Journal Article

In her introductory paper, the coordinator of this Special Issue puts the selection of subsequent contributions into context. Traditional industrial relations institutions, born of labour law's premise of unbalanced power relations between the worker and the employer, are being undermined by unprecedented global changes in patterns of work and forms of employment. This trend, compounded by the emergence of alternative forms of worker representation, poses a major challenge not only to conventional tradeunionism but also to policy and to industrial relations scholarship. This Special Issue is intended as a contribution to the ensuing, ongoing debate about the direction of future change.

Policy proposals promoting vocational education focus on the school-to-work transition. But with technological change, gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life. To test for this trade-off, we employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education. Using microdata for 11 countries from IALS, we find strong and robust support for such a trade-off, especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs. German Microcensus data and Austrian administrative data confirm the results for within-occupational-group analysis and for exogenous variation from plant closures, respectively.

The UK is in an historically unique period. During the 20th Century life expectancy gradually increased and the population slowly aged. Increases in life expectancy are driven by changing mortality rates and in particular the current decline in death rates amongst those over 65 is leading to an increase in the number and proportion of adults at very old ages. Population ageing, or age structural change, is driven primarily by low rates of childbearing, so that the average age of the population increases as fewer young people enter the population. As a result, not only are individuals living longer, they are doing so within a UK population which is in itself growing older. To grow old in a society where most people are young is fundamentally different from doing so in a society where most people are old (Harper 2016). In demographically young populations, there are high proportions of economically active individuals who may produce the wealth needed to support dependents, old and young. However, these societies may not place much emphasis on the wellbeing of older people as they comprise a small minority of the overall population. Conversely, demographically old populations have a lower proportion of economically active individuals and thus the responsibility of providing for old age dependency may be increasingly fall to the older person themselves. It is likely that the 21st century will see a continuation of these two distinct but related trends.

The purpose of this analysis is to describe the variation in students' reports of engagement in science across science teaching and learning activities. In addition, this study examines student and school characteristics that may be associated with students' levels of engagement in science. Data are drawn from the Programme for International Student Assessment 2006 study. The analysis employs a quantitative approach that includes descriptive and inferential statistics to examine three measures of student engagement for a nationally representative sample of approximately 12,000 15-year-old students in the UK. The main results indicate that there is an association between students' motivation towards science, enjoyment of science and future orientation towards science, and the frequency in which various teaching and learning activities take place in the classroom. Understanding student engagement in science and the factors that influence it is essential in addressing the issue of uptake of science after compulsory schooling.

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 22 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard- deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.

In the current economic context marked by the development of information and communications technology and the race for innovation, knowledge management (KM) has become the most important concern of any business B. Masson 1997 ). Indeed, the growing interest in innovation projects requires knowledge exchange increasingly rapid and complex in networks of actors. This places of interest are not the only dimension of innovation management but more knowledge management. Most models and tools developed GC are derived from modern information systems, they are interested in the role of production structures, circulation and storage of information. However, be limited to the integration of such systems can not be a relevant and effective way of managing innovation. Even the most sophisticated information systems (expert systems) and methods of capitalization (or feedback) the more formalized can not address the challenges of innovation. Indeed, the innovation management uses representations and practices of actors that seem close enough issues of management skills (C. Paraponaris, 2002). But this approach involves many ways to look at knowledge management (KM) for innovation: the systemic model (JL Le Moigne, 1990) focused on capitalizing and circulation of knowledge; the socio-cognitive model (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) highlights the collective creation of meaning within social groups involved in the innovation process; the pragmatic model (E. Wenger, 1998) emphasizes the collective practices as a source of creation of new knowledge. The development of the project management is a perfect example to create social bonds between members of the company (Mr. Ferrary, 2004). These three approaches can consider knowledge management systems that are focused solely on the tools, but also on the organization and practices. It is in this perspective that we have the CP as a conceptual framework to analyze in detail the GC in a context of innovation. This choice is explained by the fact that, firstly, the GC involves the practices of the actors involved in the innovation process. The knowledge and learning within innovative companies are actually structured by the problems encountered in practice. Moreover, GC covers a strategy that develops into "network" in part outside the borders of the company. Thus, the approach of communities of practice (CP) appears as a relevant tool for KM in the sense that it allows to take into account local practices of innovation. [googletranslate_en]

Create a responsive and human library, putting technology at the service of the customer relationship, here's ambition Margo Bank. To better address the issues of financial support and digital transition of European SMEs, three entrepreneurs have chosen to build from scratch a new bank. By building its own technology and rethinking the organization and its processes, the bank has become given the means to innovate to stick to new uses and expectations of its bankers and customers. Going against initiatives "100% digital" Margo Bank puts people at the heart of his project, and equips local teams in order to increase contact with customers. In addition to banking, this future credit institution will also provide SMEs with the necessary tools to operate their own data. The goal is to help them better understand and thus improve their productivity and capacity decisions. [googletranslate_en]

In Norway, the health sector has recently been looking to the petroleum industry for inspiration with respect to innovative solutions for telemedicine and patient safety. In this article, the potential for and challenges associated with augmented reality (AR) tools and practices in surgery and surgical telemedicine are investigated. Work practices in co-localised surgical operations in a neurosurgical operating theatre are investigated and analysed using central organising principles for distributed collaborative work as envisioned by Integrated Operations in the petroleum industry. Digital representations are found to take on a central role in surgical work, and they show a promising potential for the future inclusion of neurosurgery into the portfolio of telemedicine. However, the article warns against organising telemedical work processes according to theoretical principles for division of labour that are not rooted in actual practices. In line with a constructivist approach to ontology, there are many realities that may be augmented, and inadequate work processes may cause construction and augmentation of inadequate realities and hence suboptimal outcomes of surgical procedures. This possibility of AR enabling both desired and undesired outcomes is in the article referred to as the Janus face of augmented reality.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the mode of selection of experts in information technology (IT) area where the formalization of this selection process is not yet established. This can be explained by the multitude of definitions and assignments designating the expert and expertise. Indeed, by focusing on the most commonly applied definitions of the expert, discrepancies between areas of expertise are highlighted. This creates in some of the barriers to the promotion of the profession and demobilize potential candidates. On this basis, this work develops a recent example: the case of European IT2Rhine project. Through an ethnographic approach, this case study can present a method of selection of experts in a particularly interesting setting, since the project's initiators are not from the same sectors (academic, industrial ...) and n 'so have different recruitment requirements. However, led by their common goal, they managed to build a matrix containing the main characteristics that each of them considered essential to an expert in IT. [googletranslate_en]