Snakebite prevalence and risk factors in a nomadic population in Samburu County, Kenya: A community-based survey

Introduction: Snakebite is an important public health concern, especially in tropical areas, but the true burden remains unclear due to sub-optimal reporting and over-reliance on health facility-based data. Methods: A community-based cross-sectional survey was conducted in Samburu County, Kenya from December 2019 to March 2020. Geospatial techniques were used to create a sampling frame of all households in Samburu County and a multistage cluster sampling strategy to select households and recruit study participants. Five year prevalence and mortality rates were estimated, the characteristics and circumstances of snakebite were described, and multilevel logistic regression models were built to identify independent risk factors for snakebite. Results: We recruited 3,610 individuals living in 875 households from 30 clusters. The 5-year prevalence of snakebite was 2.2% (95% CI 1.4%–3.4%), and the 5-year mortality rate was 138 (95% CI 44–322) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, resulting in an estimated 1,406 snakebites and 88 deaths from snakebites per year in Samburu County. Snakebite incidents often occurred at night between 9pm and 6 am (44%, n = 36), and the participants were mostly walking/playing outdoors (51%, n = 41) or sleeping (32%, n = 27) when they were bitten. Lower household socioeconomic status and smaller numbers of people per house were significant independent risk factors. Conclusion: Samburu County has a high snakebite burden and the most victims are bitten while sleeping or walking outdoors at night. Snakebite prevention and health promotion programs in Samburu County, and other endemic regions, need to be contextualised and consider the geographic, seasonal, and temporal specificities found in our study. Our findings also have implications for health care delivery, especially identification of the need for night-time staffing with expertise in snakebite management and antivenom availability to better manage patients and thereby improve outcomes

Conceptualising digital nomadic practice: evidence from a technology-intensive firm

This thesis studies how individuals use digital media to manage connectivity and accomplish work across digital and physical spaces in modern organisations, ultimately conceptualising this new type of work as a new digital nomadic practice. Increased digitisation and the need for more flexible work styles have pressured organisations to adopt new digital media and to redesign their workplaces. Existing research provides some theoretical understanding of this phenomena, however it is scattered across multiple disciplines and lack a broader all-encompassing view of the concept. This study addresses this gap with deeper and more holistic theoretical engagement in order to better capture and explain new work practices within organisations today. Exploring the salient aspects of digital nomadic practices, the study builds on the emergent literature on connectivity to understand the ways and means of staying connected. It also draws on the technology adoption and affordance literature to review how individuals use the capabilities of multiple digital media that provide the potential for a particular action. Overall the study aims to i) understand how individuals conduct their work practices in physical and digital spaces, ii) identify how individuals use digital media to stay connected, and iii) understand how individuals manage connectivity. It draws on a single case study of a multinational IT organisation in the UK. The research follows a qualitative approach and inductively driven strategy. The study focuses on the dimensions of connectivity, digital media use, and follows digital nomad’s work ‘within and between’ the digital and physical spaces. The findings of this exploratory case study show that digital nomads use the new digital media in a way it precluded them from being overly connected and allowed them to manage connectivity across multiple, operational, social and organisational levels. It identified the digital media choice by drawing on a theory of nested affordances in order to capture media choice in a dynamic way, which happens at different levels, as digital media coexist together and provide combination of various affordances. These findings contribute to knowledge of how individuals choose digital media to manage their connectivity in digital and physical spaces, and particularly inform the study of digital media adoption and technological affordances

Access Anytime Anyplace: An Empircal Investigation of Patterns of Technology Use in Nomadic Computing Environments

With the increasing pervasiveness of mobile technologies such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants and hand held computers, mobile technologies promise the next major technological and cultural shift. Like the Internet, it is predicted that the greatest impact will not come from hardware devices or software programs, but from emerging social practices, which were not possible before. To capitalize on the benefits of mobile technologies, organizations have begun to implement nomadic computing environments. Nomadic computing environments make available the systems support needed to provide computing and communication capabilities and services to the mobile work force as they move from place to place in a manner that is transparent, integrated, convenient and adaptive. Already, anecdotes suggest that within organizations there are social implications occurring with both unintended and intended consequences being perpetuated. The problems of nomadic computing users have widely been described in terms of the challenges presented by the interplay of time, space and context, yet a theory has yet to be developed which analyzes this interplay in a single effort. A temporal human agency perspective proposes that stakeholders’ actions are influenced by their ability to recall the past, respond to the present and imagine the future. By extending the temporal human agency perspective through the recognition of the combined influence of space and context on human action, I investigated how the individual practices of eleven nomadic computing users changed after implementation. Under the umbrella of the interpretive paradigm, and using a cross case methodology this research develops a theoretical account of how several stakeholders engaged with different nomadic computing environments and explores the context of their effectiveness. Applying a literal and theoretical replication strategy to multiple longitudinal and retrospective cases, six months were spent in the field interviewing and observing participants. Data analysis included three types of coding: descriptive, interpretive and pattern coding. The findings reveal that patterns of technology use in nomadic computing environments are influenced by stakeholders’ temporal orientations; their ability to remember the past, imagine the future and respond to the present. As stakeholders all have different temporal orientations and experiences, they exhibit different practices even when engaging initially with the same organizational and technical environments. Opposing forces emerge as users attempt to be effective by resolving the benefits and disadvantages of the environment as they undergo different temporal, contextual and spatial experiences. Insights about the ability to predict future use suggest that because they are difficult to envisage in advance, social processes inhibit the predictability of what technologies users will adopt. The framework presented highlights the need to focus on understanding the diversity in nomadic computing use practices by examining how they are influenced by individual circumstances as well as shared meanings across individuals

Conceptualising business mobilities: towards an analytical framework

Existing research into business travel and mobility within the social sciences has largely focused on measurement and the identification of patterns to this phenomenon. However, a growing body of research has also identified the complex nature of and reasons behind business mobility. It is clear that business travel fulfils many different functions and the drivers behind it vary considerably between industry, job role and organizational context. This contributes to a lack of clarity in definition of the concept and a blurring with non-economic forms of mobility. In this respect, theories of business mobility provide limited assistance for transportation management practice. This paper seeks to address this, arguing for a much more nuanced analytical framework through which to understand the differential nature of business travel and mobility in the contemporary globalizing economy. It engages critically with the existing literature, arguing that existing typologies of business mobility are insufficient to fully understand how mobility is related to economic success at both the firm and regional economy levels. It goes on to propose a reformulated typology and furthermore argue for the utility of a practice-centred and outcome-oriented theoretical approach that will enable better understanding and management of business mobility

Varieties in Organic Agriculture: An Assemblage Thinking Approach to Agri-Environmental Governance in India

The need for sustainability in agriculture has become increasingly important in the face of mounting pressures from the changing environment. Several strategies for governing sustainability responses have emerged, one of which has been the adoption of private organic agriculture standards within formalized global value chains. A less researched strategy, however, has been the creation of non-formal forms of agriculture as a response to the specific problems faced by smallholder farmers in the Global South. This study seeks to fill this gap by studying organic agriculture as a form of agri-environmental governance in India. Using an Assemblage Thinking approach, it deals with the question of how varieties in organic agriculture arise in response to problems faced on the ground in a specific and situated geographical context. More specifically, I examine non-formal, existing versions of organic agriculture, exploring the diverse forms of organic agriculture in rice production as practiced in West Bengal state, and across parts of India. The problem of a lack of understanding non-formal forms of governance leads to a narrow view of sustainability governance as being mainly driven by desires and forces external to the system in question. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to the discussion around agri-environmental governance by providing an overview of the various components, both discursive and non-discursive, which interact together and are utilized by various actors to produce an emergent form of organic. Put simply, the non-formal varieties of organic exist as an alternative imaginary of globalization, and arrange materials differently. In doing so, these assemblages challenge other concurrent assemblages of globalization like input-intensive farming and organic-for-export, creating a map composed of incommensurabilities and strange alliances to better understand governance in practice

Technology-Organization-Environment Meta-Review and Construct Analysis: Insights for Future Research

The Technology-Environment-Organization (“T-O-E”) framework has been widely applied in more than 80 published empirical information systems (“IS”) studies across multiple stages of organizational technology innovation adoption research in IS since its introduction in 1990. No prior review has traced studies and their factors back to the original framework categories and sub-categories to identify the existing lack of coverage. We address this research gap to guide future work. We present a meta-review and construct analysis derived from the most comprehensive collection of T-O-E articles collected and reviewed up to now. We present four major research contributions: 1) a guide to T-O-E constructs, 2) identification of new organizational sub-categories, 3) recognition of the existing levels of factor miscategorization, 4) identification of measurement gaps particularly relating to linking and communications sub-categories

Fellow travelers: an ethnographic study of the dynamics of inter-organizational collaboration

The research is a 13-months ethnographic field work on the early operations of a Multi-party alliance active in the global field of indoor positioning. The study aims to understand and investigate empirically the challenges that at the individual and group level influence the organizing principle guiding the alliance operations and evolution. Its contribution rests on the dynamics affecting ecosystems of innovation and collaborative spaces of value co-creation in inter-organizational projects

Social outcomes of community-based rangeland management in post-socialist Mongolia: Influential factors and favorable institutional designs

Includes bibliographical references.2015 Summer.Community-based rangeland management (CBRM) has been proposed as a promising option to reduce rural poverty and resource degradation in post-socialist Mongolia. To date, research on CBRM in Mongolia has been limited to small samples and case studies within one or two ecological zones. Results have been mixed, with some studies showing favorable outcomes and others no effect or negative impacts of CBRM. Few studies have directly compared the outcomes of formally organized CBRM with management by traditional herder neighborhood groupings, or attempted to identify the causal mechanisms that explain variations in CBRM outcomes. Using data from 142 pastoral groups and 706 member households across 36 counties (soum) in four ecological zones, I assessed social outcomes of CBRM organizations in comparison with non-CBRM groups, explored causal mechanisms underlying these social outcomes, and examined the effects of external facilitation on institutional design of formal CBRM organizations. I found that formal groups had more information sources, stronger leadership, greater knowledge exchange, cooperation and more rules. Members of formal groups were more proactive in addressing resource management issues and used more rangeland practices than traditional neighborhoods. However, the two types of groups did not differ on most livelihood measures and had a weak difference in social capital. Four factors, access to diverse information sources, leadership, knowledge exchange and resource management rules, significantly facilitated the effect of formal organization on pastoralists’ traditional and innovative rangeland practices, proactive behavior and social networks. Importantly, information diversity had a triggering effect on other three mediating variables creating a sequential chain of information diversity leadership knowledge exchange rules. This ordered chain of four mediators explains the mechanisms through which formal organization leads to comparatively greater social outcomes. I also found that these mediated effects on members’ proactive behavior and social networking varied among ecological zones. Donor facilitation approach significantly influenced CBRM group attributes and external environments, but did not affect institutional arrangements. Small group size, homogeneous interests, and heterogeneity of well-being predicted higher levels of intermediate outcomes including information diversity, leadership, and income diversity. Institutional arrangements such as the presence of sanctions, group-devised rules, frequent meetings, and recording documents increased cooperation, rules and information diversity. Similarly, access to training and local government support provided a favorable external environment for achieving intermediate outcomes. Regarding ultimate social outcomes, group characteristics such as dependence on livestock, homogeneity of interests and leader legitimacy were critical for increasing social capital, livelihoods, rangeland practices, and proactive behavior. Frequent meetings of group leaders had the greatest influence on ultimate social outcomes. Local government support and ongoing donor support were associated with increased trust and norms of reciprocity, rangeland management practices, proactiveness, and per capita livestock holdings. Overall, group attributes and external environment had a greater influence on social outcomes of pastoral CBRMs in Mongolia than institutional arrangements. I found strong evidence that formal CBRM is leading to increased social outcomes across Mongolia. Many CBRM facilitation strategies were shown to be adequate for fostering social outcomes of the pastoral groups. Early achievements of individual household level variables such as rangeland practices and behavior appeared to be “fast” variables that respond quickly to new institutions. In contrast, building social capital and reaching livelihood improvement may be “slow” variables that require time and larger scale changes. Globally, the promising case of CBRM in Mongolia may encourage mobile pastoral communities elsewhere to cooperate on the sustainable management of their resources. However, as this study showed, careful facilitation is needed to achieve intermediate outcomes, and consideration of the distinct dynamics of local resource systems is a necessary prerequisite for achieving increased social outcomes