The Role of Project Leadership in Global Multicultural Project Success

Global projects have a high failure rate, with many project failures attributed to lack of effective leadership. A knowledge gap about leadership requirements and complexities in a global project management environment has increased the risks in global projects. The problem is evident in the increasing project failure rate and the struggling national strategies in the oil and gas industry in the Arabian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The purpose of this study was to explore the role of leadership in project success and adaptation complexities in GCC. The conceptual framework consisted of complex adaptive systems and contingency theories. A qualitative approach was used to capture common understandings of project leaders\u27 role and the opportunities and challenges in a multicultural global project environment. Personal interviews were conducted with 25 participants from the oil and gas industry in GCC who were selected using a purposive sampling method. Six themes emerged from an exploratory and comparative analysis, including: adaptable project structure with team and environment dynamics; leadership role and the impermanent multicultural environment; project success definition and the success criteria; aligned performance and governance systems; changing organizational strategy; and team building and the project complexity management. Based on study findings, a framework was created for leading 4 organizational processes in global projects, which includes the environment, team building, leadership selection, and setting of project success criteria. Higher efficiency in leading these processes may contribute to positive social change and support practitioners to promote a project environment for active knowledge integration

Arts, struggle and transformation from female militants to Kurdish women

69 pagesI wanted to evaluate the women‟s rights movements through the lives and struggles of two important Kurdish women of social worth who lived in the 21st century to answer the question of whether women could really exist in new battlegrounds apart from being objects of consideration and militarism. My first example is how Sakine Cansız has managed to create a public space within the Kurdish women‟s rights movement throughout her life and whether she extended beyond masculine discourse after her death. Sakine Cansız has become an important public figure because she constructed the female memory of the Kurdish public movement. During her life, although she tried not to remain constrained within the masculine political discourse, she could not necessarily extend beyond it either. It was an important ethnographic example to examine and analyze her life as well as the symbolic values of her funeral. It was possible to read how the areas of female struggle and how a new Kurdish female figurine surfaced through Sakine Cansız‟s funeral. She was the messenger of the formation of a new Kurdish female model: a new type of Kurdish woman who did not exist only within the war apparatus or the political discourse and who did not behave sexless. This type of Kurdish woman represents all the women who are capable of using different tools and apparatus to fight hegemony to contribute a serious universal awareness as well as symbolic values to the public space. Just like Zehra Doğan who could carry out a feminist struggle with her male comrades, could underline her female identity and struggled as a Kurdish woman.Kadın hareketlerinin 21. Yüzyılda dönüşümünü yaşan ve ölen iki önemli toplumsal Kürt kadın figürü üzerinden ele alıp, halk hareketlerinde kadınların bedel ve savaşçılık nesnesi olmaları dışında yeni mücadele alanlarında var olabilirler mi sorusunu sormak istedim. İlk örneğim Sakine Cansız‟ın yaşamı boyunca Kürt kadın hareketi içerisinde nasıl bir kamusal alan oluşturduğu ve ölümünden sonra eril söylemlerin dışına çıkıp çıkamadığı sorunsalı. Sakine Cansız, Kürt halk hareketinin kadın hafızasını oluşturduğu için önemli bir kamusal figür haline gelmişti. Yaşamı içerisinde, eril politik söylem içerisinde, kısıtlı kalmayaya çalışsa da, bunun dışına tam olarak çıkmış da değildir. Yaşamı ve cenazesinin sembolik değerlerinin incelenmesi önemli bir etnografik örnekti. Kadınların mücadele alanlarının nasıl değiştiği, yeni bir kürt kadın figürünün ortaya çıktığını Sakine Cansız cenazesi üzerinden okumak mümkündü. Yeni bir Kürt kadın modelinin oluştuğunun habercisiydi. Kendini salt savaş araçları ve ya politik söylem içerisinde var etmeyen, cinsiyetsiz gibi davranmayan yeni bir Kürt kadını. Bu Kürt kadını, hegemonya ile savaşmak için başka araçlar kullanabilen büyük bir evrensel farkındalık ve kamusal alanda bir sembol değer yaratabilen kadınlar. Kendi erkek yoldaşları ile feminist mücadele yürütebilen, kadın kimliğinin altını çizen, Kürt kadını olarak mücadele veren Zehra Doğan gibi

Two Steps Towards Kairos-Awareness

This thesis describes a research inspired by a concept of the classical discipline of rhetoric: kairos, the right moment to deliver a message in order to maximize its effect. The research followed two threads that, ultimately, lead to the same ending: the maximization of the potential of technology to deliver the right interaction at the right time. The first research thread is an operationalization of the concept of kairos. It entailed the development of EveWorks and EveXL, a framework for capturing daily life events in mobile devices and a domain-specific language to express them, respectively. The largely extended use of mobile devices and their proximity with their owners offers exceptional potential for capturing opportunity for interaction. Leveraging on this potential, the EveWorks-EveXL dyad was developed to allow mobile application programmers to specify the precise delivery circumstances of an interaction in order to maximize its potential, i.e., to specify its kairos. Contrasting to most event processing engines found in the literature that implement data-based event models, the EveWorks-EveXL dyad proposes a model based on temporality, through the articulation of intervals of time. This is a more natural way of representing a concept as broad as “daily life events” since, across cultures, temporal concepts like duration and time intervals are fundamental to the way people make sense of their experience. The results of the present work demonstrate that the EveWorks-EveXL dyad makes for an adequate and interesting way to express contextual events, in a way that is “closer” to our everyday understanding of daily life. Ultimately, in user centered applications, kairos can be influenced by the user’s emotional state, thereby making emotion assessment relevant. Addressing this, as well as the growing interest in the topic of emotions by the scientific community, the second research thread of the present thesis led to the development of the CAAT, a widget designed to perform quick and reliable assessments of affective states – a paramount task in a variety of scientific fields, including HCI. While there are already a number of tools for this purpose, in psychology, emotion assessments are largely conducted through the use of pen-and-paper questionnaires applied after the affective experience has occurred. As emotional states vary significantly over time, this entails the loss of important details, warranting the need for immediate, in situ, measurements of affect. In line with this requirement, the CAAT enables quick emotion assessment in a reliable fashion, as attested by the results of then validation studies conducted in order to assess its overall viability along relevant dimensions of usability and psychometrics. As such, aside from being a good fit for longitudinal studies and applications whenever the quick assessment of emotions is required, the CAAT has the potential to be integrated as one of EveWorks’ sensors to enhance its ability to find that sometimes elusive opportunity for interaction, i.e., their kairos. In this way, it becomes apparent how the two threads of research of the current work may be intertwined into a consolidated contribution to the HCI field

OntoTouTra: tourist traceability ontology based on big data analytics

Tourist traceability is the analysis of the set of actions, procedures, and technical measures that allows us to identify and record the space–time causality of the tourist’s touring, from the beginning to the end of the chain of the tourist product. Besides, the traceability of tourists has implications for infrastructure, transport, products, marketing, the commercial viability of the industry, and the management of the destination’s social, environmental, and cultural impact. To this end, a tourist traceability system requires a knowledge base for processing elements, such as functions, objects, events, and logical connectors among them. A knowledge base provides us with information on the preparation, planning, and implementation or operation stages. In this regard, unifying tourism terminology in a traceability system is a challenge because we need a central repository that promotes standards for tourists and suppliers in forming a formal body of knowledge representation. Some studies are related to the construction of ontologies in tourism, but none focus on tourist traceability systems. For the above, we propose OntoTouTra, an ontology that uses formal specifications to represent knowledge of tourist traceability systems. This paper outlines the development of the OntoTouTra ontology and how we gathered and processed data from ubiquitous computing using Big Data analysis techniquesThis research was financially supported by the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation of Colombia (733-2015) and by the Universidad Santo Tomás Seccional Tunja

Eddie Murphy and the Dangers of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination

The model of discrimination animating some of the most common approaches to detecting discrimination in both law and social science—the counterfactual causal model—is wrong. In that model, racial discrimination is detected by measuring the “treatment effect of race,” where the treatment is conceptualized as manipulating the raced status of otherwise identical units (e.g., a person, a neighborhood, a school). Most objections to talking about race as a cause in the counterfactual model have been raised in terms of manipulability. If we cannot manipulate a person’s race at the moment of a police stop, traffic encounter, or prosecutorial charging decision, then it is impossible to detect if the person’s race was the sole cause of an unfavorable outcome. But this debate has proceeded on the wrong terms. The counterfactual causal model of discrimination is not wrong because we can’t work around the practical limits of manipulation, as evidenced by both Eddie Murphy’s comic genius in the Saturday Night Live skit “White Like Me” and the entire genre of audit and correspondence studies. It is wrong because to fit the rigor of the counterfactual model of a clearly defined treatment on otherwise identical units, we must reduce race to only the signs of the category, meaning we must think race is skin color, or phenotype, or other ways we identify group status. And that is a concept mistake if one subscribes to a constructivist, as opposed to a biological or genetic, conception of race. The counterfactual causal model of discrimination is based on a flawed theory of what the category of race references, how it produces effects in the world, and what is meant when we say it is wrong to make decisions of import because of race. I argue that discrimination is a thick ethical concept that at once describes and evaluates the actions to which it is applied, and therefore, we cannot detect actions as discriminatory by identifying a relation of counterfactual causality; we can do so only by reasoning about the action’s distinctive wrongfulness by referencing what constitutes the very categories that are the objects of concern. An adequate theory of discrimination must rest upon (1) an account of the system of social meanings or practices that constitute the categories at issue and (2) a moral theory of what is fair and just in various state and private arenas given what the categories are

Implementing the state duty to consult in land and resource decisions: perspectives from Sami communities and Swedish state officials

The duty of states to consult indigenous communities is a well-established legal principle, but its implications for practice remain uncertain. Sweden is finding itself at a particularly critical juncture as it prepares to legislate a duty to consult the Sami people in line with its international obligations. This paper explores the ability of Swedish state actors to implement the duty to consult, based on lessons from an already existing duty set out in Swedish minority law, namely to ensure the effective participation of minorities in land and resource decisions. Presenting novel empirical material on the views of Sami communities and state officials in ministries and agencies, we demonstrate the existence of considerable implementation gaps linked to practice, sectoral legislation, and political discourse. We argue that if state duties are to promote the intended intercultural reconciliation, then new measures are needed to ensure enforcement, e.g. via mechanisms of appeal and rules of nullification. In addition, sectoral resource regulations should be amended to refer to the duties set out in minority law and/or a potential new bill on consultation duty in a consistent manner. In the near-term, the state should ensure that Sami communities are adequately resourced to engage in consultation and should invest in state authorities’ own ability to implement, i.e. through competence development, staffing, intersectoral coordination, and independent evaluation. Much could also be gained if state agencies and Sami communities worked together to develop detailed consultation routines for relevant resource sectors

Lived Experiences of Indian International Students: Migration, Acculturation, and Resilience

The student demographics in American universities have been changing in recent years and the result is a rapidly increasing enrollment of international students. In particular, the Indian international student population has grown to be the second largest, with over 100,000 students enrolling at post-secondary educational institutions across the nation each year (Institute of International Education, 2010). However, research on the effects of migration on international students is relatively devoid of critical explorations on the resilient responses by Indian international students to the effects of acculturation. This hermeneutic phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of eight Indian international graduate students at a mid-western American university. The participants\u27 descriptions of their psychological, physical and behavioral adjustments in the United States provided rich information. The data was analyzed using the theoretical underpinnings of the research that included Van Manen\u27s (1997) lived existentials, ecological factors of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1986), and protective and risk factors associated with resilience (Harvey, 2007; Luther, 2006). Several primary and sub-themes emerged from a thick analysis of the data, which proved to shed light on the lived experiences of the participants. Participants in the study typically faced challenges in adjusting to cultural differences, building relationships with domestic students, and adapting to academic expectations. However, protective factors including their positive attitudes and supportive relationships with their families, professors, and other Indian students helped them in responding resiliently to challenges related to cross-cultural transitions. In addition, hypotheses were generated and implications for education, research, and practice of counseling were discussed