Friday, October 23, 2009
1:00-5:00 p.m.
North Creek Events Center
University of Washington Bothell
For information on parking and for campus directions, please click here.
Join us for a spirited discussion on topics that matter: Education, Community and Business
Share in the discoveries and scholarship of UW Bothell researchers . . .
as they discuss community, education and business. Nine assistant professors invite your participation in discussions about their findings – and the future – of these important research topics.
The Focus of the individual sessions . . .
is on active audience participation and open dialogue. All in attendance are encouraged to participate in the discussion.
The Goal of the symposium . . .
is to bring scholars together in a format that encourages in-depth dialogue and differing perspectives on predefined topics and problems.
Panels
Researchers will be divided into three panels to discuss each topic. After each professor gives a short (15-20 minute) summary of their research, a senior scholar will moderate an intensive discussion and intellectual exchange of ideas.
Education Panel: 1:00-2:15pm
Panelists:
Carrie Tzou: “Leveraging home and community practices for culturally relevant science teaching”
Robin Angotti: “Math 2.0: Teaching math for the 21st century”
Keith Nitta: “Post reform teacher unionism? The 2008 Bellevue teacher’s strike” (Paper available: Webpage or PDF)
Discussants:
Paul Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education
Brad Portin, Director Education Program
Kelvin Sung, CSS Professor
Community Panel 2:15-3:30pm
Panelists:
Cinnamon Hillyard: “The relationship between quantitative literacy & risky financial behaviors”
Kari Lerum: “Public scholarship for sexual health”
Becca Price: “Emersion limits short term growth rates in intertidal Nucella lamellosa” (Papers available: Paper One, Paper Two)
Discussants:
Bruce Burgett, Director Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences Program
Pete Nye, Business Professor
Business Panel 3:30-4:45pm
Panelists:
Tim Hargrave: “Bringing in society: An institutional perspective on corporate social performance”
Alan Boss: “Where Do We Go From Here? Entrepreneurial Recovery and Re-Start After Failure”
Surya Pathak: “A Framework for Designing Policies for Networked Systems with Uncertainty”
Discussant:
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Director Business Program
Abstracts:
Tim Hargrave, "Bringing in society: an institutional perspective on corporate social performance":
Many business and society scholars see corporations as playing an increasing and even primary role in improving society. Extant measures of corporate social performance (CSP) tell us little, however, about the extent to which they collectively are doing so. This is because they assess CSP at the company level but not higher levels of analysis; do not compare the impacts of corporate practices to the scale of the problems involved; tend to consider practices that address particular stakeholders but not political and other “institutional work practices” that directly influence institutions; and lack a theory of how corporate institutional work practices contribute to societal improvement.
I draw upon a dialectical perspective on institutional change to address this last problem. I propose to redefine CSP as how and the extent to which corporations individually and collectively contribute to reconciliation of the societal tension between economizing (efficient use of resources) and ecologizing (health of the community). Frederick (2008) has characterized this as the basic tension in the business-society relationship. Rather than measuring CSP in terms of responsiveness to pressures for change, as current CSP measures do, a dialectical measure would evaluate corporate practices based on whether they enable citizens to appreciate and reconcile the contradiction between ecologizing and economizing dimensions of issues. According to this definition, good CSP involves supporting political reforms that would establish a balance of power between the respective proponents of economizing and ecologizing, as well as rigorous market-based policies that incorporate elements of both forces. It also suggests that under pluralistic conditions, companies which resist change based upon a principled stand of economizing potentially make an important contribution to society, and that companies which undertake modest voluntary activities may prematurely dissolve dialectical tension and undermine greater societal improvement.
Alan Boss, “Where Do We Go From Here? Entrepreneurial Recovery and Re-Start After Failure”:
Eventually, everyone experiences failure. Entrepreneurs, especially, have a high incidence of failure, with estimates that over 60% fail within six years. Yet, a high percentage of failed entrepreneurs recover and start another business. What characteristics of entrepreneurs help them to recover from failure? Based upon fundamental theories of human behavior and recent inquiries that have influenced the entrepreneurship literature, we propose that four areas of research can lead to a path to recovery, namely, (1) entrepreneurial self-efficacy, (2) emotion regulation, (3) practical intelligence, and (4) self-leadership. We suggest that these areas of research may enhance our knowledge of how entrepreneurs recover from failure.
Surya Pathak (with Mark McDonald and Sankaran Mahadevan),
“A Framework for Designing Policies for Networked Systems with Uncertainty”:
This paper presents a framework to design policies for networked systems. The framework integrates model building, stability analysis of dynamic systems, surrogate model generation and optimization under uncertainty. We illustrate the framework using a transportation network benchmark problem. We consider bounded rational users and model the network using software agents. We use Largest Lyapunov exponents to characterize stability and use Gaussian process model as an inexpensive surrogate, facilitating computational efficiency in policy optimization under uncertainty. We demonstrate scalability by solving a traffic grid policy design problem and show how the framework lends itself towards carrying out stability versus performance tradeoffs.