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Digitalization is changing organizations with positive and negative impacts such as increased autonomy on the one hand and increased surveillance and control on the other hand. In this context, new modes of control occur: in addition to managerial control, new modes of control are multi-directed, stemming from colleagues, customers and underlying algorithms. This paper investigates the interrelation of autonomy and new modes of control in digital work contexts from the workers’ perspectives.

Empirical data are based on a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative interviews with 25 and a quantitative questionnaire with 127 workers from urban food logistics organizations in Germany.

The results show that new modes of control are relevant for work engagement in digital work contexts: managerial and algorithm control are perceived as support. Peer and customer control are perceived as coercion.

Besides investigating the interrelation of autonomy and control and differentiating new modes of control, our study also makes important contributions to the perception of control as support and coercion.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate efforts to manage institutional complexity in a state-owned enterprise, the roles of explicated values in these efforts and how these values interact with each other and other influential management controls.

Exploratory case study in StateEnt, a state-owned enterprise that faces institutional complexity. The analysis is based on interviews, observations and documents and concepts from the management control literature and institutional logics are applied.

Findings from this study suggest that a structural differentiation have separated two logics in different departments and two of the explicated values have become symbols of these logics taking on various roles in negotiations. Tension between the departments is heightened because the departments legitimize logic enactment through mobilizing different socio-technical dyads of management control. The division of responsibility between these departments still ensures that they need to collaborate and make compromises. The study also finds that exogenously imposed constraints have a significant influence on organizational activities, which is further strengthened due to internally developed management controls embedded in the same logic.

The study contributes with deeper understanding of values as control, and how these interact with other control forms to influence organizational activity. Herein, the importance of regulatory controls in state-owned enterprises is also highlighted. A limitation of this study is the limited size of the organization under investigation.

The explicit emphasis on values as a control in studies on management control issues in institutionally complex environments is underemphasized in the literature.

This paper aims to examine the recommendation system of the video-sharing website YouTube to study how control of users is effected on online platforms.

This paper conceptualises algorithmic systems as protocols – technological and social infrastructures that both facilitate and govern interactions between autonomous actors (Galloway and Thacker, 2004, 2007). It adopts a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002) to study not only the formal, technological systems of the platform but also the systems as they were made sense of, understood and enacted upon by actors. It relies both on information as revealed by the organisation itself, as well as discussions between lay users in online forums and press coverage.

The results of this study indicate that the ways in which platforms selectively facilitate interactions between users constitute a form of control. While maintaining the appearance of an open and neutral marketplace, interactions on the platform are in fact highly structured. The system relies on the surveillance of user interactions to rapidly identify and propagate marketable contents, so as to maximise user “engagement” and ad revenue. The systems place few demands or restrictions on individual users, instead control is effected in a probabilistic fashion, over the population of users as a whole, so as to, in aggregate, accomplish organisational goal.

This paper contributes to the literature on accounting and control practices in online spaces, by extending the notion of control beyond overt rankings and evaluations, to the underlying technical and social infrastructures that facilitate and shape interactions.

The paper addresses the question of whether Crown land managed by local authorities in the New South Wales (NSW) local government system should be recognised as assets on municipal balance sheets.

The paper provides a synoptic review of the literature on accounting for public goods assets followed by a critical analysis of the official requirements of the NSW government on the recognition of Crown land.

The NSW government holds that Crown land managed by local councils should be recognised as an asset on council books. However, following an assessment of the problem through the analytical prism of financial accounting, it is argued that councils do not possess control over Crown land and that such land should thus not be recognised by councils.

The paper covers the legal and accounting framework applicable to NSW local government. However, it has broader implications for other local government systems with similar institutional and legislative foundations, such as other Australian states, New Zealand and South Africa, and these implications are highlighted in the paper.

It is argued that NSW government policymakers should re-consider the requirement for Crown land to be recognised on councils' books. Local authorities would then be able to save money and time on external auditing, management of land asset registers and the mandatory valuation of land.

Although Crown land shares some of the characteristics of other public good assets, unique accounting challenges arise due to the existence of a market in which such land could be traded not by councils, but by its legal owner (the Crown). In financial accounting, legal ownership is not considered as the main criterion over assets. However, the authors argue that for Crown land vested with councils, it becomes a critical factor in decision making.

Induction heating applications aided by power electronic control have become very attractive in the recent past. For cooking applications, power electronics circuits are very suitable to feed power to multi loads with an appropriate control technique. The purpose of this paper is to develop a three leg inverter to feed power to three loads simultaneously and independently.

Pulse density modulation control technique is used to control the output power independently with constant switching frequency.

Multi-load handling converter with independent power control is achieved with reduced number of switching devices (two switches/per load) with simple control strategy.

The proposed system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink, and the thermal analysis is carried out in COMSOL multi-physics software. The hardware realisation is performed for a 1 kW prototype with 20 kHz switching frequency and 10 kHz pulse density modulation frequency. PIC16F877A microcontroller is used to validate the experimental results for various values of control signals (D_PDM). The simulation and experimental results are in good agreement and validates the developed system.

This paper aims to present an efficient and simplified proportional-integral/proportional-integral and derivative controller design method for the higher-order stable and integrating processes with time delay in the cascade control structure (CCS).

Two approaches based on model matching in the frequency domain have been proposed for tuning the controllers of the CCS. The first approach is based on achieving the desired load disturbance rejection performance, whereas the second approach is proposed to achieve the desired setpoint performance. In both the approaches, matching between the desired model and the closed-loop system with the controller is done at a low-frequency point. Model matching at low-frequency points yields a linear algebraic equation and the solution to these equations yields the controller parameters.

Simulations have been conducted on several examples covering high order stable, integrating, double integrating processes with time delay and nonlinear continuous stirred tank reactor. The performance of the proposed scheme has been compared with recently reported work having modified cascade control configurations, sliding mode control, model predictive control and fractional order control. The performance of both the proposed schemes is either better or comparable with the recently reported methods. However, the proposed method based on desired load disturbance rejection performance outperforms among all these schemes.

The main advantages of the proposed approaches are that they are directly applicable to any order processes, as they are free from time delay approximation and plant order reduction. In addition to this, the proposed schemes are capable of handling a wide range of different dynamical processes in a unified way.

This study aims to design a multivariate control chart that improves the applicability of the traditional Hotelling T² chart. This new type of multivariate control chart displays sufficient information about the states and relationships of the variables in the production process. It is used to make better quality control decisions during the production process.

Multivariate data are collected at an equal time interval and are represented by nodes of the graph. The edges connecting the nodes represent the sequence of operation. Each node is plotted on the control chart based on their Hotelling T² statistical distance. The changing behavior of each pair of input and output nodes is studied by the neural network. A case study from the cement industry is conducted to validate the control chart.

The finding of this paper is that the points and lines in the classic Hotelling T² chart are effectively substituted by nodes and edges of the graph respectively. Nodes and edges have dimension and color and represent several attributes. As a result, this control chart displays much more information than the traditional Hotelling T² control chart. The pattern of the plot represents whether the process is normal or not. The effect of the sequence of operation is visible in the control chart. The frequency of the happening of nodes is recognized by the size of nodes. The decision to change the product feature is assisted by finding the shortest path between nodes. Moreover, consecutive nodes have different behaviors, and that behavior change is recognized by neural network.

Modifying the classical Hotelling T² control chart by integrating with the concept of graph theory and neural network is new of its kind.

Given the growing prevalence of gun control policies in service settings, this study aims to investigate how the adoption of a gun control policy by a service businesses influences consumers’ evaluations of the service businesses.

Three experiments were conducted to examine how the adoption of a gun control policy by a service businesses influences consumers’ brand favorability of that service businesses and how value congruence (i.e. the alignment between a consumer’s own personal values and perceptions of the brand’s values) is the underlying mechanism.

This study documents several major findings. First, the authors find that the adoption of a gun control policy by a service businesses increases consumers’ brand favorability. Second, the authors highlight a boundary condition to this effect, such that a gun control policy actually decreases consumers’ brand favorability for people high (vs low) in support for gun rights. Third, the authors show that value congruence is the psychological process underlying these effects. Fourth, the authors generalize the focal effects to a real-world brand and demonstrate that the adoption of a gun control policy increases brand favorability for consumers low (vs high) in patronage behavior of the brand. Finally, the authors find that a pioneer brand strategy in the adoption of a gun control policy significantly increases brand favorability, whereas a follower brand strategy in the adoption of such a policy is less effective.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to provide critical insight to service businesseses as to how their position regarding guns influences consumers’ evaluations of the service businesses.

Fuzzy-based metaheuristic algorithm is used to optimize the fuzzy controllers for the nonlinear level control system subject to uncertainty specially in the main actuator that has lost effectiveness (LOE). To optimize the fuzzy controller, type-1 harmonic search (HS) and interval type-2 (HS) will be used.

The type-1 and type-2 fuzzy-based HS algorithms are designed for optimization of fuzzy controllers for Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) applications, and this research proposes a fuzzy-based HS metaheuristic method. The performance of a fuzzy logic-based HS algorithm applied to a nonlinear two-tank level control process with a main actuator that has lost effectiveness (LOE) and also the same controller will be tested on DC motor angular position control with and without noise.

The key contribution of this work is the discovery of the best approach for generating an optimal vector of values for the fuzzy controller's membership function optimization. This is done in order to improve the controller's performance, bringing the process value of the two-tank level control process closer to the target process value (set point). It is worth noting that the type-1 fuzzy controller that has been optimized is an interval type-2 fuzzy system, which can handle more uncertainty than a type-1 fuzzy system.

The type-1 and type-2 fuzzy-based HS algorithms are designed for optimization of fuzzy controllers for FTC applications, and this research proposes a fuzzy-based HS metaheuristic method. The performance of a fuzzy logic-based HS algorithm applied to a nonlinear two-tank level control process with a main actuator that has LOE will be tested on DC motor angular position control with noise. Two nonlinear uncertain processes are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Traffic signal control is one of the oldest application areas of fuzzy sets in transportation. In general, fuzzy control is found to be superior in complex problems with multi-objective decisions. In traffic signal control, several traffic flows compete for the same time and space, and different priorities are often set to different traffic flows or vehicle groups

The public transport priorities are a very important part of the effective traffic signal control. Normally, the public transport priorities are programmed by using special algorithms, which are tailor-made for each intersection. The experiences have proved that this kind of algorithms can be very effective if some compensation algorithms and the traffic-actuated control mode are used. We believe that using the fuzzified public transport priority algorithms, the measures of effectiveness of traffic signal control can be even better. In this paper, our fuzzy control algorithm of the public transport priorities will be presented.