UNDERSTANDING COMMUNICATION NETWORK COHESIVENESS DURING ORGANIZATIONAL CRISIS: EFFECTS OF CLIQUE AND TRANSITIVITY

Various terms such as organizational mortality, organizational death, bankruptcy, decline, retrenchment and failure have been used in the literature to characterize different forms and facets of organizational crisis. Communication network studies have typically focused on nodes (individuals or organizations), relationships between those nodes, and subsequent affects of these relationships upon the network as a whole. Email networks in contemporary organizations are fairly representative of the underlying communications networks. We show that changes in communication networks and its associated group cohesiveness have implications for studying organizational crisis. In this paper, we analyze the changing communication network structure at Enron Corporation during the period of its crisis (2000-2001). Our goal was to understand how communication patterns and structure were affected by organizational crisis. Drawing on communication network crisis and group cohesiveness theory, we tested several propositions using the Enron email corpus: (1) Number of cliques increases, and (2) Communication network becomes increasingly transitive as organizations experience crisis. The results of the tests and their implications are discussed in this paper

Knowledge management in the care for people with intellectual disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic

The study aimed to gain insight into knowledge management in the intellectual dis-abilities (ID) care sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. We explored and describedhow knowledge producers, intermediaries, and knowledge users experienced knowl-edge management during this crisis situation, the responses to the specific knowl-edge needs in the ID-care sector, and changes in roles and collaboration during thisperiod. Twenty-five individual in-depth semi-structured interviews were conductedwith knowledge producers, intermediaries, and knowledge users in the Dutch ID-caresector. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted. Three key themes were identi-fied: (1) knowledge needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, (2) experiences withknowledge management, and (3) roles and collaboration in knowledge management.There was an urgent need for specific ID-related knowledge and how to translateavailable evidence for the general population into ID-care settings. In knowledgemanagement, the focus was on knowledge production and exchange, with validationand application receiving less attention. Within stakeholder groups, collaboration andknowledge exchange were intensified by existing or new knowledge infrastructures.Between stakeholder groups, knowledge producers and users created short lines toexchange needs and produce knowledge. This paper provides unique insights intoknowledge management in the Dutch ID-care sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.Implications are discussed to improve future knowledge management processes. Sup-port with knowledge validation and local knowledge infrastructures (complementaryto centralized national knowledge infrastructures) help to assess the reliability andusefulness of knowledge and improve its use in practice during future pandemic-related crisis situations

Knowledge Management What Can Organizational Economics Contribute?

Knowledge management has emerged as a very successful organization practice and has been extensively treated in a large body of academic work. Surprisingly, however, organizational economics (i.e., transaction cost economics, agency theory, team theory and property rights theory) has played no role in the development of knowledge management. We argue that organizational economics insights can further the theory and practice of knowledge management in several ways. Specifically, we apply notions of contracting, team production, complementaries, hold-up, etc. to knowledge management issues (i.e., creating and integration knowledge, rewarding knowledge workers, etc.) , and derive refutable implications that are novel to the knowledge management field from our discussion.Transaction costs, organizational economics

HIP FRACTURE CARE IN RURAL SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF PATIENT TRANSITIONS AND PHYSIOTHERAPY HANDOFFS

Patients with hip fracture transition through several care environments during recovery. The purpose of this study was to examine information exchange by physiotherapists during care handoffs o f patients with hip fracture. Using an ethnographic approach, 11 patients with hip fracture and their networks of family caregivers (n=8) and health care providers (n=24) were recruited in a rural community of southwestern Ontario. Patients were followed from acute care through each post-acute care setting. Data sources included semi-structured interviews, observations and document review.An inductive analytic approach was used. Findings revealed that handoffs were challenged when information transfer was untimely. Family caregivers experienced challenges in obtaining information required to facilitate the handoff. Major implications included: appropriate methods to facilitate information exchange by physiotherapists in various rural settings need to be identified; and health system practices which ensure patients and family caregivers receive adequate information at care handoffs need to be developed

Entwicklung IT-basierter interorganisationaler Krisenmanagement-Infrastrukturen für Stromausfälle

Große Stromausfälle, wie beispielsweise der Ausfall der Stromversorgung im Nordosten der USA (2003) oder der Ausfall in weiten Teilen von West-Europa (2005), machen die fundamentale Bedeutung von Strom in unserem täglichen Leben deutlich. Sie zeigen auch, welche wichtige Rolle die Kooperation und Zusammenarbeit zwischen allen Beteiligten der Bewältigungs- und Wiederherstellungsarbeit spielt. Die Erfahrungen aus diesen Ausfällen legen nahe, dass Stromnetzbetreiber, Feuerwehr, Polizei, Behörden und Bürger einer Vielzahl von unterschiedlichen Herausforderungen in der interorganisationalen Kommunikation und innerhalb von Informations- und Koordinierungsprozessen gegenüberstehen. Ziel des Forschungsprojekts "InfoStrom", welches vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung seit 2010 und bis Ende 2013 gefördert wird, ist die Entwicklung von Konzepten, um diese Zusammenarbeit zu unterstützten und letztlich zu verbessern. In diesem Beitrag werden potentielle Fragen und zukünftige Themen und erzielte Ergebnisse dargestellt, die sich auf die benutzerzentrierte Technologieentwicklung im Krisenmanagement und auf domain-spezifische Probleme, wie die Verbesserung der Integration von Bürgern in das Krisenmanagement, den Umgang mit Informationsunsicherheiten oder die Unterstützung des interorganisationalen Lernens, beziehen

Implementing Electronic Services Transnational Guidelines and Perspectives

Electronic services to citizens are a growing concern to governments all over the world, not inthe least in the domains of social security and labor market. It was at the Montreal Conference of the ISSA –the International Social Security Association – in 1999 that many organizations in many countries showedto be grappling with many questions concerning the implementation of electronic service delivery. In orderto elaborate on experiences of implementation, the ISSA and three Dutch member organizations arranged anexpert work shop on implementation strategies for E-government in social security in the Autumn of 2000.This report summarizes the experts conclusions on strategies, methods, do´s and don´ts. It emphasizes theimportance of a mix of technological, political, legislational and organizational prerequisites.The considerations encompass the following domains or perspectives:(i) Infrastructure, being the technical devices such as network components, servers, protocols, instrumentsfor client identification, which needs some cooperation or coordination between social securityorganizations;(ii) Data management, which poses the question how governments can avoid to ask citizens or employersfor the same information twice;(iii) Standards and responsibilities, dealing with scope, and with how they are to be established,implemented and maintained;(iv) Client appreciation, one of the key issues when designing the services, which ones and how;(v) Issues of flexibility, which are related to changes in legislation, in technical standards and clientappreciation; and last but not least:(vi) Costs and benefits, the context of justification for investments.For each domain or theme, context, goals and experiences are stated first. Only a few examples aredescribed in the report itself. Each theme ends with do´s and don´ts, aiming at the promotion of action, atthe reduction not the ignorance of complexity. A range of illustrative cases is described in a separateappendix

Designing Community Social Services

The literature is reviewed on the qualities of integrated and non-integrated organizational systems. Social service delivery has changed in recent decades such that organizational strategies and structures that may have once been successful no longer appear to be so. As tasks have changed, so too have the technologies that might assist in the more effective delivery of social services. A discussion of how organizational strategies might be designed, so as to link emerging tasks requirements with the ability to effectively use existing and potential technologies, concludes the paper

Lessons from the MH-17 transboundary disaster investigation

Transboundary crises, incidents and disasters, such as chemical spills, airplane crashes and critical infrastructure breakdowns, involving multiple levels and domains of governance pose a particular set of challenges (Ansell et al, 2010; Kuipers and Boin, 2015; Boin 2019). These challenges also pertain to the investigation and learning phase of a crisis. We study a typical transboundary case: the crash of a Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), with 298 people on board from a variety of nationalities but the majority from the Netherlands, that crashed in Ukraine in a conflict zone near the Russian border. The MH17 case contains valuable lessons on transboundary disaster investigations. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) took the lead of the international independent investigation into the causes of the crash. With an international group of stakeholders the DSB investigated a crash that resulted from a bilateral conflict, requiring the support from Ukraine’s powerful neighbor Russia that meanwhile stood accused of withholding evidence and supporting Ukrainian separatists. Retrieving evidence and researching the causality of the crash was no easy task. If countries wish to follow their ambition to learn from accidents in order to ‘prevent the past repeated’, they may more often need to investigate such transboundary cases. This case study probes into how challenges that are typical to transboundary crises affected the accident investigation into the MH17 disaster. We search for lessons on transboundary accident investigation that transcend the boundaries of this single case. Such lessons may prove invaluable for learning from future accidents. Security and Global Affair