Utilizing fuzzy compatibility of skill sets for team selection in multi-phase projects

In this paper, a model is developed for the selection of personnel for a multiple phase project which takes into account the match between the skills possessed by each individual, the skills needed for each phase, and rather flexible budget considerations. The algorithm uses the fuzzy construct of compatibility to measure the fit of a person’s skill set to the goal set for each project phase. Based on the individual fuzzy compatibility measures, the team is formed from combined levels of compatibility and acceptable levels of quality defined for the goal set. 1 and 2 present the background information necessary to an understanding of project management phases and compatibility of skills. The development of the model and subsequent algorithm in 3 and 4, respectively rely on fuzzy measures of compatibility. Finally, an application is presented in Section 4 with conclusions stated in Section 5.     

Reviewing Leadership Styles: Overlaps and the Need for a New ‘Full‐Range’ Theory

A central topic in leadership research concerns the impact of leadership style – the pattern of attitudes that leaders hold and behaviors they exhibit. Since the year 2000, several new leadership styles have been proposed to capture important missing aspects beyond the dominant charismatic/transformational and transactional framework. The authors review the emerging literature on these new styles – ideological leadership, pragmatic leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership, spiritual leadership, distributed leadership, and integrative public leadership – as well as the recent work on servant leadership. They also comment on the Ohio State studies on leadership, and then discuss the ways in which these many styles overlap with transformational leadership and each other, and issue a call to leadership researchers to collectively develop a new ‘full‐range’ model of leadership that encompasses and distills what is unique about these various styles. The authors argue that such an integrated full‐range model is necessary for research on leadership style to progress.     

Recommended Reference Values for Risk Assessment of Oral Exposure to Copper

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) database, the authoritative source of U.S. risk assessment toxicity factors, currently lacks an oral reference dose (RfD) for copper. In the absence of such a value, various health-based reference values for copper are available for use in risk assessment. We summarize the scientific bases and differences in assumptions among key reference values for ingested copper to guide selection of appropriate values for risk assessment. A comprehensive review of the scientific literature best supports the oral RfD of 0.04 mg/kg body weight/day derived by EPA from their Drinking Water Action Level. This value is based on acute gastrointestinal effects but is further supported by broader analysis of copper deficiency and toxicity.     

Selling the cryptosphere in China

ABSTRACT

China, one of the world’s most clandestine states, is currently engaged in moves to make state secrecy a matter of public policy, even inaugurating a ‘National Security Education Day’ in 2016. This article explores some recent campaigns about spy-catching to show how the state is using crowdsourcing, content marketing, and prosumerist gambits to sell an emergent social space of civic duty that I term the cryptosphere. Inciting civic participation is a particularly deft tool for propaganda work of this kind, which pivots on performative ideology. The ostensible purpose of these campaigns is to enlist the Chinese people in the securitization of the state, but in practice this is a highly disingenuous move given that the realm of the classified in China is so vast that ‘keeping secrets’ can only be perfunctory for almost all of its citizens. So far, commentators outside China have either been amused by the state’s new forays into infographics and mash-up videos, or critical of their xenophobic messaging. But the state’s apparently light-hearted drive to remind the Chinese people of the need to track spies is only peripherally about foreigners. It is occurring at a time when the government is also trialling a vast algorithmic grab on its own citizens’ personal data via the social credit system; operating a CCTV surveillance regime of more than one million cameras; and conducting mandatory biometric profiling in Xinjiang using DNA, blood types, iris scans, and fingerprints. These policies, I argue, constitute the exoskeleton of the cryptosphere. But this new sphere also needs its soft padding. Propaganda campaigns which school subjects on how to perform the role of loyal ‘informants’ – at the very moment that their own information is increasingly being expropriated by the state – are providing just this kind of thought work cushion.     

Land,territory and commons: voices and visions from the struggles

ABSTRACT

All over the world, financial capitalism and extractivism are appropriating land as if it was nothing more than a commodity, a mere ‘factor’ of production that can be exploited to generate financial returns. Movements and activists are organizing, resisting, protecting and promoting life-giving visions against this continuous enclosure of living beings and paces: they use their bodies, laws, educational projects, histories and visions to regain control over territory as a political space, self-determine and create solidarities. In the act resistance, they are the target of moral, physical and legal violence. They and their ideas are criminalized, disciplined, punished and in some cases exterminated. In this contribution, activists from the Basque Country, Guatemala, Kenya and the Six Nations and a group of academics get together to learn from each other, support the ongoing search for common vocabularies and identify possible milestones of a coordinated and international strategy for a life-enhancing future.     

Re-aligning the Stakeholders in Management Research: Lessons from Industrial, Work and Organizational Psychology

The publication of the Starkey and Madan (2001) report represents a timely and valuable contribution to an ongoing debate across a range of applied disciplines, concerning the nature and purpose of social research. The call for stakeholder alignment, culminating in the production of new knowledge that is both theoretically and methodologically rigorous on the one hand, and socially relevant on the other, is, in our view, to be greatly welcomed. However, the Mode 2 approach advocated by Starkey and Madan will not satisfy these fundamental requirements. Drawing on recent analyses of the nature, causes and consequences of the academic-practitioner divide in the subfield of industrial, work and organizational psychology, we offer an alternative, four-fold taxonomy of the varieties of managerial knowledge. Within our alternative framework, research that is low on rigour but high on relevance (a likely consequence of the wholesale adoption of a Mode 2 approach) is characterized as 'Popularist Science'. 'Pedantic Science', by contrast, is high on rigour but low on relevance, while 'Puerile Science' meets neither requirement. Only 'Pragmatic Science' will meet the twin imperatives of rigour and relevance. Whilst it is highly desirable that Pragmatic Science should dominate the management field, there are considerable barriers that impede its widespread adoption at the present time, not least the limited availability of researchers who possess the requisite sociopolitical and methodological competencies. The immediate imperative that has to be addressed, therefore, is the question of how best to close this competency gap, a fundamental precondition of stakeholder realignment.