Thinking Like a Manager: A Participatory Exercise for Understanding Managerial Roles

Using the premise of a fictional earbud company, “EarWorm,” students in an introductory management course become EarWorm managers who problem-solve and make decisions about the best choices for their company. This article outlines this engaging and participatory exercise in detail. Students are able to directly connect course concepts to EarWorm’s challenges in an active model that gives them ownership over their company’s fate. Appendices to the article provide related active learning activities using the EarWorm premise, which can serve as instructional modules to help students explore key management concepts related to global business and organization design.

Acceptable Surveillance-Orientated Security Technologies: Insights from the SurPRISE Project

Pre-emptive security emphasizes the necessity of envisioning and designing technologies enabling the anticipation and management of emergent risks threatening human and public security. Surveillance functionalities are embedded in the design of these technologies to allow constant monitoring, preparedness and prevention. Yet surveillance-orientated security technologies, such as smart CCTVs or Deep Packet Inspection, bring along with their implementation other risks, such as risks of privacy infringement, discrimination, misuse, abuse, or errors, which have often triggered public outrage and resistance. The same measures meant to foster human security, can potentially make people feel insecure, vulnerable, and exposed. This outcome is the result of a narrow approach toward problem solving that does not take into account those same people the technology is supposed to protect. Drawing from both the socio-cultural and psychometric approaches to risk analysis and from the literature on public engagement in science and technology, this article presents a new methodological tool, which combines traditional citizen summit method with an innovative mixed-method research design. The objective of this new form of participatory exercise is to engage the public and gather socially robust and in context knowledge about the public acceptability of these technologies. The method has been developed as part of the SurPRISE project, funded by the European Commission under the SeventhFramework Program. The article presents the theoretical framework and preliminary results of citizen summits organized across Europe.

Public Project Portfolio Optimization under a Participatory Paradigm

A new democracy paradigm is emerging through participatory budgeting exercises, which can be defined as a public space in which the government and the society agree on how to adapt the priorities of the citizenship to the public policy agenda. Although these priorities have been identified and they are likely to be reflected in a ranking of public policy actions, there is still a challenge of solving a portfolio problem of public projects that should implement the agreed agenda. This work proposes two procedures for optimizing the portfolio of public actions with the information stemming from the citizen participatory exercise. The selection of the method depends on the information about preferences collected from the participatory group. When the information is sufficient, the method behaves as an instrument of legitimate democracy. The proposal performs very well in solving two real-size examples.

The Arms Race, Played by SDP

Interest in the arms race has been growing in recent years as shown by coverage in the media and in political campaigns. Many students coming to class are already preconditioned either for or against increased defense spending. This participatory exercise allows them to test their ideas, and it helps make their minds more receptive to new concepts being explored in the class, such as: Is detente in the best interests of the Unted States? Should a new SALT Treaty be negotiated? What is the best ratio of expenditures for domestic programs and national defense?SDB stands for Secret Defense Budgets. In the SDB exercise, or game as it is called, the class is divided into groups of two students sitting next to each other.