Economic Change and the Decline of Raised TRAP in Lansing, MI

This paper examines the influence of economic change on the reversal of a sound change in progress in Lansing, Michigan-the tensing of TRAP as part of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). Recent reports of dialect attrition in the Inland North dialect area suggest that the shift away from the NCS is being led by upwardly mobile middle-class speakers (Driscoll and Lape 2015, Lape 2016, Wagner et al. 2016, King 2017, Zheng 2017). The social motivation and the actuation of this shift are unclear, however. Through an acoustic analysis of TRAP produced by Lansing natives born 1907-1997 (N = 27), we find that the progression of the local form (NCS raised TRAP) reverses in the Baby Boomer generation. Within this generation, maintenance of the local raised pattern is characteristic of workers and one manager who associated with the factory workers, e.g., served on unions and fought for worker rights. Other managers adopt the non-local nasal pattern characteristic of the Elsewhere Shift. We find that the rise of a class distinction for raised TRAP in this generation is especially important given the negative socio-cultural changes (population decline, unemployment and crime increase) that started to occur in Lansing because of its collapsing auto manufacturing industry in the 1980s. We argue that these changes allowed for everything local to become marked, including the accent, thus prompting upwardly mobile middle-class speakers to adopt the non-local Elsewhere pattern

Social Connections and Incentives: Evidence from Personnel Data

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength of managerial incentives and worker's ability. To do so, we combine panel data on individual worker's productivity from personnel records with a natural field experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial incentives, from fixed wages to bonuses based on the average productivity of the workers managed. We find that when managers are paid fixed wages, they favor workers to whom they are socially connected irrespective of the worker's ability, but when they are paid performance bonuses, they target their effort toward high ability workers irrespective of whether they are socially connected to them or not. Although social connections increase the performance of connected workers, we find that favoring connected workers is detrimental for the firm's overall performance

mPower: A component-based development framework for multi-agent systems to support business processes

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is the difficulty of implementing heterogeneous interactions among participating agents via asynchronous messages. This difficulty arises from the need to understand how to combine elements of various content languages, ontologies, and interaction protocols in order to construct meaningful and appropriate messages. In this paper mPower, a component-based layered framework for easing the development of multi-agent systems, is described, and the facility for customising the components for reuse in similar domains is explained. The framework builds on the JADE-LEAP platform, which provides a homogeneous layer over diverse operating systems and hardware devices, and allows ubiquitous deployment of applications built on multi-agent systems both in wired and wireless environments. The use of the framework to develop mPowermobile , a multi-agent system to support mobile workforces, is reported

Work restructuring and changing craft identity: the Tale of the Disaffected Weavers (or what happens when the rug is pulled from under your feet)

This article explores the changes in worker identity that can occur during manufacturing restructuring – specifically those linked to the declining status of craft work – through an in-depth case study of Weaveco, a UK carpet manufacturer. An analysis of changes in the labour process is followed by employee reactions centred on the demise of the traditional craft identity of male carpet weavers. The voices of the weavers dramatize the tensions involved in reconstructing their masculine identity, and we consider the implications this has for understanding gendered work relations

Worker Rights Consortium Assessment re Jerzees Choloma (Honduras): Report of Findings and Recommendations

WRC report on its assessment of labor violations at the Jerzees Choloma factory in Honduras. Includes a description of evidence and assessment logistics, and recommendations for remedial action to be taken by the company

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND EFFECTIVENESS: CAN AMERICAN THEORY BE APPLIED IN RUSSIA?

This paper examines the link between organizational culture and effectiveness for foreign-owned firms operating in Russia. Beginning with a model of organizational culture developed in the USA, the paper presents a multi-method analysis of culture and effectiveness in a transition economy. We argue that effectiveness in Russia relies more on adaptability and flexibility than in the USA. Furthermore, the legacy of the communist era forces firms in Russia to deal with a workforce with a unique time perspective and a unique set of sub-cultures that often undermine attempts at coordination and integration. We first explore these ideas using survey data on 179 foreign-owned firms operating in Russia and compare the results to those obtained for firms in the USA. We then present four case studies designed to ground the results in the Russian context, and to document cultural dynamics not captured by the model.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39984/3/wp598.pd

A Mobile Computing Architecture for Numerical Simulation

The domain of numerical simulation is a place where the parallelization of numerical code is common. The definition of a numerical context means the configuration of resources such as memory, processor load and communication graph, with an evolving feature: the resources availability. A feature is often missing: the adaptability. It is not predictable and the adaptable aspect is essential. Without calling into question these implementations of these codes, we create an adaptive use of these implementations. Because the execution has to be driven by the availability of main resources, the components of a numeric computation have to react when their context changes. This paper offers a new architecture, a mobile computing architecture, based on mobile agents and JavaSpace. At the end of this paper, we apply our architecture to several case studies and obtain our first results