The Complex Case of Noncredit Credential Innovation in Public Universities

Four-year public institutions of higher education (IHEs) face increasing pressure to innovate with noncredit credentials. The chapter aims to develop leaders' mental models for navigating unique complexities associated with offering programs that do not award academic credit. First, a review of noncredit literature and organizational science principles explains that noncredit programming is often unaligned with IHE organizational culture and structure. Then, two metaphors for leaders' roles in overcoming barriers to innovation are introduced and critiqued: Buller's organic leadership concept and Christensen and Eyring's higher education DNA concept. Complexity leadership theory is next presented as a mental model to understand three complementary leader roles for fostering innovation with a complex organizational environment. Finally, the chapter's case features three vignettes from public IHE continuing education leaders that exemplify the complexities related to pursuing noncredit credential innovation. Strategies and discussion questions are included.

Advancing the development of railway transport with the help of digital technologies

Background: The object of the study is regional and global cargo transportation. In order for cargo transportation to link the national economy into a single whole, and also allow it to realize its export opportunities, the level of organization of railway transport should be significantly higher than that of other market participants (primarily shippers and consignees). Aim: to study the prospects for increasing the role of railway transport with the help of digital technologies. Methods: To model the role of railway transport at the national and global levels, the article uses the concept of general organizational science by A. A. Bogdanov (Tectology). The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) is used to model the role of railway transport at the micro level. Results: Railway transport is considered as a system consisting of subsystems: "working body", "transmission", "engine" and "computer". Each of these subsystems corresponds to separate divisions of railway transport. Digitalization involves the transfer from a person to automated systems, first of all, the functions of such a subsystem as a "working body", which functions according to the same algorithm and, therefore, is extremely routine. This simplifies and makes more predictable the production activities of the relevant departments of railway transport, which in turn creates the opportunity to increase the complexity of other subsystems. Conclusion: Railway transport was originally created as a complex macro system based on the most advanced technologies and significantly ahead of other industries in its development. Because of this, he was able to dramatically increase the level of complexity of the territories that he reached. However, today railway transport is experiencing increasing competition from other modes of transport, and therefore qualitatively new measures are required from railway transport to ensure advanced development. To do this, it is proposed to apply digitalization to the process of physical movement of goods as a whole: from fixing the need for transportation from shippers to delivering goods directly to the production sites of consignees. In this case, the main competitive advantage of railway transport becomes the "computer".

Specialists and generalists

The article considers labor specialization in terms of A.A. Bogdanov’s General Organizational Science (Tectology), whose methodology provides conclusions different from generally accepted A. Smith’s concept of labor division. The article’s goal is to investigate specialist’s characteristics and his difference from generalist.In terms of tectology, the difference is the cause of any process or phenomenon. Labor specialization is also based on difference – the difference between initial resources and collective consumption. The depth of labor specialization is determined by the number of people and the volume of their consumption. Reaching the global market’s limits has led to a reduction of differences in most markets and a decrease in production profitability, which in the long term can lead to the curtailment of material and energy flows. A qualitatively new difference may be the difference between the values and meanings of humanity, on the one hand, and the dehumanized technosphere, on the other. Subjects capable of linking these differences are generalists, capable of combining an understanding of the technosphere as a system, an awareness of long-term cause-and-effect relations, and the values and meanings of humanity.The scientific novelty of the findings obtained lies in studying labor specialization and the prospects of its transition to universalization and generalization.

Toward Computational Literature Reviews: Applying Expert-Built Dictionaries for Automated Analysis of Complex Texts

The social sciences face growing demand for reproducible tools for processing massive troves of often-complex text data (political speeches, medical notes, etc.). In response, we aim toward computational literature review by developing an inductive method of applying expert-built dictionaries for automated analysis of complex texts. Our workflow begins with developing dictionaries from foundational texts and domain expertise. Next, we apply text-analytic methods of differential domain-specificity and complexity to create vector-space representations of texts. Finally, we compare the validity of these methods by using regression models to evaluate relationships between their representations and ground truth. Taking as our use case a large corpus of academic articles in organizational science, we find that domain-specific, relatively simple embeddings were most valid--while the more sophisticated models were very weak. Thus, we suggest that social science workflows for learning from complex texts incorporate embeddings that are domain-specific and straightforward--rather thanconvoluted.

A Bukaresti Értéktőzsde Felelős Társaságirányítási Kódexe a romániai állami vállalatok szabályozásának tükrében

The corporate governance as a regulatory system has started a journey towards independence for a while, and sooner or later it will turn into a self-standing field of science. This process is facilitated not only by its transdisciplinary nature, which combines legal science with economic science, within the civil law, the corporate law, business economics, management and organizational science, but also, in the case of state-owned companies, with public administration and proceedings law. The timeliness of the topic is illustrated by the prolonged transition to market economy following the 1989 regime change, the controversial application of company law, the scandals around certain privatization processes, the bankruptcy of many important state-owned enterprises, all of these bringing about a willingness to establish a regulatory framework. Taking into consideration the above short presentation, the subject of our analysis is very complex; this article intends to limit the examination to the Bucharest Stock Exchange Corporate Governance Code, investigating it in comparison to the provisions of the Romanian legal system. At the same time, it sets as an objective to make use of a concrete example (the most important Romanian state-owned joint stock company listed at the Bucharest Stock Exchange), Romgaz, in order to present the reader the ways and circumstances of the implementation of the general principles and provisions to comply with , as included in the Code.

Use of the concepts of" “Tektology” by A. Bogdanov in the works of the architect A. V. Rosenberg (characteristics of the methodological stage of establishment of design in Russia)

This article consists of three parts: the first discusses the role of methodology in establishment of the discipline (practice) and its further functioning; the second analyzes the work of A. Bogdanov “Tektology”; and the third explores the use of its means in the establishment of design in the early XX century. The author distinguishes the two basic functions of methodology: the stage of establishment marks criticism and analysis of unsatisfactory ways of thinking, while the stage of functioning of the newly established activity implies its methodological support. The analysis of “Tektology” allowed determining the our main interpretations: as general organizational science, distinct mathematics, practice, and private methodology. In this regard, the author reviews several meanings of the concept of organization, as well as similarity of the concept of organization with the concept of activity. Besides the organizational approach, the article also discusses the systemic approach. In the third part of the article offers the reconstruction of the works of Aleksandr Rosenberg, which indicates that a number of provisions of the establishing design (for example, the principle of “compliance” and “optimality”) were formulated based on the means of Bogdanov's “Tektology”. In conclusion, the article discussed the reasons why the organizational concepts were eliminated from design, while the systemic ones remain.

An Explanation of Personality Change in Organizational Science: Personality as an Outcome of Workplace Stress

Organizational scholarship has recently begun to treat personality as malleable in workplace settings and has called for personality change to be incorporated into current research. The lack of a comprehensive, theoretical model of organizational personality change is a critical impediment to this research. We integrate recent advances in biological and epigenetic fields with the cognitive appraisal, personality, and stress literatures to introduce a comprehensive model of short- and long-term organizational personality change. This model explains when, how, and why appraisal of workplace stress alters employee personality through three important neurochemical systems and the mechanisms through which changes in these systems differentially impact dimensions of the Five Factor personality framework. By examining epigenetic changes affecting neurochemical systems, we explain how appraisal of chronic workplace stress can lead to long-term changes in various personality traits—a relationship with substantial implications for both practice and research. This model further provides a roadmap to understand how short- and long-term employee personality change influences workplace outcomes at the individual, team, and organizational levels and how interventions at these levels can mitigate or reverse deleterious effects of workplace stressors on employee personality change. We outline the processes necessary for organizational scholars to test the propositions described here and more robustly incorporate personality change into organizational scholarship.