Communication Network Design: Balancing Modularity and Mixing via Optimal Graph Spectra

By leveraging information technologies, organizations now have the ability to design their communication networks and crowdsourcing platforms to pursue various performance goals, but existing research on network design does not account for the specific features of social networks, such as the notion of teams. We fill this gap by demonstrating how desirable aspects of organizational structure can be mapped parsimoniously onto the spectrum of the graph Laplacian allowing the specification of structural objectives and build on recent advances in non-convex programming to optimize them. This design framework is general, but we focus here on the problem of creating graphs that balance high modularity and low mixing time, and show how "liaisons" rather than brokers maximize this objective

"If We Don't Produce, Bring Another:" Work Organization and Tomato Worker Health.

Objectives: Specific work processes and management structures that contribute to high rates of occupational illness and injury in agricultural industries are not well described in academic literature. This qualitative study of work organization in the U.S. fresh tomato industry investigates how work processes and management structures impact tomato workers' occupational health. Methods: After conducting literature review and key informant interviews, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 36 individuals with experience working in the U.S. fresh tomato industry. Interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed using a modified grounded theory approach. Results: These data indicate that participants endured income insecurity and hazardous supervisory practices, including wage theft, retaliation, intimidation, and humiliation, that put them at risk of preventable illness and injury. Support from workers' organizations and health-conscious supervisory practices helped mitigate some of these occupational hazards. Conclusion: Participants' adverse work experiences may be considered sequelae of workers' lack of job control and positions of socioeconomic structural vulnerability. Other aspects of tomato work organization, including health-conscious supervisory practices and the involvement of workers' organizations, indicate that modifying work organization to better safeguard health is possible. Such modifications present compelling opportunities for employers, employees, organizations, community and government leaders, and health care professionals to help create healthier occupational environments for tomato workers

The Role of Social Capital in Economic Development

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital's diverse aspects to the "quality" of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them through synthetic indicators built by means of principal component analyses performed on a dataset including multiple variables. The quality of development is measured through human development and indicators of the state of health of urban ecosystems, public services, social protection, gender equality, and labour markets. The causal relationship between social capital's and development's different dimensions is then assessed through structural equations models. The analysis in this paper provides a proof of Putnam's claims on the positive role of civil society organizations in development processes.Social capital; Social networks; Civil Society; Economic development; Social quality; Labour precariousness; Structural Equations Modelling

The Role of Social Capital in Economic Development. Investigating the Causal Nexus through Structural Equations Models

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital’s diverse aspects to the “quality” of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them through synthetic indicators built by means of principal component analyses performed on a dataset including multiple variables. The quality of development is measured through human development and indicators of the state of health of urban ecosystems, public services, social protection, gender equality, and labour markets. The causal relationship between social capital’s and development’s different dimensions is then assessed through structural equations models. The analysis in this paper provides relevant a proof of Putnam’s claims on the positive role of civil society organizations in development processes.Social capital, Social networks, Civil Society, Economic development, Well-being, Labour precariousness, Structural Equations Modelling

The Role of Social Capital in Economic Development. Investigating the Causal Nexus through Structural Equations Models

This paper carries out an empirical assessment of the causal nexus connecting social capital’s diverse aspects to the “quality” of economic development in Italy. The analysis accounts for three main social capital dimensions (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) and measures them through synthetic indicators built by means of principal component analyses performed on a dataset including multiple variables. The quality of development is measured through human development and indicators of the state of health of urban ecosystems, public services, social protection, gender equality, and labour markets. The causal relationship between social capital’s and development’s different dimensions is then assessed through structural equations models. The analysis in this paper provides relevant a proof of Putnam’s claims on the positive role of civil society organizations in development processes.Social capital, Social networks, Civil Society, Economic development, Social quality, Labour precariousness, Structural Equations Modelling

Corporate change and integration as a result of a merger : an analysis of organizational culture within a large full-service law firm.

Previous research on organizational mergers has found that such a business activity bears an effect upon the structural and cultural foundations of organizations. Whether combining intellectual resources or capital, mergers combine workforces that have operated within every unique historical settings. This research focused on a merger between two law firms and the subsequent acquisition of an additional firm. Interviews with a random stratified sample of employees were conducted to gain insight on the cultural aspects of workforce integration. Througout the research, culture and structure were used as interrelated aspects when addressing the merger. The main result of the research revealed how the employees of three different organizations accustomed to different cultural and structural legacies were affected by workforce integration. With the conclusion of the study, an additional research setting is offered to a growing area of academic interest

Globalisation and public health: economic aspects

Globalisation is affecting all aspects of human society. There is increasing economic integration of the countries of the world through trade and investment flows. There is also the spread of socio-cultural influences through education, the mass media and population movements. Globalisation is also affecting healthcare institutions as well as the health of the public. This paper, will discuss certain economic effects of globalisation that impact upon the health of the public. These include the following: population movements, the pharmaceutical industry, foreign investment in healthcare services, the international drug trade (legal drugs such as tobacco as well as illegal drugs), cross-border pollution and the “export of hazard”, the mass media and its effect on health-related behaviour, worldwide weather changes, “structural adjustment programmes” (SAPs) implemented in response to economic crises, and the impact of multilateral organizations on national health policy

Structural Regularities in Text-based Entity Vector Spaces

Entity retrieval is the task of finding entities such as people or products in response to a query, based solely on the textual documents they are associated with. Recent semantic entity retrieval algorithms represent queries and experts in finite-dimensional vector spaces, where both are constructed from text sequences. We investigate entity vector spaces and the degree to which they capture structural regularities. Such vector spaces are constructed in an unsupervised manner without explicit information about structural aspects. For concreteness, we address these questions for a specific type of entity: experts in the context of expert finding. We discover how clusterings of experts correspond to committees in organizations, the ability of expert representations to encode the co-author graph, and the degree to which they encode academic rank. We compare latent, continuous representations created using methods based on distributional semantics (LSI), topic models (LDA) and neural networks (word2vec, doc2vec, SERT). Vector spaces created using neural methods, such as doc2vec and SERT, systematically perform better at clustering than LSI, LDA and word2vec. When it comes to encoding entity relations, SERT performs best.Comment: ICTIR2017. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval. 201

Structural, Normative, and Communal Integration in Organizations

The concepts of structural, normative, and communal dimensions of organizational behavior are defined and described, and aspects of the integration of these dimensions are discussed. Some of the dynamics of consultation utilizing these dimensions are described, and some issues and problems are delineated. The behavioral descriptions come from the author\u27s experiences as a consultant to a variety of organizations

Employee Information Security Practices: A Framework and Research Agenda

Author's accepted manuscriptEmployee information security practices are pivotal to prevent, detect, and respond to security incidents. This paper synthesizes insights from research on challenges related to employee information security practices and measures to address them. The challenges identified are associated to idiosyncratic aspects of communities and individuals within organizations (culture and personal characteristics) and to systemic aspects of organizations (procedural and structural arrangements). The measures identified aim to enhance systemic capabilities and to adapt security mechanisms to the idiosyncratic characteristics and are categorized as: (a) measures of training and awareness, (b) measures of organizational support, (c) measures of rewards and penalties. Further research is needed to explore the dynamics related to how challenges emerge, develop, and get addressed over time and also, to explore the interplay between systemic and idiosyncratic aspects. Additionally, research is needed on the role of security managers and how it can be reconfigured to suit flatter organizationsacceptedVersio