Self-Organized Cultural Cycles and the Uncertainty of Archaeological Thought

Contributing to the issue of complex relationship between social and cultural evolution, this paper aims to analyze repetitive patterns, or cycles, in the development of material culture. Our analysis focuses on culture change associated with sociopolitical and economic stasis. The proposed toy model describes the cyclical character of the quantitative and qualitative composition of archaeological assemblages, which include hierarchically organized cultural traits. Cycles sequentially process the stages of unification, diversity, and return to unification. This complex dynamic behavior is caused by the ratio between cultural traits’ replication rate and the proportion of traits of the higher taxonomic order’s related unit. Our approach identifies a shift from conformist to anti-conformist transmission, corresponding with open and closed phases in cultural evolution in respect to the introduction of innovations. The model also describes the dependence of a probability for horizontal transmission upon orders of taxonomic hierarchy during open phases. The obtained results are indicative for gradual cultural evolution at the low orders of taxonomic hierarchy and punctuated evolution at its high orders. The similarity of the model outcomes to the patters of material culture change reflecting societal transformations enables discussions around the uncertainty of explanation in archaeology and anthropology.

Impact of national culture in projects involving organizational culture change:

Globalization exerts a significant impact on project management processes by adding the complexity to operate across borders and in multicultural environments. For that reason, international collaborations require cultural affairs to be at the center of business strategies to avoid conflicts with the host country practices. For instance, Japan has unique business practices compared to most Western countries, and those must be considered in an eventual organizational culture change. This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of respecting national culture's boundaries in organizational culture change of international projects. Therefore, it will describe some peculiarities of Japanese business culture and how they were formed while making a parallel comparison with western business practices. A case study of the first project of the Renault-Nissan Alliance was applied to highlight the contrasts of Japanese and Western business practices. To understand the complexities of culture from different angles, this paper divided the research into different phases, each exploring the different cultural aspects of Japanese and French business practices in the context of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, using a mix of different theories. The theoretical approach was reinforced with interviews with two high-level executives of Renault and Nissan. The study was able to identify several cultural disparities between Japan and France that impacted the Alliance in the long run while offering an alternative solution to help project managers to improve strategies for inter-cultural collaborations.

Transforming departmental culture: Empowering a department through Appreciative Inquiry

This article outlines an appreciative inquiry (AI) into a departmental professional development process and describes the resulting implementation of an appreciative peer evaluation meeting as one part of the new professional development process. Using AI, a departmental faculty development committee sought to re-envision the professional development process. Also, the authors discuss how using AI can result in positive impacts for culture change and the model for peer evaluation can promote both individual and collective development of faculty.

Organization Culture Change and its Effect on Women’s Motivation

The research study is mainly about the organization's culture change and its effect on women’s motivation in the organization. The selected organization for this research is K-Electric and the study focuses on the transition and transformation in the organizational context. The objectives have been developed to identify and investigate that how cultural change can affect motivation. In this regard, a review of literature has been done to conduct the secondary analysis, however, for primary analysis, semi-structured interviews have been conducted and a close-ended questionnaire has been developed on Likert scale to obtain quantitative nature of data, to further analyze it by applying the quantitative tools and methods in particular. The main findings of the overall research are that the organizational culture change in K-Electric has a direct and profound impact on the women's level of motivation. Moreover, programs that were undertaken to motivate the women's also resulted in women's increased level of adaptability and flexibility in the organization to a greater extent. The research limitation and future implications have also been discussed in the research. Along with this, the conclusion of the overall study has been given; in addition to the recommendations to further bring improvements in the organizational planning and formulated strategies.