Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine the life and work of Frank Gilbreth using a critical biographical approach to draw connections between his life experiences and the major contributions he made to management history.

The research design is critical biography. First, a biography is provided that reveals critical incidents from his childhood, his early career before marriage, his life after his marriage and his key personality traits. Gilbreth’s major contributions to management thought are then considered in context of his biography.

Although Frank Gilbreth is recalled for his contributions to management history through his work in advancing efficiency through motion studies, he should likewise be credited for his foresight of management theories related to the human element in organizations. The major influences on Gilbreth’s career include Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Taylor.

A limitation of critical biography is that researchers cannot address causality but, rather, are focused on drawing connections between life experiences and significant accomplishments.

Critical biography can illuminate theory and practice by providing greater clarity by examining concepts in depth and in context. The authors situate Frank Gilbreth’s work in the context of his lived experiences.

Health scientists and urban planners have long been interested in the influence that the built environment has on the physical activities in which we engage, the environmental hazards we face, the kinds of amenities we enjoy, and the resulting impacts on our health. However, it is widely recognized that the extent of this influence, and the specific cause-and-effect relationships that exist, are still relatively unclear. Recent reviews highlight the need for more individual-level data on daily activities (especially physical activity) over long periods of time linked spatially to real-world characteristics of the built environment in diverse settings, along with a wide range of personal mediating variables. While capturing objective data on the built environment has benefited from wide-scale availability of detailed land use and transport network databases, the same cannot be said of human activity. A more diverse history of data collection methods exists for such activity and continues to evolve owing to a variety of quickly emerging wearable sensor technologies. At present, no “gold standard” method has emerged for assessing physical activity type and intensity under the real-world conditions of the built environment; in fact, most methods have barely been tested outside of the laboratory, and those that have tend to experience significant drops in accuracy and reliability. This paper provides a review of these diverse methods and emerging technologies, including biochemical, self-report, direct observation, passive motion detection, and integrated approaches. Based on this review and current needs, an integrated three-tiered methodology is proposed, including: (1) passive location tracking (e.g., using global positioning systems); (2) passive motion/biometric tracking (e.g., using accelerometers); and (3) limited self-reporting (e.g., using prompted recall diaries). Key development issues are highlighted, including the need for proper validation and automated activity-detection algorithms. The paper ends with a look at some of the key lessons learned and new opportunities that have emerged at the crossroads of urban studies and health sciences.

We do have a vision for a world in which people can walk to shops, school, friends' homes, or transit stations; in which they can mingle with their neighbors and admire trees, plants, and waterways; in which the air and water are clean; and in which there are parks and play areas for children, gathering spots for teens and the elderly, and convenient work and recreation places for the rest of us. (Frumkin, Frank, & Jackson, 2004, p. xvii)

Despite advances in Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) scholarship and practice, ESE has not yet contributed to mitigate the sustainability-related problems it is meant to remedy. As part of an explanation, some scholars have argued that current ESE scholarship and practice overemphasizes intellectual and neglects (intra-)personal competencies as envisaged learning outcomes of ESE learning programs and activities. To date, however, such personal competencies have not been systematically specified in terms of the challenges they are meant to respond to. This paper aims to derive personal competencies from an analysis of inner challenges individuals face when engaging with the cause of sustainable consumption.

The study is conceptual and proceeds in two steps: In the first step, it analyzes existing research on challenges individuals experience when intending to change their consumer behavior and engaging in consumption-related learning activities. In a second step, a set of personal competencies for sustainable consumption are derived from the analysis of challenges. Based on the set of competencies, suggestions for future research empirically corroborating the reflections of this paper are made.

The discussion of challenges indicates that both sustainable consumption and consumption-related learning activities can come along with a series of affective-motivational challenges. In contrast to established competency frameworks, personal competencies emphasize the importance of affective-motivational learning outcomes instead of intellectual ones. They are defined here as abilities, proficiencies or skills related to inner states and processes that can be considered necessary to engage with the cause of sustainability. Personal competencies responding to the inner challenges of engaging with sustainable consumption include ethics, self-awareness, emotional resilience, self-care, access to and cultivation of ethical qualities and mindsets for sustainability.

Given that this paper is conceptual, further research is needed to empirically inquire into the importance of personal competencies for sustainable consumption and corroborate the provided reflections. Furthermore, the study has not responded to some of the concerns a few ESE experts have expressed concerning the concept of (intra-)personal competencies more generally. To address these concerns, future research should be dedicated to empirically validating and operationalizing personal competencies, eventually leading to tools allowing for a systematic assessment of these competencies. Based on such assessment tools, pedagogical formats should be elaborated and evaluated with regard to their potential to stimulate personal sustainability competencies.

The concept of personal competencies explicitly acknowledges that current unsustainability is associated with the experience of inner, affective-motivational challenges. ESE learning programs and activities should prepare learners for these challenges. However, a specification of these inner challenges and corresponding personal competencies has not yet been undertaken. The set of personal competencies outlined in this paper can serve as a first starting point for specifying personal sustainability competencies and makes a case why their consideration is important when it comes to designing and evaluating ESE learning programs and activities.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the working of the Ombudsman offices in six developing democracies in the Commonwealth Caribbean in order to assess/evaluate the degree or extent of effectiveness of these offices. It aims to look at them from both contemporary and evolutionary perspectives. Although it focuses on the Commonwealth Caribbean, some references to other parts of the world are also made for a better and comparative understanding of the Ombudsman institution.

The paper is based mainly on archival research. Original/primary as well as secondary sources – old, recent and contemporary – have been used. Random interviews and observation have also been useful sources of information.

On the one hand, this study identifies various factors and related issues that make the performance of the Ombudsman institution difficult and problematic in the Commonwealth Caribbean; and, on the other, it also identifies some remedial measures for effectively dealing with these problems. Although the Ombudsman office has a number of inadequacies, it plays a fairly useful role in protecting and promoting human rights, in redressing grievances especially of the “small” people, and thus in contributing to good governance, transparency and democratic values.

There is considerable dearth of literature on this institution in the Caribbean. This study, at least partially, fills the gap.

The adoption of the remedial measures identified will improve the performance and the effectiveness of this institution in varying degrees. These measures/recommendations will also facilitate the reform efforts of the policy makers who will find them useful.

The paper, based on original research, makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the Ombudsman institution.

The Neoclassical approach to analysing personal choice is compared with an approach contained in a Biblical Christian mode of analysis. This paper compares the Neoclassical and Christian positions via analysis of characteristics of the Neoclassical rational choice model. The main characteristic examined is a basic assumption of the rational choice model that human choice is explained as the optimisation of utility via rational self‐interest. The two positions are compared in terms of how they treat self‐interest and rationality, the degree to which basic assumptions about human behaviour are specified, the importance they attach to the realism of assumptions underlying their models, and the explanatory and predictive purposes for which the models are used. The conclusion of the comparison is that the Biblical Christian perspective encompasses the variables regarded as important in Neoclassical explanation, but presents them in the context of a more embracing worldview perspective than the Neoclassical. This Christian belief perspective is applicable to human behaviour in both “economic” and “non‐economic” domains.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature on the information behavior of practicing visual artists to determine if a consistent model emerges and what further research is necessary.

Works dealing with the information needs and uses relevant to the creative activities of visual artists are discussed in the paper. These works are assessed for their contributions toward understanding of the specific information behaviors of practicing artists.

The results show that a consistent model of artists' information behavior emerges. However, nearly all of the literature focuses on art students, academic art faculty, or librarians, and so any claim that practicing artists fit the model is largely unsupported by research. There have been no published studies of communities of practicing visual artists. The implications of defining artists as communities of practice are discussed.

Research is proposed that studies the information behavior of communities of practicing visual artists in order to confirm or amend the existing model.

Practitioners will have their attention drawn to an underserved user population whose information needs and behaviors have not been directly targeted for research. They will recognize the need for study of their own artist communities and the development of services for them.

This paper directs the discussion of artists' information behavior away from the art‐library‐specific literature, where it has largely resided, as a means of adjusting the focus of research onto the largely unstudied and underserved communities of practicing artists.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.