Faculty News
O’Donoghue Garners MCC Award
Massachusetts Cultural Council Recognizes Artists for Exceptional Work
Mary O’Donoghue, Arts and Humanities, was awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) for her fiction writing. MCC recognizes Massachusetts artists for creating work of exceptional quality in a range of disciplines. O’Donoghue’s award was one of just 39 selected from more than 1,500 applicants in the following disciplines: drawing/printmaking/artist books, traditional arts, painting, choreography, poetry, and fiction/creative non-fiction. The grants are unrestricted monetary awards to help individual artists commit time and resources to hone and deepen their craft and advance professionally. The awards also provide artists with much-needed visibility and recognition from their peers and the public to further market their work. Like all MCC grants, artist awards are based on recommendations by independent panels of experts who practice in the disciplines they review.
O’Donoghue’s other writing awards for poetry and fiction are the Sean Dunne Young Writer, Salmon Poetry Prize for a first collection, Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer, and Tyrone Guthrie/Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. She has published as a poet, fiction writer, and translator of Irish-language poetry. Her first poetry collection is Tulle (Salmon Poetry) and her second collection Dürer’s Green Passion is forthcoming in 2007. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many European and North American periodicals and anthologies. Her translations of the work of Irish-language poet Louis de Paor appear in the first major bilingual edition of his work, Ag Greadadh Bas sa Reilig/Clapping in the Cemetery, published in Fall 2005. The publication of a second translation project, and another thing: A Translation of Louis de Paor’s Irish-language poetry collection agus rud eile de (supported in part by a BoR 2006 spring course release for new faculty members), is forthcoming. O’Donoghue teaches claes at foundation, intermediate and advanced level.
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Proposal Deadline
September 27, 2006
There is just one due date for major awards, 2007-2008 course releases, and 2007 summer stipends. If funds remain after the first round of applications, the BFRF may have a second call for stipend proposals in late January. Application forms and copies of the Bylaws are online at k\faculty\BFRF\forms.
If you have any questions, contact Susan Chern (x5339 or chern@babson.edu) or any of the BFRF members: Dhruv Grewal (Chair), Larry Moss, Dennis Mathaisel, Jennifer Bethel, and Blake Pattridge.
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Upcoming Research “Chats”
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Charles H. Jones, Ph.D., Instrumentation Research Coordinator, Edwards Air Force Base
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, Beyond Terror
Gang Hu, Finance, Institutional Trading, Allocation Sales, and Private Information in IPOs
SAGE Publications Features Book by Hunt and Weintraub
The Coaching Organization: A Strategy for Developing Leaders provides practical advice on how a company can strategically manage coaching initiatives that strengthen organizations and enhance employee engagement and growth. Authors James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub, members of the Management Division, offer best practices to help organizations deploy developmental coaching that drives leadership and employee effectiveness. Key features of the book include offering a strategic view of how to manage developmental coaching, presenting credible and practical examples of successful coaching initiatives, and identifying assessment tools for developing and maintaining coaching initiatives. The text is appropriate for the classroom as well as a resource for executives, managers, and human resource professionals.
Management Professors Miguel Rivera and Carlos Rufin presented a paper, “MNE-NGO Alliances in Developing Countries,” in Beijing at the Academy of International Business, the major annual conference in IB. Rivera and Rufin identify the development of alliances between MNEs and NGOs in developing countries as a theoretically and empirically important phenomenon that has received limited attention so far. Drawing on such limited research, current knowledge about MNEs and NGOs, and the large body of research on business alliances, they develop a set of propositions concerning the motivations of MNEs to enter into alliances with NGOs, the motivations of NGOs to enter into alliances with MNEs, the organizational mechanisms likely to be used in MNE-NGO alliances in developing countries—especially mechanisms to build and maintain trust, and the dynamics of these alliances over time.
Miguel Rivera also presented a paper at the Academy of Management in Atlanta. “Learning and Leakage in Alliances: Benefits and Tradeoffs from Firm-Determined Factor,” co-authored with Pierre Dussauge, explores conditions under which firms can use alliances as a reliable source of external knowledge. They argue that a firm’s intents to learn and to protect are primary factors that the firm can develop independently from its partner in order to learn from its alliances while avoiding leakage. They conceptualize both intents to include individual and organizational dimensions, as well as deliberate and behavioral aspects. Their predictions are tested on a sample of 107 e-commerce alliances. As expected, they find that a firm’s intent to learn increases actual learning, while its intent to protect reduces leakage. They also find that a firm’s learning intent moderately increases leakage, but that its protection intent has no significant impact on learning. Their findings thus suggest that firms can use alliances as a reliable source of external knowledge, but that they do so at some risk of also losing valuable knowledge.
Zhen Zhu, Marketing, presented two papers, “The Effects of Employee Contact in Technology-Based Self-Service Recovery Encounters: A Role Theory Perspective” and "Reach the Survey Respondents in China through Monitored Research Agency," in August at the 2006 Summer AMA Educators’ Conference in Chicago. In addition, she also presented her study “Strategic Responsiveness as a Dynamic Capability: A Study of its Organizational Antecedents and Contingencies on Market Turbulence," in July at the 2006 Academy of International Business Annual Conference in Beijing, China. All three presentations are related to the research projects supported by BoR and BoR/Gill grants.
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Share Your "Research News"
We would like to publish information about your recent research activities in future newsletters. We would also like to update the publications list that appeared in the May 2006 newsletter. Please forward the details about recent research activities to the Babson Faculty Research Fund office, Babson 204, or to chern@babson.edu.
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Babson Welcomes New Faculty
The Babson community extends a warm welcome to the new faculty members who are joining us this fall. Janice Bell joins the Accounting and Law Division as Professor of Accounting. TOIM’s new member, Bala Iyer, is Associate Professor of Information Technology Management.
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BFRF Fall Course Releases
Ryan Davies, Finance
Using Matched Samples to Test for Differences in Trade Execution Costs.
Researchers and market participants are interested in measuring the differences in the cost of trading on different stock exchanges. A commonly-used approach is to compare the costs of “pairs” of “similar” stocks (e.g. IBM which is listed on the NYSE might be matched with Microsoft which is listed on Nasdaq). Despite the widespread usage of this technique, it is not always clear how to best select these matched pairs, and very little is known about the (statistical) tradeoffs of these different approaches. Using Monte Carlo simulation, this project is the first to address these issues.
Marjorie Feld, History & Society
Lillian Wald: Ethnic Progressive
A second-generation German Jewish American, Lillian Wald (1867-1940) won international acclaim for her pivotal role in the creation of a more pluralist society and the American social welfare state. This study challenges conventional views of Wald and of the Progressive reform movement. Her innovative work on behalf of immigrants and industrial laborers was rooted in Jewish cultural identity, yet it expressed a universal vision at odds with the ethnic particularism with which she is now identified. By recovering Wald’s neglected legacy, Ethnic Progressive contributes to historical – and contemporary – understanding of such major issues as feminism, Zionism, immigration, and ethnic identity.
Ajaz Hussain, Economics
Disequilibrium in Airline Networks: Is there an Argument for Re-Regulation?
This paper seeks to prove and test the hypothesis that with free entry in the airline industry, the network structure cannot be in equilibrium. Put simply, the network structure will oscillate between a hub and spoke structure, to a hub and spoke plus point to point structure, and back to hub and spoke. Network structure disequilibrium exacts a welfare cost in excess of restricting entry to a hub and spoke networks. As such, there is a social optimality argument for re-regulating the airline industry; which is an especially important result given the proposal to auction off landing slots in 2007.
Donna Kelley, Entrepreneurship
Corporate Entrepreneurship Management Practices: The Influence of Project Leader Characteristics and Level of Innovativeness.
This research will draw on the innovation and corporate entrepreneurship literatures, agency and stewardship theories, and my prior qualitative research, to develop hypotheses about the management of entrepreneurs in established organizations. The hypotheses will be tested through a survey administered to 60-70 innovation project leader/manager pairs in one Korean multinational corporation. The study addresses the following research question: how does the selection of project leaders, and the level of project innovativeness, impact the management and incentive practices for innovation-based corporate entrepreneurship? This research contributes to academic and practical understanding about how to manage and support entrepreneurs in corporate environments.
Dessislava Pachamanova, Mathematics and Science
Robust Portfolio Estimation and Optimization Techniques.
As the use of predictive models and optimization techniques has become widespread among portfolio managers, the issue of the confidence practitioners can have in theoretical models has grown in importance. Consequently, there has been an increased level of interest in the subject of robust estimation of parameters and robust optimization of portfolio management models. For years, robustness has been a crucial ingredient in engineering. This is a proposal for a book that will bring together new developments from the theory of learning, robust statistics and estimation, and robust optimization, illustrate that they are part of the same conceptual and practical environment, and present them in a new context in a way that finance practitioners can understand and appreciate.
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Free Statistical Consulting Available to Faculty and Staff
The Mathematics and Science Division’s Center for Statistical Consulting (CSC) offers free help with statistics.
If you are:
- Analyzing the results of a survey or a research study
- Designing a survey or a research study
- Writing a research grant with a methods section
- Reviewing a manuscript with some statistics you need to verify
- Deciphering statistical comments from a referee
- Summarizing some data for a presentation
- Analyzing some administrative data
then, the CSC is the place to go for help. All queries, from the simplest to the most challenging, are welcomed. All projects, from a simple regression analysis of a small amount of data to a complex, multivariable analysis of large volumes of data, are appropriate. So don’t let those numbers bother you any longer.
Call John McKenzie at X4479 or send him an e-mail, mckenzie@babson.edu, today.
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BFRF Final Product Accepted
Anne Roggeveen, Marketing, conducted research and wrote two papers for her FRF award: “The Impact of Service Recovery Strategies on Consumer Responses: A Conceptual Model” and “The Impact of Customer Participation on a Service Recovery.” Roggeveen plans to present her work at the Association for Consumer Research Conference.
Elizabeth Goldberg, Arts and Humanities, completed a book manuscript, Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. Rutgers University Press will publish the book in 2007.
Toni Lester, Accounting and Law, completed an article, “The Pedagogical Implications of Teaching about LGBT Rights in the College Classroom.” The article reflects on her experience teaching the LGBT rights segment of a course on “Intolerance, Culture and the Law.” Last spring, Lester presented this topic at the University of Westminster School of Law, London.
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Call for Papers
27th Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC)
The conference, at Instituto de Empresa, in Madrid, Spain, will be held Thursday, June 7 through Saturday, June 9, 2007. The deadline for submission of abstracts is October 16, 2006. The online abstract submission site will be open on September 25, 2006. If you have any questions please email papavasiliou@babson.edu or call 781-239-4992.
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External Funding Information
Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations Office (CFGR)
Wendy Silverman, Director, CFGR
Services Provided
The Office of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations (CFGR) within Development and Alumni Relations at Babson College provides guidance and assistance to faculty and staff seeking funding from corporations, foundations, and government agencies to support their research and curricular development initiatives. Among the services provided are pre-award activities such as identifying and researching possible funding sources, assisting with cultivation of funding prospects and with proposal development and writing, particularly in the final draft stage, and ultimately with the submission of proposals. Post-award assistance is provided by both the CFGR and the Business Office. Among the post-award activities for which faculty and staff can obtain help are grant negotiation, budget clarification, financial and narrative reports, requests for extensions, and grant close-outs.
Of course, not all of our proposals are funded. However, if you never apply, you never get funded. If you would like to explore the possibility of external funding or examine your research agenda please contact me at x5993 or silverman@babson.edu .
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