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A discussion of call center agent work selection preferences is presented in the context of what is referred to herein as the accept–avoid decision. In call centers where agents are given autonomy to select calls from a shared queue for work without a standard routing mechanism, it is likely that each agent uses a different set of criteria and has different preferences which influence their decision to accept a call or avoid it. In order to understand such preferences, simple heuristics are developed and implemented into an additive linear model as an example to estimate the derived utility an agent may receive from the decision to accept a call. The game theoretic implications of such decision making by a group or team of agents are also discussed to illustrate the dilemma of the universally avoided call, and how agents may compete for acceptance or avoidance of particular calls.

In this chapter I explore how conflicting discursive claims made by the medical community are consequential for bariatric weight loss surgery patients. Bariatric surgery has become increasingly common in the United States since the 1990s, with over 177,000 Americans undergoing surgery in 2006. Despite the surgery's growing popularity, the US medical community does not wholeheartedly endorse the surgery. Rather, different members of the medical community espouse contradictory evaluations of weight loss surgery. I broadly characterize this intra-medical community controversy and, then, discuss how conflicting claims have helped shape the bariatric surgery industry's discursive conception of an “ideal patient.” Next, I analyze actual patients’ negotiations of the ideal patient archetype, and find that patients’ responses follow three paths: embracing the ideal, having a mixed response to the ideal, and strategically complying with the ideal. As patients are compelled to grapple with the ideal archetype in order to access surgery, I conclude that the ideal archetype acts as a discursive frame connecting individual patients to broad bariatric surgery discourses.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

We seek to expand the disability theoretical toolkits of higher education scholars to include frameworks that view disability as multivalent. We start by describing limitations scholars can encounter when employing traditional medical, social, and minority frameworks. Then, we draw upon: (1) the temporal and fluid understandings of disability in critical disability theory, (2) the value critical realism gives to the body, impairment, and the environment, and (3) the work of Deaf epistemologies to call attention to the varied communication methods disabled college students use to encourage the use of frameworks that promote intersectional understandings that are authentic to lived experiences. We extend scholars’ toolkits by encouraging the use of frameworks that value diverse human neurology and draw attention to the hegemonic dominance of Western thought. We conclude by discussing four implications and two limitations for higher education scholars.

This chapter considers time-differentiated airport noise surcharges that occur in addition to general noise fees at an airport. In practice, an essential problem of such surcharges may consist of setting the price for a social policy goal, such as airport noise reduction, by shifting a number of critical flights away from sensitive times-of-day in the presence of an additional, competing economic policy goal in terms of fostering the network hub function and connectivity of that airport. In such a case, additional noise surcharges aim at balancing the socioeconomic noise costs against economic prosperity, to achieve a net benefit for society by inducing a particular airline scheduling behavior, such as shifting non-hub-relevant flights only. As a result, they differ from the well-known economic concepts for the internalization of externalities. We address this problem by offering a shift from an economic welfare view to a business administration perspective with the airlines as stakeholders, in order to describe the different rationales that need to be accounted for when searching for a pricing scheme that achieves one of the distinct steering effects in terms of airline scheduling behavior. In addition, we offer a tentative, generic guideline to determine the appropriate dimension of time-differentiated noise surcharges depending on the steering effect.

This chapter explores the local narration of gendered experience of disasters in two iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) communities, Votua and Navala, both located in the Ba River catchment, Fiji. The methodology consisted of semi-formal interviews, talanoa, mapping sessions and journal entries from community members in Votua and Navala. Local narratives of post-disaster response and recovery in the aftermath of 2016 Tropical Cyclone Winston showed that women were not perceived as embodying a heightened vulnerability to disasters in comparison to men in either Votua or Navala. Rather perceptions of vulnerability were based on the experiences of those who physically struggled, such as people with disabilities, the elderly and those who had lost their homes. While gender roles and responsibilities underlay perceptions and gender relations, the roles and responsibilities were predominantly perceived as changing over time, either to a more shared sense of responsibilities or a shift from male responsibilities to female. This shift may lay the foundations for future changes in vulnerability and experiences towards disasters.