Cognitive ergonomics: the use of mind mapping tool in maintaining productive sector of a Brazilian paper company

The use of mind maps as a method of building knowledge, planning, organizing activities and ideas can be seen in the literature related to ergonomics. The results of such use are relevant and its use in academic area found. However, regarding to its use in industrial environments, studies can't not be found. With this scenario, and based on the perception of the ergonomist about the importance of using methods such as mind maps in support of human cognition, it seems pertinent to its use in industry sectors whose cognitive demand requires. Given these assumptions, this study aimed to apply the method of Mind Maps in Productive Maintenance sector of a Brazilian paper. The Productive Maintenance sector in the Paper Industry has an important contribution to operational performance. With practical Predictive Maintenance, Preventive Maintenance and Corrective Maintenance, the industry advocates to make the machines to produce paper is not to stop producing when they are programmed to do so. Among the practices cited, the Preventive Maintenance is one that leads to pre-determined intervals in order to reduce the possibility of placing the equipment in a condition below the required level of acceptance. Therefore, this article aims to propose using the tool "mental maps" in order to collaborate in planning and implementation of preventive maintenance activities in the sector of mechanical maintenance of a pulp and paper industry in southern Brazil. The study investigated the maintenance sector through its employees, who went through training about the tool and then use it and ergonomists company.     

Uncertainty in Climate Change Modeling: Can Global Sensitivity Analysis Be of Help?

Integrated assessment models offer a crucial support to decisionmakers in climate policy making. For a full understanding and corroboration of model results, analysts ought to identify the exogenous variables that influence the model results the most (key drivers), appraise the relevance of interactions, and the direction of change associated with the simultaneous variation of uncertain variables. We show that such information can be directly extracted from the data set produced by Monte Carlo simulations. Our discussion is guided by the application to the well‐known DICE model of William Nordhaus. The proposed methodology allows analysts to draw robust insights into the dependence of future atmospheric temperature, global emissions, and carbon costs and taxes on the model's exogenous variables.     

Board compensation and ownership structure: empirical evidence for Italian listed companies

This paper investigates the relationships among corporate ownership, the level of board compensation, and firms’ future performance within Italian listed companies. Board compensation could be related to corporate ownership characteristics, like the type of controlling shareholder, ownership concentration, the separation between cash flow and voting rights, and the presence of shareholders’ agreements. The evidence of high levels of board compensation associated with certain governance characteristics could signal, in a principal-agent framework, rent extraction by entrenched managers or by controlling shareholders versus minority shareholders; high board compensation, however, could be related to the need to hire directors with higher professional standing and also to the desire to create a network with other companies through the enlargement of the board, according to a social network view. In this paper we disentangle this issue showing the relationship between excess board compensation and future performance: examining firms listed on the Milan Stock Exchange over the period 1995–2002, we show that board compensation is linked to many governance characteristics, but excess compensation is never positively related to future performance. For founder family firms, in particular, high board compensation is associated with (a) smaller board size; (b) higher proportion of family members on the board; (c) lower future performance. The whole evidence therefore doesn’t support the hypothesis suggested by the social network view, but is consistent with a rent extraction hypothesis. These results could add new empirical evidence to the recent debate on the need for global remuneration reform. According to our results, some control mechanism and an increase in transparency of executive compensation schemes could be appropriate.     

Foreign direct investments in manufacturing by district firms: evidence from the Italian chair district

Manufacturing internationalisation is a phenomenon that currently involves several industrial districts. While the literature on industrial districts is wide, few works analyse the (manufacturing) internationalisation dynamics. This study tries to fill this lack by analysing forms, motivation, obstacles and results of the foreign direct investments carried out in one of the most important Italian districts. The research shows how some of the district leading firms have recently combined local presence with a strategy of internationalisation that also involves manufacturing activities through foreign direct investments. The readers can comprehend the main features of the international manufacturing path that is involving one of the most important Italian industrial districts, i.e. the chair district. The research offers a contribution to an area rather neglected in literature – the district (manufacturing) internationalisation dynamics.     

Evolution and Dimensions of a Women's Clinic in a University Setting

Abstract

As theologian Henri Nouwen has pointed out, the opposite of love is not hate; it is fear. Nowhere is the fear which strips us of our capacity to behave rationally better evidenced than in relation to AIDS. Only as we allow ourselves to be moved from what Nouwen calls the house of fear into the house of love will responsible answers begin to be formulated to the emerging moral questions presented by AIDS. The questions are threefold. To those potentially at risk for AIDS or actually infected with it, it raises questions about honesty and love in sexual relations. For caregivers, it raises questions about the nature of our professional obligations. And for society at large, it raises questions about confidentiality and scapegoating. It is the author's contention that an experience of the divine love—unconditional, unmerited, unbounded—is alone sufficient to move us from fear, and its responses to AIDS, to a more loving (and courageous) stance. Only thus will we begin—whether as victims of AIDS, as caregivers, or as members of society at large—to exercise moral responsibility with respect to this dread disease.     

MALDITOS: STREET GANG SUBVERSIONS OF NATIONAL BODY POLITICS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Since the mid-1980s, street gangs known as maras have emerged as a new social entity in Central America. In Honduras, these informal organizations are repeatedly represented in various forms of media as an aberration that is clearly separate from populace and state. Such representations render mareros as entities that possess a radically alien ontology, which is the sole locality of intervention of anti-mara programs. This article analyzes popular media and ethnographic observations to demonstrate that a) rather than being an alien ontology, marero subjectivities are co-constituted through nation and class-forming practices and b) despite such representations, Hondurans of various walks of life routinely subvert attempts to create a tripartite body politic of state-populace-marero. Continued emphasis on the marero as the sole site of intervention and rehabilitation deals with the mara issue at a symptomatic level and fails to address the quotidian processes that give form to this phenomenon.     

All Puerto Rico with Vieques: Mobilizing Support Through Social Skills and Field Dynamics

This article explains the success of All Puerto Rico with Vieques (TPRCV) in coordinating a broad-based coalition in support of the movement to remove the US Navy from Vieques. Considering the literatures on organizations, strategic fields and social movements, the analysis looks at how environmental conditions and the attributes of the leadership become relevant in the formation and sustainability of coalition work. The article argues that under the conditions of a vibrant political activist sector and a dynamic political field, TPRCV used accumulated social skills to take advantage of network intersection and frame adaptation. Though environmental dynamics may produce favorable conditions for coalition building, these will be limited to the capacity of the social actors to identify them, assimilate their potential and translate them into opportunities.     

Theorizing the relationship between inequality and economic growth

This article explores a promising theoretical approach for reassessing the relationship between inequality and economic growth. The article draws some insights from the influential inverted U-curve hypothesis originally advanced by Simon Kuznets, but drastically recasts the original arguments by shifting two fundamental premises. First, retaining Kuznets’s emphasis on the importance of economic growth in generating demographic transitions between existing and new distributional arrays, we argue that a “constant drive toward inequality” results after replacing a Schumpeterian notion of “creative destruction” for the dualistic assumptions in Kuznets’s model. Second, while Kuznets devoted considerable attention to the impact of institutions on distributional outcomes, we argue that institutions should be understood as relational and global mechanisms of regulation, operating within countries while simultaneously shaping interactions and flows between nations. The article argues that economic growth, unfolding through institutions embedded in time and space, produces a constant drive towards inequality that results in a multiple and overlapping matrix of distributional arrays, an overall income distribution (e.g., within and between countries) that is both systemic and historical.     

Darwinist connections between the systemness of social organizations and their evolution

Is the systemness of social organizations related to their evolution? This research question has not yet received appropriate attention by the literature on management and organization theory. The author believes that addressing it can constitute a substantive opportunity to understand key intertwined associated processes, such as organizational survival, competitive success/advantage, or failure. In this article, the author attempts to contribute to fill the aforesaid gap adopting a critical Darwinist approach.