An Input-Process-Output Approach to Interorganizational Teams: The Influence of Work Group Diversity, Trust and Shared Leadership on Communication Network and Team Outputs.

The market’s challenges bring firms to collaborate with other organizations in order to create Joint Ventures, Alliances and Consortia that are defined as “Interorganizational Networks” (IONs) (Provan, Fish and Sydow; 2007). Some of these IONs are managed through a shared partecipant governance (Provan and Kenis, 2008): a team composed by entrepreneurs and/or directors of each firm of an ION. The research is focused on these kind of management teams and it is based on an input-process-output model: some input variables (work group’s diversity, intra-team's friendship network density) have a direct influence on the process (team identification, shared leadership, interorganizational trust, team trust and intra-team's communication network density), which influence some team outputs, individual innovation behaviors and team effectiveness (team performance, work group satisfaction and ION affective commitment). Data was collected on a sample of 101 entrepreneurs grouped in 28 ION’s government teams and the research hypotheses are tested trough the path analysis and the multilevel models. As expected trust in team and shared leadership are positively and directly related to team effectiveness while team identification and interorganizational trust are indirectly related to the team outputs. The friendship network density among the team’s members has got positive effects on the trust in team and on the communication network density, and also, through the communication network density it improves the level of the teammates ION affective commitment. The shared leadership and its effects on the team effectiveness are fostered from higher level of team identification and weakened from higher level of work group diversity, specifically gender diversity. Finally, the communication network density and shared leadership at the individual level are related to the frequency of individual innovative behaviors. The dissertation’s results give a wider and more precise indication about the management of interfirm network through “shared” form of governance.

Differences in access and patient outcomes across antiretroviral treatment clinics in the Free State province: a prospective cohort study

Objective. To assess differences in access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) and patient outcomes across public sector treatment facilities in the Free State province, South Africa. Design. Prospective cohort study with retrospective database linkage. We analysed data on patients enrolled in the treatment programme across 36 facilities between May 2004 and December 2007, and assessed percentage initiating ART and percentage dead at 1 year after enrolment. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate associations of facility-level and patient-level characteristics with both mortality and treatment status. Results. Of 44 866 patients enrolled, 15 219 initiated treatment within 1 year; 8 778 died within 1 year, 7 286 before accessing ART. Outcomes at 1 year varied greatly across facilities and more variability was explained by facility-level factors than by patient-level factors. The odds of starting treatment within 1 year improved over calendar time. Patients enrolled in facilities with treatment initiation available on site had higher odds of starting treatment and lower odds of death at 1 year compared with those enrolled in facilities that did not offer treatment initiation. Patients were less likely to start treatment if they were male, severely immunosuppressed (CD4 count ≤50 cells/μl), or underweight (<50 kg). Men were also more likely to die in the first year after enrolment. Conclusions. Although increasing numbers of patients started ART between 2004 and 2007, many patients died before accessing ART. Patient outcomes could be improved by decentralisation of treatment services, fast-tracking the most immunodeficient patients and improving access, especially for men.

Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, and Defecating Men: The Power of Storytelling in Maithil Women’s Tales

What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and maintain a counter-system of ideational patterns and practices.

'Listen, Rama’s Wife!’: Maithil Women’s Perspectives and Practices in the Festival of Sāmā-Cakevā

As a female-only festival in a significantly gender-segregated society, sāmā cakevā provides a window into Maithil women’s understandings of their society and the sacred, cultural subjectivities, moral frameworks, and projects of self-construction. The festival reminds us that to read male-female relations under patriarchal social formations as a dichotomy between the empowered and the disempowered ignores the porous boundaries between the two in which negotiations and tradeoffs create a symbiotic reliance. Specifically, the festival names two oppositional camps—the male world of law and the female world of relationships—and then creates a male character, the brother, who moves between the two, loyal to each, betraying, in a sense, each, but demonstrating, by his movements, the currents and avenues of power. This article makes available to other scholars of South Asian culture and society an extended description and analysis of this distinctive festival, while also contributing to the scholarly discussion of women’s expressive traditions.

A Blueprint for Buddhist Revolution: The Radical Buddhism of Seno’o Girō (1889–1961) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as Japanese society became engulfed in war and increasing nationalism, the majority of Buddhist leaders and institutions capitulated to the status quo. One notable exception to this trend, however, was the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei (Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism), founded on 5 April 1931. Led by Nichiren Buddhist layman Seno’o Girō and made up of young social activists who were critical of capitalism, internationalist in outlook, and committed to a pan-sectarian and humanist form of Buddhism that would work for social justice and world peace, the league’s motto was “carry the Buddha on your backs and go out into the streets and villages.” This article analyzes the views of the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism as found in the religious writings of Seno’o Girō to situate the movement in its social and philosophical context, and to raise the question of the prospects of “radical Buddhism” in twenty-first century Japan and elsewhere.

Developing European conservation and mitigation tools for pollination services: approaches of the STEP (Status and Trends of European Pollinators) project

Pollinating insects form a key component of European biodiversity, and provide a vital ecosystem service to crops and wild plants. There is growing evidence of declines in both wild and domesticated pollinators, and parallel declines in plants relying upon them. The STEP project (Status and Trends of European Pollinators, 2010-2015, www.step-project.net) is documenting critical elements in the nature and extent of these declines, examining key functional traits associated with pollination deficits, and developing a Red List for some European pollinator groups. Together these activities are laying the groundwork for future pollinator monitoring programmes. STEP is also assessing the relative importance of potential drivers of pollinator declines, including climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, agrochemicals, pathogens, alien species, light pollution, and their interactions. We are measuring the ecological and economic impacts of declining pollinator services and floral resources, including effects on wild plant populations, crop production and human nutrition. STEP is reviewing existing and potential mitigation options, and providing novel tests of their effectiveness across Europe. Our work is building upon existing and newly developed datasets and models, complemented by spatially-replicated campaigns of field research to fill gaps in current knowledge. Findings are being integrated into a policy-relevant framework to create evidence-based decision support tools. STEP is establishing communication links to a wide range of stakeholders across Europe and beyond, including policy makers, beekeepers, farmers, academics and the general public. Taken together, the STEP research programme aims to improve our understanding of the nature, causes, consequences and potential mitigation of declines in pollination services at local, national, continental and global scales.

Coping With a Family Member's Death: Parenting, Religiosity, and Parent-Child Communication

The present study had three major aims. First, this study was a basic descriptive exploration of the frequency and nature of parent-child communication about death. Second, this study conducted a quantitative analysis to identify predictors of communication and bereaved children¿s emotional and behavioral problems. Third, this study was also a qualitative analysis of parents¿ descriptions of how religious views shape conversations about death and how conversations are beneficial. Based on prior research, it was predicted that positive child outcomes would be associated with parental warmth, religiosity, adaptive coping, positive religious coping, and frequent parent-child communication about death. Conversely, it was predicted that negative child outcomes would be associated with parental psychological control, maladaptive coping, negative religious coping, and less frequent parent-child communication about death. Additionally, it was hypothesized that parents¿ religious and spiritual views would shape parent-child communication about death, and parents would describe numerous benefits of discussing death with children. Parents completed a series of survey measures assessing their religiosity, coping strategies, parent-child communication about death, and their children¿s emotional and behavioral symptoms. Almost 80% of parent-child dyads discussed death at least once a week, and children initiated approximately half of these conversations. Parent-child communication about death was predicted by parents¿ warmth toward and acceptance of their children and inversely predicted by children¿s hyperactivity and social problem solving. Higher levels of children¿s social problem solving could predict lower frequency of parent-child communication about death if children were holding frequent, meaningful, and comforting conversations with friends and other adults. Higher levels of parents¿ psychological control predicted more emotional and behavioral problems in the child. Parents¿ adaptive coping had significant relationships with all of the dimensions of parent-child communication about death. Qualitative analyses revealed that parents perceived their religious beliefs as shaping conversations about death and grief as an individualized journey. A majority of parents described the emotional, social, and intellectual benefits of holding parent-child conversations about death. This study contributes to the literature by further describing parent-child communication about death, identifying its predictors, and investigating parents¿ religiosity and coping strategies in relation to child well-being. Overall, this study revealed the importance of assessing global parenting characteristics (i.e., warmth/acceptance and psychological control) when examining parent-child relationships and communication about death. Furthermore, this unique study illustrates the value of qualitative data when examining parent-child communication about death and religiosity.

A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology

Grigorij Kreidlin (Russia). A Comparative Study of Two Semantic Systems: Body Russian and Russian Phraseology. Mr. Kreidlin teaches in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the State University of Humanities in Moscow and worked on this project from August 1996 to July 1998. The classical approach to non-verbal and verbal oral communication is based on a traditional separation of body and mind. Linguists studied words and phrasemes, the products of mind activities, while gestures, facial expressions, postures and other forms of body language were left to anthropologists, psychologists, physiologists, and indeed to anyone but linguists. Only recently have linguists begun to turn their attention to gestures and semiotic and cognitive paradigms are now appearing that raise the question of designing an integral model for the unified description of non-verbal and verbal communicative behaviour. This project attempted to elaborate lexical and semantic fragments of such a model, producing a co-ordinated semantic description of the main Russian gestures (including gestures proper, postures and facial expressions) and their natural language analogues. The concept of emblematic gestures and gestural phrasemes and of their semantic links permitted an appropriate description of the transformation of a body as a purely physical substance into a body as a carrier of essential attributes of Russian culture - the semiotic process called the culturalisation of the human body. Here the human body embodies a system of cultural values and displays them in a text within the area of phraseology and some other important language domains. The goal of this research was to develop a theory that would account for the fundamental peculiarities of the process. The model proposed is based on the unified lexicographic representation of verbal and non-verbal units in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures, which the Mr. Kreidlin had earlier complied in collaboration with a group of his students. The Dictionary was originally oriented only towards reflecting how the lexical competence of Russian body language is represented in the Russian mind. Now a special type of phraseological zone has been designed to reflect explicitly semantic relationships between the gestures in the entries and phrasemes and to provide the necessary information for a detailed description of these. All the definitions, rules of usage and the established correlations are written in a semantic meta-language. Several classes of Russian gestural phrasemes were identified, including those phrasemes and idioms with semantic definitions close to those of the corresponding gestures, those phraseological units that have lost touch with the related gestures (although etymologically they are derived from gestures that have gone out of use), and phrasemes and idioms which have semantic traces or reflexes inherited from the meaning of the related gestures. The basic assumptions and practical considerations underlying the work were as follows. (1) To compare meanings one has to be able to state them. To state the meaning of a gesture or a phraseological expression, one needs a formal semantic meta-language of propositional character that represents the cognitive and mental aspects of the codes. (2) The semantic contrastive analysis of any semiotic codes used in person-to-person communication also requires a single semantic meta-language, i.e. a formal semantic language of description,. This language must be as linguistically and culturally independent as possible and yet must be open to interpretation through any culture and code. Another possible method of conducting comparative verbal-non-verbal semantic research is to work with different semantic meta-languages and semantic nets and to learn how to combine them, translate from one to another, etc. in order to reach a common basis for the subsequent comparison of units. (3) The practical work in defining phraseological units and organising the phraseological zone in the Dictionary of Russian Gestures unexpectedly showed that semantic links between gestures and gestural phrasemes are reflected not only in common semantic elements and syntactic structure of semantic propositions, but also in general and partial cognitive operations that are made over semantic definitions. (4) In comparative semantic analysis one should take into account different values and roles of inner form and image components in the semantic representation of non-verbal and verbal units. (5) For the most part, gestural phrasemes are direct semantic derivatives of gestures. The cognitive and formal techniques can be regarded as typological features for the future functional-semantic classification of gestural phrasemes: two phrasemes whose meaning can be obtained by the same cognitive or purely syntactic operations (or types of operations) over the meanings of the corresponding gestures, belong by definition to one and the same class. The nature of many cognitive operations has not been studied well so far, but the first steps towards its comprehension and description have been taken. The research identified 25 logically possible classes of relationships between a gesture and a gestural phraseme. The calculation is based on theoretically possible formal (set-theory) correlations between signifiers and signified of the non-verbal and verbal units. However, in order to examine which of them are realised in practice a complete semantic and lexicographic description of all (not only central) everyday emblems and gestural phrasemes is required and this unfortunately does not yet exist. Mr. Kreidlin suggests that the results of the comparative analysis of verbal and non-verbal units could also be used in other research areas such as the lexicography of emotions.

Language, Thought, Relativism, Nationalism: An Interdisciplinary Study

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions.

On the Integration of Smalltalk and Java

After decades of development in programming languages and programming environments, Smalltalk is still one of few environments that provide advanced features and is still widely used in the industry. However, as Java became prevalent, the ability to call Java code from Smalltalk and vice versa becomes important. Traditional approaches to integrate the Java and Smalltalk languages are through low-level communication between separate Java and Smalltalk virtual machines. We are not aware of any attempt to execute and integrate the Java language directly in the Smalltalk environment. A direct integration allows for very tight and almost seamless integration of the languages and their objects within a single environment. Yet integration and language interoperability impose challenging issues related to method naming conventions, method overloading, exception handling and thread-locking mechanisms. In this paper we describe ways to overcome these challenges and to integrate Java into the Smalltalk environment. Using techniques described in this paper, the programmer can call Java code from Smalltalk using standard Smalltalk idioms while the semantics of each language remains preserved. We present STX:LIBJAVA - an implementation of Java virtual machine within Smalltalk/X - as a validation of our approach

Add a Dash of Rhetoric, a Pinch of Technical Communication, a Handful of Pedagogy, and Mix Well: Cookbooks and Recipes as Instructional Texts, and What Domestic Texts from 1870 to 1935 Can Teach Us About Technical Communication

Through the use of rhetoric centered on authority and risk avoidance, scientific method has co-opted knowledge, especially women's everyday and experiential knowledge in the domestic sphere. This, in turn, has produced a profound affect on technical communication in the present day. I am drawing on rhetorical theory to study cookbooks and recipes for their contributions to changes in instructional texts. Using the rhetorical lenses of metis (cunning intelligence), kairos (timing and fitness) and mneme (memory), I examine the way in which recipes and cookbooks are constructed, used and perceived. This helps me uncover lost voices in history, the voices of women who used recipes, produced cookbooks and changed the way instructions read. Beginning with the earliest cookbooks and recipes, but focusing on the pivotal temporal interval of 1870-1935, I investigate the writing and rhetorical forces shaping instruction sets and domestic discourse. By the time of scientific cooking and domestic science, everyday and experiential knowledge were being excluded to make room for scientific method and the industrial values of the public sphere. In this study, I also assess how the public sphere, via Cooperative Extension Services and other government agencies, impacted the domestic sphere, further devaluing everyday knowledge in favor of the public scientific model. I will show how the changes in the production of food, cookbooks and recipes were related to changes in technical communication. These changes had wide rippling effects on the field of technical communication. By returning to some of the tenets and traditions of everyday and experiential knowledge, technical communication scholars, practitioners and instructors today can find new ways to encounter technical communication, specifically regarding the creation of instructional texts. Bringing cookbooks, recipes and everyday knowledge into the classroom and the field engenders a new realm of epistemological possibilities.

Pharmacovigilance of drug allergy and hypersensitivity using the ENDA-DAHD database and the GALEN platform. The Galenda project

Nonallergic hypersensitivity and allergic reactions are part of the many different types of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Databases exist for the collection of ADRs. Spontaneous reporting makes up the core data-generating system of pharmacovigilance, but there is a large under-estimation of allergy/hypersensitivity drug reactions. A specific database is therefore required for drug allergy and hypersensitivity using standard operating procedures (SOPs), as the diagnosis of drug allergy/hypersensitivity is difficult and current pharmacovigilance algorithms are insufficient. Although difficult, the diagnosis of drug allergy/hypersensitivity has been standardized by the European Network for Drug Allergy (ENDA) under the aegis of the European Academy of Allergology and Clinical Immunology and SOPs have been published. Based on ENDA and Global Allergy and Asthma European Network (GA(2)LEN, EU Framework Programme 6) SOPs, a Drug Allergy and Hypersensitivity Database (DAHD((R))) has been established under FileMaker((R)) Pro 9. It is already available online in many different languages and can be accessed using a personal login. GA(2)LEN is a European network of 27 partners (16 countries) and 59 collaborating centres (26 countries), which can coordinate and implement the DAHD across Europe. The GA(2)LEN-ENDA-DAHD platform interacting with a pharmacovigilance network appears to be of great interest for the reporting of allergy/hypersensitivity ADRs in conjunction with other pharmacovigilance instruments.

Soil property and management effects on grassland microbial communities across a latitudinal gradient in Germany

There is much interest in the identification of the main drivers controlling changes in the microbial community that may be related to sustainable land use. We examined the influence of soil properties and land-use intensity (N fertilization, mowing, grazing) on total phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) biomass, microbial community composition (PLFA profiles) and activities of enzymes involved in the C, N, and P cycle. These relationships were examined in the topsoil of grasslands from three German regions (Schorfheide-Chorin (SCH), Hainich-Dun (HAI), Schwabische Alb (ALB)) with different parent material. Differences in soil properties explained 60% of variation in PLFA data and 81% of variation in enzyme activities across regions and land-use intensities. Degraded peat soils in the lowland areas of the SCH with high organic carbon (OC) concentrations and sand content contained lower PLFA biomass, lower concentrations of bacterial, fungal, and arbuscular mycorrhizal PLFAs, but greater enzyme activities, and specific enzyme activities (per unit microbial biomass) than mineral soils in the upland areas of the HAI and ALB, which are finer textured, drier, and have smaller OC concentrations. After extraction of variation that originated from large-scale differences among regions and differences in land-use intensities between plots, soil properties still explained a significant amount of variation in PLFA data (34%) and enzyme activities (60%). Total PLFA biomass and all enzyme activities were mainly related to OC concentration, while relative abundance of fungi and fungal to bacterial ratio were mainly related to soil moisture. Land-use intensity (LUI) significantly decreased the soil C:N ratio. There was no direct effect of LUI on total PLFA biomass, microbial community composition, N and P cycling enzyme activities independent of study region and soil properties. In contrast, the activities and specific activities of enzymes involved in the C cycle increased significantly with LUI independent of study region and soil properties, which can have impact on soil organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling. Our findings demonstrate that microbial biomass and community composition as well as enzyme activities are more controlled by soil properties than by grassland management at the regional scale. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V: All rights reserved.

Gender and language in online job advertisements - a cross-cultural study

The aim of this project is to investigate the use of gender-fair language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Specifically, we are interested in whether the use of gender-fair language correlates with socio-economic rankings of gender equality and with structural features of a language. We decided to analyze online job advertisements, as they reflect common language use and can easily be compared across languages. Moreover, formulations in job advertisements have been shown to impact personnel selection via the way target groups are addressed and referred to. In the present study we examined to what extent job advertisements are formulated in a gender-fair way and how this correlates with factors such as language, culture as well as status and gender-typicality of the job advertised. The data consisted of job advertisements published online in four European countries which occupy different positions in socio-economic rankings of gender equality (World Economic Forum, 2011): Switzerland (10), Austria (rank 34), Poland (42), and Czech Republic (75). We randomly selected 100 job advertisements from four lines of business characterized by different proportions of female employees – steels/metals, science, restaurants/food services, and health care. The advertisements were analyzed with regard to the linguistic form of the job title and the remaining text; we also noted indicators of job status, reference to gender-typical traits, pictures of women/men and other information which might be relevant to the use of gender-fair language (e.g., equal opportunity policies). A first analysis of the data indicates that the phrasing of job titles is closely related to the gender-typicality of a profession. While mainly gender-fair forms are used in healthcare, masculine forms are used more often in the domain of steels and metals. Feminine forms only, however, are almost never used. Cultural differences as well as correlations with associated variables will be discussed.