The use of systems thinking to deal with managing change in the context of the new South Africa

The case study afforded an opportunity to demonstrate how divergent opinions of various stakeholders could be harnessed and synthesised to provide input to resolve perceived problematical situations. In the case study of the hard systems method, ISM, divergence of the stakeholder views was through the process intended to achieve convergence (consensus) in order to solve the problem situation. In the case of the soft systems method, SSM, divergence of views were synthesised to produce an all embracing solution Of the perceived situation. No attempt is made to produce consensus. Systems thinking, therefore, is able to deal with issues that have given known-to-be desirable ends (hard systems) and where known-to-be desirable ends (soft systems) cannot be taken as given. This research has attempted to address the issue of managing the complexity of development in the context of the recently democratised South Africa. It has basically suggested that, as a point of departure, developmental issues should be approached holistically and systematically. It is important to select an appropriate methodology in seeking to solve the problem of managing change. The quality of the outcome of the two case studies reviewed has been affected by the quality of the inputs, particularly with respect to availability of time, availability of stakeholder inputs and the status of the research (that is, as an academic exercise)

Cumulonimbus convection, and its seasonal variation over India

Imperial Users onl

Small business lending and bank consolidation: is there cause for concern?

Small banks are a major source of credit for small businesses. As banking consolidation continues, will a resulting decline in the presence of small banks adversely affect the availability of that credit?Bank loans ; Bank mergers ; Small business

Cycle tourism development in the Peak District National Park, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Protected areas are at the centre of nature-based tourism, which is increasingly popular across the world. As visitor numbers increase, so does awareness of the harmful effects that large crowds may have on both natural resources and individuals’ recreational experience. This volume considers the challenge of transportation to and within natural and protected areas, the improvement of which has already been recognised as having great potential for mitigating the environmental impacts of ecotourism. While several books have focused considerable attention to the management of protected areas in general, little has been said about the specific issue of sustainable transport, an emerging trend that is already reshaping visitation patterns in natural settings. This book provides current knowledge on issues associated with the transportation of visitors in natural and protected areas, and a comprehensive overview of the technical and strategic options available to tackle these issues. It approaches the subject via three main topics: preferences, or the visitors' attitudes towards transportation; practices, where current approaches are assessed through examples and case-studies of successful experiences and methodologies from around the world; and policies, where suggestions and recommendations are put forward for both local scale strategies and broad-scale regulatory action with global relevance. Contributors include academics in the field of natural resource management and tourism, with extensive experience in protected area management and active partnerships with natural park administrations

Individual perceptions of culture and change: a unifying perspective on change-oriented organizational cultures

2018 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Organizational change has become a mainstay for today's organizations. Yet, organizational change efforts overwhelmingly represent unsuccessful and stressful events for both organizations and employees. Much of the extant literature on organizational change focuses on a modified culture as an outcome of change, but this ignores the potential for organizational culture itself to facilitate organizational change efforts by engendering an inherent value for organizational change in employees before changes even happen. I propose that one potential solution to unsuccessful change efforts is for organizations to adopt a change-oriented culture, making change acceptable rather than an obstacle to overcome. Because a changed culture is the typical change outcome, existing organizational culture frameworks are broad and therefore address organizational change (e.g., adaptive culture in the competing values framework, or learning organizations) in a cursory manner. Furthermore, these broad frameworks were developed in parallel yet isolated streams of research; hence, their value for predicting organizational change outcomes is limited. Therefore, to address failing organizational change efforts and disjointed culture frameworks, I synthesize the facets of existing organizational culture frameworks that focus on change to create and define a change-oriented culture. Data from multiple samples of a total of 963 Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers were used to test the psychometric properties of a new measure of change-oriented organizational culture. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the relationship of change-oriented organizational culture to its nomological network above and beyond existing cultural frameworks. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that change-oriented culture directly relates to organizational change attitudes, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment; indirectly relates to change-related behaviors through readiness for change; and indirectly relates to perceptions of change success through resistance to change. Moreover, change-oriented organizational culture related to change-related attitudes and organizationally relevant outcomes significantly better than the adhocracy dimension of the competing values framework, the innovative dimension of Wallach's organizational culture measure, and perceptions of learning organizational culture. However, both change-oriented organizational culture and perceptions of learning organizational culture related to affective commitment to change and organizational commitment equally well. This study advances the organizational culture literature by proposing a new theoretical orientation to change – that the culture can facilitate change efforts rather than simply serve as an outcome of change interventions – and furthermore, provides a first attempt at defining and collecting empirical data to support the validity of a change-oriented culture dimension

Partitionings and convex metrics

In 1928 K. Menger proposed a problem concerning the existance of a convex metric for a Peano space. In 1949 R. H. Bing published a solution to this problem. This thesis is mainly an exposition of Bing\u27s paper

The Greatest Little Mother In The World

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/5730/thumbnail.jp

Use of system identification techniques for improving airframe finite element models using test data

A method for using system identification techniques to improve airframe finite element models using test data was developed and demonstrated. The method uses linear sensitivity matrices to relate changes in selected physical parameters to changes in the total system matrices. The values for these physical parameters were determined using constrained optimization with singular value decomposition. The method was confirmed using both simple and complex finite element models for which pseudo-experimental data was synthesized directly from the finite element model. The method was then applied to a real airframe model which incorporated all of the complexities and details of a large finite element model and for which extensive test data was available. The method was shown to work, and the differences between the identified model and the measured results were considered satisfactory

Use of system identification techniques for improving airframe finite element models using test data

A method for using system identification techniques to improve airframe finite element models was developed and demonstrated. The method uses linear sensitivity matrices to relate changes in selected physical parameters to changes in total system matrices. The values for these physical parameters were determined using constrained optimization with singular value decomposition. The method was confirmed using both simple and complex finite element models for which pseudo-experimental data was synthesized directly from the finite element model. The method was then applied to a real airframe model which incorporated all the complexities and details of a large finite element model and for which extensive test data was available. The method was shown to work, and the differences between the identified model and the measured results were considered satisfactory