scholarly journals The Performativity of Organizational Culture in a No Excuses Charter School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Radford

Theories developed by academics influence those they study, in some cases fundamentally shaping the world we study. This influential relationship, often called performativity, has gone largely unnoticed and uncommented on in organizational theory and research. The few studies investigating performativity in organizations or other fields typically focus on cases in which the ultimate success of theory's implementation is known. In this paper, I examine how one high-performing charter school sought to turn a prescribed organizational culture into reality. I find that path to successful performance is very narrow and ambiguous. The school succeeded and failed in many steps of the process, making it difficult to assess whether the initiative was successful and to attribute their successes and failures to the theory or their implementation. I conclude that performativity is a cyclical process occurring at multiple time scales. During these cycles, organizations iteratively test new implementations of the theory, seeking to gain clear insight into the success of their strategy and correctly attribute their successes and failures to decide whether the theory actually works or not.

Author(s):  
Simon F. Thrush ◽  
Judi E. Hewitt ◽  
Conrad A. Pilditch ◽  
Alf Norkko

Demonstrating changes over time in soft-sediment ecosystems is critical to understanding ecosystem dynamics and predicting how they may change. Monitoring is thus an essential process providing insight into how complex ecological systems change and has important implications in adaptive management, impact assessment and stewardship. The chapter describes how both slow and fast processes operate in soft sediments and drive changes across multiple time scales. The role of time series data in helping to understand detailed short-term studies is discussed. The interactions between space and time have important implications in study design, interpretation and accounting for inconsistency in results. The chapter finishes by discussing two types of temporal change of significant concern these days due to their implications for resilience and ecosystem dynamics: tipping points and hysteresis.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Liang ◽  
◽  
Daniele J. Cherniak ◽  
Chenguang Sun

2021 ◽  
Vol 383 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-148
Author(s):  
Shadi Jafari ◽  
Mattias Alenius

AbstractOlfactory perception is very individualized in humans and also in Drosophila. The process that individualize olfaction is adaptation that across multiple time scales and mechanisms shape perception and olfactory-guided behaviors. Olfactory adaptation occurs both in the central nervous system and in the periphery. Central adaptation occurs at the level of the circuits that process olfactory inputs from the periphery where it can integrate inputs from other senses, metabolic states, and stress. We will here focus on the periphery and how the fast, slow, and persistent (lifelong) adaptation mechanisms in the olfactory sensory neurons individualize the Drosophila olfactory system.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Bedinger ◽  
Lindsay Beevers ◽  
Lila Collet ◽  
Annie Visser

Climate change is a product of the Anthropocene, and the human–nature system in which we live. Effective climate change adaptation requires that we acknowledge this complexity. Theoretical literature on sustainability transitions has highlighted this and called for deeper acknowledgment of systems complexity in our research practices. Are we heeding these calls for ‘systems’ research? We used hydrohazards (floods and droughts) as an example research area to explore this question. We first distilled existing challenges for complex human–nature systems into six central concepts: Uncertainty, multiple spatial scales, multiple time scales, multimethod approaches, human–nature dimensions, and interactions. We then performed a systematic assessment of 737 articles to examine patterns in what methods are used and how these cover the complexity concepts. In general, results showed that many papers do not reference any of the complexity concepts, and no existing approach addresses all six. We used the detailed results to guide advancement from theoretical calls for action to specific next steps. Future research priorities include the development of methods for consideration of multiple hazards; for the study of interactions, particularly in linking the short- to medium-term time scales; to reduce data-intensivity; and to better integrate bottom–up and top–down approaches in a way that connects local context with higher-level decision-making. Overall this paper serves to build a shared conceptualisation of human–nature system complexity, map current practice, and navigate a complexity-smart trajectory for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (9) ◽  
pp. 2139-2154
Author(s):  
Caroline E. Weibull ◽  
Paul C. Lambert ◽  
Sandra Eloranta ◽  
Therese M. L. Andersson ◽  
Paul W. Dickman ◽  
...  

Nanomaterials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1392
Author(s):  
David Gallina ◽  
G. M. Pastor

Structural disorder has been shown to be responsible for profound changes of the interaction-energy landscapes and collective dynamics of two-dimensional (2D) magnetic nanostructures. Weakly-disordered 2D ensembles have a few particularly stable magnetic configurations with large basins of attraction from which the higher-energy metastable configurations are separated by only small downward barriers. In contrast, strongly-disordered ensembles have rough energy landscapes with a large number of low-energy local minima separated by relatively large energy barriers. Consequently, the former show good-structure-seeker behavior with an unhindered relaxation dynamics that is funnelled towards the global minimum, whereas the latter show a time evolution involving multiple time scales and trapping which is reminiscent of glasses. Although these general trends have been clearly established, a detailed assessment of the extent of these effects in specific nanostructure realizations remains elusive. The present study quantifies the disorder-induced changes in the interaction-energy landscape of two-dimensional dipole-coupled magnetic nanoparticles as a function of the magnetic configuration of the ensembles. Representative examples of weakly-disordered square-lattice arrangements, showing good structure-seeker behavior, and of strongly-disordered arrangements, showing spin-glass-like behavior, are considered. The topology of the kinetic networks of metastable magnetic configurations is analyzed. The consequences of disorder on the morphology of the interaction-energy landscapes are revealed by contrasting the corresponding disconnectivity graphs. The correlations between the characteristics of the energy landscapes and the Markovian dynamics of the various magnetic nanostructures are quantified by calculating the field-free relaxation time evolution after either magnetic saturation or thermal quenching and by comparing them with the corresponding averages over a large number of structural arrangements. Common trends and system-specific features are identified and discussed.


Author(s):  
Jia-Rong Yeh ◽  
Chung-Kang Peng ◽  
Norden E. Huang

Multi-scale entropy (MSE) was developed as a measure of complexity for complex time series, and it has been applied widely in recent years. The MSE algorithm is based on the assumption that biological systems possess the ability to adapt and function in an ever-changing environment, and these systems need to operate across multiple temporal and spatial scales, such that their complexity is also multi-scale and hierarchical. Here, we present a systematic approach to apply the empirical mode decomposition algorithm, which can detrend time series on various time scales, prior to analysing a signal’s complexity by measuring the irregularity of its dynamics on multiple time scales. Simulated time series of fractal Gaussian noise and human heartbeat time series were used to study the performance of this new approach. We show that our method can successfully quantify the fractal properties of the simulated time series and can accurately distinguish modulations in human heartbeat time series in health and disease.


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