Invisible Whispering: Restructuring Collaborative Decision Making with Instant Messaging

Organizational decision making is dominated by teams. When an important decision is required, a team is often formed to make it or to advise the individual decision maker, because a team has more resources, knowledge, and political insight than any one individual working alone. As teams have become geographically distributed, collaboration technology has come to play an important role in such collective decision making efforts. Instant messaging (IM) is an increasingly prevalent workplace collaboration technology that enables near‐synchronous text exchanges on a variety of devices. We examined the use of IM during face‐to‐face, telephone, and computer‐mediated team meetings, a practice we call “invisible whispering.” We introduce Goffman's characterization of social interaction as dramatic performance, differentiable into “front stage” and “backstage” exchanges, to analyze how invisible whispering alters the socio‐spatial and temporal boundaries of team decision making. Using IM, workers were able to influence front stage decision making through backstage conversations, often participating in multiple backstage conversations simultaneously. This type of interaction would be either physically impossible or socially constrained without the use of IM. We examine how invisible whispering changes the processes of collaborative decision making and how these new processes may affect the efficiency and effectiveness of collaborative decision making, as well as participation, satisfaction, relationships among team members, and individual attention.     

The New AskTech: Implementing a Ticketing System Platform for Technical Services Resource Troubleshooting

Abstract

Duke University Libraries’ Technical Services department recently completed a project to transition AskTech, its resource troubleshooting support service, from working over email to working within a ticketing system platform. The team responsible for this transition examined the flaws in the existing system and searched among alternative systems before ultimately deciding on the Spiceworks platform. Over the course of several months, the team successfully set up the system, tested it, trained Technical Services staff in its use, and moved the service to the system. Technical Services is currently using this system for over 150 tickets per month.     

Illiquide Assets in der Portfoliooptimierung

When optimizing a portfolio, which comprises liquid as well as illiquid assets, under the constraint of a liquidity requirement, one has to take into account the particular characteristics of illiquid assets. Illiquid assets in this context have the constituting property that they can only be sold as a whole and – if sold on a short term basis – selling leads to losses. Performing the analysis of a single period model in a mean downside risk framework with one liquid and one illiquid asset, significant differences are proven in comparison to the results of an optimization concerning solely liquid assets. For example, although the return on assets is safe in the first scenario, the portfolio value is already risky due to the uncertain liquidity requirement and situations arise where the allocation to both the liquid and the illiquid asset is optimal. Furthermore, when asset returns are uncertain, the expected portfolio value depends on the assets’ variances and can even be increased by positive correlations.     

Art for Whose Sake?

In a wide ranging article the author considers the nature of poetry and the political agendas of literature generally in order to dispel The myth of the personal versus the political, which has been particularly prevalent in the disability arts debate. He examines some of the statements made about disability art in the disability press, questioning on the way assumptions about the existence of a so-called disability culture. He promotes a role for the poet, particularly the poet of a minority group, as witness to the oppression generated by a dominant language-constructed culture, Concluding that there is no longer the need for a conflict between the role of writer/artist and political activist in their movement towards the political liberation of disabled people.     

That wretched prior

The foundations of statistics are of importance for all statisticians, whatever their interests, because they provide, in the method of maximisation of expected utility, a realistic, practical framework for the solution of most statistical problems. The method depends on probability and in this article Dennis Lindley discusses the need to improve our methods of assessing probabilities whenever we face uncertainty.     

Community availability of contraceptives and family limitation

This study examines the impact of contraceptive service availability on contraceptive use in Korea, Mexico, and Bangladesh. Using World Fertility Survey Data on once-married females and their communities of residence, the mutivariate analysis finds that the community level of contraceptive availability directly affects the likelihood of current use, net of the effects of community development, education, parity, and marital duration. The results are supportive of the recent policy emphasis on maximizing the geographic availability of contraceptive services.     

Effects of a social norm feedback campaign on the drinking norms and behavior of Division I student-athletes

Social norm feedback is a promising strategy for reducing alcohol misuse on college campuses. However, little is known about the impact of these interventions on at-risk populations, such as student-athletes. This study examined the effects of a campus-wide media campaign on Division I student-athletes at three universities. A discriminant function analysis revealed that a composite measure of perceived campus drinking norms distinguished between two campaign exposure groups. With the exception of one perceived norm measure (closest friends), the campaign-exposed group reported more conservative estimates of alcohol use in peers. However, there was no evidence that the campaign had reduced alcohol use. The inability of the campaign to reduce perceptions of alcohol use among one's closest friends may have accounted for the lack of change in drinking behavior. Discussion is directed to the potential limitations of using social norm feedback campaigns to reduce alcohol misuse in high-risk groups, such as student-athletes.     

Emotionally focused interventions for couples with chronically ill children: a 2-year follow-up

Couples with chronically ill children are particularly at risk for experiencing marital distress. The study presented here is a 2-year follow-up of a randomized control trial that assessed the efficacy of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in decreasing marital distress in a sample of couples with a chronically ill child. Thirteen couples with chronically ill children who received treatment were assessed to determine if the significant improvement in relationship distress observed at posttreatment and 5-month follow-up would be maintained at 2-year follow-up. Results demonstrated that improvements in marital functioning were not only maintained but, in some cases, enhanced at the 2-year follow-up. This uncontrolled follow-up study provides initial evidence of the longer-term benefits of EFT.     

On Celebrating the Organizational Identity Metaphor: A Rejoinder to Cornelissen

We disagree strongly with Cornelissen's critique of the organizational identity metaphor on grounds that he: seriously underplays the generative strength of metaphor in the study of organizations; inappropriately applies the standards of assessment from one paradigm to the approaches of another; and raises false concerns about issues of self reference, reification and multilevel transference of concepts, among others.