Using life strategies to explore the vulnerability of ecosystem services to invasion by alien plants

Invasive plants can have different effects of ecosystem functioning and on the provision of ecosystem services, from strongly deleterious impacts to positive effects. The nature and intensity of such effects will depend on the service and ecosystem being considered, but also on features of life strategies of invaders that influence their invasiveness as well as their influence of key processes of receiving ecosystems. To address the combined effect of these various factors we developed a robust and efficient methodological framework that allows to identify areas of possible conflict between ecosystem services and alien invasive plants, considering interactions between landscape invasibility and species invasiveness. Our framework combines the statistical robustness of multi-model inference, efficient techniques to map ecosystem services, and life strategies as a functional link between invasion, functional changes and potential provision of services by invaded ecosystems. The framework was applied to a test region in Portugal, for which we could successfully predict the current patterns of plant invasion, of ecosystem service provision, and finally of probable conflict (expressing concern for negative impacts, and value for positive impacts on services) between alien species richness (total and per plant life strategy) and the potential provision of selected services. Potential conflicts were identified for all combinations of plant strategy and ecosystem service, with an emphasis for those concerning conflicts with carbon sequestration, water regulation and wood production. Lower levels of conflict were obtained between invasive plant strategies and the habitat for biodiversity supporting service. The added value of the proposed framework in the context of landscape management and planning is discussed in perspective of anticipation of conflicts, mitigation of negative impacts, and potentiation of positive effects of plant invasions on ecosystems and their services.

The Corrosion of Career? - Occupational Trajectories of Business Economists and Engineers in Switzerland

Achievement careers are regarded as a distinctive element of the post-war period in occidental societies. Such a career was at once a modal trajectory of the modern parts of middleclass men and a social emblem for progress and success. However, if the achievement career came to be a biographical pattern with great normative power, its precise sequential course remained vague. Theories of the 1960s and 1970s described it as an orderly advancement within large firms. By the 1990s, scholars postulated an erosion of the organizational structures that once contributed to the institutionalization of careers, accompanied by a weakening of the normative weight of the achievement career by management discourse. We question the thesis of the corrosion of achievement career by analysing the trajectories of 442 engineers and business economists in Switzerland in regard to their orderliness, loyalty, and temporal rhythm. An inspection of types of careers and cohorts reveals that even if we face a decline of loyalty over time, hierarchical orderliness is not touched by those changes. Foremost, technical-industrial careers fit the loyal and regular pattern. Hence, this trajectory-type represents only a minority and is by far the slowest and least successful in terms of hierarchical ascension.

Toward a comprehensive conceptualization of business organizations and their members from a sensemaking perspective. Lessons learned from Picassoâeuro?s cubism

Until recently, much of the discussion regarding the type of organization theory needed in management studies focused on normative vs. descriptive roles of management science. Some authors however noticed that even a descriptive theory can have a normative impact. Among others, management theories are used by practitioners to make sense of their identity and roles in given contexts, and so guide their attitude, decision process, and behavior. The sensemaking potential of a theory might in this view represent an important element for predicting the adoption of a theory by practitioners. Accordingly, theories are needed which better grasp the increased complexity of today's business environment in order to be more relevant for practitioners. This article proposes a multi-faceted perspective of organizations. This implies leaving a simplistic view of organizations and building a 'cubist' conception. Picasso's cubism paintings are characterized by the use of multiple perspectives within a single drawing. Similarly, I argue here that managers must learn not only to add multiple responsibilities in their work, but to develop an integrated conception of their managerial identity and of their organizations in which the multiple social and economic dimensions are enmeshed. Social entrepreneurship is discussed as illustration of typical multi-faceted business.

"Periodic crises": Clément Juglar between theories of crises and theories of business cycles

Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world - an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.