83,898 research outputs found
Beyond the hegemonic narrative – a study of managers
Purpose – The aim is to analyse managerial behaviour using narrative analysis to identify stories that are often ignored, silenced or missed by the hegemonic managerialist narrative.
Design/methodology/approach – An ethnographic narrative based on an 18 month period of participant observation where the author was a manager in a business unit acquired by another company for $1 billion.
Findings – Strategy can be diverted or altered by managers lower down the organization in a counter strategy process. This is consistent with Dalton where managers lower down the organization adapt and change strategy to make it work in practice.
Research limitations/implications – Participant observation and ethnomethodological narrative analysis have the potential to go beyond the hegemonic managerialist literature and identify a much more complex picture. However, such research is always open to criticism as being from the author's “own perspective” and appearing to claim “omnipresence.” Other stories have been given voice but it is never possible to say that all stories have been recovered from the silencing processes of the organization.
Practical implications – A clearer understanding of how management operates counter strategies within an organization in practice. This enables organizations to reconsider how they engage managers beyond the hegemonic narrative.
Originality/value – This paper aims to provide an insight into management behaviour beyond the usual treatment of managers as an amorphous mass as is common in most of the hegemonic managerialist narrative. When managers are told the narratives in this paper they can recount their own similar stories yet these are rarely told
Redundancy Scheduling with Locally Stable Compatibility Graphs
Redundancy scheduling is a popular concept to improve performance in
parallel-server systems. In the baseline scenario any job can be handled
equally well by any server, and is replicated to a fixed number of servers
selected uniformly at random. Quite often however, there may be heterogeneity
in job characteristics or server capabilities, and jobs can only be replicated
to specific servers because of affinity relations or compatibility constraints.
In order to capture such situations, we consider a scenario where jobs of
various types are replicated to different subsets of servers as prescribed by a
general compatibility graph. We exploit a product-form stationary distribution
and weak local stability conditions to establish a state space collapse in
heavy traffic. In this limiting regime, the parallel-server system with
graph-based redundancy scheduling operates as a multi-class single-server
system, achieving full resource pooling and exhibiting strong insensitivity to
the underlying compatibility constraints.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure
Lifted Multiplicity Codes and the Disjoint Repair Group Property
Lifted Reed Solomon Codes (Guo, Kopparty, Sudan 2013) were introduced in the context of locally correctable and testable codes. They are multivariate polynomials whose restriction to any line is a codeword of a Reed-Solomon code. We consider a generalization of their construction, which we call lifted multiplicity codes. These are multivariate polynomial codes whose restriction to any line is a codeword of a multiplicity code (Kopparty, Saraf, Yekhanin 2014). We show that lifted multiplicity codes have a better trade-off between redundancy and a notion of locality called the t-disjoint-repair-group property than previously known constructions. More precisely, we show that, for t <=sqrt{N}, lifted multiplicity codes with length N and redundancy O(t^{0.585} sqrt{N}) have the property that any symbol of a codeword can be reconstructed in t different ways, each using a disjoint subset of the other coordinates. This gives the best known trade-off for this problem for any super-constant t < sqrt{N}. We also give an alternative analysis of lifted Reed Solomon codes using dual codes, which may be of independent interest
Self-repairing Homomorphic Codes for Distributed Storage Systems
Erasure codes provide a storage efficient alternative to replication based
redundancy in (networked) storage systems. They however entail high
communication overhead for maintenance, when some of the encoded fragments are
lost and need to be replenished. Such overheads arise from the fundamental need
to recreate (or keep separately) first a copy of the whole object before any
individual encoded fragment can be generated and replenished. There has been
recently intense interest to explore alternatives, most prominent ones being
regenerating codes (RGC) and hierarchical codes (HC). We propose as an
alternative a new family of codes to improve the maintenance process, which we
call self-repairing codes (SRC), with the following salient features: (a)
encoded fragments can be repaired directly from other subsets of encoded
fragments without having to reconstruct first the original data, ensuring that
(b) a fragment is repaired from a fixed number of encoded fragments, the number
depending only on how many encoded blocks are missing and independent of which
specific blocks are missing. These properties allow for not only low
communication overhead to recreate a missing fragment, but also independent
reconstruction of different missing fragments in parallel, possibly in
different parts of the network. We analyze the static resilience of SRCs with
respect to traditional erasure codes, and observe that SRCs incur marginally
larger storage overhead in order to achieve the aforementioned properties. The
salient SRC properties naturally translate to low communication overheads for
reconstruction of lost fragments, and allow reconstruction with lower latency
by facilitating repairs in parallel. These desirable properties make
self-repairing codes a good and practical candidate for networked distributed
storage systems
Detecting and Refactoring Operational Smells within the Domain Name System
The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most important components of the
Internet infrastructure. DNS relies on a delegation-based architecture, where
resolution of names to their IP addresses requires resolving the names of the
servers responsible for those names. The recursive structures of the inter
dependencies that exist between name servers associated with each zone are
called dependency graphs. System administrators' operational decisions have far
reaching effects on the DNSs qualities. They need to be soundly made to create
a balance between the availability, security and resilience of the system. We
utilize dependency graphs to identify, detect and catalogue operational bad
smells. Our method deals with smells on a high-level of abstraction using a
consistent taxonomy and reusable vocabulary, defined by a DNS Operational
Model. The method will be used to build a diagnostic advisory tool that will
detect configuration changes that might decrease the robustness or security
posture of domain names before they become into production.Comment: In Proceedings GaM 2015, arXiv:1504.0244
- …