Visiting the iron cage: Bureaucracy and the contemporary workplace

Bureaucracy as an organizational form has always been a controversial issue and placed at the very heart of most discussions within organizational theory. One side of this prolonged discussion praises this administrative form as the ‘rational’ way to run an organization. It provides needed guidance and clarifies responsibilities, which enables employees to become more efficient. However, the opposition claims that in a non-linear world, where industrial organizations are forced to confront the challenging task of sensing and responding to unpredictable, novel situations of highly competitive markets, such an organizational form stifles creativity, fosters de-motivation and causes pressure on employees. Dealing with a bureaucratic form of organization and its consequences begs for a context. It would be appropriate to quit ‘taking sides’ and develop a sound analysis of this phenomenon under the conditions of today’s global workplace environment. This chapter intends to delineate the conditions under which bureaucracy has emerged and the way it has been interpreted since its inception and develop a sound and appropriate analytical approach to its functioning given the prevailing conditions of the contemporary workplace.Publisher's VersionAuthor Post Prin

Experimental traumatic brain injury

Traumatic brain injury, a leading cause of death and disability, is a result of an outside force causing mechanical disruption of brain tissue and delayed pathogenic events which collectively exacerbate the injury. These pathogenic injury processes are poorly understood and accordingly no effective neuroprotective treatment is available so far. Experimental models are essential for further clarification of the highly complex pathology of traumatic brain injury towards the development of novel treatments. Among the rodent models of traumatic brain injury the most commonly used are the weight-drop, the fluid percussion, and the cortical contusion injury models. As the entire spectrum of events that might occur in traumatic brain injury cannot be covered by one single rodent model, the design and choice of a specific model represents a major challenge for neuroscientists. This review summarizes and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the currently available rodent models for traumatic brain injury

An update of the Worldwide Integrated Assessment (WIA) on systemic insecticides. Part 2: impacts on organisms and ecosystems

New information on the lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoids and fipronil on organisms is presented in this review, complementing the previous WIA in 2015. The high toxicity of these systemic insecticides to invertebrates has been confirmed and expanded to include more species and compounds. Most of the recent research has focused on bees and the sublethal and ecological impacts these insecticides have on pollinators. Toxic effects on other invertebrate taxa also covered predatory and parasitoid natural enemies and aquatic arthropods. Little, while not much new information has been gathered on soil organisms. The impact on marine coastal ecosystems is still largely uncharted. The chronic lethality of neonicotinoids to insects and crustaceans, and the strengthened evidence that these chemicals also impair the immune system and reproduction, highlights the dangers of this particular insecticidal classneonicotinoids and fipronil. , withContinued large scale – mostly prophylactic – use of these persistent organochlorine pesticides has the potential to greatly decreasecompletely eliminate populations of arthropods in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Sublethal effects on fish, reptiles, frogs, birds and mammals are also reported, showing a better understanding of the mechanisms of toxicity of these insecticides in vertebrates, and their deleterious impacts on growth, reproduction and neurobehaviour of most of the species tested. This review concludes with a summary of impacts on the ecosystem services and functioning, particularly on pollination, soil biota and aquatic invertebrate communities, thus reinforcing the previous WIA conclusions (van der Sluijs et al. 2015)

The role of the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum contact sites in the development of the immune responses

Abstract Mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum (ER) contact sites (MERCs) are dynamic modules enriched in subset of lipids and specialized proteins that determine their structure and functions. The MERCs regulate lipid transfer, autophagosome formation, mitochondrial fission, Ca2+ homeostasis and apoptosis. Since these functions are essential for cell biology, it is therefore not surprising that MERCs also play a critical role in organ physiology among which the immune system stands by its critical host defense function. This defense system must discriminate and tolerate host cells and beneficial commensal microorganisms while eliminating pathogenic ones in order to preserve normal homeostasis. To meet this goal, the immune system has two lines of defense. First, the fast acting but unspecific innate immune system relies on anatomical physical barriers and subsets of hematopoietically derived cells expressing germline-encoded receptors called pattern recognition receptors (PRR) recognizing conserved motifs on the pathogens. Second, the slower but very specific adaptive immune response is added to complement innate immunity. Adaptive immunity relies on another set of specialized cells, the lymphocytes, harboring receptors requiring somatic recombination to be expressed. Both innate and adaptive immune cells must be activated to phagocytose and process pathogens, migrate, proliferate, release soluble factors and destroy infected cells. Some of these functions are strongly dependent on lipid transfer, autophagosome formation, mitochondrial fission, and Ca2+ flux; this indicates that MERCs could regulate immunity