Followership in educational organizations: a pilot mapping of the territory

A new lexicon of followership terms is suggested to develop this innovative area of research, helping to recognize that both our followership and leadership roles are important to organizational success

"A manager in the minds of doctors" : a comparison of new modes of control in European hospitals

Background: Hospital governance increasingly combines management and professional self-governance. This article maps the new emergent modes of control in a comparative perspective and aims to better understand the relationship between medicine and management as hybrid and context-dependent. Theoretically, we critically review approaches into the managerialism-professionalism relationship; methodologically, we expand cross-country comparison towards the meso-level of organisations; and empirically, the focus is on processes and actors in a range of European hospitals. Methods: The research is explorative and was carried out as part of the FP7 COST action IS0903 Medicine and Management, Working Group 2. Comprising seven European countries, the focus is on doctors and public hospitals. We use a comparative case study design that primarily draws on expert information and document analysis as well as other secondary sources. Results: The findings reveal that managerial control is not simply an external force but increasingly integrated in medical professionalism. These processes of change are relevant in all countries but shaped by organisational settings, and therefore create different patterns of control: (1) ‘integrated’ control with high levels of coordination and coherent patterns for cost and quality controls; (2) ‘partly integrated’ control with diversity of coordination on hospital and department level and between cost and quality controls; and (3) ‘fragmented’ control with limited coordination and gaps between quality control more strongly dominated by medicine, and cost control by management. Conclusions: Our comparison highlights how organisations matter and brings the crucial relevance of ‘coordination’ of medicine and management across the levels (hospital/department) and the substance (cost/quality-safety) of control into perspective. Consequently, coordination may serve as a taxonomy of emergent modes of control, thus bringing new directions for cost-efficient and quality-effective hospital governance into perspective

Social Exchange and the Maintenance of Order in Status-Stratified Systems

This paper examines the role of social exchange in the construction of microorder within status-differentiated relations. How order is constructed and maintained in the context of social inequality is a classic sociological problem. We use a serendipitous finding from a recent experiment as a stimulus for theorizing an important feature of this larger problem of order. The finding is that, in an experiment where African-American females negotiated with white males, the white males received much larger payoffs than the African-American females. Yet, despite substantial power and profit differentiation advantaging white males, both individuals reported positive feelings (pleasure/satisfaction and interest/excitement) to the same degree, which contradicts most research on emotional responses to power. We argue that these similar emotional responses, in the context of substantial payoff inequalities, are due to parallel, joint effects of (a) status processes that create and legitimate initial profit differences and (b) exchange processes that make salient a relationship between the actors during repeated exchange. This explanation integrates notions of status value, referential structure, and legitimacy from status theories with notions of relational cohesion and shared responsibility from exchange theories. Broadly, the paper proposes some ways to productively interweave ideas from status and exchange theories to explain the emergence or maintenance of enduring social inequalities

Self-regulated learning and knowledge sharing in the workplace

This study explores how experts in a global multinational company self-regulate their learning. It investigates experts‟ perceptions of the impact of knowledge sharing on their learning and work. Findings indicate that self-regulated learning (SRL) is a highly social process that is structured by and deeply integrated with work tasks. Experts tend to draw heavily upon their personal networks of trusted colleagues in the process of diagnosing and attaining their learning goals. In contradiction to existing models, SRL in the workplace does not appear to be a clearly delineated, linear process comprised of discrete stages. Further research is needed to understand tacit practices of SRL in the workplace

Database Systems - Present and Future

The database systems have nowadays an increasingly important role in the knowledge-based society, in which computers have penetrated all fields of activity and the Internet tends to develop worldwide. In the current informatics context, the development of the applications with databases is the work of the specialists. Using databases, reach a database from various applications, and also some of related concepts, have become accessible to all categories of IT users. This paper aims to summarize the curricular area regarding the fundamental database systems issues, which are necessary in order to train specialists in economic informatics higher education. The database systems integrate and interfere with several informatics technologies and therefore are more difficult to understand and use. Thus, students should know already a set of minimum, mandatory concepts and their practical implementation: computer systems, programming techniques, programming languages, data structures. The article also presents the actual trends in the evolution of the database systems, in the context of economic informatics.database systems - DBS, database management systems – DBMS, database – DB, programming languages, data models, database design, relational database, object-oriented systems, distributed systems, advanced database systems

From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

Diversity Entitlement: Does Diversity-Benefits Ideology Undermine Inclusion?

Ideologies are most successful (or most dangerous) when they become common-sense—when they become widely accepted, taken-for-granted truths—because these truths subsequently provide implicit guidelines and expectations about what is moral, legitimate, and necessary in our society. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke, the Court, without a majority opinion, considered and dismissed all but one of several “common-sense” rationales for affirmative action in admissions. While eschewing rationales that focused on addressing discrimination and underrepresentation, the Court found that allowing all students to obtain the educational benefits that flow from diversity was a compelling rationale—essential, even, for a quality education. Although ostensibly pro-diversity, this rationale positioned diversity as conditional on the educational benefit to the student body as a whole, including white students. Armed with social science evidence, subsequent affirmative action jurisprudence in Grutter and Fisher reinforced this rationale. While these cases proved favorable to affirmative action, the reasoning surrounding the benefits of diversity may prove deleterious to inclusion efforts in the long run. In this Essay, we first review the intellectual history of “diversity-benefits” ideology in these key affirmative action cases, focusing on the recruitment of social science by litigants, amici, and the Court. We focus on how these legal actors have used social science to construct a view of diversity as a benefit to all, including dominant groups. In contrast, we note that the impact of discrimination and lack of diversity on historically marginalized groups has been largely, though not entirely, absent from this social science literature. We then examine the interracial contact framework that pervades the diversity-benefits literature, arguing that this approach is psychologically one-sided in that it focuses more on the benefits Whites receive from diversity than on how nondominant groups experience diversity. Moreover, because diversity-benefits ideology positions Whites as key beneficiaries, it could create a sense of entitlement to diversity. We explain that while it appeals to egalitarian sensibilities, it can simultaneously appeal to Whites’ psychological desires to maintain their position at the top of the social hierarchy. Finally, we discuss an experiment we conducted to examine how four rationales based on those in Bakke affect policy support. Preliminary results suggest that diversity-benefits language may lead Whites to support policies that center benefits to white students more than policies tailored for nondominant racial groups. Furthermore, the study provides initial support for the role that egalitarianism and preference for racial hierarchy together can play in cultivating a common-sense entitlement to diversity

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments