Environmental features which limit organization and industry viability:a study of the footwear industry

This thesis proposes a conceptual framework for the analysis of organizational environments. Three primary segments of the task environment - the transaction environment, the industrial environment and the ecotone are delineated. The interrelationships between the organization and these three environmental segments are examined. It is suggested that the task environment i) defines the nature of the task confronting the organization and the economic, political and social position of the organization within this network; ii) influences the way organizations and industries are organized; iii) prevents recognition of the need for adaptation and change; and iv) limits the alternatives available to the organization should changes in the environment render existing technology, behaviour and structures obsolete. The British Footwear Industry provides an example of how this framework might be used to investigate the problem of industry decline and organization viability. It is argued that the explanations usually put forth to explain organization failure and industrial decline have not taken into consideration the environmental factors which affect organization and industry viability. The shift from national markets to global markets has altered the composition of the task environment and has changed the nature of competition from firm versus firm to environment versus environment. Organizations do not compete in the market, their products do. These products are often produced by organizations embedded in environments which are significantly different from the one in which the focal organization and industry are embedded.

Defining failure in the nonprofit organization: The case of four human service agencies

Private nonprofit human service organizations provide a spectrum of services that aim to resolve societal problems. Their failure may leave needed and desired services unprovided or not provided sufficiently to meet public demand. However, the concept of organizational failure has not been examined for the nonprofit organization. This research addresses the deficiency in the literatures of organization failure and nonprofit organizations.^ An eight category typology, developed from a review of the current literature and findings from expert interviews, is initially presented to define nonprofit organization failure. A multiple case study design is used to test the typology in four nonprofit human service delivery agencies. The case analysis reduces the typology to five types salient to nonprofit organization failure: input failure, legitimacy failure, adaptive failure, management failure and leadership failure.^ The resulting five category typology is useful to both theory builders and nonprofit practitioners. For theory development, the interaction of the failure types extends the literature and lays a foundation for a theory of nonprofit organization failure that diffuses management and leadership across all of the failure types, highlights management and leadership failure as collective functions shared by paid staff and the volunteer board of directors, and emphasizes the importance of organization legitimacy.^ From a practical perspective, the typology provides a tool for diagnosing failure in the nonprofit organization. Using the management indicators developed for the typology, a checklist of the warning signals of potential failure, emphasizing the key types of management and leadership, offers nonprofit decision makers a priori examination of an organization's propensity for failure. ^

The empire beats on: Oyo, Bata drums and hegemony in nineteenth-century Cuba

The Lukumí people of Cuba, currently known as Yoruba, are descendants of one of the mightiest West African kingdoms, the Oyo, Empire. The Oyo-Yoruba were important cultural contributors to certain areas of the New World such as Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad, and to some degree Haiti and the Lesser Antilles. Anthropologist William Bascom has said that “no African group has had greater influence on New World culture than the Yoruba.” ^ After the devastation of the empire around 1825, two new Oyos resuscitated. The first, New Oyo, was established about 80 miles south of the ancient site around 1830. The second Oyo was instituted on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the city of Havana and its surrounding towns. Much of Oyo lie, as ancient Oyo is now called, was transported to the New World, reformed and adapted according to its new surroundings, and, it preserved its reign over its “subjects” through the retention and dissemination of its cultural and religious practices. ^ Using an interdisciplinary approach, this investigation will argue that of all the African groups brought to Cuba, the Oyo-Yoruba were the most influential in shaping Afro-Cuban culture since their introduction in the nineteenth century. The existence of batá drums in Cuba and the cultural components of this musical genre will serve as one of many examples to illustrate the vitality of Oyo cultural hegemony over Afro-Cubans. It is arguable that these drums and the culture that surrounded them were very important instruments used by the Oyo to counter the acculturation of many Africans in Cuba. Likewise, this culture became acculturative in itself by imposing its religious world views on non-Oyo ethnics and their descendants. Oral histories and narratives collected among Lukumí practitioners on the island and abroad have been invaluable archives to supplement and/or complement primary and secondary sources of information. ^

Inter-subjective and transnational racial effects: The role of the United States in the formation and evolution of the collective perception and racial relations in Cuba, 1898–1902

Since the arrival of the first African slaves to Cuba in 1524, the issue of race has had a long-lived presence in the Cuban national discourse. However, despite Cuba’s colonial history, it has often been maintained by some historians that race relations in Cuba were congenial with racism and racial discrimination never existing as deep or widespread in Cuba as in the United States (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). In fact, it has been argued that institutionalized racism was introduced into Cuban society with the first U.S. occupation, during 1898–1902 (Cannon, 1983, p. 113). This study of Cuba investigates the influence of the United States on the development of race relations and racial perceptions in post-independent Cuba, specifically from 1898-1902. These years comprise the time period immediately following the final fight for Cuban Independence, culminating with the Cuban-Spanish-American War and the first U.S. occupation of Cuba. By this time, the Cuban population comprised Africans as well as descendants of Africans, White Spanish people, indigenous Cubans, and offspring of the intermixing of the groups. This research studies whether the United States’ own race relations and racial perceptions influenced the initial conflicting race relations and racial perceptions in early and post-U.S. occupation Cuba. This study uses a collective interpretative framework that incorporates a national level of analysis with a race relations and racial perceptions focus. This framework reaches beyond the traditionally utilized perspectives when interpreting the impact of the United States during and following its intervention in Cuba. Attention is given to the role of the existing social, political climate within the United States as a driving influence of the United States’ involvement with Cuba. This study reveals that emphasis on the role of the United States as critical to the development of Cuba’s race relations and racial perceptions is credible given the extensive involvement of the U.S. in the building of the early Cuban Republic and U.S. structures serving as models for reconstruction. U.S. government formation in Cuba aligned with a governing system reflecting the existing governing codes of the U.S. during that time period.

Assessing the influence of organizational personality, applicants' need motivation, expectancy beliefs, and person-organization fit on applicant attraction

This research explored the thesis that organizational personality is related to applicants’ attraction to an organization through a process which involves need motivation, expectancy beliefs, and applicants’ perceptions of person-organization fit. Organizational personality may be defined as a collection of trait-like characteristics that individuals use to describe organizational practices, policies, values, and culture. Specifically, this research investigated the hypothesis that organizational personality information is useful to applicants because it helps individuals to determine their perceptions of fit. A sample of students (N = 198) and working adults (N = 198) participated in an online experiment. Findings indicated that individuals’ beliefs about the instrumentality of desirable work related outcomes are essential to determining their perceptions of fit and organizational attraction. Additionally, organizational personality perceptions interacted with need motivation to affect perceptions of fit and organizational attraction. For instance, perceptions of fit mediated the influence of the interaction between need for achievement and perceptions of innovativeness on organizational attraction. The interaction of need motivation and perceptions of organizational personality helped individuals to better determine their perceptions of fit and subsequent attraction toward organizations.^

Variables affecting the success of older applicants for employment in a public organization: An age -cued cognitive model of administrative decision-making

The dissertation takes a multivariate approach to answer the question of how applicant age, after controlling for other variables, affects employment success in a public organization. In addition to applicant age, there are five other categories of variables examined: organization/applicant variables describing the relationship of the applicant to the organization; organization/position variables describing the target position as it relates to the organization; episodic variables such as applicant age relative to the ages of competing applicants; economic variables relating to the salary needs of older applicants; and cognitive variables that may affect the decision maker's evaluation of the applicant. ^ An exploratory phase of research employs archival data from approximately 500 decisions made in the past three years to hire or promote applicants for positions in one public health administration organization. A logit regression model is employed to examine the probability that the variables modify the effect of applicant age on employment success. A confirmatory phase of the dissertation is a controlled experiment in which hiring decision makers from the same public organization perform a simulated hiring decision exercise to evaluate hypothetical applicants of similar qualifications but of different ages. The responses of the decision makers to a series of bipolar adjective scales add support to the cognitive component of the theoretical model of the hiring decision. A final section contains information gathered from interviews with key informants. ^ Applicant age has tended to have a curvilinear relationship with employment success. For some positions, the mean age of the applicants most likely to succeed varies with the values of the five groups of moderating variables. The research contributes not only to the practice of public personnel administration, but is useful in examining larger public policy issues associated with an aging workforce. ^

Using Coding to Improve Localization and Backscatter Communication Performance in Low-Power Sensor Networks

Backscatter communication is an emerging wireless technology that recently has gained an increase in attention from both academic and industry circles. The key innovation of the technology is the ability of ultra-low power devices to utilize nearby existing radio signals to communicate. As there is no need to generate their own energetic radio signal, the devices can benefit from a simple design, are very inexpensive and are extremely energy efficient compared with traditional wireless communication. These benefits have made backscatter communication a desirable candidate for distributed wireless sensor network applications with energy constraints.

The backscatter channel presents a unique set of challenges. Unlike a conventional one-way communication (in which the information source is also the energy source), the backscatter channel experiences strong self-interference and spread Doppler clutter that mask the information-bearing (modulated) signal scattered from the device. Both of these sources of interference arise from the scattering of the transmitted signal off of objects, both stationary and moving, in the environment. Additionally, the measurement of the location of the backscatter device is negatively affected by both the clutter and the modulation of the signal return.

This work proposes a channel coding framework for the backscatter channel consisting of a bi-static transmitter/receiver pair and a quasi-cooperative transponder. It proposes to use run-length limited coding to mitigate the background self-interference and spread-Doppler clutter with only a small decrease in communication rate. The proposed method applies to both binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme and provides an increase in rate by up to a factor of two compared with previous methods.

Additionally, this work analyzes the use of frequency modulation and bi-phase waveform coding for the transmitted (interrogating) waveform for high precision range estimation of the transponder location. Compared to previous methods, optimal lower range sidelobes are achieved. Moreover, since both the transmitted (interrogating) waveform coding and transponder communication coding result in instantaneous phase modulation of the signal, cross-interference between localization and communication tasks exists. Phase discriminating algorithm is proposed to make it possible to separate the waveform coding from the communication coding, upon reception, and achieve localization with increased signal energy by up to 3 dB compared with previous reported results.

The joint communication-localization framework also enables a low-complexity receiver design because the same radio is used both for localization and communication.

Simulations comparing the performance of different codes corroborate the theoretical results and offer possible trade-off between information rate and clutter mitigation as well as a trade-off between choice of waveform-channel coding pairs. Experimental results from a brass-board microwave system in an indoor environment are also presented and discussed.

Household "ethnoscapes" and rite of passage: meaning and chronicity of the diagnosis in schizophrenia

Based on the results of an ethnographic study with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their relatives in Barcelona and Tarragona along one year, I problematize the transformation of roles and relationships inside the household from the first burst and the assignation of a diagnosis as rite of passage. I appeal to a cultural interpretation of family, understanding the family group as a specific ethnoscape. I analyze the chronicity meaning, and its consequences in the conformation of the “role of sick person” in the context of parental relationships. I also discuss the paradoxes in terms of autonomy for the affected persons because of the projection of cultural connotation of chronicity.

Too good to leave, too bad to stay: anti-retaliation precautionary measures for whistle blowers

Whistle blowing is an act of exposing the wrongdoings in an organization, either committed by its members of the lower level or the top management. Many have agreed that whistle blowing is an effective means of deterring and detecting organizational mishaps. Whistle blowers have been referred to as canaries in the coal mine. The idea of telling the truth however, may result in exposure to uncontrolled risk by the whistle blower. The extent to which the whistle blower is protected and safe after information is leaked to the public or the relevant authority remains unknown. In the Malaysian context, whistle blowing is not new. Being honest is a custom among Malaysians. Honesty is deeply rooted in Malaysian culture and is supported by the high value Malaysian place on spiritual belief which also put a premium on moral virtue. But being loyal to the management is another thing. A critical issue that whistle blowers face is the tension between the virtues of honesty and the virtues of loyalty. The ethical dilemmas faced by the whistle blowers place them in situations where there are significant and difficult ethical conflicts. Recently, the Parliament of Malaysia has passed the Whistle Blowing Protection Act which was seen as an holistic approach to cover all Malaysians who were willing to blow the whistle. Some do not feel confident that such program under the Act can be accomplished in Malaysia as the Malaysian culture believing keeping things to ourselves. Thus the paper intends to explore the anti-retaliation precautionary factors mediate by the culture that will most likely explain motivational issues subordinates face in publicizing the wrongs that are harmful to the organization in Malaysia.

The Catholic Church in Cuba and the Diaspora: A Symposium

This flyer promotes a symposium "The Catholic Church in Cuba and the Diaspora: A Symposium". Among the topics discussed were Pope Francis' September 2015 visit to Cuba and the United States, and its impact on the future of the Catholic Church in Cuba and the diaspora. Among the speakers for this event were Dr. Ana Maria Bidegain, FIU, Sister Ondina Cortes, St. Thomas University, Dr. Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, University of Miami, Bibi Hidalgo, co-founder, En Comunion, Ana Celia Perera, independent scholar, Dagoberto Valdes, Convivencia, and Achbishop Thomas Wenski, Archdiosese of Miami.

Knowledge Sharing within IT Projects

Even though today’s corporations recognize that they need to understand modern project management techniques (Schwalbe, 2002, p2), many researchers continue to provide evidence of poor IT project success. With Kotnour, (2000) finding that project performance is positively associated with project knowledge, a better understanding of how to effectively manage knowledge in IT projects should have considerable practical significance for increasing the chances of project success. Using a combined qualitative/quantitative method of data collection in multiple case studies spanning four continents, and comprising a variety of organizational types, the focus of this current research centered on the question of why individuals working within IT project teams might be motivated towards, or inhibited from, sharing their knowledge and experience in their activities, procedures, and processes. The research concluded with the development of a new theoretical model of knowledge sharing behavior, ‘The Alignment Model of Motivational Focus’. This model suggests that an individual’s propensity to share knowledge and experience is a function of perceived personal benefits and costs associated with the activity, balanced against the individual’s alignment to a group of ‘institutional’ factors. These factors are identified as alignments to the project team, to the organization, and dependent on the circumstances, to either the professional discipline or community of practice, to which the individual belongs.

Measuring CRM and SCM benefits : a preliminary measurement model

Organizations invest heavily in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, and their related infrastructure, presumably expecting positive benefits to the organization. Assessing the benefits of such applications is an important aspect of managing such systems. Considering the salient differences between CRM and SCM applications with other intra-organizational applications, existing Information Systems benefits measurement models and frameworks are ill-suited to gauge benefits of inter-organizational systems. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a measurement model developed to assess benefits of CRM and SCM applications. The preliminary model, which reflects the characteristics of the Analytic Theory, is derived using a review of 55 academic studies and 44 papers from the practice. Six hundred and six identified benefits were then synthesized in to 74 non-overlapping benefits, arranged under six dimensions.

Evaluating information systems

The book within which this chapter appears is published as a research reference book (not a coursework textbook) on Management Information Systems (MIS) for seniors or graduate students in Chinese universities. It is hoped that this chapter, along with the others, will be helpful to MIS scholars and PhD/Masters research students in China who seek understanding of several central Information Systems (IS) research topics and related issues. The subject of this chapter - ‘Evaluating Information Systems’ - is broad, and cannot be addressed in its entirety in any depth within a single book chapter. The chapter proceeds from the truism that organizations have limited resources and those resources need to be invested in a way that provides greatest benefit to the organization. IT expenditure represents a substantial portion of any organization’s investment budget and IT related innovations have broad organizational impacts. Evaluation of the impact of this major investment is essential to justify this expenditure both pre- and post-investment. Evaluation is also important to prioritize possible improvements. The chapter (and most of the literature reviewed herein) admittedly assumes a blackbox view of IS/IT1, emphasizing measures of its consequences (e.g. for organizational performance or the economy) or perceptions of its quality from a user perspective. This reflects the MIS emphasis – a ‘management’ emphasis rather than a software engineering emphasis2, where a software engineering emphasis might be on the technical characteristics and technical performance. Though a black-box approach limits diagnostic specificity of findings from a technical perspective, it offers many benefits. In addition to superior management information, these benefits may include economy of measurement and comparability of findings (e.g. see Part 4 on Benchmarking IS). The chapter does not purport to be a comprehensive treatment of the relevant literature. It does, however, reflect many of the more influential works, and a representative range of important writings in the area. The author has been somewhat opportunistic in Part 2, employing a single journal – The Journal of Strategic Information Systems – to derive a classification of literature in the broader domain. Nonetheless, the arguments for this approach are believed to be sound, and the value from this exercise real. The chapter drills down from the general to the specific. It commences with a highlevel overview of the general topic area. This is achieved in 2 parts: - Part 1 addressing existing research in the more comprehensive IS research outlets (e.g. MISQ, JAIS, ISR, JMIS, ICIS), and Part 2 addressing existing research in a key specialist outlet (i.e. Journal of Strategic Information Systems). Subsequently, in Part 3, the chapter narrows to focus on the sub-topic ‘Information Systems Success Measurement’; then drilling deeper to become even more focused in Part 4 on ‘Benchmarking Information Systems’. In other words, the chapter drills down from Parts 1&2 Value of IS, to Part 3 Measuring Information Systems Success, to Part 4 Benchmarking IS. While the commencing Parts (1&2) are by definition broadly relevant to the chapter topic, the subsequent, more focused Parts (3 and 4) admittedly reflect the author’s more specific interests. Thus, the three chapter foci – value of IS, measuring IS success, and benchmarking IS - are not mutually exclusive, but, rather, each subsequent focus is in most respects a sub-set of the former. Parts 1&2, ‘the Value of IS’, take a broad view, with much emphasis on ‘the business Value of IS’, or the relationship between information technology and organizational performance. Part 3, ‘Information System Success Measurement’, focuses more specifically on measures and constructs employed in empirical research into the drivers of IS success (ISS). (DeLone and McLean 1992) inventoried and rationalized disparate prior measures of ISS into 6 constructs – System Quality, Information Quality, Individual Impact, Organizational Impact, Satisfaction and Use (later suggesting a 7th construct – Service Quality (DeLone and McLean 2003)). These 6 constructs have been used extensively, individually or in some combination, as the dependent variable in research seeking to better understand the important antecedents or drivers of IS Success. Part 3 reviews this body of work. Part 4, ‘Benchmarking Information Systems’, drills deeper again, focusing more specifically on a measure of the IS that can be used as a ‘benchmark’3. This section consolidates and extends the work of the author and his colleagues4 to derive a robust, validated IS-Impact measurement model for benchmarking contemporary Information Systems (IS). Though IS-Impact, like ISS, has potential value in empirical, causal research, its design and validation has emphasized its role and value as a comparator; a measure that is simple, robust and generalizable and which yields results that are as far as possible comparable across time, across stakeholders, and across differing systems and systems contexts.

Secure data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a set of sensors that are integrated with a physical environment. These sensors are small in size, and capable of sensing physical phenomena and processing them. They communicate in a multihop manner, due to a short radio range, to form an Ad Hoc network capable of reporting network activities to a data collection sink. Recent advances in WSNs have led to several new promising applications, including habitat monitoring, military target tracking, natural disaster relief, and health monitoring. The current version of sensor node, such as MICA2, uses a 16 bit, 8 MHz Texas Instruments MSP430 micro-controller with only 10 KB RAM, 128 KB program space, 512 KB external ash memory to store measurement data, and is powered by two AA batteries. Due to these unique specifications and a lack of tamper-resistant hardware, devising security protocols for WSNs is complex. Previous studies show that data transmission consumes much more energy than computation. Data aggregation can greatly help to reduce this consumption by eliminating redundant data. However, aggregators are under the threat of various types of attacks. Among them, node compromise is usually considered as one of the most challenging for the security of WSNs. In a node compromise attack, an adversary physically tampers with a node in order to extract the cryptographic secrets. This attack can be very harmful depending on the security architecture of the network. For example, when an aggregator node is compromised, it is easy for the adversary to change the aggregation result and inject false data into the WSN. The contributions of this thesis to the area of secure data aggregation are manifold. We firstly define the security for data aggregation in WSNs. In contrast with existing secure data aggregation definitions, the proposed definition covers the unique characteristics that WSNs have. Secondly, we analyze the relationship between security services and adversarial models considered in existing secure data aggregation in order to provide a general framework of required security services. Thirdly, we analyze existing cryptographic-based and reputationbased secure data aggregation schemes. This analysis covers security services provided by these schemes and their robustness against attacks. Fourthly, we propose a robust reputationbased secure data aggregation scheme for WSNs. This scheme minimizes the use of heavy cryptographic mechanisms. The security advantages provided by this scheme are realized by integrating aggregation functionalities with: (i) a reputation system, (ii) an estimation theory, and (iii) a change detection mechanism. We have shown that this addition helps defend against most of the security attacks discussed in this thesis, including the On-Off attack. Finally, we propose a secure key management scheme in order to distribute essential pairwise and group keys among the sensor nodes. The design idea of the proposed scheme is the combination between Lamport's reverse hash chain as well as the usual hash chain to provide both past and future key secrecy. The proposal avoids the delivery of the whole value of a new group key for group key update; instead only the half of the value is transmitted from the network manager to the sensor nodes. This way, the compromise of a pairwise key alone does not lead to the compromise of the group key. The new pairwise key in our scheme is determined by Diffie-Hellman based key agreement.

Towards a CRM and SCM Benefits Measurement Model

Organizations invest heavily in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems, and their related infrastructure, presumably expecting positive benefits to the organization. Assessing the benefits of such systems is an important aspect of managing such systems. Given the substantial differences between CRM and SCM systems with traditional intra-organizational applications, existing Information Systems benefits measurement models and frameworks are ill-suited to gauge CRM and SCM benefits. This paper reports the preliminary findings of a research that seeks to develop a measurement model to assess benefits of CRM and SCM applications. The a-priori benefits measurement model is developed reviewing the 55 academic studies and 40 practitioner papers. The review of related literature yielded 606 benefits, which were later synthesized into 74 mutually exclusive benefit measures of CRM and SCM applications arranged under five dimensions.