Historical Consciousness as a Management Tool

Author(s):  
Diane Ella Németh Bongers

The increasing call for historical perspectives in organization studies illustrates that history has become a central concern. While most studies of organizational history focus on the use of history by top managers, which we propose to call “tight history” (top-down), they seem to ignore the informal articulations of history that evolve from the lower levels of the organization (bottom-up), which we offer to label “loose history.” So far, scholars have largely focused on one level of analysis, but have not explored how the levels articulate with each other. This chapter investigates the activities and processes by which actors use history at both the individual and the institutional levels. Thus, our work aims to contribute to the understanding of processes by which organizations develop different forms of historical consciousness by promoting both tight and loose history, highlighting the collective dimension in both the process and the agency of historical consciousness.

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Lelebina ◽  
Sébastien Gand

While expert knowledge is a crucial resource for large science-based companies, management of the specific population of experts remains a sensitive issue for the HRM. In order to recognize and retain these employees, companies traditionally implement a dual ladder—a career management tool that proposes an alternative technical career track to the managerial one, thus allowing recognition of an expert status in the organization. However, multiple studies have demonstrated that the implementation of a dual ladder does not bring the expected results. While previous research has investigated the individual aspirations of experts as possible reasons for their dissatisfaction with this managerial tool, we show the importance of the collective dimension of expertise and claim that the latter is insufficiently supported by HRM practices. Drawing on a case study in a large multinational firm, we explore the consequences of individualized practices on expert work and discuss the role of HRM in dealing with so-called “hero-based” management. The findings show that individualized practices could endanger the learning and innovation capacities of the firm and compromise processes such as decision making and problem solving. It could also jeopardize the continuity of expertise from a long-term perspective as younger generations refuse to align with a “hero-based” culture. Despite such a strategic challenge, HR managers experience difficulties in reinforcing the collective dimension of expertise. This opens up new perspectives for the HRM function that could lead the management of experts towards new horizons by supporting the fragile equilibrium between “agency” and “communion” in expertise processes.


Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman

This chapter introduces the innovators and provides a portrait of them. The chapter analyzes these innovators at the individual, interactional, and macro level of the gender structure. The chapter begins at the individual level of analysis because these young people emphasize how they challenge gender by rejecting requirements to restrict their personal activities, goals, and personalities to femininity or masculinity. They refuse to live within gender stereotypes. These Millennials do not seem driven by their feminist ideological beliefs, although they do have them. Their worldviews are more taken for granted than central to their stories. Nor are they consistently challenging gender expectations for others, although they often ignore the gender expectations they face themselves. They innovate primarily in their personal lives, although they do reject gendered expectations at the interactional level and hold feminist ideological beliefs about gender equality.


1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Smith

With the widespread usage of systems analysis in political science over the last twenty years it is axiomatic that the problem of adaptation has been a recurring theme in the literature. At the level of the individual political system this concern has been germane to the work of Easton, the structural functionalists and the developmental/modernization writers. In International Politics writing, the problem of adaptation is central to both the applications of systems theory, at whatever level of analysis (for example Kaplan, Rosecrance at the systemic level, and Hanrieder and Modelski at the state level) and the less overtly theoretical works which still emphasize the importance of a state adapting to its environment.


2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bencherki ◽  
Alaric Bourgoin

Property is pervasive, and yet we organization scholars rarely discuss it. When we do, we think of it as a black-boxed concept to explain other phenomena, rather than studying it in its own right. This may be because organization scholars tend to limit their understanding of property to its legal definition, and emphasize control and exclusion as its defining criteria. This essay wishes to crack open the black box of property and explore the many ways in which possessive relations are established. They are achieved through work, take place as we make sense of signs, are invoked into existence in our speech acts, and travel along sociomaterial networks. Through a fictionalized account of a photographic exhibition, we show that property overflows its usual legal-economic definition. Building on the case of the photographic exhibit, we show that recognizing the diversity of property changes our rapport with organization studies as a field, by unifying its approaches to the individual-vs.-collective dilemma. We conclude by noting that if theories can make a difference, then whoever controls the assignment of property – including academics who ascribe properties to their objects of study – decides not only who has or who owns what, but also who or what that person or thing can be.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scot M. Miller ◽  
Anna M. Michalak ◽  
Vineet Yadav ◽  
Jovan M. Tadic

Abstract. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite launched in summer of 2014. Its observations could allow scientists to constrain CO2 fluxes across regions or continents that were previously difficult to monitor. This study explores an initial step toward that goal; we evaluate the extent to which current OCO-2 observations can detect patterns in biospheric CO2 fluxes and constrain monthly CO2 budgets. Our goal is to guide top-down, inverse modeling studies and identify areas for future improvement. We find that uncertainties and biases in the individual OCO-2 observations are comparable to the atmospheric signal from biospheric fluxes, particularly during northern hemisphere winter when biospheric fluxes are small. A series of top-down experiments indicate how these errors affect our ability to constrain monthly biospheric CO2 budgets. We are able to constrain budgets for between two and four global regions using OCO-2 observations, depending on the month, and we can constrain CO2 budgets at the regional level (i.e., smaller than seven global biomes) in only a handful of cases (16 % of all regions and months). The potential of the OCO-2 observations, however, is greater than these results might imply. A set of synthetic data experiments suggests that observation or retrieval errors have a salient effect. Advances in retrieval algorithms and to a lesser extent atmospheric transport modeling will improve the results. In the interim, top-down studies that use current satellite observations are best-equipped to constrain the biospheric carbon balance across only continental or hemispheric regions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-273
Author(s):  
Oksana Konstantinovna Pozdnyakova

The paper raises the problem of students orientation towards moral self-determination as one of the directions of moral education of students. The necessity of carrying out a categorical analysis of the personality self-determination concept to determine the content and methods of orientation of students towards moral self-determination is substantiated. Personality self-determination is considered at the philosophical, psychological and pedagogical levels of analysis. At the philosophical level of analysis, the essence of the personality self-determination phenomenon and the concept adequate to it is revealed; it consists in a persons choice of certain actions and deeds in a given situation; shows the role of moral choice in the self-determination of the individual. At the psychological level of analysis, the author substantiates the relationship between the self-determination of the individual and the system of his/her relations (to the surrounding reality, other people and himself/herself), which determine the content of the personalitys position. At the pedagogical level of analysis, the self-determination of a person is associated with his/her choice of values, the source of which is his/her needs. The paper argues that the self-determination of a person is both a process and a result of a persons choice of his/her own position, there is a choice of relations that form the content of a position, there is a choice of values, the focus on which constitutes the value orientations of a person, which become the core of self-determination. The author also has determined some practical pedagogical tasks, the solution of which is aimed at creating conditions for the orientation of students towards moral self-determination: the task of students moral principles development, which will ensure their choice of their position, goals and means of self-realization in life; the task of familiarizing students with the value of good, which is the essence of their ethical attitude to the world, to people and to themselves; the task of developing students ability to substantiate the foundations of moral choice and its principles to reflection.


Author(s):  
Nguyễn Hữu An ◽  
Lê Duy Mai Phương

Determinants of the variation of happiness have long been discussed in social sciences. Recent studies have focused on investigating cultural factors contributing to the level of individual happiness, in which the cultural dimension of individualism (IND) and collectivism (COL) has been drawing the attention of a large number of scholars. At the cultural level of analysis, happiness is associated with personal achievements as well as personal egoism in individualistic cultures, while it is related to interpersonal relationships in collectivistic cultures. Empirical research yields unconventional results at the individual level of analysis, that is, individuals in collectivistic cultures favor IND to be happy, in contrast, people in individualistic cultures emphasize COL be satisfied in life. Using data from the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), this study takes the cultural dimension of IND and COL at the individual level of analysis to detect its effects on happiness (conceptualized as subjective well-being – SWB) in the comparison between the two cultures. Multiple linear regression models reveal results that individuals from the “West” experience greater happiness when they expose themselves less individualist, while, individuals from the “East” feel more satisfied and happier in their life when they emphasize more on IND or being more autonomous.


Author(s):  
Louis Bayman

This article investigates the trend represented by the recent TV series This Is England 86 (2010), Deutschland 83 (2015) and 1992 (2015). It analyses retro in the series as enabling an exhilarating experience of the music, fashions and lifestyles of the past while claiming to offer a serious social history. The article thus takes issue with theories of retro that view it as ahistorical (for example Guffey), to demonstrate how retro in these series enables a particular dramatic conception of the dynamics of national history, whether in post-imperial decline (This Is England), a westalgie for the grip of geopolitical conflict (Deutschland 83) or the cyclical progression of trasformismo (1992). The article discusses the series’ common visions of the past as characterised by a pleasing youthful naivety, opposed to an implied present of cynical superior knowledge. I argue that these series embody retro’s distinct ability to combine irony and fetishism in its recreation of the past, as befits an age in which historical consciousness is increasingly referred to the intimate sphere of the individual self and its uncertain relation to posterity.


Nematology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Ann-Kristin Koehler ◽  
Christopher A. Bell ◽  
Matthew A. Back ◽  
Peter E. Urwin ◽  
Howard J. Atkinson

Summary Globodera pallida is the most damaging pest of potato in the UK. This work underpins enhancement of a well-established, web-based scenario analysis tool for its management by recommending additions and modifications of its required inputs and a change in the basis of yield loss estimates. The required annual decline rate of the dormant egg population is determined at the individual field sample level to help define the required rotation length by comparing the viable egg content of recovered cysts to that of newly formed cysts for the same projected area. The mean annual decline was 20.4 ± 1.4% but ranged from 4.0 to 39.7% annum−1 at the field level. Further changes were based on meta-analysis of previous field trials. Spring rainfall in the region where a field is located and cultivar tolerance influence yield loss. Tolerance has proved difficult to define for many UK potato cultivars in field trials but uncertainty can be avoided without detriment by replacing it with determinacy integers. They are already determined to support optimisation of nitrogen application rates. Multiple linear regression estimates that loss caused by pre-plant populations of up to 20 viable eggs (g soil)−1 varies from ca 0.2 to 2.0% (viable egg)−1 (g soil)−1 depending on cultivar determinacy and spring rainfall. Reliability of the outcomes from scenario analysis requires validation in field trials with population densities over which planting is advisable.


PeerJ ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. e3988
Author(s):  
Yong-il Lee ◽  
Yeojeong Choi ◽  
Jaeseung Jeong

In its most basic form, empathy refers to the ability to understand another person’s feelings and emotions, representing an essential component of human social interaction. Owing to an increase in the use of mass media, which is used to distribute high levels of empathy-inducing content, media plays a key role in individual and social empathy induction. We investigated empathy induction in cartoons using eye movement, EEG and behavioral measures to explore whether empathy factors correlate with character drawing styles. Two different types of empathy-inducing cartoons that consisted of three stages and had the same story plot were used. One had an iconic style, while the other was realistic style. Fifty participants were divided into two groups corresponding to the individual cartoon drawing styles and were presented with only one type of drawing style. We found that there were no significant differences of empathy factors between iconic and realistic style. However, the Induced Empathy Score (IES) had a close relationship with subsequent attentional processing (total fixation length for gaze duration). Furthermore, iconic style suppressed the fronto-central area more than realistic style in the gamma power band. These results suggest that iconic cartoons have the advantage of abstraction during empathy induction, because the iconic cartoons induced the same level of empathy as realistic cartoons while using the same story plot (top-down process), even though lesser time and effort were required by the cartoon artist to draw them. This also means that the top-down process (story plot) is more important than the bottom-up process (drawing style) in empathy induction when viewing cartoons


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document