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Process Based Management and the Central Role of Dialogical Collective Activity in Organizational Learning. The Case of Work Safety in the Building Industry
The notion of “process”, which describes the cooperation of heterogeneous practices and competences for a given output, has gained a major position in managerial practices for the last twenty years. This paper presents three ideas about organizational dynamics and processes and tests their applicability in the case of work safety improvement in a building company. The first idea is that the success of the process notion shows the central role of “conjoint” (as opposed to “common”) collective activity in organizational learning. Conjoint collective activity is dialogical (“acts speak”) and mediated by the utilization of semiotic systems (languages and technical and managerial tools). The second idea is that organizational learning is neither based on the actors’ individual subjectivity nor on the technological and objective artefacts engaged in the processes, but rather on the reflexive understanding and ongoing redesign of processes by the process actors themselves, in the frame of a reflexive inquiry, a “collective activity about collective activity” which is triggered and kept in motion by axiological judgments (process evaluation). The third idea is that the possibilities to configure processes in a given organization are multiple. The reflexive inquiry enacts a specific social, spatial and time configuration of the process, its “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, which plays a major role in the way actors can make sense of their collective activity and transform it. A longitudinal case study about work safety on the building yards shows that it is difficult to “control out” risk at work once designs have been established, in the frame of the “project execution” process, but it is easier to “design out” risk, when the actors of the process collectively design and redesign their collective activity, from the very first phases of a building project to the end. Therefore a major way to improve safety consists in extending the chronotope of the collective activity under consideration, overcoming the traditional separation between “design / planning” and “execution”. The conclusion summarizes the main theoretical, epistemological and practical issues involved in this research about conjoint collective activity.Business Process; Chronotope; Collective Activity; Collective Sense Making; Dialogism; Inquiry; Process-based Management; Safety Management
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The uses of process modeling : a framework for understanding modeling formalisms
There is wide-spread recognition of the urgent need to improve software processes in order to improve the performance of software organizations. Process models are essential in achieving understanding and visibility of processes and are important for other uses including the analysis of processes for improvement. It has been increasingly difficult to compare and evaluate the variety of process modeling formalisms that have appeared in recent years without a clear understanding of precisely for what they will be used. The contribution of this paper is to provide an understanding and a fairly comprehensive catalog of the applications of process modeling for which formalisms may be used. The primary mechanism for doing this is a guided tour of the literature on process modeling supplemented by recent industrial experience. In the paper, basic definitions concerning processes, process descriptions and process modeling are reviewed and then uses of process modeling are surveyed under the following headings: communication among process participants, construction of new processes, control of processes, process· analysis, and process support by automation. Comments are offered on paradigms for process modeling formalisms and directions for future work to permit evolution of a discipline of process engineering are given
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
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