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Sri Lanka, as an island located near the southern tip of India and the Asian Continent and in the core area of the South Asian Monsoon has developed its own unique forms of Hydraulic Civilization. Sri Lanka is covered with a network of thousands of man-made lakes and ponds, known locally as “tanks,” numbering more than 25,000. Some are in the functional mode and others still remaining abandoned type. Many are thousands of years old and almost all show a high degree of sophistication in their construction and design. Sri Lanka's tanks are fascinatingly distributed in the cascades of tanks one below the other conserving water and soil and most effectively, acting as buffers against droughts while giving due consideration to maintaining the ecosystem equilibrium.

Expansion through mergers and acquisitions (M&As) continues to be a viable international strategy utilised by industrial firms. A striking feature of this is that global giant firms lead the M&A wave and generate an unimaginable impact on relatively small and weak firms across sectors and even nations. There seems to be a kind of ‘cascade effect’ between the industrial consolidations in these areas. A combined cascade model developed in this paper explains that, the power imbalance caused by the degree of consolidation of the players within a firm's value system determines the movement and direction of the ‘cascade effect’. With the existence of such effect, M&A will be a mutually interdependent, dynamic, reversible and endless process among industries.

The study addresses the mechanism of how cultural dimensions influence the different dimensions of emotional intelligence. Building on the cascading model described by Joseph and Newman (2010), we extend our previous findings (Gunkel, Schlaegel, & Engle, 2014) by exploring the influence of cultural dimensions on a cascading model of emotional intelligence.

We use survey data from 2,067 business students in nine countries (China, Colombia, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States), representing 8 of the 11 cultural clusters identified by Ronen and Shenkar (2013).

We find that uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation have a positive influence on self-emotional appraisal, which in turn influence regulation of emotion, which then has a positive influence on the use of emotion. At the same time, others’ emotional appraisal mediates the relationship between all cultural dimensions except power distance and use of emotion. We also find that uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation directly influence the use of emotion, suggesting a partial mediation effect.

Our findings have to be interpreted in the light of the limitations of our approach owing to the cross-sectional study design and the limited generalizability of the sample.

We contribute to the existing literature by examining the mechanism through which culture influences the different facets of emotional intelligence and whether and how the different facets affect each other. The proposed influence of culture on a cascading model of emotional intelligence provides a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the mechanism and the pathways in which culture affects emotional intelligence.

We follow Dr. Luc Verburgh through his first two years as CEO of Wellant College. He arrived there in the middle of a major strategic change and his mandate was to implement a change away from a traditional learning model to a new one. His first task was to define, with the executive team, the college's overall vision and strategy. Once that was accomplished, he turned his attention to the task of cascading both the vision and the strategy down throughout the organization and quickly implementing them. He achieved this by focusing on four areas: (1) making sure that the right people were on the team; (2) changing Wellant College's organizational structures and processes to promote communication and to manage performance; (3) communicating clearly and transparently throughout the entire process to all of the stakeholders about the changes taking place and the evolution of the strategy, seeking their views when appropriate; and (4) gradually changing from a top-down approach to one that had clearer guidelines and regulations, as well as allowing, even encouraging, more local ownership.

Online social networks are increasingly important venues for businesses to promote their products and image. However, information propagation in online social networks is significantly more complicated compared to traditional transmission media such as newspaper, radio, and television. In this chapter, we will discuss research on modeling and forecasting diffusion of virally marketed content in social networks. Important aspects include the content and its presentation, the network topology, and transmission dynamics. Theoretical models, algorithms, and case studies of viral marketing will be explored.

Purpose — The overall quality of an information retrieval system depends on many different aspects of the system and its users' information seeking behaviour, such as the speed of the system, the user interface, the query language and the features provided by the engine. One of the most important aspects is the effectiveness of the retrieval system, i.e. its ability to retrieve items that are relevant to the information need of an end user. This chapter focuses on methods for measuring effectiveness, in particular focusing on recent work that more directly models the utility of an engine to its users.

Methodology/approach — We discuss traditional approaches to effectiveness evaluation based on test collections, then transition to approaches based on test collections along with explicit models of user interaction with search results. We contrast this with approaches for which the user is ‘in the loop’, such as user studies and online evaluations.

Research limitations/implications — If it were possible to model users perfectly, we could directly estimate the utility of a search engine to its users; this would undoubtedly have a transformative effect on information retrieval and web search research. In practice, this goal will never be achievable because users exhibit far too much variability in how they approach the search engine, and furthermore provide valuable feedback that models and simulations cannot provide. Nevertheless, better models of user interaction will help develop better web search engines for a wider variety of tasks more rapidly.

Originality/value of paper — This is the first work that surveys recent work on user model-based evaluation and places it in a context with traditional evaluation based on the Cranfield paradigm.

In this chapter, the authors weave together a set of ideas that lead us closer to a more general institutional theory – one that embraces multiple levels of analysis, including the micro-level. The authors build on the roots of micro-institutional thought – including phenomenological and ethnomethodological underpinnings – as well as very active, social-psychological research areas that address key mechanisms in institutionalization. Among these, the authors discuss the important roles of legitimacy, trust, social influence, and routines. There is great promise for micro-institutional inquiry to make an integral contribution to institutional theory by bringing processes and people back in.

One crucial but sometimes overlooked fact regarding the difference between observation in the cross-section and observation over time must be stated before proceeding further. Tempting though it is to draw conclusions about the dynamics of a process from cross-sectional observations taken as a snapshot of that process, it is a fallacious practice except under a very precise condition that is highly unlikely to obtain in processes of interest to the social scientist. That condition is known as ergodicity.