Managing in Uncertainty : Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life

© 2015 Chris Mowles. All rights reserved.The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control. So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what’s possible for managers to achieve? Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways. Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective

Physiological and whole-body correlates of contest behaviour in the hermit crab Pagurus bernhardus

The series of experiments that comprise this thesis used shell fights in the hermit crab Pagurus hernhardus as a model system to address the proximate physiological and whole-organism correlates of contest behaviour. These correlates of fighting ability rangec from the metal ions magnesium (Mg ) and calcium (Ca ), through respiratory pigments and muscular proteins to whole-organism performance capacities and behavioural syndromes. The work presented here thus demonstrates that a suite of physiological and whole organism variables influence contest behaviour in hermit crabs, and that both aerobic and performance capacities are very important in determining agonistic success.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

What we talk about when we talk about leadership in South Sudan.

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Development in Practice on 19/09/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2019.1662770It is important to think critically about how we develop leaders, particularly in highly unpredictable countries like South Sudan. This article gives an account of a yearlong reflective and experiential programme in Juba which sought to straddle the paradox of outside and inside: it took seriously the critical insight that leadership development needs to take greater account of endogenous experience. However, to do so we drew on methods developed elsewhere, but which prioritise local experience. The programme focused on the everyday interdependencies of group life, rather than an abstract and often idealised understanding of leadership favoured in many business schools.Peer reviewe

Multimodal communication in courting fiddler crabs reveals male performance capacities

Courting males often perform different behavioural displays that demonstrate aspects of their quality. Male fiddler crabs, Uca sp., are well known for their repetitive claw-waving display during courtship. However, in some species, males produce an additional signal by rapidly stridulating their claw, creating a ‘drumming’ vibrational signal through the substrate as a female approaches, and even continue to drum once inside their burrow. Here, we show that the switch from waving to drumming might provide additional information to the female about the quality of a male, and the properties of his burrow (multiple message hypothesis). Across males there was, however, a strong positive relationship between aspects of their waving and drumming displays, suggesting that drumming adheres to some predictions of the redundant signal hypothesis for multimodal signalling. In field experiments, we show that recent courtship is associated with a significant reduction in male sprint speed, which is commensurate with an oxygen debt. Even so, males that wave and drum more vigorously than their counterparts have a higher sprint speed. Drumming appears to be an energetically costly multimodal display of quality that females should attend to when making their mate choice decisions

The Missing Link for Maximizing Impact: Foundations Assessing Their Capacity

A rapidly changing, global sociopolitical environment requires foundations to be nimble in maximizing opportunities to advance their agendas. At the same time, grantmakers are establishing ever more ambitious goals that often require grantees to function at peak capacity. Why, then, have more foundations not assessed their own institutional capacity? This article discusses an assessment of 54 foundations that participated in taking a new tool, developed for funders by TCC Group, to explore five core capacity areas shown to be central to organizational effectiveness. The Foundation Core Capacity Assessment Tool’s findings should not be seen as a report card, but rather a data-driven prompt for reflection and collective learning. While a diverse set of funders participated in this assessment, a larger pool will be needed to make broader statements about sectorwide trends. Nonetheless, the preliminary findings shared in this article do offer an unprecedented first look at how foundations are holistically assessing their institutional capacity as part of their efforts to maximize impact at a critical point in history

Robotic crabs reveal that female fiddler crabs are sensitive to changes in male display rate

Males often produce dynamic, repetitive courtship displays that can be demanding to perform and might advertise male quality to females. A key feature of demanding displays is that they can change in intensity: escalating as a male increases his signalling effort, but de-escalating as a signaller becomes fatigued. Here, we investigated whether female fiddler crabs, Uca mjoebergi, are sensitive to changes in male courtship wave rate. We performed playback experiments using robotic male crabs that had the same mean wave rate, but either escalated, de-escalated or remained constant. Females demonstrated a strong preference for escalating robots, but showed mixed responses to robots that de-escalated (‘fast’ to ‘slow’) compared to those that waved at a constant ‘medium’ rate. These findings demonstrate that females can discern changes in male display rate, and prefer males that escalate, but that females are also sensitive to past display rates indicative of prior vigour

The effectiveness of three types of practice in word recognition in grades II and III

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Mental Health, Chronic Disease, and Substance Use: Findings From Rural Texas

There are vital links among mental health conditions, chronic diseases, and substance use disorders. Simultaneous examination of the relationship among these three conditions is essential for providing well-integrated care to rural residents who have limited resources and for representing medically underserved areas. We aimed to assess the burden of behavioral health conditions and chronic diseases from a rural Texas community to garner context-specific insights and inform effective health promotion strategies in similar communities. We conducted a cross-sectional study among 181 residents from various zip codes in a rural Texas county. A self-administered, 18-item health-needs questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants. Of the total participants, 30.0% reported mental health conditions, 16.0% reported substance use disorders, and 44.2% reported having at least one type of chronic disease. Overall, mental health conditions were associated with substance use disorders [OR: 1.58 (95% CI: 0.73–2.42)] and chronic disease [OR: 1.07 (95% CI: 0.39–1.75)], but no associations were observed between substance use and chronic disease [OR: 0.62 (95% CI: -0.20–1.43)]. The economic and accessibility barriers that rural residents commonly face call attention to the need for integrated care that combines primary care and behavioral health services

Rethinking capacity development for critical development practice. Inquiry into a postgraduate Programme

Our proposal focuses on a theoretical framework intended to characterise and understand capacity development processes oriented towards the promotion of a critical development practice, an approach that faces the tensions between reformist and critical views of development management. This is what we call capacity development for emancipatory social change. From this viewpoint, we explore a postgraduate university programme in development management offered by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain), with a twofold aim: first, to carry out an inquiry of the programme as a capacity development process in the training of critical development practitioners and second, to discuss the suitability of the framework for understanding similar capacity development processes

Anthropogenic noise disrupts mate choice behaviors in female Gryllus bimaculatus

By assessing the sexual signals produced by conspecifics, individuals can make informed decisions on the best choice of mate, which can lead to reproductive fitness benefits. However, these communication systems are often vulnerable to disruption by conflicting with stimuli present in the environment. Anthropogenic noise may act as one such disruptive stimulus, leading to inefficient mate choice decisions and, thus, reductions to an animal’s fitness. In this study, the mate choice behaviors of female Gryllus bimaculatus were tested when presented with artificial male courtship songs of differing “quality” under different acoustic conditions. In ambient noise conditions, females significantly preferred mates paired with higher-quality songs, indicated by increased mating rates and reduced latency to mate. However, this mate selection pattern was disrupted in both traffic and white noise conditions. Additionally, “high-quality” courtship songs had an increased mounting latency in traffic and white noise conditions, when compared to ambient noise conditions. Making nonoptimal mating decisions, such as the ones seen here, can lead to deleterious fitness consequences, alter population dynamics, and weaken sexual selection, unless individuals adapt to cope with anthropogenic interference