Most higher education alumni work in professional fields, making higher education responsible for the provision of high-quality professionalism throughout society. However, higher education does not yet fulfil its role as a provider of methodologies for the renewal of professionalism. In this lecture, Didi Griffioen outlines the characteristics of professionalism, asserting that current methodologies for the continuous renewal of different elements of professionalism are lacking. By positioning itself as provider of these methodologies, higher education can play a more relevant role in society while also contributing to its own professional renewal and innovativeness.
The overall topic of this book is internationalization. It is hard to deny that organizations are increasingly internationalizing in order to remain competitive, to access growth markets and resources and to reduce operating costs. Understanding international business has become imperative for academic researchers, business managers and policy makers but also for students as they prepare themselves to enter an increasingly complex business environment. The subject of International Business can be viewed from many angles and general interest in the subject, as educators, researchers and business professionals, has grown exponentially. A simple Google Scholar search on the keywords “international business” delivers nearly 1 million articles and, as a teacher, I can choose from 258 “international business” textbooks. It is, therefore, necessary in this introductory chapter to provide some background on the subject and to adequately describe the scope and context of the international business that we focused on in the series of studies that follows.
A pilot speech production experiment combined articulatory data obtained using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), along with acoustic measures, to investigate the effects of cluster size (CC vs. CCC) and morpheme boundaries on consonant cluster synchronicity for five speakers of Polish. We found that being placed in a larger cluster leads to less synchronous productions of two-consonant sequences. We also found, surprisingly, greater synchronicity for clusters spanning a morpheme boundary than for the same cluster within a morpheme. Our findings may be interpreted from a listener-oriented perspective in which speech production is sensitive to perceptual considerations.
