Search results

Organization change (OC) is increasingly important in today's volatile world. Understanding OC is a growing emphasis of management and organization (M&O) research and the singular focus of OC scholarship and practice. We show how selected M&O theories inform OC at the organization level. These theoretical perspectives diverge on issues central to OC. We explore what these conceptual differences mean for OC study and practice going forward.

Since 1990, the number of empirical and applied research dealing with employee empowerment has proliferated. This article will examine four dimensions of power: various resources to influence the outcome of decision‐making; controlling access to those processes; through hegemonic process to legitimize power through culture and norms; and determining the limits of power. A critical perspective from other behavioral sciences will present various designs. Foucauldian Theory will challenge the devolution of power via prior research attempts. Contemporary research on organization culture and structure will be examined via the validation of six hypotheses. Organizational characteristics facilitating empowerment such as vision, openness and teamwork, discipline and control, support and security will be discussed, along with the impact of leadership on an empowered workforce. Psychological dimensions of empowerment: choice, competence, meaningfulness and progress are examined in addition to trust issues. Some conclusions and recommendations will integrate the diverse theories.

Perceptions of employment histories are important insofar as they influence future job prospects. Critically, in light of the current pandemic, wherein many individuals are likely to have unanticipated employment gaps and/or temporary work experiences, this exploratory study aims to seek a better understanding of the signal associated with temporary employment histories, which is particularly germane to individuals' employment trajectories and a successful labour market recovery.

Drawing primarily on signalling theory and using a simulated hiring decision experiment, the authors examined the perceptions of temporary employment histories, as well as the period effect of COVID-19, a major exogenous event, on the attitudes of fictitious jobseekers with standard, temporary and unemployment histories.

The authors find that prior to COVID-19 unemployed and temporary-work candidates were perceived less favourably as compared to applicants employed in a permanent job. During the COVID-19 pandemic, assessments of jobseekers with temporary employment histories were less critical and the previously negative signal associated with job-hopping reversed. This study’s third wave of data, which were collected post-COVID, showed that such perceptions largely dissipated, with the exception for those with a history of temporary work with different employers.

The paper serves as a reminder to check, insofar as possible, preconceived biases of temporary employment histories to avoid potential attribution errors and miss otherwise capable candidates.

This paper makes a unique and timely contribution by focussing and examining the differential effect of economic climate, pivoted by the COVID-19 pandemic, on perceptions of temporary employment histories.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

City identity is a distinct form of collective identity based on the perceived uniqueness and meanings of place, rather than group category and membership. A city’s identity is constructed over time through architecture, which involves three sign systems – material, visual, and rhetorical – and multiple institutional actors to communicate the city’s distinctiveness and identity. We compare Barcelona and Boston to examine the identity and meaning created and communicated by different groups of professionals, such as architects, city planners, international guide book writers, and local cultural critics, who perform the semiotic work of ­constructing city identity.

This paper aims to explore a paradoxical situation, asking whether it is possible to reconcile the immutable ledger known as blockchain with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), and more broadly privacy and data protection.

This paper combines doctrinal legal research examining the GDPR’s application and scope with case studies examining blockchain solutions from an archival theoretic perspective to answer several questions, including: What risks are blockchain solutions said to impose (or mitigate) for organizations dealing with data that is subject to the GDPR? What are the relationships between the GDPR principles and the principles of archival theory? How can these two sets of principles be aligned within a particular blockchain solution? How can archival principles be applied to blockchain solutions so that they support GDPR compliance?

This work will offer an initial exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of blockchain solutions for GDPR compliant information governance. It will present the disjunctures between GDPR requirements and some current blockchain solution designs and implementations, as well as discussing how solutions may be designed and implemented to support compliance. Immutability of information recorded on a blockchain is a differentiating positive feature of blockchain technology from the perspective of trusted exchanges of value (e.g. cryptocurrencies) but potentially places organizations at risk of non-compliance with GDPR if personally identifiable information cannot be removed. This work will aid understanding of how blockchain solutions should be designed to ensure compliance with GDPR, which could have significant practical implications for organizations looking to leverage the strengths of blockchain technology to meet their needs and strategic goals.

Some aspects of the social layer of blockchain solutions, such as law and business procedures, are also well understood. Much less well understood is the data layer, and how it serves as an interface between the social and the technical in a sociotechnical system like blockchain. In addition to a need for more research about the data/records layer of blockchains and compliance, there is a need for more information governance professionals who can provide input on this layer, both to their organizations and other stakeholders.

Managing personal data will continue to be one of the most challenging, fraught issues for information governance moving forward; given the fairly broad scope of the GDPR, many organizations, including those outside of the EU, will have to manage personal data in compliance with the GDPR. Blockchain technology could play an important role in ensuring organizations have easily auditable, tamper-resistant, tamper-evident records to meet broader organizational needs and to comply with the GDPR.

Because the GDPR professes to be technology-neutral, understanding its application to novel technologies such as blockchain provides an important window into the broader context of compliance in evolving information governance spaces.

The specific question of how GDPR will apply to blockchain information governance solutions is almost entirely novel. It has significance to the design and implementation of blockchain solutions for recordkeeping. It also provides insight into how well “technology-neutral” laws and regulations actually work when confronted with novel technologies and applications. This research will build upon significant bodies of work in both law and archival science to further understand information governance and compliance as we are shifting into the new GDPR world.

Integrated care models have shown to deliver efficient healthcare, but implementation has proven to be difficult. The Support Consultation is an integrated care model, which enables full integration by bundled payment, insurer involvement, predefined care pathways and strengthening of primary care. The purpose of this paper is to provide an indication of the improvements in healthcare delivery after implementation of this proposed model and to create a base for extension to similar interfaces between primary and secondary care.

A retrospective study was used to compare the effect on the number of referred patients with non-acute cardiac complaints and the cost effectiveness before and after implementation of the Support Consultation. Patients who previously would have been referred to the cardiologist were now discussed between general practitioner and cardiologist in a primary care setting.

The first consecutive 100 patients (age 55±16 years, male 48 percent), discussed in the Support Consultation, were analyzed. Implementation of the Support Consultation resulted in a net costs (program costs and referral costs) reduction of 61 percent compared with usual care. All involved parties were positive about the program.

The Support Consultation has the ability to provide more effective healthcare delivery and to reduce net costs. The setting of the current study can be used as example for other specialties in countries with a similar healthcare system.

This study provides the potential cost savings after implementation of an integrated care model, based on real-life data.

This paper considers how archival accounting records may support truth-telling about past atrocities during Australia's frontier wars.

The study examines two colonial accounting records – military muster payrolls and the ledger statements of a local tax fund – used during the British's punitive expeditions against the Aboriginal peoples of Sydney in 1816.

The accounting records reveal new information about the full scale of the campaign, the degree to which the violence was formally endorsed and acts of Aboriginal resistance. However, much of the human toll of the campaign remains obscured by the highly structured, monetary lens of financial records authored and archived by the British colonial regime.

Australia's First Nations have called for greater truth-telling about the frontier wars to enable meaningful reconciliation and political recognition of Indigenous sovereignty. This study highlights the potential role of accounting records as a resource for contemporary truth-telling processes.

The study contributes to the literature about the dark history of accounting by explicating genre features in the content, form and context of archival accounting records, which can both render past atrocities more visible as well as perpetrate invisibilities, ambiguities and silences.