Dynamicity and Performance in Adaptive Organizations

In this dissertation, I focus on the conceptualization and empirical investigation of organizational adaptation. Specifically, I intend to study how dynamic organizations evolve and under which conditions they successfully adapt to a changing environment. In essay 1 (with D. Levinthal), we develop a simulation model to clarify and explore some of the basic conceptual issues concerning the dynamics through which business practices locally adapt within an intra-organizational ecology of organizational level skills, knowledge, and capabilities subject to processes of mutation and selection. For essay 2 (with A. Prencipe), we designed and conducted a field project by collecting qualitative data: a mix of archival data, interviews and ethnographic field notes. The main goal is to investigate how organizational adaptation plays out under the pressure of various institutional forces. Our findings illustrate that institutional forces generate selective reactions within the ecology of existing organizational routines. Conversely, non-institutional forces adapt to the existing behavioral forms following a two-way dynamic process. In essay 3, I developed an empirical research design based on a panel data analysis to investigate the role of dynamic capabilities in boosting adaptation performance. This work examines some of the fundamental contingencies that impact the relationship between dynamic capabilities and organizational performance. Specifically, although prior experience in product adaptation is considered as a key driver of superior performance, its value is found to be highly conditional on both the level of focal activity - a recent adaptation effort on specific activities - and the intensity of the environmental changes

Alien Registration- Marino, Alessandro (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/25818/thumbnail.jp

Stage Business: Britain's Neoliberal Theatre, 1976-2016

Stage Business examines contemporary British drama vis--vis the neoliberal economic reforms that have dominated British policy for the last forty years, attending to the material conditions of theatre production amid a thoroughgoing transformation of the arts relationship to government, business, and consumer culture. The concretization of neoliberal policy in Britains recent political history produced a logical parallel in the countrys theatre history, which has effectively accepted a mixed economy of arts funding and the necessity of cooperation with the worlds of finance and corporate sponsorship. And the British stage has, throughout this fraught history, indexed its own complex entanglement with neoliberal consensus politics: on the one hand, playwrights have denounced the rapacious, acquisitive values encouraged by global capitalism and monetarisms uncontested dominance across the political spectrum; on the other hand, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. In their form and content, the plays discussed in Stage Business account for two undeniable trends in contemporary British drama. The first involves an explicit engagement not only with corporate finance and business culture but also with the ways in which neoliberal economics have revised cultural life. Connected to this thematic preoccupation is a structural trend some have called postdramatic, involving a rejection of traditional narrative and characterization. This formal fragmentation requires theatre practitioners to make sense of radically open-ended theatre texts, inviting considerable creative collaboration, but it too resembles the outsourcing of labour central to global capitalism. Stage Business thus tells the story of forty years in the British theatre by zooming in on a selection of plays and productions that function as nodes in Britains recent political, economic, and theatrical history. In so doing, it demonstrates the theatres immeasurable value not only in reflecting the cultural and political contexts from which it emerges but also in resisting a neoliberal hegemony that rides roughshod over social democratic values even when the theatre itself dangerously straddles the line of capitulating to the capitalist marketization of our cultural life

Relaxation, pre-thermalization and diffusion in a noisy Quantum Ising Chain

We study the dynamics of thermalization resulting from a time-dependent noise in a Quantum Ising Chain subject to a sudden quench of the transverse magnetic field. For weak noise the dynamics shows a pre-thermalized state at intermediate time scales, eventually drifting towards an asymptotic infinite temperature steady state characterized by diffusive behavior. By computing analytically the density of kinks, as well as the transverse and longitudinal magnetic field correlators, we characterize these two regimes, their observability and their signatures in the various physical quantities.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in PRB Rapid Communication

A Mixed-Integer Linear Programming Formulation for Human Multi-Robot Task Allocation

In this work, we address a task allocation problem for human multi-robot settings. Given a set of tasks to perform, we formulate a general Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem aiming at minimizing the overall execution time while optimizing the quality of the executed tasks as well as human and robotic workload. Different skills of the agents, both human and robotic, are taken into account and human operators are enabled to either directly execute tasks or play supervisory roles; moreover, multiple manipulators can tightly collaborate if required to carry out a task. Finally, as realistic in human contexts, human parameters are assumed to vary over time, e.g., due to increasing human level of fatigue. Therefore, online monitoring is required and re-allocation is performed if needed. Simulations in a realistic scenario with two manipulators and a human operator performing an assembly task validate the effectiveness of the approach.Comment: Accepted to 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN

Delta and Theta Operator Expansions

We give an elementary symmetric function expansion for $M\Delta_{m_\gamma e_1}\Pi e_\lambda^{\ast}$ and $M\Delta_{m_\gamma e_1}\Pi s_\lambda^{\ast}$ when $t=1$ in terms of what we call $\gamma$-parking functions and lattice $\gamma$-parking functions. Here, $\Delta_F$ and $\Pi$ are certain eigenoperators of the modified Macdonald basis and $M=(1-q)(1-t)$. Our main results in turn give an elementary basis expansion at $t=1$ for symmetric functions of the form $M \Delta_{Fe_1} \Theta_{G} J$ whenever $F$ is expanded in terms of monomials, $G$ is expanded in terms of the elementary basis, and $J$ is expanded in terms of the modified elementary basis $\{\Pi e_\lambda^\ast\}_\lambda$. Even the most special cases of this general Delta and Theta operator expression are significant; we highlight a few of these special cases. We end by giving an $e$-positivity conjecture for when $t$ is not specialized, proposing that our objects can also give the elementary basis expansion in the unspecialized symmetric function.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figure

Organizational Routines Development and New Venture Performance

To better understand how entrepreneurial ventures vary as they evolve, we introduce and develop the concept of an organizational routine in a prototypical state, a protoroutine. Protoroutines allow experienced new ventures (but not inexperienced start-ups) to economize on decision-making and execution time in problem solving by drawing from an inventory of prior solutions to challenges. Protoroutines are not, however, tailored to the challenge at hand. We embed protoroutines into a simulation-based model featuring agents with differing decision-making speeds and abilities of exploring more distant solutions, two parameters influenced by founding team characteristics. Search speed and distance are typically traded off against each other at the team design level. Protoroutines may therefore be particularly helpful in organizational contexts in which it is optimal to have both search speed and distance. We characterize the organizational contextual configurations along the dimensions of environmental turbulence and decision complexity in which protoroutines, search speed, and search distance are associated with elevated (and dampened) organizational performance. One important conclusion is that decision-making speed can be a valuable organizational resource across organizational environments. Overall, our agent-based model and simulation results deepen our understanding of how and with what performance consequence new ventures develop

Communicating corporate social responsibility to involve stakeholders. The case of employer branding for university students

La responsabilità sociale d'impresa (o Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR) è uno strumento efficace di marketing e la sua efficacia è mediata dalla modalità con cui le aziende comunicano le proprie attività di CSR agli stakeholder. La ricerca si propone di valutare l'effetto di cinque strategie di comunicazione della CSR, ordinate secondo un livello crescente di coinvolgimento degli stakeholder, sull'Employer Branding (EB) di un'azienda ipotetica. Attraverso la distribuzione di cinque varianti di un opuscolo, l’azienda è stata presentata a due campioni di studenti universitari (n=167; n=112) in cinque diversi scenari comunicativi della CSR. È stato somministrato un questionario con scale che misurano l’attrattività dell'azienda, il prestigio percepito dell'azienda, la disponibilità dei soggetti a entrare in contatto con l'azienda e l’impegno prospettico sul lavoro. È stata anche indagata la percezione della brand personality e della comunicazione della CSR. Le analisi confermano che tutti e cinque gli scenari sono caratterizzati da alti livelli delle dimensioni dell’EB, però lo specifico dialogo di CSR adottato può generare differenti percezioni della brand personality dell'azienda.Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) is an effective marketing lever, and its effectiveness is mediated by the strategies companies use to communicate their CRS activities to stakeholders. The present research aims at assessing the effect of five CSR communicative strategies, ranked according to an increasing involvement level of stakeholders, on a fictional company’s Employer Branding (EB). The company was presented to two samples of university students (n=167; n=112) via the administration of five different versions of a brochure, corresponding to five different communicative scenarios of CSR. A self-report questionnaire was administrated, with scales measuring the company’s attractiveness, perceived prestige, intention to contact the company, and prospective engagement, as well as the company’s perceived brand personality and CSR communication. Analyses report high levels of the EB dimensions in all five communicative scenarios, which however produce different perceptions of the company’s brand personality

In-group bias in preferences for redistribution: a survey experiment in Italy

Using a new survey and experimental data, we investigate how information on inequality and immigration affect preferences for redistribution in Italy. Our randomized treatments show that preferences for redistribution are often inelastic to information. However, we find that provision of information on poverty statistics related to the native-immigrant composition of poverty reduces economic in-group bias by affecting exclusionary redistributive preferences: respondents are less likely to support policies which exclude immigrants from access to the welfare state once they learn that immigrants are less represented among the poor and natives are not as poor as they used to believe. Finally, we find some evidence of in-group bias by investigating the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects across groups