Coordination and artifacts in joint activity: the case of tagging in high-risk industries

The social, organizational, and technological complexity of high-risk organizations creates a strong need for coordination. Joint activity in such systems thus relies both on formal coordination and on a set of informal coordinative practices. Coordinated joint activity is documented in this paper from two perspectives: the development of coordinative practices to overcome the limitations of formal coordination, and the use of artifacts for coordinative purposes. The empirical material is provided by a workplace study undertaken according to theoretical conceptions of situated action and cognition. It was undertaken in the context of a design project that aims at improving the tagout process in a high-risk industry. Findings first describe and analyze situations in which formal coordination turned out to be more of a constraint than a resource for effective action. They then illustrate the role played by artifacts in coordinated activity, focusing on the use of a particular artifact, the tagout tag, in different situations.     

Ad-Hoc Reviewers from 2009

Acknowledgments

Ad-Hoc Reviewers from 2009     

Is migration an effective adaptation to climate-related agricultural distress in sub-Saharan Africa?

Population and Environment - Migration is often considered a form of climate change adaptation by which individuals, households, and communities seek to reduce the risks associated with climate...     

Developing a Human‐centred and Science‐based Approach to Design: The Knowledge Management Platform Project

The gap between theory and practice is a persistent problem in management and organization research. In this respect, several scholars have suggested that ‘design’ is an ideal‐typical form of mode 2 knowledge production. Design research develops knowledge in the service of action and problem solving in organizational settings. In this paper, we connect two perspectives on design that can be considered to be largely complementary but have hardly been combined and integrated in practice: science‐based design drawing on design propositions grounded in research and human‐centred design emphasizing an active and systematic participation by users and other stakeholders. An integrated approach that builds on both perspectives is developed and subsequently applied to designing and developing a portal for mapping competencies in an information technology cluster. This project involves creating problem awareness and articulating design propositions as well as developing scenarios of use, experimenting with prototypes, and organizational transformation. As such, this methodology addresses the dual challenge of rigour and relevance by producing both scientific and practical knowledge.     

Board size and firm value: evidence from Australia

We study the effect of board size on firm value in Australia. Using a large sample of Australian firms over the period 2001–2011, we find strong evidence of a negative relationship. We show that firms with a large board are associated with CEO compensation that is sensitive to firm size, but not to firm performance. This incentive to accumulate assets is congruent with the fact that firms with a large board also exhibit lower operating performance and higher operating costs. Furthermore, we find that the effect of board size is stronger in small firms. This result might explain why earlier studies, which focused on large Australian firms, found board size to have little impact on firm value.     

A note on local spillovers, convexity, and the strategic substitutes property in networks

We provide existence results in a game with local spillovers where the payoff function satisfies both convexity and the strategic substitutes property. We show that there always exists a stable pairwise network in this game, and provide a condition which ensures the existence of pairwise equilibrium networks.     

CEO characteristics and firm valuation: a quantile regression analysis

This study investigates the effects of three highly-visible CEO characteristics on firm valuation. Using a sample of 2702 observations for Australian firms over the period 2001–2011, we find that CEO age is uniformly associated with lower firm valuation. CEO tenure is also associated with lower valuation, but more significantly so in the higher quantiles of firm valuation, that is for firms with high-growth opportunities. In contrast, CEO duality is found to be beneficial only for firms with high-growth opportunities. Overall, the study highlights the contingent relationship between CEO characteristics and firm valuation.     

Selection of regressors in econometrics: parametric and nonparametric methods selection of regressors in econometrics

The present paper addresses the selection-of-regressors issue into a general discrimination framework. We show how this framework is useful in unifying various procedures for selecting regressors and helpful in understanding the different strategies underlying these procedures. We review selection of regressors in linear, nonlinear and nonparametric regression models. In each case we successively consider model selection criteria and hypothesis testing procedures.