4,474 research outputs found
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The impact of employees' working relations in creating and retaining trust: the case of the Bahrain Olympic Committee
Introduction: This thesis investigates the impact of employees’ working relations in creating, maintaining and retaining trust in the Bahrain Olympic Committee (BOC).
Aim: The main aim of this thesis is to determine how the three groups of Organisational Trust variables, namely Social System Elements (SSE), Factors of Trustworthiness (FoT) and Third-Party Gossip (TPG), affect employees’ Organisational Trust (OTR) in the BOC and promote Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB). To answer this main aim, a conceptual framework was created that focused on exploring the following research aims: (1) the interrelationship between SSE and FoT, (2) the effect of SSE on OTR, (3) the impact of TPG on OTR and (4) the effect of OTR on overall OCB.
Methodology: The study uses a mixed-method case study research style that included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 17 managers, an online questionnaire survey with 320 employees of the BOC and an analysis of the BOC’s Annual Reports from 2015 to 2018.
Results: The qualitative and quantitative findings indicate, firstly, that there is a significant interrelationship between SSE and FoT, establishing that SSE’s perception of organisational justice (OJ), including that FoTs benevolence and integrity as the most important factors in yielding employees’ trust in the BOC. Secondly, it has been established that SSEs have significant direct and indirect effects on OTR. Thirdly, negative and positive TPG concurrently occurred in the BOC and the prevalence of negative TPG poses more impact on OTR. Finally, this study’s findings demonstrated OTR’s effect in generating OCB, including that Civic Virtue was rated as the most preferred of the five OCB themes; this indicates the managers’ and the employees’ strong emotional attachment and support of the activities taking place at the BOC.
Contributions: Overall, this thesis substantially contributes to OTR literature, particularly in the context of the Middle East. It also proposes several insightful recommendations for future research and practical implications for practitioners in the field of Organisational Trust
Facilitating prosociality through technology: Design to promote digital volunteerism
Volunteerism covers many activities involving no financial rewards for volunteers but which contribute
to the common good. There is existing work in designing technology for volunteerism in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) and related disciplines that focuses on motivation to improve
performance, but it does not account for volunteer wellbeing. Here, I investigate digital volunteerism
in three case studies with a focus on volunteer motivation, engagement, and wellbeing. My research
involved volunteers and others in the volunteering context to generate recommendations for a
volunteer-centric design for digital volunteerism. The thesis has three aims:
1. To investigate motivational aspects critical for enhancing digital volunteers’ experiences
2. To identify digital platform attributes linked to volunteer wellbeing
3. To create guidelines for effectively supporting volunteer engagement in digital volunteering
platforms
In the first case study I investigate the design of a chat widget for volunteers working in an
organisation with a view to develop a design that improves their workflow and wellbeing. The second
case study investigates the needs, motivations, and wellbeing of volunteers who help medical
students improve their medical communication skills. An initial mixed-methods study was followed by
an experiment comparing two design strategies to improve volunteer relatedness; an important
indicator of wellbeing. The third case study looks into volunteer needs, experiences, motivations, and
wellbeing with a focus on volunteer identity and meaning-making on a science-based research
platform. I then analyse my findings from these case studies using the lens of care ethics to derive
critical insights for design.
The key contributions of this thesis are design strategies and critical insights, and a volunteer-centric
design framework to enhance the motivation, wellbeing and engagement of digital volunteers
Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse
This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses.
This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups.
In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena
Corporate Social Responsibility: the institutionalization of ESG
Understanding the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance as it relates to industries reliant on technological innovation is a complex and perpetually evolving challenge. To thoroughly investigate this topic, this dissertation will adopt an economics-based structure to address three primary hypotheses. This structure allows for each hypothesis to essentially be a standalone empirical paper, unified by an overall analysis of the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance. The first hypothesis explores the evolution of CSR to the modern quantified iteration of ESG has led to the institutionalization and standardization of the CSR concept. The second hypothesis fills gaps in existing literature testing the relationship between firm performance and ESG by finding that the relationship is significantly positive in long-term, strategic metrics (ROA and ROIC) and that there is no correlation in short-term metrics (ROE and ROS). Finally, the third hypothesis states that if a firm has a long-term strategic ESG plan, as proxied by the publication of CSR reports, then it is more resilience to damage from controversies. This is supported by the finding that pro-ESG firms consistently fared better than their counterparts in both financial and ESG performance, even in the event of a controversy. However, firms with consistent reporting are also held to a higher standard than their nonreporting peers, suggesting a higher risk and higher reward dynamic. These findings support the theory of good management, in that long-term strategic planning is both immediately economically beneficial and serves as a means of risk management and social impact mitigation. Overall, this contributes to the literature by fillings gaps in the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance, particularly from a management perspective
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An Agile Musicology: Improvisation in Corporate Management and Lean Startups
The last decade of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of publications that use jazz as a metaphor for corporate management, arguing that in the contemporary knowledge economy, jazz is superior to the symphonic model that governed mid-century factory floors. As the literature on the jazz metaphor, and organizational improvisation more broadly, continued to develop into the twenty-first century, another managerial methodology became widely adopted by entrepreneurs: agile. While agile is yet to be fully theorized as an improvisatory practice, agile shares several core tenets with the models promoted by organizational improvisation scholars, including the use of small teams, an emphasis on feedback, and an openness to change. In this dissertation, I argue that agile methods, and the adjacent lean methodology, are inherently improvisatory and that understanding them as improvisatory offers opportunities not only for their deployment within growing businesses, but also for adoption at-scale in large corporations.
I draw on an array of disciplinary perspectives, including management science, organizational studies, musicology, and critical improvisation studies, as well as a wide range of sources, from peer-reviewed journal publications to trade manuals. Each chapter builds upon the former: a substantial and critical review of the jazz metaphor literature is followed by a dissection of its main themes under a musicological lens; after securing the foundations of organizational improvisation, the next chapter reveals the improvisatory nature of agile and lean startup practices and links them to concepts discussed within the jazz metaphor literature. Drawing on insights from large-scale improvisatory musical practices, the final chapter reveals how improvisation, as a set of practices shared between corporate management and agile methodologies, provides avenues for agile to be scaled up as startups grow or for its widespread adoption within established companies
Command and Persuade
Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? Levels of violent crime have been in a steady decline for centuries—for millennia, even. Over the past five hundred years, homicide rates have decreased a hundred-fold. We live in a time that is more orderly and peaceful than ever before in human history. Why, then, does fear of crime dominate modern politics? Why, when we have been largely socialized into good behavior, are there more laws that govern our behavior than ever before? In Command and Persuade, Peter Baldwin examines the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over three thousand years. Baldwin explains that the involvement of the state in law enforcement and crime prevention is relatively recent. In ancient Greece, those struck by lightning were assumed to have been punished by Zeus. In the Hebrew Bible, God was judge, jury, and prosecutor when Cain killed Abel. As the state's power as lawgiver grew, more laws governed behavior than ever before; the sum total of prohibited behavior has grown continuously. At the same time, as family, community, and church exerted their influences, we have become better behaved and more law-abiding. Even as the state stands as the socializer of last resort, it also defines through law the terrain on which we are schooled into acceptable behavior. This title is also available in an Open Access edition
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BY THE NUMBERS: HOW ACADEMIC CAPITALISM SHAPES GRADUATE STUDENT EXPERIENCES OF WORK AND TRAINING IN MATERIAL SCIENCES
The neoliberal reorganization of higher education has reshaped the research and education missions of university science. Much of the scholarship examining this shift focuses on faculty experiences. This dissertation centers the experiences of student scientists to explore: (1) how entrepreneurial universities manage marginal academic knowledge workers, including students, through processes that shift responsibility onto individual workers; (2) how universities use mechanisms like internships and Individual Development Plans to shift educational responsibilities onto students; and (3) how performances of masculinity in commercial spaces of university science contribute to durable gender inequalities among students under academic capitalism. Longitudinal qualitative methods were employed to understand how students experience years of training in an academic capitalist context. The data for the dissertation were collected during a five-year ethnography in two academic science sites, and include 60 interviews with academic faculty, staff, and student scientists.
Findings show how universities shift responsibilities for handling job market instabilities or the devalued aspects of education onto academic staff, postdocs, and students. Universities use accountability practices under the narrative that grad student scientists need to “take ownership” of their education. Universities create structures channeling undergraduate students into industry internships. Many material science graduate students also express a desire for industry experience, but faculty reliance on graduate student labor in academic labs deters students from holding internships. Internship dynamics at both undergraduate and graduate levels reveal how students are commodified under academic capitalism. This dissertation also finds that men students are integrated into commercial spaces of academic science while women are excluded. These processes of gender inequality exclude women from innovation teams as well as from many resources available to commercially focused scientists
Practices of cultural democracy : the Cultura Viva program in Brazil
Despite the socio-economic crisis Brazil has experienced since 2014 and that has been
considerably deepened by political instability in a polarized scenario, in 2022 the cultural area
resists. The sector has confronted a deliberate dismantlement in the last two governments,
Michel Temer's (2016-2018) and, since 2019, Jair Bolsonaro’s. On the other hand, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva’s mandates (2003-2010) represented in Brazilian contemporary history a radical
paradigmatic shift to the approach to culture from a political and ideological perspective, as
culture was a crucial aspect for fostering social equality and economic development, besides
its role for overcoming social exclusion. In other words, culture was transformed into one of
the main pillars of Brazilian identity's construction and preservation (Lula da Silva 2003).
Twelve years after the end of Lula's government, this research examines practices of
cultural democracy during his two mandates through the analysis of the National Plan of
Culture and of the National System of Culture. Special attention is given to the Cultura Viva
program and its pontos de cultura, understood as the most significant governmental initiative
to expand and democratize the access to culture, especially in terms of its production. Bearing
in mind the political disruption and the dismantlement of the cultural-artistic sector in the last
two governments, this dissertation aims at evaluating Lula’s practices of cultural democracy
and the legacy of Cultura Viva.Apesar da crise socioeconômica que o Brasil vive desde 2014 e que foi
consideravelmente aprofundada pela instabilidade política em um cenário polarizado, em 2022
a área cultural no resiste. O setor enfrentou um desmonte deliberado nos dois últimos governos,
no de Michel Temer (2016-2018) e, desde 2019, no de Jair Bolsonaro. Por outro lado, os
mandatos de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) representaram na história contemporânea
brasileira uma mudança radical de paradigma na abordagem da cultura sob uma perspectiva
política e ideológica, pois a cultura foi um aspecto crucial para a promoção da igualdade social
e do desenvolvimento econômico, além do seu papel para a superação da exclusão social. Em
outras palavras, a cultura se transformou em um dos principais pilares da construção e
preservação da identidade brasileira (Lula da Silva 2003).
Doze anos após o fim do governo Lula, esta pesquisa examina as práticas de democracia
cultural durante seus dois mandatos por meio da análise do Plano Nacional de Cultura e do
Sistema Nacional de Cultura. O foco principal é o programa Cultura Viva e seus pontos de
cultura, entendidos como a mais significativa iniciativa governamental em ampliar e
democratizar o acesso à cultura, especialmente no que se refere à sua produção. Tendo em vista
a ruptura política e o desmonte do setor artístico-cultural nos dois últimos governos, esta
dissertação tem como objetivo avaliar as práticas de democracia cultural dos governos Lula e o
legado do Cultura Viva
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