Cultural Aspects of Telecommuting: Does individualism affect telecommuting outcomes?

Objectives The main objective of this study was to find out if there is a significant correlation between individualism and collectivism and telecommuting outcomes. It does this by finding the most prominent telecommuting outcomes in the literature review and then comparing them to individualists and collectivists in a survey. Summary The text is divided into six main sections (Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Findings & Analysis, Discussion, and Conclusion). Throughout these sections telecommuting, specifically its outcomes, and culture, specifically individualism and collectivism, are analyzed through secondary data. Additionally, primary data gathered through a survey is examined to see if the objectives and hypothesis of this thesis are supported. Conclusions The objective was achieved and, thus, the hypothesis was not supported. Individualism and collectivism of a person does not predict the telecommuting outcomes that a person experiences. However, age did correlate with some telecommuting outcomes and gender did play a role in their significance. Also, some telecommuting outcomes correlated significantly with each other

Virtual work and leadership: the role of the Internet, complexity, creativity, and knowledge workers

This chapter presents the case for strong leadership to develop an internationally distributed virtual workforce. It is a speculative approach to how work and workers may behave in a future where most of their work and interactions will be virtual and disconnected from their physical location. The lessons that can be learned from the natural world are explored especially from complexity theories. Examples are provided of natural systems in action and the insights others have drawn from these theories and how this may inform decision-making, risk-taking and the management of virtual workers. The impact of the Internet on knowledge creation and discovery is explored. These theories and trends have important implications for leaders and managers and for stimulating creativity and innovation. One can speculate that in future digital workers will live in two realities; the @-Home-culture and the @-Large-culture. Knowledge workers of the future will be able to create a healthy balance between these two realities by working digitally in a global system and benefiting financially, but also living and participating fully in their local or national culture. Ultimately this may lead to more tolerance and opportunities to distribute work and wealth in ways that equalize rather than divide people

Investigating Item Bias on the PISA 2009 Reading Assessment: A Case of Macau with Chinese and English Versions.

M.Ed. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Community-Based Behavioral Understanding of Mobility Trends and Public Attitude through Transportation User and Agency Interactions on Social Media in the Emergence of Covid-19

The increased availability of technology-enabled transportation options and modern communication devices (smartphones, in particular) is transforming travel-related decision-making in the population differently at different places, points in time, modes of transportation, and socio-economic groups. The emergence of COVID-19 made the dynamics of passenger travel behavior more complex, forcing a worldwide, unparalleled change in human travel behavior and introducing a new normal into their existence. This dissertation explores the potential of social media platforms (SMPs) as a viable alternative to traditional approaches (e.g., travel surveys) to understand the complex dynamics of people’s mobility patterns in the emergence of COVID-19. In this dissertation, we focus on three objectives. First, a novel approach to developing comparative infographics of emerging transportation trends is introduced by natural language processing and data-driven techniques using large-scale social media data. Second, a methodology has been developed to model community-based travel behavior under different socioeconomic and demographic factors at the community level in the emergence of COVID-19 on Twitter, inferring users’ demographics to overcome sampling bias. Third, the communication patterns of different transportation agencies on Twitter regarding message kinds, communication sufficiency, consistency, and coordination were examined by applying text mining techniques and dynamic network analysis. The methodologies and findings of the dissertation will allow real-time monitoring of transportation trends by agencies, researchers, and professionals. Potential applications of the work may include: (1) identifying spatial diversity of public mobility needs and concerns through social media platforms; (2) developing new policies that would satisfy the diverse needs at different locations; (3) introducing new plans to support and celebrate equity, diversity, and inclusion in the transportation sector that would improve the efficient flow of goods and services; (4) designing new methods to model community-based travel behavior at different scales (e.g., census block, zip code, etc.) using social media data inferring users’ socio-economic and demographic properties; and (5) implementing efficient policies to improve existing communication plans, critical information dissemination efficacy, and coordination of different transportation actors to raise awareness among passengers in general and during unprecedented health crises in the fragmented communication world

Gender, Ethnicity and Space: The Case of Racial Ethnic Minority Women Telecommuters in Omaha, NE

Telecommuting is a labor process in which employees work from home on a regular basis, but maintain contact with the office through telecommunications technology such as computer networks, facsimile machines, voice messaging systems, and so on. Telecommuting has become very popular in recent years; however, little is known about its social and spatial impacts. Preliminary research on gender and telecommuting has shown that telecommuting tends to reinforce a traditional division of domestic labor and identification of women with the home; however, whether this is the case for ethnic minority women is unknown. This thesis research used in-depth, semistructured interviews to investigate interactions among gender, race, ethnicity, telecommuting, and geography. Interviews with four racial and / or ethnic minority women in Omaha, Nebraska provided data for an examination of their lived experiences as telecommuters

Testing the Measurement Invariance and Latent Mean Differences of Data from the Employee Perceptions of Supervisor/Line Manager Coaching Behavior Measure Between Virtual and Traditional Employees from Generation X and Y

Currently, the workforce is comprised of multiple generations, of which Generation X and Y are the largest, working in a variety of arrangements. These include working from home, satellite centers, on the road, collaboration offices, and brick and mortar locations. As information and communication technology advances, more opportunities for individuals to supplement or change their working environments are available. Along with these different modes of work comes occasions and challenges for managers to demonstrate coaching behaviors toward employees who work alongside them on an on-going basis, and simultaneously to those who are removed from the face-to-face interactions and instead rely on technology for primary communication. Thus, managers in today’s organizations are tasked with coaching and developing both traditional and virtual employees. The purpose of this study was to test for measurement invariance and assess latent mean differences between groups of traditional and virtual employees with data from one of the most widely used managerial coaching instruments. Data was collected via MTurk in this cross-sectional, multi-survey design. Both groups were equated before measurement invariance testing and latent mean analysis by employing propensity score matching techniques. Once invariance was demonstrated, latent mean differences were assessed. Results indicated traditional employees perceived their managers exhibited more coaching behaviors than those perceived by virtual employees. However, the results were not statistically or practically significant. Findings from this study do provide support for the psychometric properties of the Employee Perceptions of Supervisor/Line Manager Coaching Behavior (Ellinger, Ellinger, & Keller, 2003) instrument. Implications to research and practice were discussed, including the importance of virtual managerial coaching to the virtual human resource development movement

The Impact of Emerging Information Technologies on the Employment Relationship: New Gigs for Labor and Employment Law

The technology of production has always shaped the employment relationship and the issues that are important in labor and employment law. Since at least the late 1970s the American economy has adopted information technology that promises to change the employment relationship in ways at least as profound as those wrought by the other revolutions in general production technology, such as the adoption of steam power, electricity, or methods of mass production. The global network of programmable machines of the information age allows us to communicate and process much more information, much more quickly than ever previously imagined. This increased informational capacity has remade every aspect of the employment relationship including: job search, the organization of production, the methods of production, and the size of the relevant market. With the new information technology, we have progressed from a system of manual production in a single physical location serving regional or national markets, to one of highly automated production drawing on and serving a global economy. We have also progressed to the point where information technology can replicate some higher-order thinking through the rote analysis of data, yielding “artificial intelligence” that can displace human intelligence in the work place. In this article, I examine how information technology has remade the employment relationship and the legal issues these changes have raised. I begin by chronicling those changes, their economic implications, and the legal issues they raise in job search, the organization of production, the demand for human skills, and participation in the global economy. I examine some now familiar problems including telecommuting, outsourcing, and international trade, but also analyze some more recent topics including using “big data” for “talent matching,” “work on demand apps,” “crowd-sourcing,” “job polarization,” and “artificial intelligence.” Although I hope that my economic analysis outlines and clarifies many of the labor and employment law issues the new technology raises, it is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to resolve all of these issues for the reader. I leave the debate on at least some of these issues to the other authors in this volume, save that I venture the outline of an argument on what has emerged as the quintessential question: whether the new production relationships developed using information technology constitute employment relationships for the purpose of coverage under the web of protective legislation known as labor and employment law. I argue that we need to abandon outmoded legal definitions of who is an employee and who is an “independent contractor.” In their place we should adopt two unifying principles for coverage: the avoidance of “regulatory arbitrage” so that decisions on the organization of production are made on the basis of real economic advantages rather than just on the basis of avoiding legislative responsibility; and the assignment of responsibility for the provision of benefits under protective legislation to the cheapest cost avoider so as to minimize the burden of fulfilling the promises of protective legislation. These principles argue for broad, perhaps universal, coverage for workers under protective legislation, and that responsibility for garnering the money necessary to pay for these benefits generally be with the large corporations who organize production in the new economic environment

THREE ESSAYS ON REMOTE WORK AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

This dissertation is comprised of three papers that collectively explore the relationship between remote work, or people that work from anywhere, and regional economic development. The first paper measures remote occupational employment in the United States with Census microdata and a shift-share model to decompose the share of occupational growth attributed to remote work. Findings indicate remote work has grown significantly since 2000, with the most pronounced growth in high skill jobs. The second paper uses a mixed-methods design to understand the role of remote work in migration decisions. It concludes that remote work arrangements enable access to employment opportunities that are unavailable locally and supports certain migration. The third paper uses a cross-sectional design and spatial econometrics to investigate the influence of amenities on the concentration of remote workers across a sample of US counties. The findings indicate that amenities, especially recreational and cultural, play a powerful role in explaining variations of remote worker concentrations across counties and that amenities play different roles in the hierarchy of county sizes. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications for place and offers avenues for future inquiry