Organizational control & the Catholic Church: a case study

This paper presents an analysis of the problem of child-abusing priests in the Catholic Church using data from the USA, UK and Ireland. The apparent scale of this issue raises crucial theoretical as well as policy issues. This paper explores various organizational explanations, linking it to traditional methods of ‘confessional control’ of organizational members. This is a novel concept which brings the issue into a wider organizational lens. Confessional control creates a series of guilt-laden identities that serve to maintain hierarchical control as well as social inclusion. Thus the process of recycling priests was part of a long-persisting pattern applied to child abuse cases. The theoretical implications of this are explored. The data consists of a series of cases across the three countries, partly drawn from a data-base of 4,000 alleged cases

How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket

Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of tension that Hohwy depicts. On the contrary, they actively favour the EEE story. This is because the Markov property, as exemplified in biological agents, picks out neither a unique nor a stationary boundary. It is this multiplicity and mutability– rather than the absence of agent-environment boundaries as such - that EEE cognition celebrates

The King's many bodies: the self-deconstruction of law's hierarchy

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in die Course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international poliucs and public international law. Consequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical condicions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new condicions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law

Organizational Change Perspectives on Software Process Improvement

Many software organizations have engaged in Software Process Improvement (SPI) and experienced the challenges related to managing such complex organizational change efforts. As a result, there is an increasing body of research investigating change management in SPI. To provide an overview of what we know and don’t know about SPI as organizational change, this paper addresses the following question: What are the dominant perspectives on SPI as organizational change in the literature and how is this knowledge presented and published? All journals on the AIS ranking list were screened to identify relevant articles and Gareth Morgan’s organizational metaphors (1996) were used to analyze this literature considering the following dimensions of each article: organizational perspective (metaphor), knowledge orientation (normative versus descriptive), theoretical emphasis (high versus low), main audience (practitioner versus academic), geographical origin (Scandinavia, the Americas, Europe, or the Asia-Pacific), and publication level (high versus low ranked journal). The review demonstrates that the literature on SPI as organizational change is firmly grounded in both theory and practice, and Scandinavia and the Americas are the main contributors to this research. The distribution of articles across Morgan’s metaphors is uneven and reveals knowledge gaps that present new avenues for research. The current literature offers important insights into organizational change in SPI from machine, organism, and brain perspectives. Practitioners may use these articles as a guide to SPI insights relevant to their improvement initiatives. In contrast, the impact of culture, dominance, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and politics in SPI have only received scant attention. We argue that these perspectives offer important insights into the challenges involved in managing change in SPI. Researchers are therefore advised to engage in new SPI research based on one or more of these perspectives. Overall, the paper provides a roadmap to help identify insights and specific articles related to SPI as organizational change.Software Process Improvement; Organizational Change; Organizational Metaphors; Images of Organization; Literature Review

Beyond the market-institutions dichotomy: The institutionalism of Douglass C. North in response to Karl Polanyi's challenge

On the basis of the "challenge" North [1997 (1977)] identified in the works of Polanyi, we propose to outline the originality of North's institutionalism, especially in comparison with "new institutionalism" in economics as well as in sociology. Far from endorsing the dichotomy between market and non market dimensions of economic activities at the basis of the analyses of Williamson and Granovetter, North's definition of institutions as "rules of the game" allows him to conceive of institutions as the institutional foundations of the market and therefore as explanatory principles of historical dynamics.institutions, institutionalism, North, Polanyi, Williamson, Granovetter

The chaotic nature of healthcare information systems: The need for transdisciplinary collaboration

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.This paper demonstrates one of the challenges of the healthcare information systems development, namely the chaotic nature of healthcare systems. Although the reliable evidence demonstrating the positive effects of health information systems on safety and quality remains inconclusive (a growing body of research revealing the unintended consequences and potentially error producing effects of health information systems’ implementation. Different arguments from the literature concerning the chaotic nature of healthcare, including but not limited to the nature of patients and disease have been presented. The requirements of new ways of systems design and the need for transdisciplinary dynamic teams within the requirements engineering phase as a start has been discussed. These arguments have been investigated in the context of an exploratory case addressing one of the advanced oncology centres in the US. This paper concludes that there is an important need to rethink healthcare information systems development method, which has to be in a dynamic ongoing manner for some major issues

Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities

[Excerpt] My goal in this book is to examine the formation of labor-environmental alliances that focus on health issues. Health concerns are increasingly a common ground on which blue-green coalitions are developing across the United States. Activists from both movements often see health issues through different lenses, which lends a particular slant to how they approach potential solutions for reducing exposures to toxics. The coalition framework emphasizes the fundamental link between occupational and environmental health, providing an internal cohesion and a politically persuasive agenda based on the centrality of health-related issues. By engaging labor and environmental activists in a common dialogue regarding the need for cooperative action to reduce the risks of community and workplace exposures, blue-green coalitions are creating new opportunities for progressive social change

HOW DEMOCRATIC INTERNAL LAW LEADS TO LOW COST EFFICIENT PROCESSES : PRACTICES AS A MEDIUM OF INTERACTION BETWEEN INSTITUTION AND ORGANIZATION

According to Sewell's principle of the multiplicity and the intersection of the structures, we consider here a retailing bank as an organization and as an institution. As an institution, the studied bank appears to be a constitutional democracy, whereas, as an organization, it proves to be a very efficient low cost company. Organizational and institutional features of this firm look correlated and this correlation is interpreted as an interaction between institution and organization, which takes place through the medium of interconnected practices inside the firm. Institutional features are analyzed through Hauriou's institutionalism and Turpin's Constitutional laws theory, whereas organizational routines are described through a triadic model (Ostensive aspect, performance and artifacts) proposed by Pentland and Feldman. Through the study of induction practice and interactions between this practice and other ones inside the firm, we map systematically induction's practising in the sense of Pesqueux and establish a dual influence of institution on organization. Firstly, there is a mainstream influence from constitutional law to organizational routines, through interconnection with an intermediate step called “institutional routines”. Secondly, there is a “coherence” effect, by which some peculiarities of several organizational routines reinforce each other in the day-to-day life of the firm. Finally, we discuss the possibility of building a constitutional theory of the firm. We emphasize the structuring role of law and the specific influence of political constitutional law on the empowerment of employees, through the dialectic tension between law and other components of the institution.

Glycemia Regulation: From Feedback Loops to Organizational Closure.

Endocrinologists apply the idea of feedback loops to explain how hormones regulate certain bodily functions such as glucose metabolism. In particular, feedback loops focus on the maintenance of the plasma concentrations of glucose within a narrow range. Here, we put forward a different, organicist perspective on the endocrine regulation of glycaemia, by relying on the pivotal concept of closure of constraints. From this perspective, biological systems are understood as organized ones, which means that they are constituted of a set of mutually dependent functional structures acting as constraints, whose maintenance depends on their reciprocal interactions. Closure refers specifically to the mutual dependence among functional constraints in an organism. We show that, when compared to feedback loops, organizational closure can generate much richer descriptions of the processes and constraints at play in the metabolism and regulation of glycaemia, by making explicit the different hierarchical orders involved. We expect that the proposed theoretical framework will open the way to the construction of original mathematical models, which would provide a better understanding of endocrine regulation from an organicist perspective