Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0440
H. Sætra
{"title":"Stephen Barley, Work and Technological Change","authors":"H. Sætra","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0440","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90375107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0399
B. Oyewo, Syed Tanvir Hussain, Chipo Simbi
{"title":"Challenges of implementing management accounting innovations: Evidence from the field","authors":"B. Oyewo, Syed Tanvir Hussain, Chipo Simbi","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0399","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the challenges of implementing innovative management accounting techniques, referred to as strategic management accounting (SMA), the interrelationship among the challenges and the impact of the challenges on SMA usage intensity. From the analysis of survey data obtained from listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria, the result supports the conclusion that SMA implementation challenges are interrelated. However, lack of top management support and low awareness/lack of knowledge are contributory to most of the implementation challenges. The challenges discouraging the intensive use of SMA are the perception that SMA implementation is unnecessary as strategy issues are already integrated in other functions within the organization, high implementation cost and problems relating to information flow between departments within the organization. The current study contributes to knowledge in the sense that it is the first (to the researchers’ knowledge) to examine specifically the interrelationship among SMA implementation challenges in the Nigerian context, thereby drawing attention to the need to consider the challenges to embracing management accounting innovations holistically. Knowledge of SMA implementation challenges could help explain the low adoption rate of SMA in developing countries. Such knowledge might be helpful in providing a robust response to the challenges of implementing management accounting innovations.","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88187155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0385
J. Söderberg
{"title":"The psychedelic renaissance: a case of outlaw user innovation in the pharmaceutical industry","authors":"J. Söderberg","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.4.0385","url":null,"abstract":"Psychedelic substances are undergoing a renaissance. As they have been out-of-bounds for public research for half a century, the development process has been driven by drug user communities. With the prospect of a legalization of psychedelics, the data collected by users about toxicity, dosage, etc. have been turned into billion-dollar assets. Know-how stemming from stigmatized user communities is being transferred to companies and put under the protection of patent law. This transfer of information is predicated on psychedelics being reframed as therapeutic. The psychedelic renaissance provides an entry point for reflecting in a more critical vein about ‘user innovation’.","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79533050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-08-30DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0194
William H. A. Johnson
{"title":"Shades of gray: Understanding the ethics of society’s technology and innovation propensities using national culture","authors":"William H. A. Johnson","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0194","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines the effects of national culture on national innovation. This is important because underlying values, which relate to national culture and are the basis of ethical stances, are predicted to affect directly country-level innovation propensities, which then can affect national economic well-being. Combining analyses from two databases, the paper explores the relationships between cultural dimensions, which are manifestations of underlying personal values held across a societal group, and national innovation outcomes. The first database uses Hofstede’s national culture dimensions and the other is based on the global innovation index scores of 71 countries. Of the six cultural dimensions, only masculinity/femininity is not found to be significantly related to innovation outcomes. Power distance and uncertainty avoidance negatively relate to innovation outcomes for three and four years, respectively, of the five years tested. Individualism, long-term orientation and indulgence positively relate to innovation outcomes for all five years tested. A major implication is that these cultural variables are important for innovation progress. Findings also suggest that the ethical use of technology and its underlying innovation practices (based on the value systems underlying these cultural dimensions) could benefit from further exploration on the effects of culture. In particular, if a country wants to increase its innovative efforts, it may be well advised to stress individualistic, future-oriented and egalitarian tendencies.","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"388 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80811730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-08-30DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0207
P. Trott, David Baxter, Paul Ellwood, Patrick van der Duin
{"title":"The changing context of innovation management: A critique of the relevance of the stage-gate approach to current organizations","authors":"P. Trott, David Baxter, Paul Ellwood, Patrick van der Duin","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0207","url":null,"abstract":"The stage-gate method was initially developed as a description of the new product development practices within high-performing firms. At its heart the concept is simple: and the flow of activity of a stage-gate includes project action, information generation, analysis and decision. Research has shown that the stage-gate method has been extremely successful in many contexts. The question of whether the approach is suitable for all projects in all situations is a principal faultline within the literature. Proponents argue that adaptations and evolutions of the stage approach enable it to be universally applied. This paper provides a critical review of the literature and we identify chronic limitations of stage-gate when evaluated against contemporary challenges, including VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), environment, digitization and open innovation. We remain critical about whether these contemporary currents are best approached by yet another reconfiguration of stage-gate building blocks. We argue that high uncertainty (caused by these currents) requires the flexibility to change fundamental elements of a project, including the underlying concept and the target market, which means that stage-gate is not well suited to innovation processes addressing these contemporary challenges. We propose a typology to show its suitability.","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90010651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-08-30DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0147
Thanos Fragkandreas
{"title":"Three decades of research on innovation and inequality: Causal scenarios, explanatory factors and suggestions","authors":"Thanos Fragkandreas","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.2.0147","url":null,"abstract":"Prompted by rising income inequality (in short, inequality) in advanced economies, a rapidly growing number of studies across various fields and disciplines of social science have, since the 1990s, sought to find out how innovation (as the main engine of economic progress) affects the distribution of income in modern-day capitalist societies. Using the systematic literature review method, this paper provides the first critical review of 166 studies on innovation and inequality published in 114 journals in the last three decades (1990–2019). It is shown that, while the great majority of studies under review concur that innovation induces inequality, this finding is subject to the disciplinary origins of research (e.g., development studies, economics, geography, innovation studies, etc.) and the country under investigation. Furthermore, guided by an original causally holistic analytical framework, the analysis demonstrates that the relationship between innovation and inequality is significantly more causally complex than the most popular theoretical perspective (i.e., skill-biased technological change account) has let us believe; in particular, it is subject to five causal scenarios and a range of explanatory factors (i.e., skill premiums, technological unemployment, international trade, declining union membership, spatial aspects, changing employment conditions, policy, horizontal inequalities, sectoral composition and types of innovation). The paper ends by discussing findings, policy implications and knowledge gaps, one of which concerns the following under-researched question: how, and under what conditions do publicly funded innovation policies reduce (or increase) inequality?","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86913549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.37.4.0404
C. Kemper
{"title":"Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagallo, Advanced Introduction to Law and Artificial Intelligence reviewed by Carolin Kemper","authors":"C. Kemper","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.37.4.0404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.37.4.0404","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73041498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.3.0365
Philip Wane
{"title":"Michael J. Boyle, The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace","authors":"Philip Wane","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.3.0365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.3.0365","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74275452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0005
Steven Umbrello, Steffen Steinert, Tristan Emile de Wildt
{"title":"Editorial: Designing for value change","authors":"Steven Umbrello, Steffen Steinert, Tristan Emile de Wildt","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Prometheus has grown four years older since its last and highly controversial special issue, published in 2017 on the Shaken Baby Debate. But, as always, Prometheus is committed to open discussion and dissemination of scientific research, regardless of the potential backlash or controversy that may ensue from such a venture, a venture that is at the core of authentic scholarship. Since the beginning of 2020, the world has changed irrevocably, making once-held norms seem obsolete in favour of new ways of being in the world and new technologies emerging to face these new ways of living. Although it has been a long-held insight in the philosophy of technology that technical systems are carriers of values, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made manifest how these values, and their incarnations in sociotechnical systems, can likewise change. Prometheus has, since its inception, danced in tandem with the critical interpretations, theories, and methods for understanding innovation, and how innovations fundamentally impact and are impacted by the world in which they emerge and are situated. For this reason, Steffen Steinert, Tristan de Wildt, and I chose to guest edit this special issue on designing for value change and chose Prometheus as its home. Given that a lot of Dutch universities have a long and strong tradition of thinking about technology and its impact, it is no wonder that most of the papers that comprise this special issue come from Dutch-based scholars who are intimately familiar with the importance of technologies and how they change over time. The Netherlands is primarily an engineered country, even the most apparently superficial changes in design and implementation can have cascading social effects across space and time. The burgeoning debates surrounding how these technologies embody values, how those values change over time and how that change affects other entangled systems is at the heart of this special issue. Ibo van de Poel’s paper, ‘Understanding value change’, inaugurates the special issue and discusses the process of how values change over time, with specific reference to sociotechnical systems. Van de Poel proposes an analysis of value change where he explores how we can understand it from a descriptive and a normative account. He concludes by discussing the implication of those different accounts for the design of new technologies, adopting a value-sensitive design and responsible innovation approach. In ‘Exploring value change’, Tristan de Wildt and Vanessa Schweizer explore the emergence of new value structures, in whole or in part, arguing that such structures emerge as a consequence of the interaction of technological systems and the environments in which they are being introduced. The authors explore these structures using semi-quantitative scenario techniques applied mainly to two examples from two very different contexts: the implementation of voice assistants and the search for effective therapies against malaria. In ‘The ","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81184252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Prometheus (Italy)Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0098
Tom N. Coggins
{"title":"More work for Roomba? Domestic robots, housework and the production of privacy","authors":"Tom N. Coggins","doi":"10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.1.0098","url":null,"abstract":"Housework is hard work. Keeping our homes clean, tidy and comfortable takes effort and every moment we spend on housework (that we would prefer to avoid) means we have less time to devote to our private lives. Over the past two decades, numerous companies have created robots designed to relieve their owners of housework. Having robots take care of housework for us, it seems, would enable us to focus our energy at home on private pursuits we find valuable, such as spending quality time with our loved ones, recreation, and relaxation. Although this line of reasoning helps explain why domestic robots are in high demand, this article will contest its validity throughout. By drawing from historical accounts of older, ostensibly labour-saving domestic technologies, it will argue that we should expect domestic robots to alter the nature of housework rather than reduce the need for it. Overall, it will argue that domestic robots change what needs to be done for their owners to enjoy their private lives.","PeriodicalId":38494,"journal":{"name":"Prometheus (Italy)","volume":"152 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86223109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}