Modernity and Decision-Making for Global Challenges

There are competing views on modernity. Some focus on the isolation of the individual, bereft of traditions and rituals, while others optimistically espouse the power of globalization, technology, and science to support progress and enhance human life. The challenges created by emerging diseases and human environmental impacts allow a new appreciation of the power of coordinated human responses while highlighting the limitations of globalization, technology, and science. Both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that science and technology provide rapidly updated information, but immediate solutions reside in aggregate changes in personal behavior supported by regulation and governmental or trans-governmental agencies. These requirements for personal responsibility challenge individual powerlessness and highlight the necessity of communal responses to global challenges.

Critical Success Factors for Organizational Agility

Companies are facing important challenges related to markets' internationalization, regulatory restrictions, and fierce competition especially during the COVID-19 context. Environment is thus characterized by rapid and volatile changes. Organizational agility is the key capability allowing firms to adapt continuously by sensing changes in their environment and responding in an efficient and rapid manner. Previous work has addressed organizational agility enablers, including IT ones, allowing the firm to be more agile. In this chapter, the authors first extend their organizational agility enablers list through an in-depth analysis of consulting firms and governmental agencies reports on agility during the COVID-19 context. The final list contains 28 organizational agility enablers belonging to 10 groups. Then, the authors conduct a Q-study in order to identify what factors are critical for a successful journey towards agility and to analyze the results from an IT perspective.

Introduction: Black Swans and Sinatra Inferences

Public mismanagement as a threat to life and limb is a rare and highly improbable phenomenon—the proverbial Black Swan. Bridges and buildings collapse, claiming the lives of people who had every reason to believe that governmental agencies protect their physical integrity through public oversight and maintenance. Properly analyzed, however, these unlikely events reveal causal mechanisms of a general nature, strong enough to trigger fateful mismanagement even under the restrictive conditions of professional bureaucracies and democratic government. Hence the “Sinatra Inference”: When a mechanism is powerful enough ‘to make it there’—i.e., where causal leverage is supposedly low—it is likely to ‘make it everywhere’ as soon as leverage is enlarged by weaker accountability structures, lower professional standards and lesser values than human safety.

Conducting Research in Difficult, Dangerous, and/or Vulnerable Contexts: Messy Narratives From the Field

Organizational communication scholars have historically conducted research in large for-profit businesses, governmental agencies, and a few high-profile nonprofits/NGOs—all of which are relatively easy to access and presumably “safe” to study. It is largely unsurprising, then, that limited scholarship addresses the challenges associated with conducting research in less standard contexts that are often perceived to be difficult, dangerous, and/or vulnerable (DDV). In this forum, we offer lived stories—unfiltered messy narratives—to demystify three core ethical challenges inherent in conducting research of this nature and share how we (imperfectly) navigated them. In addition, we offer practical strategies for conducting research in DDV contexts. Taken together, our overall collective aim is to successfully prepare future scholars to conduct research projects in DDV contexts.

Green Infrastructure Development in Urban Areas: Case Studies of Samutsakhon, Krathumbaen and Banphaeo Municipalities in Samut Sakhon Province

Though the development of green infrastructure in parks in Samut Sakhon province has been continuously implemented, there are still no research studies that have explicitly demonstrated the parks’ potential, nor any public opinions toward the development of urban green infrastructure in the parks that would be productive for the planning to efficiently improve and provide urban green infrastructure. As a result, this study had the following objectives: 1) To analyze the potential and networks of urban green infrastructure in parks in Samut Sakhon province, 2) To analyze the satisfaction of using the services and requirements of the urban green infrastructure development in the parks in Samut Sakhon province, and 3) To propose development guidelines in urban green infrastructure for the parks of Samut Sakhon province. The research instruments comprised a questionnaire, and the data were analyzed by using a scalogram. The results found that high-potential parks were not large in size, but they had all the complete components, as well as green infrastructure featured in the attributes of patch, matrix, and mosaic. Nevertheless, the green infrastructure development featured in the attribute of the corridor had disappeared in several sites of the green infrastructure in the parks. Likewise, the green networks of the parks, specifically those in the high-potential category, were not successive by walking. For this reason, the people were mostly satisfied with the convenient accessibility of the parks, but there were the requirements of paving the footpath, improving the landscape, and adding a variety of activities in the parks. Therefore, the development guidelines of urban green infrastructure in the parks should formulate more areas in the attribute of the corridor at the riverside and on the streets, conserve and increase the park areas by allowing public participation in the management, as well as apply urban planning measures to obtain the park area. In addition, a footpath and bike lane should be safely constructed in the high-potential parks. Simultaneously, the landscape should be adjusted in the low- and moderate-potential parks by launching pilot projects in the parks of the governmental agencies.

FOOD ENVIRONMENT: CONCEPTUALIZATION AND IMPORTANCE IN PERSPECTIVE OF URBAN INDIA

Food environment of an individual is characterized by the ‘availability of food’ and ‘affordability of food’. The latter determines the type of food available that is nutritious or nonnutritious nature of food while former determines the access to food in terms of purchasing power of people. These two components of food environment collectively play a major role in determining the food and nutritional security of any region. Country like India is characterized by the disparity in incomelevels, demography and development. Likewise, India is characterized by regions with varying degree of ‘food security’ and ‘nutritional security’. The present research article discusses the concept of ‘food environment’ in perspective of urban India. Further, the present research study investigates that how the above-mentioned concepts helpful in identifying the regions with food security and nutritional security or both. The study is based on secondary data collected from various governmental and non-governmental agencies.

Management of Celestial Systems under Spatial Grasp Model

Many governmental agencies and private companies of different countries are now rushing into space around Earth in hope to provide smart communication, industrial, security, and defense solutions. This often involves massive launches of cheap small satellites which are also contributing to the growth of space debris. The current paper discusses how the developed high-level system philosophy and model can effectively organize distributed space-based systems on different stages of their development and growth. The briefed Spatial Grasp Technology, based on parallel pattern-matching of distributed environments with high-level recursive mobile code, can effectively provide any networking protocols and important applications of large satellite constellations, especially those on Low Earth Orbits. The paper contains examples of technology-based solutions for establishing basic communications between satellites, starting from their initial, often chaotic, launches and distributing and collecting data in the growing constellations with even unstable and rapidly changing connections between satellites. It describes how to organize and register networking topologies in case of predictable distances between satellites, and how the fixed networking structures can help in solving complex problems. The latter including those related to the new Space Development Agency multiple-satellite defense-oriented architecture and allowing for effective integration of its continuous earth custody observation and cooperative missile tracking and elimination layers, based on self-spreading mobile intelligence. Earlier versions of the technology, described in many papers, six books including, were prototyped and used in different countries, with the current one quickly implementable too, even in university-based environments.

Excellence in Internal Quality Assurance: An Empirical Study in United States

Assessment or internal quality assurance (IQA) processes have often been driven by external stakeholders such as accreditation and governmental agencies of higher education, which are focused on accountability rather than quality improvement. This research examined how private and non-profit Doctoral and Research institutions with less public financial dependence and accountability requirements adopted the Excellence in Assessment (EIA) rubric to improve their IQA models that supports improvement. A survey based on National Institute of Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) EIA rubric was sent to the ASSESS Listserv to learn if there was a difference in EIA scores related to source of funding and Carnegie characteristics. A two-way MANOVA analysis of the survey responses showed that there was no difference in IQA practice followed EIA rubric between source of funding (public and non-profit private institutions) and Carnegie classification (Research and Comprehensive). Recommendations are made regarding the reliability of the EIA rubric. The EIA designation can serve as a framework for U.S. and non-U.S. higher education institutions to benchmark and improve the current IQA processes.

Sustainable Building Plan-Design, Construction, Performance, and Renovation Criteria

Published data or available literature on sustainable building plan-design, construction, performance, and renovation criteria have covered some stages or some parts of each stage. These data usually have been published partially in many different papers―there have not been any papers that published these data together. Hence, this paper aims to collectively review these data and publish them together. The collection and review of these data were carried out by our twenty-five team members who specialized in sustainable urban, architectural, and civil engineering and construction management. The gathered and reviewed outputs were combined and validated based on a general group consensus. This consensus decision-making proceeded through two major group meetings with several follow-up meetings. The first major meeting was to combine and improve the gathered reviewed sustainable building criteria for Cambodia. The second major meeting was to validate the improved reviewed sustainable building criteria for Cambodia. The several follow-up meetings were to discuss the relevance and importance of the validated data “criteria and their classifications and descriptions” in all stages and more focused on their importance and applicability to Cambodia. The collective reviewed data in this paper would be useful to researchers in the fields. They could also be useful collective knowledge and information for policymakers from governmental agencies and development partners, particularly for sustainable building and construction companies.