Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Documenting multiple temporalities

Purpose: This article explores the varied ways that individuals create and use calendars, planners, and other cognitive artifacts to document the multiple temporalities that make up their everyday lives. It reveals the hidden documentary time work required to synchronize, coordinate, or entrain their activities to those of others. Design/methodology/approach: We interviewed 47 Canadian participants in their homes, workplaces, or other locations, and photographed their documents. We analyzed qualitatively; first thematically to identify mentions of times, and then relationally to reveal how documentary time work was situated within participants’ broader contexts. Findings: Participants’ documents revealed a wide variety of temporalities, some embedded in the templates they used, and others added by document creators and users. Participants’ documentary time work involved creating and using a variety of tools and strategies to reconcile and manage multiple temporalities and indexical time concepts that held multiple meanings. Their work employed both standard “off the shelf” and individualized “do-it-yourself” approaches. Originality: This article combines several concepts of invisible work (document work, time work, articulation work) to show both how individuals engage in documentary time work and how that work is situated within broader social and temporal contexts and standards

Teleworking practice in small and medium-sized firms: Management style and worker autonomy

In an empirical study of teleworking practices amongst small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in West London, organisational factors such as management attitudes, worker autonomy and employment flexibility were found to be more critical than technological provision in facilitating successful implementation. Consequently, we argue that telework in most SMEs appears as a marginal activity performed mainly by managers and specialist mobile workers

Atmosphere as a means of governing life: weather modification and ecological conservation in Sanjiangyuan, China

Prominent advocates suggest that weather modification and geoengineering are crucial in addressing environmental changes in the Anthropocene, yet their practices and politics are under-examined. To fill this gap, this research explores the weather modification policies and practices in China, and develops a conceptual framework to understand the atmospheric governance. From data collected through the fieldwork in Qinghai province, this analysis of atmospheric governance is developed through four chapters. The first analytical chapter provides an overview of weather modification drawing on literatures on ‘environmentalities’, in which life is governed by modulating the environment. Based on a historical analysis of weather modification in Qinghai, it argues that atmospheric environmentality cannot be conceptualised as a singular form, but instead as variegated modes of governance with different temporalities and subjects. The remaining three analytical chapters tackle three key characteristics of atmospheric governance: focusing on its embodied, epistemic and affective dimensions. Chapter 5 emphasises the practices through which meteorologists attune to the dynamics of the weather—with what I call a weather choreography—to make the atmosphere palpable and modifiable. In Chapter 6, I pay attention to the politics of epistemology and discuss how differences between meteorologists and hydrologists in comprehending the volume of the cloud water lead to different geopolitical implications. Chapter 7 brings together the meteorological and affective senses of the atmosphere for understanding weather modification governance. I show how the policies and practices of weather modification in China have been associated with optimistic projections that convert humanised rain into hope from the air. In conclusion, I summarise the chapters’ insights to propose a conceptual framework for atmospheric governance and discuss how my analysis contributes to debates on proactive interventions in the Anthropocene

Project-based Temporary Organizing and Routine Dynamics

Projects are forms of organizing that have become increasingly common in the past decades. The ad-hoc and temporary nature of projects seemingly poses significant challenges to the patterning of activities into organizational routines. Yet, considerable research in routine dynamics has been carried out in project contexts. In this chapter, we show that projects and routines share some common characteristics and that acknowledging the project nature of routines as well as the organizational routine nature of projects offers significant opportunities for the advancement of routine dynamics research

Time and the work/family interface in a Fortune 500 organization : the direct and interactive effects of temporal structures, out-of-office contact, and polychronicity on negative work-to-family spillover

The modern economy is high-paced and demanding, in part due to globalization’s effect on business processes and expanded technological capabilities; as a result, employees can experience greater pressure and stress in the workplace that can lead to increased work/family conflict. In light of these more challenging conditions for employees, some work/family scholars have adjusted the theoretical lens by which they operationalize and explain work/family conflict to incorporate employees’ temporal norms, cultures, and structures. For example, many organizational scholars have explored how hours worked, paid-time-off, and even work pacing, timing, and cycles are related to work/family conflict. In this dissertation, I employ Layered-Task Time (LTT) – a structural temporal construct that is inherently linked to an employee’s work experience – to define workplace conditions that predict negative work-to-family spillover. In addition, I combine this temporal approach with the degree to which employees are contacted outside of the typical workplace and hours (henceforth referred to as “out-of-office contact” or “OOOC”) to explore how the integrated nature of the work and nonwork domains influences the work/family interface. Using data from a large, bureaucratically organized Fortune 500 insurance company, I examine the first-order effects of the LTT components on negative work-to-family spillover, and, in an effort to also extend current work/family theory, the interactive effect of these temporal conditions with out-of-office contact on negative work-to-family spillover. Finally, I also explore the interactive effect of polychronicity, or the degree to which one prefers multi-tasking, on both of these sets of relationships in order to better understand how polychronicity can buffer the negative influence of these temporal conditions and the interactive effect of these temporal conditions with OOOC frequency on negative work-to-family spillover. The results support the majority of the hypotheses presented in this dissertation – specifically, that the temporal conditions operationalized in this dissertation predict negative work-to- family spillover, and that when these temporal conditions are combined with increased work-related contact outside of the traditionally defined work place/time, those effects are stronger. I find support that polychronicity interacts with some of these temporal conditions as well as many of the interactions between these temporal conditions and out- of-office contact to buffer the negative implications of these constructs for negative work-to-family spillover. Finally, I discuss the implications of this research for practice as well as for the theoretical state of current temporality and work/family literature

An Iconography-Based Modeling Approach for the Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Architectural Heritage

The study of historic buildings is usually based on the collection and analysis of iconographic sources such as photographs, drawings, engravings, paintings or sketches. This paper describes a methodological approach to make use of the existing iconographic corpus for the analysis and the 3D management of building transformations. Iconography is used for different goals. Firstly, it's a source of geometric information (image-based-modeling of anterior states); secondly, it's used for the re-creation of visual appearance (image-based texture extraction); thirdly it's a proof of the temporal distribution of shape transformations (spatio-temporal modeling); finally it becomes a visual support for the study of building transformations (visual comparison between different temporal states). The aim is to establish a relation between the iconography used for the hypothetical reconstruction and the 3D representation that depends on it. This approach relates to the idea of using 3D representations like visualization systems capable of reflecting the amount of knowledge developed by the study of a historic buildin