Marriages of Convenience and Other Trade-offs: Exploring the Ambivalent Nature of Organizational Relationships

Depictions of organizational life have ranged from depictions of extreme alienation (Erikson, 1986) to extreme commitment (Butterfield, 1985; Kunda, 1992). However, the emotional portrait of workers may not be so easily captured by simple shades of positive or negative feelings. Rather, the rapid rate of change, the ever-increasing complexity, and the seeming incompleteness characteristic of social life in the twentieth century suggest that this is an "age of ambivalence" (Weigert & Franks, 1989). In the work place, individuals confront the realities of hyper-competitive market places, technologically mediated relationships, empowerment, and economic insecurity. These and other issues have become embedded in the social structure of organizations and affect the bonds between individuals and between individuals and their organization. The result, we argue, is that individuals often experience ambivalence: "overlapping approach-avoidance tendencies" (Sincoff, 1990) characterized by "mixed feelings" about their work groups and organizations. Despite the fact that ambivalence is inherent in modern life, and is a central concept in many social sciences (cf. Boehm, 1989; Freud, 1950/1920; Bowlby, 1982; Merton, 1976; Smelser, 1998), our understanding of ambivalence in organizations is limited. In this chapter, we examine the topic of emotional ambivalence in the context of work relationships. We have four major goals in this regard: (1) to briefly review the concept of ambivalence, especially emotional ambivalence; (2) to argue for the prevalence of ambivalence in individuals' relationships both with and in organizations; (3) to propose two major sources of ambivalence in these relationships; and (4) to offer a typology of responses that individuals use to cope with emotional ambivalence. To illustrate these goals, we draw upon two different cases, rural doctors whose practices have been recently bought out by a large managed care organization (referred to hereafter as HealthCo), and employees at bank call-centers. These cases reveal two types of ambivalent relationships in organizations. The case of the rural doctors illustrates how individuals can become ambivalent with their employing organization. Thus, it illustrates an individuals' ambivalence with their collective. The call-center, by contrast, primarily illustrates ambivalent relationships between bank call-center employees and co-workers, as well as between employees and customers. Thus, it shows us ambivalent relationships within (rather than with) an organization. We believe that both types of ambivalent relationships (both with and within) are likely to be common in modern organizations.

An integrated brain-behavior model for working memory.

Working memory (WM) is a central construct in cognitive neuroscience because it comprises mechanisms of active information maintenance and cognitive control that underpin most complex cognitive behavior. Individual variation in WM has been associated with multiple behavioral and health features including demographic characteristics, cognitive and physical traits and lifestyle choices. In this context, we used sparse canonical correlation analyses (sCCAs) to determine the covariation between brain imaging metrics of WM-network activation and connectivity and nonimaging measures relating to sensorimotor processing, affective and nonaffective cognition, mental health and personality, physical health and lifestyle choices derived from 823 healthy participants derived from the Human Connectome Project. We conducted sCCAs at two levels: a global level, testing the overall association between the entire imaging and behavioral-health data sets; and a modular level, testing associations between subsets of the two data sets. The behavioral-health and neuroimaging data sets showed significant interdependency. Variables with positive correlation to the neuroimaging variate represented higher physical endurance and fluid intelligence as well as better function in multiple higher-order cognitive domains. Negatively correlated variables represented indicators of suboptimal cardiovascular and metabolic control and lifestyle choices such as alcohol and nicotine use. These results underscore the importance of accounting for behavioral-health factors in neuroimaging studies of WM and provide a neuroscience-informed framework for personalized and public health interventions to promote and maintain the integrity of the WM network

An original interferometric study of NGC 1068 with VISIR BURST mode images

We present 12.8 microns images of the core of NGC 1068 obtained with the BURST mode of the VLT/VISIR. We trace structures under the diffraction limit of one UT and we investigate the link between dust in the vicinity of the central engine of NGC 1068, recently resolved by interferometry with MIDI, and more extended structures. This step is mandatory for a multi-scale understanding of the sources of mid-infrared emission in AGNs. A speckle processing of VISIR BURST mode images was performed to extract very low spatial-frequency visibilities, first considering the full field of VISIR BURST mode images and then limiting it to the mask used for the acquisition of MIDI data. Extracted visibilities are reproduced with a multi-component model. We identify two major sources of emission: one compact < 85 mas, associated with the dusty torus, and an elliptical one, (< 140) mas x 1187 mas at P.A.=-4 degrees from N to E. This is consistent with previous deconvolution processes. The combination with MIDI data reveals the close environment of the dusty torus to contribute to about 83 percent of the MIR flux seen by MIDI. This strong contribution has to be considered in modeling long baseline interferometric data. It must be related to the NS elongated component which is thought to originate from individually unresolved dusty clouds and is located inside the ionization cone. Low temperatures of the dusty torus are not challenged, emphasizing the scenarios of clumpy torus.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Annealed Flow Transport Monte Carlo

Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) extensions are state-of-the-art methods for estimating normalizing constants of probability distributions. We propose here a novel Monte Carlo algorithm, Annealed Flow Transport (AFT), that builds upon AIS and SMC and combines them with normalizing flows (NFs) for improved performance. This method transports a set of particles using not only importance sampling (IS), Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and resampling steps - as in SMC, but also relies on NFs which are learned sequentially to push particles towards the successive annealed targets. We provide limit theorems for the resulting Monte Carlo estimates of the normalizing constant and expectations with respect to the target distribution. Additionally, we show that a continuous-time scaling limit of the population version of AFT is given by a Feynman--Kac measure which simplifies to the law of a controlled diffusion for expressive NFs. We demonstrate experimentally the benefits and limitations of our methodology on a variety of applications