The dynamics of managerial ideology: analyzing the cuban case

After the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, management researchers devoted considerable energy to investigate ways to smooth transition to market economies. But one country of the former Soviet bloc, Cuba resisted transition and reaffirmed loyalty to communism. Little is known about management in Cuba on the managerial impacts of the combination of two major environmental forces: the American embargo and the Soviet Union collapse, both of which have challenged the sustainability of the communist regime. This study intends to approach one particular aspect of management in Cuba: the relationship between national ideology and management practice. To analyze these topics, direct qualitative data from focus groups with Cuban managers and management professors was obtained and complemented with documentary analysis. Results suggest that the dynamics of managerial ideology can be understood as the interplay of several processes operating at distinct levels: institutional, professional, organizational and individual. The study provides a nested, multi-level understanding of management and organization as parts of a wider institutional context, which is both a source of constraint and a non-tangible resource to be used by ideological bricoleurs. The interplay between the acceptance of ideology and its use as a practical resource is a potential source of change. As such, the same professional class (managers) may be both a source of continuity and a trigger of change - a finding that is line with institutional theorys claim that it is necessary to understand both institutionalization and de-institutionalization for understanding organizational change and continuity.Cuba, managerial ideology, institutional change, ideological bricolage

Analytic Relations between Localizable Entanglement and String Correlations in Spin Systems

We study the relation between the recently defined localizable entanglement and generalized correlations in quantum spin systems. Differently from the current belief, the localizable entanglement is always given by the average of a generalized string. Using symmetry arguments we show that in most spin 1/2 and spin 1 systems the localizable entanglement reduces to the spin-spin or string correlations, respectively. We prove that a general class of spin 1 systems, which includes the Heisenberg model, can be used as perfect quantum channel. These conclusions are obtained in analytic form and confirm some results found previously on numerical grounds.Comment: 5 pages, RevTeX

First-passage times in multi-scale random walks: the impact of movement scales on search efficiency

An efficient searcher needs to balance properly the tradeoff between the exploration of new spatial areas and the exploitation of nearby resources, an idea which is at the core of scale-free L\'evy search strategies. Here we study multi-scale random walks as an approximation to the scale- free case and derive the exact expressions for their mean-first passage times in a one-dimensional finite domain. This allows us to provide a complete analytical description of the dynamics driving the asymmetric regime, in which both nearby and faraway targets are available to the searcher. For this regime, we prove that the combination of only two movement scales can be enough to outperform both balistic and L\'evy strategies. This two-scale strategy involves an optimal discrimination between the nearby and faraway targets, which is only possible by adjusting the range of values of the two movement scales to the typical distances between encounters. So, this optimization necessarily requires some prior information (albeit crude) about targets distances or distributions. Furthermore, we found that the incorporation of additional (three, four, ...) movement scales and its adjustment to target distances does not improve further the search efficiency. This allows us to claim that optimal random search strategies in the asymmetric regime actually arise through the informed combination of only two walk scales (related to the exploitative and the explorative scale, respectively), expanding on the well-known result that optimal strategies in strictly uninformed scenarios are achieved through L\'evy paths (or, equivalently, through a hierarchical combination of multiple scales)