development takes place is clearly defined.They have particularly good links between product development and manufacturing with feedback into the design process – a key theme emerging out of their early presence as a strong player in process technology innovation. Their move into new markets and less certain product/market definitions has meant that they are now experimenting with different routes to managing the ‘do different’ innovation process. These include: †¢ Learning with others – rather than trying to own all the resources, there has been a growing trend to network- and alliance-based product development.Their existing skill of being able to configure rapid response cross-functional teams has helped them in this process. †¢ Learning from new networks – allied to this has been a significant expansion of the selection environment in which they work, so that they explore much less familiar territory through their co-operation with a wide group of outside agencies in joint ventures and other collaborations. †¢ Related to this has been their extended use of technology sharing partnerships with major players which also had large but complementary R&D capabilities.Working with big players on complementary projects helps both partners move the frontier forward quickly by being able to focus resources.  ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 2 Case Studies Building an Innovative Organization †¢ Emphasizing knowledge flows across the organization and creating structures to †¢ †¢ †¢ †¢ enable creative interchanges amongst them. Strong core value of quality and continuous improvement.Deliberate attempt to create communities of practice – enable setting up of differentmix teams to bring some variety into the knowledge ‘gene pool’. Use of ‘storytelling’ as a mechanism to build and communicate shared memory and ‘collective ingenuity’. Development of ‘fle xible critical mass’ – the ability to quickly concentrate key human resources on high priority projects. This is underpinned by the storytelling since this quickly and effectively communicates and shares ‘good practice’ around how such teams can quickly form and perform.Linkages and Networking Corning has been involved in many joint ventures of a significant scale and their learning from these has led to a growing emphasis on actively building links as a key innovation strategy. They have a long tradition of R&D networking and co-operation – for example, much of their competence base in photonics arose out of close networks and collaborations made with institutes in the former Soviet Union which contained excellent science but lacked resources and access to development facilities.Reflection on the sources of their innovation success have led them to extend their ‘virtual’ global laboratory and they have developed sophisticated ways of h arvesting intellectual property from such collaborations without taking over or compromising the autonomy and independence of the laboratories and institutes with which they work. Learning and Capability Development A key development has been in the use of storytelling and other approaches to try and recapture the earlier strengths of the company which had, to some extent, been lost in the later part of the twentieth century.It provides an accepted and widely-used mechanism to ‘recapture grounded experience in the company itself’ – rather than have reliance on ‘best practice’ or other prescriptions delivered from outside. For more on Corning and the ways in which it manages innovation see M. Graham and A. Shuldiner, Corning and the Craft of Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).  ©2005 Joe Tidd, John Bessant, Keith Pavitt www. wileyeurope. com/college/tidd 3

Portrayal Of Immigrants In America. Out Of All The Stories

Portrayal of Immigrants in America Out of all the stories told throughout history, from caves to computers, never has there been one more dramatically scripted as the tale of the United States of America and her immigrants. Like a Shakespearean tragedy that never ends, this story is full of romantic plots dating back to its inception: with a heroic plight of a nation borne by gun-blazing revolution and glory; fueled by the brave journeys of immigrants, dreams, and a future paved in golden freedom. Unfortunately, tragic as its nature, this narrative has panned out awkwardly—seemingly worsened century by century. In present day America, the topic of immigrants, and immigration, is not a completely delightful one, but of politics and†¦show more content†¦This venture would continue for decades as the colonies watched and welcomed fleets and caravans of ships dock upon the countrysides. Each of them were pouring in vast amounts of new settlers, new immigrants, all finding themselves off in novel beginnings . From slave to scholar, America painstakingly filled up and began to prune itself into an opportunistic world of its own. By 1775, on the eve of the revolution, there was now a population of nearly 2.5 million (History). Here is where the tides turn, as the economical, sociological, and political landscapes of the colonies came to form a new ideology of freedom—much to the dismay of the previous European owners. America beckoned a call unto herself to be sole proprietor and true master of the land, so she bravely took up arms and fought for independence. Successful in the end, the colonies had now joined together in committed communion as The United States of America, and the people were no longer estranged immigrants, but native countrymen and women. It is from this timeline and onwards that the American identity found itself scuffling through the adolescence of what the 20th century philosopher Heidegger coined the thrownness of sovereign existence (Wheeler, 2011). For more than two centuries, the U.S. underwent countless battles on domestic and international fronts, slowly growing into its own skin. Where each fight forward was reflected by a remodeled versionShow MoreRelatedThe American dream, an idea spread throughout the world, that coming to the United States would900 Words   |  4 PagesThe American dream, an idea spread throughout the world, that coming to the United States would give people ultimate freedom and opportunity for prosperity, and success with hard work. James Truslow Adams once said in his book The Epic of America, â€Å"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. 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