People, Clouds, and Roots

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 236-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yunita T. Winarto ◽  
Sue Walker ◽  
Rhino Ariefiansyah
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Science Field ◽  
Mind Set

Various studies reveal the paradox of farmers’ local knowledge. Farmers are equipped with traditional cosmology and detailed empirical knowledge of their agricultural habitats. However, these same knowledge frameworks seem to contribute to entrapping farmers in a mind-set that prevents them from understanding the diverse unintended consequences of changes in their environment. To avoid this, we utilize the learning arena of science field shops (SFSs) to help farmers better understand the relationships at work from the “clouds to the roots and in between”, and to address ongoing changes and vulnerabilities in the environment. This article seeks to explain the changes that occurred to farmers following the learning they acquired from SFSs and its impact on their anticipation and decision making.

Changing Livelihoods, Livestock and Local Knowledge Systems: Women Stake their Claim in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagari R. Ramdas ◽  
Yakshi ◽  
Girijana Deepika
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Research ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Andhra Pradesh ◽  
Rural Livelihoods ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
Natural Flora ◽  
Women's Role

This paper discusses women's role, resource access control and decision-making power in the context of rapid changes in rural livelihoods, local knowledge systems and NRM. Participatory research was carried out in collaboration with NGOs and community-based organisations in six distinct agro-ecological regions of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, with a focus on eco nomically and socially marginalised communities. The research revealed that state policies have resulted in dramatic changes from food to commercial crops. This has threatened food and fodder security, the biodiversity of crops, natural flora, local livestock and poultry breeds, and led to unsustainable extraction of ground water and high levels of indebtedness. Women have borne the brunt. Women who formerly played key decision-making roles have been marginalised, their knowledge and expertise made valueless. Traditionally also women have been denied access to certain kinds of knowledge that constrain their livelihoods. Participatory research has empow ered women to take the lead in movements to challenge mainstream paradigms of sustainable development.

Enhancing Regulatory Decision Making for Postmarket Drug Safety

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vishal Ahuja ◽  
Carlos A. Alvarez ◽  
John R. Birge ◽  
Chad Syverson
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Operations Management ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pharmaceutical Products ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Veterans Health ◽  
Health Administration ◽  
Regulatory Decision ◽  
Increased Risk

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the approval and safe public use of pharmaceutical products in the United States. The FDA uses postmarket surveillance systems to monitor drugs already on the market; a drug found to be associated with an increased risk of adverse events (ADEs) is subject to a recall or a warning. A flawed postmarket decision-making process can have unintended consequences for patients, create uncertainty among providers and affect their prescribing practices, and subject the FDA to unfavorable public scrutiny. The FDA’s current pharmacovigilance process suffers from several shortcomings (e.g., a high underreporting rate), often resulting in incorrect or untimely decisions. Thus, there is a need for robust, data-driven approaches to support and enhance regulatory decision making in the context of postmarket pharmacovigilance. We propose such an approach that has several appealing features—it employs large, reliable, and relevant longitudinal databases; it uses methods firmly established in literature; and it addresses selection bias and endogeneity concerns. Our approach can be used to both (i) independently validate existing safety concerns relating to a drug, such as those emanating from existing surveillance systems, and (ii) perform a holistic safety assessment by evaluating a drug’s association with other ADEs to which the users may be susceptible. We illustrate the utility of our approach by applying it retrospectively to a highly publicized FDA black box warning (BBW) for rosiglitazone, a diabetes drug. Using comprehensive data from the Veterans Health Administration on more than 320,000 diabetes patients over an eight-year period, we find that the drug was not associated with the two ADEs that led to the BBW, a conclusion that the FDA evidently reached, as it retracted the warning six years after issuing it. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by retroactively evaluating two additional warnings, those related to statins and atenolol, which we found to be valid. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

scholarly journals Strategic Planning to Advance Equity on Campus: A Case Study at Portland State University

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa Zapata ◽  
Stephen Percy ◽  
Sona Karentz Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Strategic Planning ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
State University ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Portland State University

Propelled by many factors, including a newly appointed Board of Trustees responsible for governance of our university, resource shortages, and enrollment swings, Portland State University embarked on a strategic planning effort in 2014 with the intent of reunifying a divided campus and creating a bold vision for moving forward in the next five years. While committed from the start to goals of diversity and inclusion, the planning process itself generated greater awareness of and commitment to equity—a bolder vision of empowerment that creates a responsibility to understand and mitigate negative, but often unintended consequences of, campus decisions and action—particularly as they impact groups that have experienced institutional racism and injustice. Equity emerged not only as a goal, with intendant initiatives for action, but also as a commitment to conscientious ongoing attention to decision-making that embraces utilization of an equity lens.

Is an Emoji Worth a Thousand Words? The Effect of Emoji Usage on Nonprofessional Investors’ Perceptions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilda E. Carrillo ◽  
Robin Pennington ◽  
Yibo (James) Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Nonprofessional Investors

Emojis act as non-verbal cues to disambiguate and communicate affect and are increasingly used in online corporate disclosures. Emotion work, a concept founded in social psychology, suggests that individuals adjust their behavior as emotions are evoked or suppressed. Despite the growing evidence that emojis may influence judgments and decisions due to their deliberate expression of context and affect, the accounting research community has yet to investigate emojis’ impact. We experimentally explore whether emojis can soften nonprofessional investors’ perceptions of bad news or enhance perceptions of good news. We find that emojis modestly suppress participants’ positive emotions on positive news, influencing their investment-related judgments and decision-making. Subsequent data collection fails to replicate the initial findings in a less experienced participant pool, suggesting that investing experience may play a role. Our study enhances our understanding of the unintended consequences of emojis and introduces a sociology-based principle into the accounting literature.

scholarly journals Evaluating underpinning, complexity and implications of ethical situations in humanitarian operations: qualitative study through the lens of career humanitarian workers

BMJ Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. e039463
Author(s):  
Ramin Asgary ◽  
Katharine Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Moral Distress ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Aid Effectiveness ◽  
International Agency ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Ethical Frameworks ◽  
Humanitarian Operations

IntroductionData regarding underpinning and implications of ethical challenges faced by humanitarian workers and their organisations in humanitarian operations are limited.MethodsWe conducted comprehensive, semistructured interviews with 44 experienced humanitarian aid workers, from the field to headquarters, to evaluate and describe ethical conditions in humanitarian situations.Results61% were female; average age was 41.8 years; 500 collective years of humanitarian experience (11.8 average) working with diverse major international non-governmental organisations. Important themes included; allocation schemes and integrity of the humanitarian industry, including resource allocation and fair access to and use of services; staff or organisational competencies and aid quality; humanitarian process and unintended consequences; corruption, diversion, complicity and competing interests, and intentions versus outcomes; professionalism and interpersonal and institutional responses; and exposure to extreme inequities and emotional and moral distress. Related concepts included broader industry context and allocations; decision-making, values, roles and sustainability; resource misuse at programme, government and international agency levels; aid effectiveness and utility versus futility, and negative consequences. Multiple contributing, confounding and contradictory factors were identified, including context complexity and multiple decision-making levels; limited input from beneficiaries of aid; different or competing social constructs, values or sociocultural differences; and shortcomings, impracticality, or competing philosophical theories or ethical frameworks.ConclusionsEthical situations are overarching and often present themselves outside the exclusive scope of moral reasoning, philosophical views, professional codes, ethical or legal frameworks, humanitarian principles or social constructivism. This study helped identify a common instinct to uphold fairness and justice as an underlying drive to maintain humanity through proximity, solidarity, transparency and accountability.

scholarly journals Potential Unintended Consequences Of Recent Shared Decision Making Policy Initiatives

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (11) ◽  
pp. 1876-1881 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby ◽  
Douglas J. Opel ◽  
Neal W. Dickert ◽  
Daniel B. Kramer ◽  
Brownsyne Tucker Edmonds ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Shared Decision Making ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Shared Decision ◽  
Policy Initiatives

Facebook confessions: Corporate abdication and Silicon Valley dystopianism

2020 ◽  
pp. 146144482093354
Author(s):  
Tero Karppi ◽  
David B Nieborg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Platform

This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform’s unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of sins. They speak of Facebook’s capacity to damage democratic decision-making and “exploit human psychology,” suggesting that individual users, children in particular, should disconnect. Rather than expressions of truth, this emerging form of corporate abdication constructs dystopian narratives that have the power shape our future visions of social platforms and give rise to new utopias. As such, and marking a stark break with decades of technological utopianism, the confessions are an emergent form of Silicon Valley dystopianism.

The Black Box Myth

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Abraham Rudnick
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Dynamic Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Extreme Caution ◽  
Scientific Facts

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its correlates, such as machine and deep learning, are changing health care, where complex matters such as comoribidity call for dynamic decision-making. Yet, some people argue for extreme caution, referring to AI and its correlates as a black box. This brief article uses philosophy and science to address the black box argument about knowledge as a myth, concluding that this argument is misleading as it ignores a fundamental tenet of science, i.e., that no empirical knowledge is certain, and that scientific facts – as well as methods – often change. Instead, control of the technology of AI and its correlates has to be addressed to mitigate such unexpected negative consequences.

Dealing with the visibility created by accounting numbers – A case study of cost accounting translation in a transitional economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-303
Author(s):  
Catalin Nicolae Albu ◽  
Nadia Albu ◽  
Flavius Andrei Guinea ◽  
Mathew Tsamenyi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Management Accounting ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Construction Companies ◽  
Cost System ◽  
Costing System ◽  
State Taxation ◽  
The Cost

PurposeThis paper investigates the process of translating a costing tool into operational use in the context of a transitional (post-communist) economy, where local institutions challenge the rationality of western methods.Design/methodology/approachBy mobilizing Actor–Network Theory, in particular Callon's four moments of translation, and by drawing data from an interventionist research, the paper focuses on the process of change instilled by the implementation of a costing tool in 20 Romanian construction companies.FindingsThe costing system is initially problematized as a tool for rational decision making. However, the visibility over the accounting figures generated by the costing tool instilled new roles for the cost system to manage internal and external interdependencies. First, two costing datasets were created, one for decision making and one for tax purposes, to manage the relationship with the state taxation authorities. Second, since the costing tool generated visibility over the field practices as well, engineers convinced management to drop the decision-making set of costs. The costing tool ultimately only became used for tax optimization, an originally unintended use, reflecting its translation process.Research limitations/implicationsBy taking an interventionist approach, the paper contributes to theorizing accounting in transitional economies by bringing their economic idiosyncrasies into the analysis.Practical implicationsThe results inform managers about the intended and unintended consequences of management accounting tools and about actors' role in shaping their use.Originality/valueOur research responds to recent calls to study how organizations configure their control systems in a rapidly changing environment and what is the role of management accounting in these arrangements.

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