Relación entre cultura corporativa y desempeño: Una caracterización desde las ciencias de la complejidad

La siguiente monografía busca dar una mirada descriptiva a la cultura corporativa y a su relación con el desempeño organizacional desde la perspectiva de las ciencias de la complejidad. Inicialmente presenta una mirada general de la definición de cultura y caracteriza los sistemas complejos para luego proceder a examinar como algunos fenómenos de la complejidad se ven reflejados en la cultura, revisando la propuesta de Dolan et al, que proponen los valores como atractores en el desempeño. Adicionalmente se examinan distintas formas y definiciones de desempeño organizacional y se identifican algunos estudios que apuntan a la correlación entre culturas fuertes y desempeño. Sin embargo Gordon & DiTomaso concluyen que no se comprende muy bien cómo funciona la relación más allá de la correlación. Finalmente se concluye que la complejidad presenta una opción para explicar cómo puede funcionar la relación entre cultura y desempeño a través de los valores como un elemento cultural que lleva a la emergencia. Sin embargo queda la incógnita sobre la aplicabilidad de estrategias para implementar lo estudiado en organizaciones y en el uso de herramientas de simulación para profundizar en la investigación

Inteligencia emocional y afrontamiento del estrés

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es realizar una revisión teórica de los estudios que han elaborado un análisis acerca de la Inteligencia Emocional con la capacidad para afrontar situaciones generadoras de estrés. Los diferentes estudios muestran que niveles altos en Inteligencia Emocional se relacionan con estrategias de afrontamiento basadas en el análisis y resolución de conflictos, mientras que niveles bajos de inteligencia emocional se relacionan con estrategias de afrontamiento basadas en la evitación, la superstición, y la resistencia al cambio. La evidencia que arrojan los estudios indican que la inteligencia emocional es fundamental en el autocontrol emocional y en la habilidad de adaptación de los individuos para afrontar situaciones generadoras de estrés.

On intentional and social agents with graded attitudes

La principal contribución de esta Tesis es la propuesta de un modelo de agente BDI graduado (g-BDI) que permita especificar una arquitetura de agente capaz de representar y razonar con actitudes mentales graduadas. Consideramos que una arquitectura BDI más exible permitirá desarrollar agentes que alcancen mejor performance en entornos inciertos y dinámicos, al servicio de otros agentes (humanos o no) que puedan tener un conjunto de motivaciones graduadas. En el modelo g-BDI, las actitudes graduadas del agente tienen una representación explícita y adecuada. Los grados en las creencias representan la medida en que el agente cree que una fórmula es verdadera, en los deseos positivos o negativos permiten al agente establecer respectivamente, diferentes niveles de preferencias o de rechazo. Las graduaciones en las intenciones también dan una medida de preferencia pero en este caso, modelan el costo/beneficio que le trae al agente alcanzar una meta. Luego, a partir de la representación e interacción de estas actitudes graduadas, pueden ser modelados agentes que muestren diferentes tipos de comportamiento. La formalización del modelo g-BDI está basada en los sistemas multi-contextos. Diferentes lógicas modales multivaluadas se han propuesto para representar y razonar sobre las creencias, deseos e intenciones, presentando en cada caso una axiomática completa y consistente. Para tratar con la semántica operacional del modelo de agente, primero se definió un calculus para la ejecución de sistemas multi-contextos, denominado Multi-context calculus. Luego, mediante este calculus se le ha dado al modelo g-BDI semántica computacional. Por otra parte, se ha presentado una metodología para la ingeniería de agentes g-BDI en un escenario multiagente. El objeto de esta propuesta es guiar el diseño de sistemas multiagentes, a partir de un problema del mundo real. Por medio del desarrollo de un sistema recomendador en turismo como caso de estudio, donde el agente recomendador tiene una arquitectura g-BDI, se ha mostrado que este modelo es valioso para diseñar e implementar agentes concretos. Finalmente, usando este caso de estudio se ha realizado una experimentación sobre la flexibilidad y performance del modelo de agente g-BDI, demostrando que es útil para desarrollar agentes que manifiesten conductas diversas. También se ha mostrado que los resultados obtenidos con estos agentes recomendadores modelizados con actitudes graduadas, son mejores que aquellos alcanzados por los agentes con actitudes no-graduadas.

Counting Her Dresses and other plays

Counting Her Dresses and other plays, devised by Lib Taylor, is a short, mixed-media, promenade performance based on theatre writings by Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein was an American writer who lived in Paris for most of her adult life and was a significant figure in the development of early twentieth century modernism. She was an artists’ patron and one of the first collectors of paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne and others. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry and criticism, as well as a number of very short ‘plays’ and opera libretti. Even though her plays are very rarely performed they have been very influential in the development of avant-garde theatre. The performance juxtaposes a soundcape of voices, live performance, an ‘exhibition’ of paintings and mediated images projected onto and across the space to evoke Stein’s sense of theatre as a place of experience and emotion, not as a place of story and action. The performance comprises five theatre fragments which have been combined in a collage that alludes to the experimental art that Stein promoted.

Ashanti

This was a theatre performance of the first English translation of Aszantka (Ashanti), written by Polish playwright Wlodzimierz Perzynski in 1906. Dr Teresa Murjas is the translator, designer and director. The performance took place in Bob Kayley Studio, University of Reading and at the Polish Theatre in Hammersmith, London.

Prêt-à-Médiatiser by House of POLLYFIBRE

Prêt-à-Médiatiser by House of POLLYFIBRE is a performance/film that takes the fashion show catwalk as a site for exploration, with a focus on the dialogue between liveness and mediatisation. The performance showcases a clothing collection that has been designed to be documented and thus is challenged in the context of the live event. Motivated by the 2-dimensionality and biased perspective of mediated images such as magazine photography, social network profiles images and the surfaces of digital interfaces, the garments are one sided and obstruct the models in their attempt to play out familiar fashion poses, unless they align themselves 'correctly' for the lense. There is material metaphor and wordplay throughout, for example the clothing pieces are made from interfacing fabrics that are physically cut, pasted and layered to create the rigid flat silhouettes. The performance is accompanied by live sound created by tools of the fashion industry (including scissors and camera clicks) that have been adapted and amplified to be used as instruments. The audience and press are invited to document the live event and the subsequent film is made using footage collated from the crew, the audience and the official press

Slideshow by POLLYFIBRE

A live work where digital and analogue media collide. This work uses the Internet as a central point of departure in that the script is taken from the Wikipedia entry for the word 'slideshow'. Words are randomly extracted and transferred onto photographic 35mm slide to be projected with analogue carousel slide projectors taking the audience into a visual wordplay, from Google to PowerPoint presentation. The sound of projectors is manipulated gradually into a clashing, confrontational, digital/analogue crescendo. 'Slideshow' investigates how information is sourced, navigated and considered in a culture of accelerating mediation. It posits the notion of a post-digital era in which we are increasingly faced with challenging questions of authenticity and authority.

Surviving Objects

Surviving Objects (2012) is a devised multi-media practice-as-research performance based on extensive interviews conducted with my elderly mother and recorded on a hand-held device. Our conversations concern her experiences as a child refugee following violent deportation by the Soviet Army from Eastern Poland to Siberia (1941), and her subsequent route, via Persia, to a British-run refugee camp in Northern Rhodesia, where she remained for 6 years before arriving in the UK. In order to aid my mother’s reflections, our recorded conversations focus on the objects remaining from that period in her life – my ‘inheritance’. The material presence of this handful of objects is central to the ninety-minute performance. Surviving Objects constitutes my attempt to locate a theatrical form through which to root/re-route this engagement with my mother’s marginalised voice. The end-on performance haptically navigates themes of intimacy and failing memory – navigates, indeed, my constantly shifting relationship with my mother. It searches for new cross-medial pathways along which her experience, and my experience of her, can play-out. Surviving Objects involves: 1. live performance (two silent female actors handling/presenting my mother’s objects); 2. Film (two synchronously-playing, large-scale projections exploring the objects by means of a highly-magnifying macro lens); 3. Pre-recorded sound (my mother’s voice, taken from our recorded interviews, which were conducted in Polish, with my own verbal contribution meticulously editorially excised from those conversations); 4. My translation of her stories (appearing periodically as written text that ‘overlays’ - rather than sub- or surtitles - the projected imagery).

'Eden Cinema' by Marguerite Duras

Duras’s theatre work has been profoundly neglected by UK theatre academics and practitioners, and Eden Cinema has almost no performance history in Britain. My project asked three interconnected research questions: how developing the performance contributes to understanding Duras’s theatre and specifically Eden Cinema’s problems of performability; how multimedia performance emphasising mediated sound and the live body reconfigures memory, autobiography, storytelling, gender and racial identity; how to locate a performance style appropriate for Durasian narratives of displacement and death which reflect the discontinuous and mutable form of Duras’s ‘texte/film/théâtre’. Drawing on my research interests in gender, post-colonial hybridity and performed deconstruction, I focused my staging decisions on the discontinuities and ambivalences of the text. I addressed performability by avoiding the temptation to resolve the strange ellipses in the text and instead evoked the text’s imperfect and fragmented memories, and its uncertain spatial and temporal locations, by means of a fluid theatrical form. The mise-en-scène represented imagined and remembered spaces simultaneously, and co-existing historical moments. The performance style counterpointed live and mediated action and audio-visual forms. A complex through-composed soundscape, comprising voice-over, sound and music, became a key means for evoking overlapping temporalities, interconnected narratives and fragmented memories that were dispersed across the performance. The disempowerment of the mother figure and the silent indigenous servant in the text was demonstrated through their spatial centrality but physical stillness. The servant’s colonial subaltern identity was paralleled and linked with the mother’s disenfranchisement through their proxemic relationships. I elicited a performance style which evoked ‘characters’, whose being was deferred across different regimes of reality and who ‘haunted’ the stage rather than inhabited it. I developed the project further in the additional written outcomes and presentations, and the subsequent performance of Savannah Bay where problems of performability intensify until embodiment is almost erased except via voice.

A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards

A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards is an instructional performance piece based on a corporate manual from 1960. The pamphlet is focused on the time necessary for the accomplishment of minute labour procedures in the office, from the depressing and releasing of typewriter keys to the opening and closing of filing cabinet drawers. In the performance, seven costumed performers represent the different levels of management and employment while performing the actions described in the guide, accompanied by a live musical score. There has been much discussion of the changes to work in the west following the decline of post-Fordist service sector jobs. These increasingly emphasise the specificity of employees’ knowledge and cognitive skill. However, this greater flexibility and creativity at work has been accompanied by an opposite trajectory. The proletarisation of white collar work has given rise to more bureaucracy, target assessment and control for workers in previously looser creative professions, from academia to the arts. The midcentury office is the meeting point of these cultures, where the assembly line efficiency management of the factory meets the quantifying control of the knowledge economy. A Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards explores the survival of one regime into its successor following the lines of combined and uneven development that have turned the emancipatory promise of immaterial labour into the perma-temp hell of the cognitariat. The movement is accompanied by a score of guitar, bass and drums, the componenets of the rock ‘n’ roll music that rose from the car factories of the motor city and the cotton fields of the southern states to represent the same junction of expression and control.

'The Mistress'(or 'Miss Maliczewska') by Gabriela Zapolska. Translated, designed and directed by Teresa Murjas

'The Mistress (or 'Miss Maliczewska') by Gabriela Zapolska Translated, designed and directed by Teresa Murjas Performed at University of Reading (5 - 8 December 2008, 5 public performances) Polish Theatre (POSK), London (25 - 27 January 2009, 4 public performances)

'The Morality of Mrs Dulska' by Gabriela Zapolska. Translated and directed by Teresa Murjas.

The Morality of Mrs. Dulska by Gabriela Zapolska. Translated and directed by Teresa Murjas. Performed at University of Reading (3 - 6 December 2003, 5 public performances) Polish Theatre (POSK), London (17 - 19 January 2004, 4 public performances)

'Four of Them' by Gabriela Zapolska. Translated and directed by Teresa Murjas.

'Four of Them' by Gabriela Zapolska. Translated and directed by Teresa Murjas. Performed at University of Reading (6 - 9 December 2006, 5 public performances) Polish Theatre (POSK), London (15 - 17 February 2007, 4 public performances) Łódź International Theatre Festival (17 - 18 April 2007)