Description:
This paper develops an analysis of innovation based on Allen Oakley's (2002) primary themes of ontological priority, agency-structure and critical realism. I develop a history of thought and contemporaneous endogenous view of innovation in an environment of uncertainty, potential novelty and policy priority. Drawing on the literature of Austrian, institutional, Schumpeterian, Penrosean and other schools, I explore a continuum of agency-structure relationships that enhance innovation. These relationships cover environments that are based on agency and contingency, through to those that balance contingency with containment (structure), and situations that are heavily contained. The literature on innovation is investigated vis-à-vis the degree to which different environments encourage creative, original marketable opportunities for the common good. Innovation policy-making is then investigated through the traverse process of irreversibility, and within a retroductionist planning process. Overall, I seek to advance the cause of realism through innovations generated in different environments.
Description:
This paper develops an analysis of innovation based on Allen Oakley's (2002) primary themes of ontological priority, agency-structure and critical realism. I develop a history of thought and contemporaneous endogenous view of innovation in an environment of uncertainty, potential novelty and policy priority. Drawing on the literature of Austrian, institutional, Schumpeterian, Penrosean and other schools, I explore a continuum of agency-structure relationships that enhance innovation. These relationships cover environments that are based on agency and contingency, through to those that balance contingency with containment (structure), and situations that are heavily contained. The literature on innovation is investigated vis-à-vis the degree to which different environments encourage creative, original marketable opportunities for the common good. Innovation policy-making is then investigated through the traverse process of irreversibility, and within a retroductionist planning process. Overall, I seek to advance the cause of realism through innovations generated in different environments.
Description:
The cost of adverse drug reactions to society in the form of deaths, chronic illness, foetal malformation, and many other effects is quite significant. For example, in the United States of America, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs is around the fourth leading cause of death. The reporting of adverse drug reactions is spontaneous and voluntary in Australia. Many methods that have been used for the analysis of adverse drug reaction data, mostly using a statistical approach as a basis for clinical analysis in drug safety surveillance decision support. This thesis examines new approaches that may be used in the analysis of drug safety data. These methods differ significantly from the statistical methods in that they utilize co variability methods of association to define drug-reaction relationships. Co variability algorithms were developed in collaboration with Musa Mammadov to discover drugs associated with adverse reactions and possible drug-drug interactions. This method uses the system organ class (SOC) classification in the Australian Adverse Drug Reaction Advisory Committee (ADRAC) data to stratify reactions. The text categorization algorithm BoosTexter was found to work with the same drug safety data and its performance and modus operandi was compared to our algorithms. These alternative methods were compared to a standard disproportionality analysis methods for signal detection in drug safety data including the Bayesean mulit-item gamma Poisson shrinker (MGPS), which was found to have a problem with similar reaction terms in a report and innocent by-stander drugs. A classification of drug terms was made using the anatomical-therapeutic-chemical classification (ATC) codes. This reduced the number of drug variables from 5081 drug terms to 14 main drug classes. The ATC classification is structured into a hierarchy of five levels. Exploitation of the ATC hierarchy allows the drug safety data to be stratified in such a way as to make them accessible to powerful existing tools. A data mining method that uses association rules, which groups them on the basis of content, was used as a basis for applying the ATC and SOC ontologies to ADRAC data. This allows different views of these associations (even very rare ones). A signal detection method was developed using these association rules, which also incorporates critical reaction terms.
Description:
There is a lack of ontology in the study and explication of innovation. Does this matter? It matters because ‘innovation’ has become an important word in the 21st Century, reflecting all that is modern, progressive and exciting in a complex world. This is reflected in every phase of daily existence in modern capitalist economies. Firms are urged to be innovative to gain or sustain a ‘competitive edge’, consultants advertise their strategic advice as the essence of innovation, local communities’ survival depend on the capacity building that comes from innovation, schools are exalted to have innovation in their curriculum, universities promote themselves as leaders in innovation. Politicians respond to the need for supporting all the above through policies for enhancing such innovation in the nation.
Description:
There is a lack of ontology in the study and explication of innovation. Does this matter? It matters because ‘innovation’ has become an important word in the 21st Century, reflecting all that is modern, progressive and exciting in a complex world. This is reflected in every phase of daily existence in modern capitalist economies. Firms are urged to be innovative to gain or sustain a ‘competitive edge’, consultants advertise their strategic advice as the essence of innovation, local communities’ survival depend on the capacity building that comes from innovation, schools are exalted to have innovation in their curriculum, universities promote themselves as leaders in innovation. Politicians respond to the need for supporting all the above through policies for enhancing such innovation in the nation.
Description:
Nursing and nurses rely upon qualitative research to understand the intricacies of the human condition. Acknowledging the subjective nature of reality and commonly founded in a constructivist epistemology, qualitative approaches offer opportunities for uncovering insights from the perspective of the individual participants, the insider's view, and the construction of representations that maintain an intimacy with the subject's realities. Debate continues, however, about what is needed for a qualitative construction to be considered an authentic understanding of a subject's realities. Authenticity in the context of qualitative research has been described as entailing consideration of a number of well‐trodden dimensions: fairness, ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical. Taking these dimensional requirements as key, this paper argues that authenticity may not always be as well‐developed through some of the standard practices in qualitative research as perhaps expected. In particular, qualitative understandings of authenticity stress that participants should not be merely reported on but instead should be dynamically involved in and changed by the constructions and interpretations of data developed throughout the research process. As this paper illustrates, such engagements appear problematic for qualitative research approaches that are beholden to designative commitments in the context of language and meaning‐making and which tend to prioritise commonality and generality at the expense of individual authenticity. An alternative qualitative approach, Hermeneutic Constructivism, is proposed as better able to achieve the requirements of the dimensions of authenticity. As outlined, this approach is well‐placed to present an understanding of human experience through a genuinely expressivist approach and transcends the stress upon the common or the general that can be pervasive and problematic.
Description:
Nursing and nurses rely upon qualitative research to understand the intricacies of the human condition. Acknowledging the subjective nature of reality and commonly founded in a constructivist epistemology, qualitative approaches offer opportunities for uncovering insights from the perspective of the individual participants, the insider's view, and the construction of representations that maintain an intimacy with the subject's realities. Debate continues, however, about what is needed for a qualitative construction to be considered an authentic understanding of a subject's realities. Authenticity in the context of qualitative research has been described as entailing consideration of a number of well‐trodden dimensions: fairness, ontological, educative, catalytic and tactical. Taking these dimensional requirements as key, this paper argues that authenticity may not always be as well‐developed through some of the standard practices in qualitative research as perhaps expected. In particular, qualitative understandings of authenticity stress that participants should not be merely reported on but instead should be dynamically involved in and changed by the constructions and interpretations of data developed throughout the research process. As this paper illustrates, such engagements appear problematic for qualitative research approaches that are beholden to designative commitments in the context of language and meaning‐making and which tend to prioritise commonality and generality at the expense of individual authenticity. An alternative qualitative approach, Hermeneutic Constructivism, is proposed as better able to achieve the requirements of the dimensions of authenticity. As outlined, this approach is well‐placed to present an understanding of human experience through a genuinely expressivist approach and transcends the stress upon the common or the general that can be pervasive and problematic.