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When in‐plant and college‐based courses are run for supervisors and managers, it is conventional to use a U‐shaped seating arrangement in the training room to promote participation and discussion. However, at each class session, people will tend to sit with the same companions habitually, which may be more comfortable, but less productive than if they sat with different people each time.

Based on several new concepts, this paper mathematically deduces a new model of general systems, namely, the structural model of general systems. By its mathematical analysis, the principles and laws of general systems can be mathematically achieved, which can not only help scientists achieve a better understanding and control of complex systems in nature and society but also be applied to solve particular scientific problems, and thus a problem‐oriented and mathematically expressed general systems theory, namely, the structural theory of general systems, would be achieved.

Describes issues relevant to multilevel systems and, as a particular case, living systems analysed from the entities point of view. As attributes, behaviours, sub‐systems, etc., entities are primitive terms. For this reason, in examining issues such as the influences between entities, look indirectly at issues referring to different levels in the system. This notion was also extended in considering the environment system and analysing the different relationships between the system and the environment system.

Begins with the Staff Report to the National Commission on Terrorist Attack on the United States, which indicates the methods used to trace, seize and freeze terrorist assets, and the informal methods used by al‐Qaeda to transfer money. Questions the amount of progress made since September 11 to freeze funds. Focuses on encryption technology and how it allows illegal use of the Internet in the form of cyber laundering and e‐cash, and on the move by terrorists into narcotics production and trafficking ‐ which is defined as nacre‐terrorism. Describes efforts to proscribe cyber crime, including cyber laundering and cyber terrorism, including controls on privacy and encryption. Shows how business corporations can become involved with terrorism, including a case study on tanzanite.

Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

Acute and chronic pain affects more Americans than heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. Conservative estimates suggest the total economic cost of pain in the United States is $600 billion, and more than half of this cost is due to lost productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. In addition, an escalating opioid epidemic in the United States and abroad spurred by a lack of safe and effective pain management has magnified challenges to address pain in the workforce, particularly the military. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the organizational antecedents and consequences of pain and prescription opioid misuse (POM). This chapter provides a brief introduction to pain processing and the biopsychosocial model of pain, emphasizing the relationship between stress, emotional well-being, and pain in the military workforce. We review personal and organizational risk and protective factors for pain, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, optimism, perceived organizational support, and job strain. Further, we discuss the potential adverse impact of pain on organizational outcomes, the rise of POM in military personnel, and risk factors for POM in civilian and military populations. Lastly, we propose potential organizational interventions to mitigate pain and provide the future directions for work, stress, and pain research.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

Hamming distance of a two bit strings u and v of length n is defined to be the number of positions of u and v with different digit. If G is a simple graph on n vertices and m edges and B is an edge–vertex incidence matrix of G, then every edge e of G can be labeled using a binary digit string of length n from the row of B which corresponds to the edge e. We discuss Hamming distance of two different edges of the graph G. Then, we present formulae for the sum of all Hamming distances between two different edges of G, particularly when G is a path, a cycle, and a wheel, and some composite graphs.

This study applies asymmetric rather than conventional symmetric analysis to advance theory in occupational psychology. The study applies systematic case-based analyses to model complex relations among conditions (i.e., configurations of high and low scores for variables) in terms of set memberships of managers. The study uses Boolean algebra to identify configurations (i.e., recipes) reflecting complex conditions sufficient for the occurrence of outcomes of interest (e.g., high versus low financial job stress, job strain, and job satisfaction). The study applies complexity theory tenets to offer a nuanced perspective concerning the occurrence of contrarian cases – for example, in identifying different cases (e.g., managers) with high membership scores in a variable (e.g., core self-evaluation) who have low job satisfaction scores and when different cases with low membership scores in the same variable have high job satisfaction. In a large-scale empirical study of managers (n = 928) in four (contextual) segments of the farm industry in New Zealand, this study tests the fit and predictive validities of set membership configurations for simple and complex antecedent conditions that indicate high/low core self-evaluations, job stress, and high/low job satisfaction. The findings support the conclusion that complexity theory in combination with configural analysis offers useful insights for explaining nuances in the causes and outcomes to high stress as well as low stress among farm managers. Some findings support and some are contrary to symmetric relationship findings (i.e., highly significant correlations that support main effect hypotheses).