2nd Call for Proposals Wednesday, February 4, 2009 The BFRF, Center for Women’s Leadership, and Glavin Center have resources available to support faculty research projects. 2009-2010 course releases and 2009 summer stipends are available. Please note that the BFRF is looking for projects that result in finished, journal-ready submissions or completed book chapters, not working papers.
Details on application forms and proposal guidelines may be found on the BFRF website. If you have any questions, contact Susan Chern (x5339).
Upcoming Research Chats Thursday, February 5 Mary Pinard, Arts and Humanities “Song Net for an Estuary” and Mark Potter, Finance “Risk-Taking with Multiple-Mutual-Fund (MMF) Management”
Thursday, February 19 Stephen Deets, History and Society “The Institutions and Unfulfilled Vision of the Sami” and Lisa DiCarlo, Entrepreneurship “Impressions of Ebru”
Save the Dates Wednesday, March 4 Wednesday, March 25
Recent CFGR Grants Corporate, Foundation & Government Relations (CFGR) is pleased to announce the following grants received by Babson College and its faculty during the past six months: The George I. Alden Trust awarded Babson’s Math/Science Division a $90,000 grant to procure equipment for use in the science laboratories. Lecturer Charles Winrich and Science Lab Manager Jodi Schaefer were instrumental in obtaining the award. The Leon Lowenstein Foundation awarded the Undergraduate School a grant to conduct a year-long assessment of the learning support services Babson provides its students.
Babson was one of 19 colleges that received grants to participate in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III Ethnic Minority and Women’s Internship Program.
In addition to these curriculum development grants, Babson also received several gifts to support new scholarship funds for both undergraduate and graduate students. These donors include: The Charles C. Ely Trust, Compass Group-USA (manager of Babson Executive Conference Center), Fortis Investments, William G. McGowan Charitable Fund, and the May and Stanley Smith Charitable Trust. The Office of 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. If you would like to explore the possibility of external funding or examine your research agenda please contact Wendy Silverman, Director, at x5993.
Faculty News Dover Garners International Research Prize Phil Dover (Marketing) and Udo Dierk (International Center for Management Learning, Paderborn, Germany) were recently awarded second prize in an international research competition sponsored by the FHDW University of Applied Science (North Rhine – Westphalia) that honored the best scientific projects from business and administration on the topic of Innovative Strategies for the Sustainable Internationalization of Companies. Their paper – a pilot project of a much larger study being conducted this academic year – was entitled “Sustaining Innovation in the Global Corporation: The Role of Managers, Leaders and Entrepreneurs” and deals with the challenges facing the ambidextrous organization which needs to concurrently manage the short-term through stability while controlling the longer-term through innovation, risk-taking and change. The authors argue that three main archetypes exist – managers, entrepreneurs and leaders – and that these archetypes perform different (and not always complementary) tasks in guiding the organization. They have created, designed and tested a new tool: the MEL-Index, a numerical and graphical representation of executives’ evaluation of their own and the corporation’s collective performance as managers, entrepreneurs and leaders. Data has been collected to date from Western European and US companies and correlates sought on such dimensions as company performance, innovation profile, ownership status and geographic location. The project continues to receive welcome support from the BFRF and the Glavin Center. Allan Cohen, Dean of the Olin Graduate School (Interim) and Edward A. Madden Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership, delivered the keynote Address, “Do Western Leadership Ideas Fit India?” at Nirma University International Conference on Management: Strategic HRM and Entrepreneurship in the Changing Business Scenario, January 8, 2009.
Lisa DiCarlo, Entrepreneurship, presented “Positioning Turkey's New Christians: Are you Armenian now?” at the Middle East Studies Association meeting in Washington, DC in November. In January, she presented her BFRF-funded research on Ebru ("From Millet to Multiculturalism: Defining Turkishness in the 21st Century") at the Anatolian Civilizations conference in Atlanta.
Community of Science (CoS) Funding Opportunities Once again, the Babson Faculty Research Fund has funded a subscription to the Community of Science (COS) Funding Opportunitiesdatabase. The COS Funding Opportunities is the largest, most comprehensive database of available funding to support research and other academic activities. It has more than 22,000 records representing over $33 billion in funding. Grants are available for work in all disciplines—physical sciences, social sciences, life sciences, health & medicine, arts & humanities—and for many purposes, such as research, collaborations, travel, curriculum development, conferences, fellowships, postdoctoral positions, equipment acquisitions, and capital or operating expenses. Searching is easy and intuitive. If you are looking for external funding ideas, this link to COS is accessible on or off-campus. If you want to explorer external funding ideas, contact Wendy Silverman, Director Corporations, Foundations, and Government Relations, x5993.
BFRF Final Products Accepted Stephen Deets, History and Society “The Institutions and Unfulfilled Vision of the Sami” This chapter uses the three Sami Parliaments in Scandinavia to examine the problems and prospects of non-territorial autonomy operating both inside states and across state boundaries. Non-territorial autonomy seeks to allow national groups to create their own representative institutions and to exercise power over culture and education, but these bodies often become enmeshed in debates over their competencies and role vis-à-vis other state institutions. Based on extensive interviews, this chapter argues that, despite significant differences in power, the Sami Parliaments of Finland, Sweden, and Norway do exercise considerable control over their culture, but their powers over education and land rights have been limited by the unwillingness of state institutions to expand their competencies. Still, the international networks between the parliaments and with other international institutions illustrate how governance of trans-boundary nations could operate. Julie Levinson, Arts and Humanities Introduction to Top of the World: The American Success Myth in Film Top of the World: The American Success Myth in Film is a cultural history of the American idea of success. Although the book focuses on the codification of the success myth in Hollywood movies, its perspective is couched in two centuries of American thought and in a range of disciplinary methodologies. This introductory chapter lays out some of the key frames of reference that will inform the film analyses in the succeeding chapters. It synthesizes the work of historians and theorists of myth in order to establish a scholarly context for the success stories that recur in popular cultural narratives of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ notion that myths are comprised of layered pairs of seemingly irreconcilable oppositions.
