A culturally-attuned distributed decision making model of global virtual teams in world summit on the information society

The purpose of this paper is to provide a rich description of people from diverse cultural backgrounds participating in distributed decision making process using email.The qualitative model was driven based on Adler’s (1997) culturally bound decision making model and Kingdon’s (1994) public policy making process.Our research question is ‘how does the globally distributed decision making process different compared to Adler and Kingdon’s proposed theoretical frameworks? This study analyzed the archival email messages (n= 1760 emails) from Civil Society team members in the World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) over the period of six months.The findings help to explain the way people from diverse cultural backgrounds participate in a virtual environment that’s consistent with the sequential of Adler and King don.In addition, our study also further exemplifies the dynamic and iterative process of distributed decision making among members of Civil Society

Information, Development and Social Change Programs in Information Schools

The objective of this report from School of Information masters students is to explore opportunity spaces for dynamic research networks and agendas focused on information, development, and social change. Research networks will include faculty, master's and doctoral students across information schools who will generate new paradigms for meeting social challenges through information science, new design methods for community inquiry, and evaluation methods to measure the effectiveness of these initiatives in affecting social change through mechanisms such as efficiency of resource utilization. Development in the context of this report refers to economic, social, and infrastructure capacity building initiatives in both emerging and developed economies.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/1/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.dochttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91307/2/2009-McLauglinPuckett-ISI_Report_Final.pd

Examining Cultural Equity: Boston’s Arts & Culture Sector

There is a cultural equity gap within the United States’ arts and culture landscape, constituting unequal representation of various identities in the arts, including, race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. These inequities reproduce within arts management, academia, artist sales, and donor and foundation demographics and priorities. With the objective of working toward creative justice in Boston’s arts and culture sector, this multiphase study employs transdisciplinary research using inductive, mixed-methods to learn: 1) current influencers’ understanding of the cultural equity gap; 2) current influencers’ motivations to eradicate the cultural equity gap; 3) how arts leaders with various marginalized identities conceptualize and operationalize leadership development for themselves; and 4) how arts leaders with various marginalized identities perceive barriers to access for positions of leadership in the arts and culture sector. These nuanced investigations support the foundational question: What are the social, emotional, economic, and cultural assets within Boston that can lead to creative justice and what reformation is still needed to achieve creative justice? Findings include attitudes and beliefs surrounding cultural equity, examination of historical and present-day oppressive structures, pipeline talent issues and opportunities, levers for change in building equity, and a call for culture shift

Emergence of the connectivist leadership paradigm: a grounded theory study in the Asia region

This qualitative, grounded theory study focused on the exploration of leadership arising within the Asia region. While enduring leadership qualities like strength, humility, resolve, and trust have been foundational in leadership practice globally, scholars have demonstrated that leadership does not exist in absolute terms; it is shaped by the values of local culture, which set expectations for leadership behaviors. This study explored the conceptualization of a more collective and connected form of leadership in the context of a region leading the world with highly networked digital social practices. The question the study explored was, if, and to what extent, leaders and teams in the Asia region are shifting their understanding and practices of leadership, from a process led primarily by an individual to a system of shared and digitally connected relationships. The literature review provided the opportunity to go beyond the mere transferability of heroic Western-centric leadership theories and investigated emerging leadership models in Asia, learning theories in the digital age, and the evolution of leadership theory and organization design. Data collection comprised of forty-two interviews: twenty-nine one-on-one in-depth interviews with research participants based in the Asia region and thirteen global leading experts in networked learning, leadership, and Asian studies. The findings were harnessed in support of the development of a grounded theory, which shifts the heroic leadership paradigm in favor of the discovery of a new leadership model called Connectivist Leadership

University and School Collaborations during a Pandemic

Based on twenty case studies of universities worldwide, and on a survey administered to leaders in 101 universities, this open access book shows that, amidst the significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, universities found ways to engage with schools to support them in sustaining educational opportunity. In doing so, they generated considerable innovation, which reinforced the integration of the research and outreach functions of the university. The evidence suggests that universities are indeed open systems, in interaction with their environment, able to discover changes that can influence them and to change in response to those changes. They are also able, in the success of their efforts to mitigate the educational impact of the pandemic, to create better futures, as the result of the innovations they can generate. This challenges the view of universities as “ivory towers” being isolated from the surrounding environment and detached from local problems. As they reached out to schools, universities not only generated clear and valuable innovations to sustain educational opportunity and to improve it, this process also contributed to transform internal university processes in ways that enhanced their own ability to deliver on the third mission of outreach

Understanding the process of cross-cultural code switching of global virtual teams in knowledge sharing

Globalization is reshaping the international business landscape and shifting traditional work structures to a more flexible, dynamic, and virtual work structure. — This has led to the use of Global Virtual Team (GVT) —which has become a common working structure in most organisations, with email being the most popular medium for global virtual teams to bridge the language barrier gap. However, cultural diversity has resulted in miscommunication, which has had an impact on the virtual business environment. Despite the absence of face-to-face interaction and a diverse cultural background, virtual team members could adjust their communicative behaviour to account for the lack of nonverbal cues and cultural differences. The cross-cultural code-switching concept, which refers to the shifting of behaviour when people communicate in a foreign setting, served as the foundation for this study, which aimed to explore and understand the cross-cultural code-switching process of high-context GVT members. Twenty-two (n=22) Malaysian employees who participated in a GVT were interviewed for the study. The qualitative research method with semi-structured online interviews was used to collect data. To gain a better understanding of the cross-cultural code-switching process, the data was analysed using a qualitative content analysis with an inductive approach. The findings revealed that high context GVT members switched cross-cultural codes in three stages: initiation, convergence switching, and internalisation. It also discovered the cultural factors and reasons for the switch, as well as the challenges that high context GVT members faced when switching communication styles. This study theoretically extended Hall's cultural context in a virtual setting and bridged Molinsky's cross-cultural code-switching model with intercultural communication theory. In practical sense, this study proposed a cross-cultural code-switching training for effective intercultural communication in a virtual setting. This that would help various GVT stakeholders, including Human Resource managers and GVT project leaders to communicate more effectively with people from other cultures

The Terror Experts: Discourse, Discipline, and the Production of Terrorist Subjects at a University Research Center

This thesis examines the production and circulation of discourses related to (counter)terrorism at a university-affiliated terrorism and security studies research center in eastern Massachusetts. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with faculty and students at the research center, I suggest that expert discourses of (counter)terrorism at the center traffic in an archetypal construction of the terrorist that I call the “depoliticized radical.” This construction locates the root of terrorism in individual morality and psychology, tending to abstract the terrorist from the political conditions in which they enact violence. I further propose that the depoliticized radical functions as a boundary object in Star and Griesemer’s (1989) conception, serving the interests of both expert regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be known and counterterror regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be controlled and/or corrected. Through fine-grained case studies, I track the strategic deployment of the depoliticized radical by different actors at the center within distinctive professional contexts. My discussion of the practices by which actors at the center seek to consolidate their expertise within the contested fields of terrorism studies and security studies draws on and develops Gieryn’s (1983) concept of “boundary-work” as a rhetorical and theatrical strategy for demarcating legitimate from illegitimate knowledges. I conclude by contemplating the political stakes of terrorism expertise as a project of knowledge production that seeks to establish the terrorist as an archetypal subject to be both known and controlled

The Terror Experts: Discourse, Discipline, and the Production of Terrorist Subjects at a University Research Center

This thesis examines the production and circulation of discourses related to (counter)terrorism at a university-affiliated terrorism and security studies research center in eastern Massachusetts. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with faculty and students at the research center, I suggest that expert discourses of (counter)terrorism at the center traffic in an archetypal construction of the terrorist that I call the “depoliticized radical.” This construction locates the root of terrorism in individual morality and psychology, tending to abstract the terrorist from the political conditions in which they enact violence. I further propose that the depoliticized radical functions as a boundary object in Star and Griesemer’s (1989) conception, serving the interests of both expert regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be known and counterterror regimes that take the terrorist as a subject to be controlled and/or corrected. Through fine-grained case studies, I track the strategic deployment of the depoliticized radical by different actors at the center within distinctive professional contexts. My discussion of the practices by which actors at the center seek to consolidate their expertise within the contested fields of terrorism studies and security studies draws on and develops Gieryn’s (1983) concept of “boundary-work” as a rhetorical and theatrical strategy for demarcating legitimate from illegitimate knowledges. I conclude by contemplating the political stakes of terrorism expertise as a project of knowledge production that seeks to establish the terrorist as an archetypal subject to be both known and controlled

Global Competency and International Context at Aspiring Public Charter School

Teaching and assessing global competencies are areas of research that have become the focus of many educational organizations. This organizational improvement plan (OIP) examined the problem of a lack of global competencies taught, and international context provided, in an urban Canadian public school. The internal and external contextual landscape of the organization were considered, and available data analyzed to establish the need and readiness for change. Four primary solutions are proposed to solve this problem of practice: status quo and communication, international programs, strategic partnerships, and global competency education. Relying on contextual knowledge that connects the theories of servant, authentic, and distributed leadership with the change path model and the four frames of leadership, an organizational change framework has been developed. This framework, the Change Climb, will need to be tested and evaluated within a variety of institutions in order to accurately assess its adaptability and success. The hope would be that it becomes a flexible and effective tool to facilitate deliberate change in any organization. This OIP also describes a plan for measuring, monitoring, and evaluating change by employing the Lean Startup methodology