Strategic Assessment of Organizational Commitment

The concept of organizational commitment has been widely studied over recent decades, yet it remains one of the most challenging concepts in organizational research. While commitment is understood to be highly valuable in today’s dynamic business environment, its multifaceted nature is not necessarily understood adequately. The purpose of this study was to examine the concept of organizational commitment and its measurement issues within organizations, and to develop a practical evaluation tool for management, which is based on previous scientific research. First, a theoretical framework discussing organizational commitment and engagement was established. Based on the literature research, three ontologies were developed addressing organizational commitment and engagement, as well as academic engagement. The ontologies were constructed as a synthesis of existing theories. With the help of the ontologies and the created evaluation system, it is possible to better understand these concepts, gain a collective view of the organization’s current state and vision for the future, and to open a dialogue between members of the organization regarding their development. The results of the empirical case studies are presented at the end of this thesis, as well as in the attached research papers. The empirical results indicate that, by using these applications, it is possible to gain insights about the respondents’ feelings and aspirations, which can be used to support effective decision-making and as the basis for creating development actions within the organization.Organisaatiositoutumisen käsitettä on tutkittu laajasti kuluneiden vuosikymmenten aikana, kuitenkin se on edelleen yksi organisaatiotutkimuksen haastavimmista käsitteistä. Sitoutuminen on laajalti ymmärretty erittäin tärkeäksi tämän päivän liiketoimintaympäristössä mutta sen moniulotteista luonnetta ei yrityksissä ole välttämättä ymmärretty riittävästi. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli tarkastella organisatorisen sitoutumisen käsitettä ja sen mittaamisen ongelmallisuutta sekä kehittää aikaisempaan tieteelliseen tutkimukseen perustuva käytännön sovellus sitoutumisen tason määrittämiseksi. Tutkimuksen ensimmäisessä osassa laadittiin organisaatioon sitoutumista käsittelevä teoreettinen viitekehys, jonka perusteella kehitettiin kolme ontologiaa. Ontologiat käsittelevät organisaation sitoutumista eri näkökulmista sekä opiskelijoiden akateemista sitoutumista. Ontologioiden sekä laaditun arviointijärjestelmän avulla on mahdollista ymmärtää sitoutumiseen liittyviä käsitteitä, saada yhteinen näkemys organisaation nykytilasta ja tulevaisuuden näkemyksestä sekä löytää mahdollisia kehityskohteita. Empiiristen case-tutkimusten tuloksia on esitetty tämän työn loppuosassa sekä liitteenä olevissa tutkimusartikkeleissa. Tulokset osoittavat, että laadittujen sovellusten avulla on mahdollista saada tietoa vastaajien tuntemuksista ja pyrkimyksistä. Tätä tietoa voidaan hyödyntää päätöksenteon tukena sekä perustana kehitystoimien luomiselle.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Representing Mental Functioning: Ontologies for Mental Health and Disease

Mental and behavioral disorders represent a significant portion of the public health burden in all countries. The human cost of these disorders is immense, yet treatment options for sufferers are currently limited, with many patients failing to respond sufficiently to available interventions and drugs. High quality ontologies facilitate data aggregation and comparison across different disciplines, and may therefore speed up the translation of primary research into novel therapeutics. Realism-based ontologies describe entities in reality and the relationships between them in such a way that – once formulated in a suitable formal language – the ontologies can be used for sophisticated automated reasoning applications. Reference ontologies can be applied across different contexts in which different, and often mutually incompatible, domain-specific vocabularies have traditionally been used. In this contribution we describe the Mental Functioning Ontology (MF) and Mental Disease Ontology (MD), two realism-based ontologies currently under development for the description of humanmental functioning and disease. We describe the structure and upper levels of the ontologies and preliminary application scenarios, and identify some open questions

The Self stepping into the shoes of the Other: Understanding and developing self-perceptions of empathy among prospective physical education teachers through a special school placement

Teachers who demonstrate a high degree of empathy are said to have more positive attitudes towards pupils with disabilities. Therefore, this article sought to explore the influence of a special school placement on prospective teachers’ self-perceptions of empathy. Thirty-two final year undergraduate students participated in focus group interviews and were selected because they aspired to be a physical education teacher and had attended a placement in a special school. Interview transcripts were analysed and the following themes constructed: Stepping into the shoes of the Other; Frustrated ‘for’ not ‘with’ pupils with disabilities; Empathy for planning inclusive lessons and ‘reading’ pupil body language; and Knowing when not to show empathy. All prospective teachers felt that: (a) they could empathise with pupils with disabilities; (b) situated learning experiences within the placement enabled them to reflect on the ways in which their empathy influences their teaching now and could continue to do so in the future; and (c) it was important that teachers demonstrated empathy. Thus, it is recommended that all prospective teachers gain some experience teaching in special schools. Our research also warns against teachers claiming the last, conclusive word about who children with disabilities are, what they think, how they feel and what they want, in myriad contexts and situations

Developing an ontology of mechanisms of action in behaviour change interventions

Background: Behaviour change interventions can influence behaviours central to health and sustainability. To design better interventions, a strong evidence base about ‘why’ interventions work is needed, i.e., their mechanisms of action (MoAs). MoAs are often labelled and defined inconsistently across intervention reports, creating challenges for understanding interventions and synthesising evidence. An ontology can address this problem by providing a classification system that labels and defines classes for MoAs and their relationships. Aims: To develop an ontology of MoAs in behaviour change interventions, and to explore challenges in understanding MoAs and their links to behaviour change techniques (BCTs) Methods: Behavioural scientists’ challenges to understanding MoAs and BCT-MoA links were investigated using a thematic analysis (Study 1 [S1]). To help better understand MoAs, Studies 2-7 developed the MoA Ontology: (S2) Identifying and grouping MoAs from 83 behavioural theories; (S3) Converting the groupings into an ontology by drawing on relevant ontologies; (S4) Restructuring the ontology to be more usable and ontologically correct; (S5) Applying and refining the ontology to code MoAs in 135 intervention reports; (S6) Nine behavioural scientists reviewing the ontology’s comprehensiveness and clarity, informing revisions; (S7) Investigating the inter-rater reliability of researchers double-coding MoAs in reports using the ontology, informing changes to the ontology. Results: Study 1 suggested challenges to understanding broad and underspecified MoAs. To form the basis of a detailed ontology, Study 2 identified 1062 MoAs and formed 104 MoA groups. Building on these groups, Studies 3-7 created the MoA Ontology, which had 261 classes (e.g., ‘belief’) on seven hierarchical levels. Inter-rater reliability was ‘acceptable’ for researchers familiar with the ontology but lower for researchers unfamiliar with the ontology (Study 7). Conclusions: The developed ontology captured MoAs with greater detail than previous classification systems. With its clear class labels and definitions, the ontology provides a controlled vocabulary for MoAs

Of Monsters and Mothers: Affective Climates and Human-Nonhuman Sociality in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s “Dear Matafele Peinam”

This article examines the production of doubt and apathy within climate change debates and argues that the material outcomes of this affective regime perpetuate colonialism in Oceania. By furthering land dispossession, resource depletion, cultural loss, and impoverishment, the affective and material impacts of climate change have been and continue to be a site of activism for Native Pacific peoples. While climate change functions in many ways as an affective regime of colonialism, this affective regime is dismantled through Indigenous Oceania’s affects, epistemes, and ontologies, as exemplified by Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam” and its performance at the 2014 UN Summit on Climate Change. Through her use of experiential and embodied knowledges, which inform the affects that circulate in the performance, Jetñil-Kijiner intervenes into the colonial affective regime of climate change. Furthermore, her evocation of Indigenous epistemes and ontologies regarding nonhuman entities points to forms of sociality that I argue can provide alternative frameworks of thinking through not only climate change and its effects but also what an inter-Indigenous Oceanian sociality and politics might look like within contested colonial territories

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Towards the mental health ontology

Lots of research have been done within the mental health domain, but exact causes of mental illness are still unknown. Concerningly, the number of people being affected by mental conditions is rapidly increasing and it has been predicted that depression would be the world's leading cause of disabilityby 2020. Most mental health information is found in electronic form. Application of the cutting-edge information technologies within the mental health domain has the potential to greatly increase the value of the available information. Specifically, ontologies form the basis for collaboration between researchteams, for creation of semantic web services and intelligent multi-agent systems, for intelligent information retrieval, and for automatic data analysis such as data mining. In this paper, we present Mental Health Ontology which can be used to underpin a variety of automatic tasks and positively transform the way information is being managed and used within the mental health domain