2018 Faculty Excellence Showcase, AFIT Graduate School of Engineering & Management

Excerpt: As an academic institution, we strive to meet and exceed the expectations for graduate programs and laud our values and contributions to the academic community. At the same time, we must recognize, appreciate, and promote the unique non-academic values and accomplishments that our faculty team brings to the national defense, which is a priority of the Federal Government. In this respect, through our diverse and multi-faceted contributions, our faculty, as a whole, excel, not only along the metrics of civilian academic expectations, but also along the metrics of military requirements, and national priorities

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2019

This Research Report presents the FY19 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2018

This Research Report presents the FY18 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2020

This Research Report presents the FY20 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document

Resistance and Production in the Ruins of Pedagogy and Student Writing

This thesis is an examination of the (im)possibility of the critical in pedagogy and student writing. More specifically, using Foucault’s concept of governance, and his genealogical problematization of power/knowledge which animates and constrains the present, it interrogates normative understandings of ‘the critical’ as a criterion against which practice and language are evaluated in the academy. A poststructuralist, materialist approach to understanding academic work and its subjects is developed and employed in exploring the ‘ruins’ of pedagogy and student writing, where the metaphor of ‘ruins’ refers to ‘the crumbling edifice of Enlightenment values’ (Maclure 2011:997). Foucault’s methods and sensitivities, and Derrida’s understanding of the ‘event’ of writing, are conjointly put to work to problematise the operations of power in the governance, administration and legitimation of hegemonic understandings of ‘the critical’ in higher education. Deploying as analytical notions and tools Foucault’s understanding of power as multiple forces of resistance and consent, or as an immanence in our doings which operates in minute, micro-physical heterogeneous ways, this thesis scrutinizes the ways the present of critical pedagogical practice, and undergraduate student writing in the field of intercultural communication, is produced and conditioned from within. The ineluctable oscillation between resistance and consent in such presents puts into question the post- possibility of ‘the critical’, here understood as ‘the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis’ (Derrida 2006:87) within the ‘matrix of calculabilities’ in the university (Ball & Olmedo 2012:103). This question is put into context in relation to the wider field of pedagogical and student writing practices. Using close reading of student assessment texts, contingent ‘micro-practices of resistance’ are considered for ways they fleetingly keep openness in play, and proposed as one tentative way forward for a post-critical praxis of literacy pedagogy and writing

Decision-making in practice: The use of cognitive heuristics by senior managers

This thesis uses a grounded theory methodology to reveal the processes by which cognitive heuristics are used by senior managers to make decisions in a large UK local authority. The thesis is based on primary data, organisational documentation and an extensive and critical review of the pertinent literature. Primary data was generated over four years and involved detailed observation of 156 senior managers making a total of 513 decisions, together with formal interviews and informal discussions with these managers. The organisation under study provided an ideal context for this research since it offered a rich insight into management decision-making practices in diverse contexts such as social work and highways, and with varying degrees of urgency ranging from procurement decisions lasting several months to instant decisions concerning child protection. Furthermore, UK local government has been subject to drastic change in recent years, such as the introduction of private sector management practices and increased competition. This has been exacerbated by an austerity programme which means that local authorities, in common with much of the world, have to do a lot more with a lot less. The turbulent context of local government is, in Yin’s (2009) terms, an ‘exemplifying’ case study, and hence the issues raised in this study resonate far beyond the scope of this thesis. This thesis makes a number of significant contributions to knowledge. Firstly, original flow charts are developed that allow the underlying processes of heuristic decision-making to be identified, and these reveal that, whereas the academic literature treats heuristics as discrete entities, there is actually considerable interplay between them. Further, a new definition of the moral heuristic is developed, which allows researchers to view this heuristic at a higher, more conceptual level than has hitherto been possible. The thesis also extends the work of Daniel Kahneman and demonstrates that the role of the unconscious in decision-making is more complex than previously thought. For instance, intuitive heuristics can be used consciously and choice-based heuristics can be used unconsciously. It is also argued that the underlying processes of ‘classical’ theory are better explained by the degree of consciousness involved when making a decision, and not by the commonly accepted normative/behavioural distinction made by Herbert Simon and others. As such, this thesis represents an important contribution to the decision-making literature