Carleen F. Maitland

Research

The following are summaries of Dr. Maitland's current ('08/'09) projects. See the past projects page for descriptions of previous work.

Current Projects

Standards: An impetus for growth in a regional economy?

The goals of the project are to understand the extent to which inter-organizational relations in standards making extend beyond the nation state to geographically defined regional partners. For the U.S. regional partners include Canada and Mexico and for Japan it includes South Korea and China, as well as other Asian partners. The research examines both organizations and their participants’ relations as well as relations among nation states or their nationals across multiple standards making organizations. To this end, the project is developing three interconnected case studies including two information technology related cases of an international standards making organization and the issue of Asian cooperation in standards between China, Japan and South Korea (CJK), together with a comparative case of international environmental standards. To learn more see our international standards page.

Coordination of information management and technology use in international humanitarian relief and development

This research examines the role of inter-organizational relations in humanitarian relief and development on coordination in the domain of information management and information technology. In this research stream Dr. Maitland is working with colleagues from Penn State (Andrea Tapia and John Yen, among others) and Benita Beamon of University of Washington. In one project the team is seeking to understand how NGOs/IGOs involved in disaster relief coordinate on deployments of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as use ICTs in their coordination efforts. In a second project the team is examining the role of humanitarian organizations in the broader information gathering and management efforts during disaster relief. For more information see cohort.ist.psu.edu 

Inter-organizational relations in global supply chains

In this research program Dr. Maitland together with Dr. Irene Petrick (also of Penn State College of IST) is seeking to develop fundamental knowledge about the intersection of information management and technology, risk management and innovation. They are joined by supply chain colleagues from Michigan State University, University College Dublin and National University of Singapore in a project funded by IBM.

This current effort builds research on previous research in the domain of effectiveness of inter-organizational networks.  In that project, carried out between 2006 and 2008, they found that inter-organizational coordination does contribute to firm-level network effectiveness, which is also influenced by lock-out and network structure. To read more see the network effectiveness research site.

Regionalization of wireless policy making and its effects

While nation states continue to play a fundamental role in wireless policy making, extra-national actors such as regional bodies (EU, SADC, Mercusor) are playing a role as well. This research seeks to identify the ways in which these regional policy making and regulatory bodies influence policy making and regulation at the national level as well as their implications for market entry by mobile carriers. Working together with Annemijn van Gorp and Nicolai Pogrebnyakov this research calls into question the emphasis on policy harmonization as an outcome of regional cooperation.

In particular, Dr. van Gorp's dissertation identified a number of different ways in which national regulators benefit from participation in regional policy making, even when policy harmonization is not achieved. It's a good thing that such benefits exist because as Nic Progrebnyakov finds harmonization, even in the highly integrated European Union, is not always achieved and indeed in places where wireless policies are similar it may have little to do with the region.

Papers from these endeavors have been presented at the International Communications Association and the Telecommunication Policy Research Conference.

A.F. van Gorp and C.F. Maitland ( 2007). The Regulatory Design Problem Revisited: Tanzania’s Pioneering Position in Africa. The 35th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC). Arlington, Virginia, September 28-30.

C.F. Maitland and A.F. van Gorp (2007). Beyond Harmonization: The Role of Regions in Facilitating ICT-Based Development. The 35th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC). Arlington, Virginia, September 28-30.

A.F. van Gorp and C.F. Maitland (2007). Regionalization of Telecommunications Regulatory Policy: A Model to Assess Regional Effects on National Regulations. The 57th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association. San Francisco, CA, May 24-28.

Scaling the wall: content and application developer experiences in building the mobile marketplace

While equipment manufacturers (Nokia, Ericsson, Qualcomm) and network operators (ATT Wireless, Verizon Wireless, NTT DoCoMo) have played an important role in the development of the mobile Internet services market, their accomplishments could not have been achieved without the wide array of middleware, content and application developers who are also part of the 'mobile data ecosystem.' This project studies the experience of application developers who have been working 'behind the scenes' in this industry and addresses questions such as how difficult is it to port applications between operators' platforms and how complicated is the process to make an application available to consumers? The answers to these questions will shed on light on the degree of competition in this market and its role in shaping the broader mobile data services market. This project has benefited from mentorship from NSTL.

In research undertaken by Ankur Tarnacha, the research stream seeks to shed light on the role of mobile applications platform certification and its market effects. Findings from this project can (or will) be found at:

A. Tarnacha and C. F. Maitland, Structural Effects of Platform Certification on a Complementary Product Market: The Case of Mobile Applications, The International Journal of IT Standardization and Standardization Research, Idea Group Publishing, Forthcoming in 2008

A. Tarnacha and C. F. Maitland, The effects of standards competition on market entry: The case of the mobile application markets, in The Standards Edge: Unifier or Divider?, The Bolin Group, Forthcoming in 2007

Previous findings in this research stream have been presented at the 2005 meeting of IFIP [pdf], the 2006 meeting of TPRC, and the 8th annual meeting of the International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), August 2006.