Adaptive Management: A Paradigm for Remediation of Public Facilities Following a Terrorist Attack

Terrorist actions are aimed at maximizing harm (health, psychological, economical, and political) through the combined physical impacts of the act and fear. Immediate and effective response to a terrorist act is critical to limit human and environmental harm, effectively restore facility function, and maintain public confidence. Though there have been terrorist attacks in public facilities that we have learned from, overall our experiences in restoration of public facilities following a terrorist attack are limited. Restoration of public facilities following a release of a hazardous material is inherently far more complex than in industrial settings and has many unique technical, economic, social, and political challenges. For example, there may be a great need to quickly restore the facility to full operation and allow public access even though it was not designed for easy or rapid restoration, and critical information is needed for quantitative risk assessment and effective restoration must be anticipated to be incomplete and uncertain. Whereas present planning documents have substantial linearity in their organization, the “adaptive management” paradigm provides a constructive parallel paradigm for restoration of public facilities that anticipates and plans for uncertainty, inefficiencies, and stakeholder participation. Adaptive management grew out of the need to manage and restore natural resources in highly complex and changing environments with limited knowledge about causal relationships and responses to restoration actions. Similarities between natural resource management and restoration of a public facility after a terrorist attack suggest that integration of adaptive management principles explicitly into restoration processes will result in substantially enhanced and flexible responses necessary to meet the uncertainties of potential terrorist attacks.     

Writing resistance together

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open‐ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.     

Inequality in Interaction: Equalising the Helper–Recipient Relationship in the Refugee Solidarity Movement

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - In this paper, we supplement existing scholarship on the interactional process within volunteering with one that focuses...     

GLOBAL STRUCTURES OF COMMON DIFFERENCE,CULTURAL OBJECTIFICATION,AND THEIR SUBVERSIONS: CULTURAL POLITICS IN AN AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND SCHOOL

This article adds to Richard Wilk's work on the emergence of “global structures of common difference,” that organize diversity through objectification of culture. Using cases from an Aotearoa/New Zealand school in 1997–1998, this article reveals a limit to the hegemony of global structures of common difference in daily life. By focusing on the indigenous Māori culture and newly arrived Asian's culture, this article shows (1) how variously positioned individuals did not necessarily subscribe to global structures of common difference—defying, evading, critiquing, ignoring, and circumventing them—and (2) to what degrees people objectified cultural differences and with what effects when global structures of common difference shaped cultural differences.     

A Performance Metric and Goal‐Setting Procedure for Deadline‐Oriented Processes

A performance metric and goal‐setting procedure is defined for an order fulfillment operation. In this operation, order requests arrive continuously, and filled orders are shipped at a specific time each day. The metric links the continuous operation of order fulfillment to the scheduled shipment times. To prescribe goals against the metric, a performance model is developed that incorporates the motivational effect of a goal. Goal‐Setting Theory is used to establish the performance goal and to show how to match arriving orders to deadlines based on their arrival times and expected processing times. Monte Carlo simulation on data from a large distribution center is used to demonstrate that setting these two parameters in the light of motivational research yields quite different results than doing so with an intuitive method. Moreover, a motivational goal leads to better operational performance; that is, correctly setting up the metric causes more customers to receive their orders sooner.     

Learning through laughing: an ‘African-American’ singer with ‘Japanese soul’ and the possibility of a new subjectivity in Japan

In this article, we argue that laughter can be a catalyst in learning about a new subjectivity – simultaneously African-American and Japanese – by analyzing an audience’s initial reaction to Jero, a young ‘African-American’ singer wearing hip hop attire who sings enka, a genre of music that is considered the ‘heart and soul of Japan’. Using television clips uploaded to YouTube and the viewers’ comments left on the sites as data, we analyze the audience’s laughter and amazement, followed by the question, ‘Why?’ and explanation of his background. Drawing on Hervé Varenne’s argument that learning occurs when we acknowledge our ignorance and seek to change it, we argue that the laughter marks their ignorance of such subjectivity, followed by learning as to why such subjectivity is possible. Challenging hegemonic behavior in daily life is often considered ‘bad sport’ and thus difficult. While involving complex relations of power of consumer-performer relations and authenticator-authenticated relations as well as a problematic race-talent link, we suggest that learning-through-laughing may be a new field worth exploring as an effective strategy for social change.     

“See You in Court”: How CEO narcissism increases firms' vulnerability to lawsuits

Although some researchers have suggested that narcissistic CEOs may have a positive influence on organizational performance (e.g., Maccoby, 2007; Patel & Cooper, 2014), a growing body of evidence suggests that organizations led by narcissistic CEOs experience considerable downsides, including evidence of increased risk taking, overpaying for acquisitions, manipulating accounting data, and even fraud. In the current study we show that narcissistic CEO's subject their organizations to undue legal risk because they are overconfident about their ability to win and less sensitive to the costs to their organizations of such litigation. Using a sample of 32 firms, we find that those led by narcissistic CEOs are more likely to be involved in litigation and that these lawsuits are more protracted. In two follow-up experimental studies, we examine the mechanism underlying the relationship between narcissism and lawsuits and find that narcissists are less sensitive to objective assessments of risk when making decisions about whether to settle a lawsuit and less willing to take advice from experts. We discuss the implications of our research for advancing theories of narcissism and CEO influence on organizational performance.     

Learning as othering: narratives of learning,construction of difference and the discourse of immersion in study abroad

This article shows ethnographically the process of learning as othering in study abroad: acknowledgement of ‘learning’ through immersion – without clear structure or markers of learning – constructs cultural difference of the host society. It is because acknowledgement of learning something is necessarily the acknowledgement of the prior ignorance about it due to difference. Study abroad thus privileges particular types of difference in the name of learning them, under-appreciating domestic minorities’ cultural differences.