Discursive resources: top managers' identities and the long-term survival of their organisations

This paper represents an attempt to understand the dynamics of the identity work in the context of the challenges top managers have to address. Managers' discursive resources influence what they notice and also the interpretation of what is noticed. Their ability to understand and challenge their discursive resources is crucial because the persistence of categories and metaphors that depicts a globalized world where they do not have capacity to react may explain the decline of their organizations. The stories they tell ground their emotions and their identities and then they see the world and themselves through them. Hence, their discursive resources and their emotions impact on the long-term survival of their organizations through the strategic exchange between top managers and organizations. The paper raises queries about the discursive resources that top managers use to define their identities, and how these identities may affect the long-term survival of organizations. The findings from this study add to the theoretical knowledge of the sense-making literature. They have practical consequences for the textile sector in Portugal and how strategic issues are addressed. This is in allowing an understanding of the influence that discursive resources have in managers' identity construction and the effects of their identities on the long-term survival of their organizations

Taming the resistive switching in Fe/MgO/V/Fe magnetic tunnel junctions: An ab initio study

A possible mechanism for the resistive switching observed experimentally in Fe/MgO/V/Fe junctions is presented. Ab initio total energy calculations within the local density approximation and pseudopotential theory shows that by moving the oxygen ions across the MgO/V interface one obtains a metastable state. It is argued that this state can be reached by applying an electric field across the interface. In addition, the ground state and the metastable state show different electric conductances. The latter results are discussed in terms of the changes of the density of states at the Fermi level and the charge transfer at the interface due to the oxygen ion motion

A Uniform Approximation for the Coherent State Propagator using a Conjugate Application of the Bargmann Representation

We propose a conjugate application of the Bargmann representation of quantum mechanics. Applying the Maslov method to the semiclassical connection formula between the two representations, we derive a uniform semiclassical approximation for the coherent state propagator which is finite at phase space caustics.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

A New Form of Path Integral for the Coherent States Representation and its Semiclassical Limit

The overcompleteness of the coherent states basis leads to a multiplicity of representations of Feynman's path integral. These different representations, although equivalent quantum mechanically, lead to different semiclassical limits. Two such semiclassical formulas were derived in \cite{Bar01} for the two corresponding path integral forms suggested by Klauder and Skagerstan in \cite{Klau85}. Each of these formulas involve trajectories governed by a different classical representation of the Hamiltonian operator: the P representation in one case and the Q representation in other. In this paper we construct a third representation of the path integral whose semiclassical limit involves directly the Weyl representation of the Hamiltonian operator, i.e., the classical Hamiltonian itself.Comment: 16 pages, no figure