Action research in a collective organisation:Developing an education programme in a pressure group

The aim of this project was to develop the education work of an environmental pressure group. The research devised and implemented a project to produce multi-media teaching packs on the urban environment. Whilst this involved understanding environmental education it was necessary to research beyond this to include the various structural and dynamic constraints on change in the field. This presented a number of methodological difficulties; from the resolution of which a model of the research process involved in this project has been developed. It is argued that research oriented towards practical change requires the insights of an experienced practitioner to be combined with the rigours of controlled systematic enquiry. Together these function as a model-building process encompassing intuition, induction and deduction. Model testing is carried out through repeated intervention in the field; thus an interplay between researcher and client ensues such that the project develops in a mutually acceptable direction. In practice, this development will be both unpredictable and erratic. Although the conclusions reached here are based on a single case study they address general methodological issues likely to be encountered in different field settings concerned with different practical problems.

Opportunity, fair process and relationship value:career development as a driver of proactive work behaviour

In line with recent findings from organisational justice theory, we hypothesised that employee proactive behaviour and careerist orientation is predicted by the interplay of perceived favourability of career development opportunities, the perceived fairness of the procedures used to decide them, and employee organisational commitment. Employees (N = 325) of a large financial services organisation responded to a self-completion questionnaire. As predicted, when career development opportunities were viewed unfavourably, perceived procedural justice was significantly and positively related to individual proactive behaviour and significantly and negatively related to careerist orientation but only when organisational commitment was high. It appears that high procedural justice may only 'offset' the negative effects of unfavourable career development opportunities when employees identify with, and are committed to, their organisation. Further support is presented for a relational, rather than instrumental, model of procedural justice when reflecting on employee reactions to their employers' policies and decision-making. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Requirements-aware systems:a research agenda for RE for self-adaptive systems

Requirements are sensitive to the context in which the system-to-be must operate. Where such context is well-understood and is static or evolves slowly, existing RE techniques can be made to work well. Increasingly, however, development projects are being challenged to build systems to operate in contexts that are volatile over short periods in ways that are imperfectly understood. Such systems need to be able to adapt to new environmental contexts dynamically, but the contextual uncertainty that demands this self-adaptive ability makes it hard to formulate, validate and manage their requirements. Different contexts may demand different requirements trade-offs. Unanticipated contexts may even lead to entirely new requirements. To help counter this uncertainty, we argue that requirements for self-adaptive systems should be run-time entities that can be reasoned over in order to understand the extent to which they are being satisfied and to support adaptation decisions that can take advantage of the systems' self-adaptive machinery. We take our inspiration from the fact that explicit, abstract representations of software architectures used to be considered design-time-only entities but computational reflection showed that architectural concerns could be represented at run-time too, helping systems to dynamically reconfigure themselves according to changing context. We propose to use analogous mechanisms to achieve requirements reflection. In this paper we discuss the ideas that support requirements reflection as a means to articulate some of the outstanding research challenges.

La traducción como mecanismo de (re)canonización:el discurso nacional y feminista de Rosalía de Castro en sus traducciones a inglés

Women authors have been traditionally ignored by patriarchal values informing the dominant literary canon. The most important icon of Galician literature, however, is a woman – Rosalía de Castro (1837-1885). She is not only a foundational myth for Galician letters, but also one of the most widely translated Galician authors. That said, the way she has been canonized in the Galician literary system has generally presented her work as exclusively committed to the construction of the national/ist identity, disregarding and muting her subversive feminist ideas. Taking this context as a starting point, in this article I shall examine most English translations of her work published between 1909 and 2010 in order to assess to what extent these translations have contributed to either disseminating or concealing Rosalía de Castro’s national and/or feminist discourse. I also aim to offer new critical readings of some of the author’s texts written in 19th century, which show how the Galician author is a real pioneer in Western literary feminism.

The discretionary role of the line manager in inspiring work engagement and innovative behaviour:a study of social exchange and job resources in the public sector

This thesis is about the discretionary role of the line manager in inspiring the work engagement of staff and their resulting innovative behaviour examined through the lens of Social Exchange Theory (Blau, 1964) and the Job Demands-Resources theory (Bakker, Demerouti, Nachreiner & Schaufeli, 2001). The study is focused on a large British Public Sector organisation undergoing a major organisational shift in the way in which they operate as part of the public sector. It is often claimed that people do not leave organisations; they leave line managers (Kozlowski & Doherty, 1989). Regardless of the knowledge in the literature concerning the importance of the line manager in organisations (Purcell, 2003), the engagement literature in particular is lacking in the consideration of such a fundamental figure in organisational life. Further, the understanding of the black box of managerial discretion and its relationship to employee and organisation related outcomes would benefit from greater exploration (Purcell, 2003; Gerhart, 2005; Scott, et al, 2009). The purpose of this research is to address these gaps with relation to the innovative behaviour of employees in the public sector – an area that is not typically associated with the public sector (Bhatta, 2003; McGuire, Stoner & Mylona, 2008; Hughes, Moore & Kataria, 2011). The study is a CASE Award PhD thesis, requiring academic and practical elements to the research. The study is of one case organisation, focusing on one service characterised by a high level of adoption of Strategic Human Resource Management activities and operating in a rather unique manner for the public sector, having private sector competition for work. The study involved a mixed methods approach to data collection. Preliminary focus groups with 45 participants were conducted, followed by an ethnographic period of five months embedded into the service conducting interviews and observations. This culminated in a quantitative survey delivered within the wider directorate to approximately 500 staff members. The study used aspects of the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) approach to analyse the data and developed results that highlight the importance of the line manager in an area characterised by SHRM and organisational change for engaging employees and encouraging innovative behaviour. This survey was completed on behalf of the organisation and the findings of this are presented in appendix 1, in order to keep the focus of the PhD on theory development. Implications for theory and practice are discussed alongside the core finding. Line managers’ discretion surrounding the provision of job resources (in particular trust, autonomy and implementation and interpretation of combined bundles of SHRM policies and procedures) influenced the exchange process by which employees responded with work engagement and innovative behaviour. Limitations to the research are the limitations commonly attributed to cross-sectional data collection methods and those surrounding generalisability of the qualitative findings outside of the contextual factors characterising the service area. Suggestions for future research involve addressing these limitations and further exploration of the discretionary role with regards to extending our understanding of line manager discretion.

Process re-engineering for effective implementation of projects

Time, cost and quality are the prime objectives of any project. Unfortunately, today’s project management does not always ensure the realisation of these objectives. The main reasons of project non-achievement are changes in scope and design, changes in Government policies and regulations, unforeseen inflation, under-estimation and mis-estimation. An overall organisational approach with the application of appropriate management philosophies, tools and techniques can only solve the problem. The present study establishes a methodology for achieving success in implementing projects using a business process re-engineering (BPR) framework. Internal performance characteristics are introspected through condition diagnosis that identifies and prioritises areas of concern requiring attention. Process re-engineering emerges as a most critical area for immediate attention. Project process re-engineering is carried out by eliminating non-value added activities, taking up activities concurrently by applying information systems rigorously and applying risk management techniques throughout the project life cycle. The overall methodology is demonstrated through applications to cross country petroleum pipeline project organisation in an Indian scenario.

Help in finding the right balance:leadership, work-family balance and employee outcomes

Although much research has examined employees’ experience of the work-family interface, its conceptualization has been rather problematic, ranging from work and family as mutually constraining through to mutually enriching and, more recently, to work-family balance (WFB). Building on Greenhaus and Allen’s (2011) conceptualization of WFB as comprising satisfaction and effectiveness components, I proposed and tested a model of he antecedents and outcomes of WFB. Based on work-family border theory, I hypothesised that family-supportive supervisor behaviours (FSSB) facilitate WFB and hat the relationship is stronger when the organisation also offers formal support (availability of family-friendly practices (FFPs); enhancement effect). Furthermore, I integrated the leadership and work-family interface literatures by proposing authentic eadership as an antecedent of FSSB. Based on role accumulation theories, I proposed life satisfaction and health as outcomes of WFB satisfaction and WFB effectiveness and job performance as an outcome of only WFB effectiveness. I tested my hypotheses with individual-level data in Study 1 (two waves of data; employees from Germany and the UK) and nested data (individuals nested in teams; two waves of data; employee and supervisor ratings; Germany and the UK) in Study 2. The obtained findings largely supported the hypothesized model and showed that both authentic leadership (Study 1) and team authentic leadership (Study 2) predicted FSSB which, in turn, increased WFB satisfaction and WFB effectiveness. Contrary to my prediction, both studies revealed that FSSB and (team) availability of FFPs compensated for each other, only impacting WFB satisfaction/effectiveness if the other form of family support was not available. Furthermore, both components were positively related to life satisfaction and health, while WFB effectiveness was only related to self-rated performance (Study 1) and not supervisor-rated performance (Study 2). Lastly, the serial moderated mediation model hat tested the conditional indirect effect of (team) authentic leadership on the outcomes received mixed support.