Professional Socialization During Restructuring: A Study of Workload and Career Time

This article examines the experiences of newly graduated officers and specialist officers, as they recently entered employment in the Swedish Armed Forces. Building on 35 interviews, this article illustrates the dynamics of excessive workload and an unstructured working environment, and how embedded strategies for mentoring and guidance can reduce negative outcomes associated with the workload. The article introduces the concept of career time, reflecting the participant’s propensity to perform unpaid work to pursue a career in the organization. This study reveals tensions between organizational and employee interests, and experiences of exclusion from the officer profession, contextualized drawing on classical theorists Foucault and Habermas. When restructuring organizations, the quest for efficiency can outweigh professional values, such as esprit de corps and taking pride in work and professional identity.

The three logics of sustainability-oriented hybrid organisations: a multi-disciplinary review

Given current limitations of global and national governance arrangements in redirecting economic globalisation towards a climate-safe and sustainable world, it is crucial to understand how organisations that aim to tackle social and environmental problems using market mechanisms can contribute to fostering sustainability transformations. This review identified 60 different terms or concepts for hybrid organisations aiming to solve social and ecological problems through market related activities, reflecting a high degree of discontinuity and inconsistency in the literature. To assess the contribution to societal transformations of this array of innovative ventures, we introduce and operationalise Sustainability-Oriented Hybrid Organisations (SOHOs) as an umbrella concept to carry out a comprehensive review of 126 scientific articles that discuss them. Unlike traditional enterprises who apply one logic (commercial) and social and environmental enterprises who combine two logics (social–commercial or environmental–commercial), SOHOs unite commercial, social, and environmental logics, beliefs, and practices simultaneously—thereby adopting a higher level of organisational hybridity. SOHOs are oriented towards achieving net-positive sustainability and consider future generations and global socio-ecological systems which makes transforming enterprises towards SOHO models a potentially significant intervention point for promoting sustainability transformations. However, the narratives and actions of SOHOs can perpetuate rather than ameliorate the underlying causes and differential impacts of complex problems like climate change, unless the organisations adopt systemic, global, long-term, and socio-ecologically embedded strategies.

Claiming and re-claiming the Ayeyarwady Delta, time and again: the case of Nyaungdone Island, Myanmar

Since 2011 and the transition to civilian government, Myanmar and the Ayeyarwady Delta in particular are witnessing swift and dramatic changes in the modalities of access and use of natural resources. Drawing from political ecology, and on the basis of ethnographic work conducted in Yeinek village tract in the Nyaungdone Township of the Ayeyarwady Delta, this article places recent resources dynamics in a historical perspective. Rather than seeing natural resources as a 'given', we see them as resulting from socially embedded strategies of resource-making. These strategies contribute to a constant redefinition of the "resource-frontier" the delta has historically been for multiple actors. Notably, we show how land for rice cultivation, and water for capture fisheries and aquaculture, have been made into key resources over time, often in an exclusionary way. Post-2011 land and fishery reforms are the most recent examples of resource-making dynamics; they have certainly triggered significant resource re-allocation, but existing cross-scale patronage networks still largely shape how this takes place in practice. Finally, in this deltaic environment where resources are part water, part land, part rice, part fish, and the legitimacy of one's claims often hinges on proving prior use of a specific resource, it is the nature of the resource to be reallocated that is contested. In the newly politicized context of Myanmar, resources and institutional fluidity is in itself a frontier to navigate.Keywords: Ayeyarwady Delta; Myanmar; fisheries; land; resource making; frontier; exclusion

Task Embedded Coordinate Update: A Realizable Framework for Multivariate Non-Convex Optimization

We in this paper propose a realizable framework TECU, which embeds task-specific strategies into update schemes of coordinate descent, for optimizing multivariate non-convex problems with coupled objective functions. On one hand, TECU is capable of improving algorithm efficiencies through embedding productive numerical algorithms, for optimizing univariate sub-problems with nice properties. From the other side, it also augments probabilities to receive desired results, by embedding advanced techniques in optimizations of realistic tasks. Integrating both numerical algorithms and advanced techniques together, TECU is proposed in a unified framework for solving a class of non-convex problems. Although the task embedded strategies bring inaccuracies in sub-problem optimizations, we provide a realizable criterion to control the errors, meanwhile, to ensure robust performances with rigid theoretical analyses. By respectively embedding ADMM and a residual-type CNN in our algorithm framework, the experimental results verify both efficiency and effectiveness of embedding task-oriented strategies in coordinate descent for solving practical problems.

How do research-intensive universities portray employability strategies? A review of their websites

Employability development is a strategic priority for universities across advanced western economies. Despite this, there is no systematic study of employability development approaches internationally. In this study, we considered how universities portray employability on the public pages of their websites. We undertook website content analysis of 107 research-intensive universities in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Following Farenga and Quinlan, we classified these strategies as Portfolio, Hands-off, Award and Non-embedded. Portfolio or Award strategies were the most common across all four locations; Hands-off and Non-embedded strategies were more common to US universities; and Award was more common in the United Kingdom. Universities focused on either possessional or positional approaches to employability. We advocate for a pedagogical shift towards processual approaches in which responsibility for employability development is shared.