ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND EFFECTIVENESS: CAN AMERICAN THEORY BE APPLIED IN RUSSIA?

This paper examines the link between organizational culture and effectiveness for foreign-owned firms operating in Russia. Beginning with a model of organizational culture developed in the USA, the paper presents a multi-method analysis of culture and effectiveness in a transition economy. We argue that effectiveness in Russia relies more on adaptability and flexibility than in the USA. Furthermore, the legacy of the communist era forces firms in Russia to deal with a workforce with a unique time perspective and a unique set of sub-cultures that often undermine attempts at coordination and integration. We first explore these ideas using survey data on 179 foreign-owned firms operating in Russia and compare the results to those obtained for firms in the USA. We then present four case studies designed to ground the results in the Russian context, and to document cultural dynamics not captured by the model.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39984/3/wp598.pd

A note on the abelian sandpile in Z^d

We analyse the abelian sandpile model on \mathbbm{Z}^d for the starting configuration of $n$ particles in the origin and $2d-2$ particles otherwise. We give a new short proof of the theorem of Fey, Levine and Peres \cite{FLP} that the radius of the toppled cluster of this configuration is $O(n^{1/d})$

Bendings of radio jets in BL Lacertae objects I: EVN and MERLIN observations

Several blazars, and BL Lac objects in particular, show a misalignment between the jet orientation on parsec and kiloparsec scales. Some authors (i.e. Conway & Murphy, 1993) have attempted to explain this behaviour invoking helical jets for misalignment angles around 90\degr, showing how in this case there are interesting implications for the understanding of the medium into which the jet is expanding. By comparing sensitive VLA observations (Cassaro et al., 1999) with images available in the literature for the BL Lac objects from the 1-Jy Sample (Stickel et al., 1991), it is clear that there is a wide range of misalignments between the initial jet direction and the kpc-scale jet, when detected. We have carried out VLBI observations of these BL Lac objects, in order to investigate the spatial evolution of the radio jets from few tens to hundreds of mas, and to search for helical jets in this class of sources. We present here the first dataset obtained from EVN+MERLIN observations at 5 GHz for seven objects. From these observations we never have a clear detection of helical jets, we only have a possible signature of their presence in 2 objects. In only one of the sources with a misalignment angle around 90\degr the presence of helical jets can be ruled out. This implies that it is not possible to invoke helical jets to explain the morphology of all the sources showing a misalignment of about 90\degr between the parsec and the kiloparsec scale jets.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, latex, accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysic

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND EFFECTIVENESS: CAN AMERICAN THEORY BE APPLIED IN RUSSIA?

This paper examines the link between organizational culture and effectiveness for foreign-owned firms operating in Russia. Beginning with a model of organizational culture developed in the USA, the paper presents a multi-method analysis of culture and effectiveness in a transition economy. We argue that effectiveness in Russia relies more on adaptability and flexibility than in the USA. Furthermore, the legacy of the communist era forces firms in Russia to deal with a workforce with a unique time perspective and a unique set of sub-cultures that often undermine attempts at coordination and integration. We first explore these ideas using survey data on 179 foreign-owned firms operating in Russia and compare the results to those obtained for firms in the USA. We then present four case studies designed to ground the results in the Russian context, and to document cultural dynamics not captured by the model.Organizational Culture, Effectiveness, Russia, Transition Economies

Driving sandpiles to criticality and beyond

A popular theory of self-organized criticality relates driven dissipative systems to systems with conservation. This theory predicts that the stationary density of the abelian sandpile model equals the threshold density of the fixed-energy sandpile. We refute this prediction for a wide variety of underlying graphs, including the square grid. Driven dissipative sandpiles continue to evolve even after reaching criticality. This result casts doubt on the validity of using fixed-energy sandpiles to explore the critical behavior of the abelian sandpile model at stationarity.Comment: v4 adds referenc

The Spotted Lanternfly in Gettysburg and Public Mobilization Through an Awareness Campaign

The invasive Spotted Lanternfly poses a significant risk to the environment and fruit industry of Adams County PA. This project involves the creation of an informational poster campaign to inform the geographically diverse daily population of Gettysburg about the spotted lanternfly and mobilize them to take action against it

Characterisation of Long Baseline Calibrators at 2.3 GHz

We present a detailed multi-epoch analysis of 31 potential southern hemisphere radio calibrators that were originally observed as part of a program to maintain the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF). At radio wavelengths, the primary calibrators are Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), powerful radio emitters which exist at the centre of most galaxies. These are known to vary at all wavelengths at which they have been observed. By determining the amount of radio source structure and variability of these AGN, we determine their suitability as phase calibrators for long baseline radio interferometry at 2.3 GHz. For this purpose, we have used a set of complementary metrics to classify these 31 southern sources into five categories pertaining to their suitability as VLBI calibrators. We find that all of the sources in our sample would be good interferometric calibrators and almost ninety per cent would be very good calibrators.Comment: 9 pages, 7 Figures, accepted MNRA