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Article
Publication date: 6 June 2019

Hope Koch, Jie (Kevin) Yan and Patrick Curry

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the digital workplace, in particular employees using consumer tools at work (users), impacts how internal IT departments function…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the digital workplace, in particular employees using consumer tools at work (users), impacts how internal IT departments function and their relationships with users they have historically supported.

Design/methodology/approach

An interpretive, longitudinal case study highlighting how one IT department coped with the conflicts using consumer tools at work creates a trend called IT consumerization.

Findings

Internal IT departments manage the conflicts IT consumerization poses through an ongoing process of conflict and conflict resolution. This impacts the IT department’s relationship with users along three dimensions: IT-control, user-self-sufficiency and IT-user partnerships.

Originality/value

While there is an ongoing debate about internal IT departments needing to change, the study shows how one IT department did change in response to IT consumerization. The authors develop a data-driven model grounded in theories that explains how IT departments cope with the conflicts IT consumerization poses.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 33 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 2 September 2021

Gina Green, Hope Koch, Peter Kulaba, Shelby L. Garner, Carolin Elizabeth George, Julia Hitchcock and Gift Norman

The purpose of this paper is to understand how to build and implement information and communication technology (i.e. ICT) to help vulnerable people when significant social…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to understand how to build and implement information and communication technology (i.e. ICT) to help vulnerable people when significant social, cultural and economic barriers exist between the stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors followed an action research approach to design and implement a mobile health hypertension education application to help India's most vulnerable populations. The authors used interpretive analysis, guided by the sustainable livelihoods framework, to uncover key findings.

Findings

Successfully implementing information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) requires understanding that all stakeholders (i.e. donors, facilitators and the beneficiaries) have important assets to contribute. Facilitators play an important role in connecting donors to the beneficiaries and fostering cultural humility in donors so that the donors will understand the role beneficiaries play in success. Stakeholders may use the ICT4D in unintended ways that both improve the people's health and increase some beneficiaries' financial livelihood.

Research limitations/implications

This research expands the definition of information systems success when implementing ICT4D in resource-constrained environments. Success is more than creating an mHealth app that was easy for beneficiaries to use and where they learned based on a pre- and post-test statistical analysis. Success involved development in all the stakeholders impacted by the social innovation collaboration. For the beneficiary community, success included getting screened for noncommunicable diseases as a first step toward treatment. For the facilitator, success involved more resources for their community health program. Amongst the donors, success was a change in perspective and learning cultural humility.

Practical implications

Although universities encourage faculty to work in interdisciplinary research teams to address serious world problems, university researchers may have to exert considerable effort to secure contracts, approvals and payments. Unfortunately, universities may not reward this effort to build ICT4D and continue to evaluate faculty based on journal publications. When universities undertake social innovation collaborations, administrators should ensure responsive and flexible university processes as well as appropriate academic reward structures are in place. This need is heightened when collaborations involve international partners with limited resources and time needed to build relationships and understanding across cultures.

Social implications

This study discovered the importance of fostering cultural humility as a way of avoiding potential conflicts that may arise from cultural and power differences. Cultural humility moves the focus of donor-beneficiary relationships away from getting comfortable with “them” to taking actions that develop relationships and address vulnerabilities (Fisher-Borne et al., 2015). This research shows how the facilitator helped the donor develop cultural humility by involving the donor in various initiatives with the beneficiary community including allowing the donor to live in a dormitory at the hospital, work in an urban slum and visit health screening campus.

Originality/value

This study (1) extends the ICT4D literature by incorporating cultural humility into the sustainable livelihoods framework, (2) provides a contextual understanding of developing cultural humility in ICT4D projects with a complex group of stakeholders and (3) describes how facilitators become a catalyst for change and a bridge to the community. The culturally humble approach suggests revising the livelihood framework to eliminate words like “the poor” to describe beneficiaries.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. 35 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 July 2021

Chamila Kumudunee Wijekuruppu, Alan Coetzer and Pattanee Susomrith

The strength-based approach is promulgated as a management practice that improves individual productivity and performance. This study's purpose is to explore the prospective…

Abstract

Purpose

The strength-based approach is promulgated as a management practice that improves individual productivity and performance. This study's purpose is to explore the prospective applicability of the strengths-based approach to managing and developing employees in small businesses. The study focuses on four domains of practice: selection, training, performance evaluation and task assignment.

Design/methodology/approach

The study employed semi-structured, face-to-face interviews to obtain data. The units of analysis were managers and employees of small businesses. Eleven managers and 19 employees were interviewed. Data analysis involved thematic analysis with the NVivo 12 software program.

Findings

First, the small businesses used a strengths-based approach for employee selection during employees' temporary status of employment and in employee task assignment. However, managers did not employ a strengths-based approach to employee selection during selection interviews, training or performance evaluations. Second, the managers perceived strengths identification as a difficult task. Based on personal observations, they perceived employees' positive character traits, job-related skills and work-related efficiency as employee strengths.

Practical implications

This study informs managers about a potential alternative to the traditional weakness-based management practice. The findings and conceptual arguments suggest that a strengths-based approach can provide a cost-effective alternative to the resource-intensive approaches commonly employed to enhance employee productivity and performance.

Originality/value

The study provides the first empirical evidence on the prospective applicability of the strengths-based approach to small businesses and explores conceptually the suitability of the said approach to this context.

Details

Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, vol. 8 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2051-6614

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 October 1901

The great difficulties which attach to the fixing of legal standards of composition for food products have now to be grappled with by the Departmental Committee appointed by the…

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Abstract

The great difficulties which attach to the fixing of legal standards of composition for food products have now to be grappled with by the Departmental Committee appointed by the Board of Agriculture to consider and determine what regulations should be made by the Board, under Section 4 of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1899, with respect to the composition of butter. As we predicted in regard to the labours of the Milk and Cream Standards Committee, so we predict now that the Butter Committee will be unable to do more than to recommend standards and limits, which, while they will make for the protection of the public against the sale of grossly adulterated articles, will certainly not in any way insure the sale of butter of really satisfactory, or even of fair, composition. Standards and limits established by law for the purposes of the administration of criminal Acts of Parliament must of necessity be such as to legalise the sale of products of a most inferior character, to which the term “genuine” may still by law be applied as well as to legalise the sale of adulterated and sophisticated products so prepared as to come within the four corners of the law. It is, of course, an obvious necessity that official standards and limits should be established, and the Board of Agriculture are to be congratulated upon the manner in which they are endeavouring to deal with these extremely knotty problems; but it is important that misconception on the part of the public and the trade with respect to the effect of the regulations to be made should be as far as possible prevented. All that can be hoped for is that the conclusions at which the Committee may find themselves compelled to arrive will not be such as to place too high and too obvious a premium upon the sale of those inferior and scientifically‐adulterated products which are placed in such enormous quantities on the food market.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 3 no. 10
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

Article
Publication date: 2 January 2021

Rebekka Dieterich-Hartwell, Craig Haen, Girija Kaimal, Sabine Koch, Augusta Villanueva and Sherry Goodill

The purpose of this study is to investigate what resources recent refugees to the USA tap into and how collaborative expressive movements were experienced with regard to coping…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to investigate what resources recent refugees to the USA tap into and how collaborative expressive movements were experienced with regard to coping and resourcing, and to derive a theoretical model that would inform the use of dance/movement therapy and other holistic treatment modalities with refugees.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 13 refugees overall participated in parts of this study. Ten of these refugees completed movement sessions and semi-structured in-person interviews. Constructivist grounded theory methods and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.

Findings

The findings suggest that refugees draw on a number of resources. The collaborative movement experiences seemed to have both a settling and mobilizing effect with the most important phenomenon of connection to the self or to another person. A grounded theory model, developed based on the findings, shows a dynamic interaction between the encountered categories.

Research limitations/implications

The findings are preliminary and not transferrable because of limited size and potential researcher bias.

Practical implications

The findings contribute to an understanding of the resettlement and acculturation phase of refugees with potential implications and suggestions for current clinical practices and health services.

Originality/value

This study was original in its focus on understanding the role and the potential of body and expressive movement among refugees who have experienced trauma. Adherence to transformative paradigm principles invited participants to become co-researchers.

Details

International Journal of Migration, Health and Social Care, vol. 17 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1747-9894

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 May 1994

Derek Mozley

Three events of significance to this country took place in 1899 – the British Food Journal was launched, Australia retained the Ashes, and the Boer War hostilities commenced. If…

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Abstract

Three events of significance to this country took place in 1899 – the British Food Journal was launched, Australia retained the Ashes, and the Boer War hostilities commenced. If challenged on the order of their importance, cricketers and Empire‐builders may be excused their preference. However, looking at it purely from the standpoint of pro bono publico, the dispassionate observer must surely opt for the birth of a certain publication as being ultimately the most beneficial of the three.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 96 no. 5/6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

Article
Publication date: 26 January 2023

Muhammad Zahid Iqbal, Ayesha Shakoor, Malik Ikramullah and Tamania Khan

Being grounded in interdependence theory, this study aims to address the following research question: Do managers’ negotiation styles (collaborative versus competitive) make…

Abstract

Purpose

Being grounded in interdependence theory, this study aims to address the following research question: Do managers’ negotiation styles (collaborative versus competitive) make employees’ relational justice-emotional experiences links sporadic?

Design/methodology/approach

Data elicited from N = 139 Pakistani undergraduate students participating in an online scenario-based experiment were used to employ repeated measures analysis and partial least square structural equation modeling techniques.

Findings

Results suggest that employees’ relational justice is likely to be higher when managers use a collaborative negotiation style than when they use competitive style in performance review meetings. Moreover, per managers’ different negotiation styles, employees’ relational justice perceptions may predict their positive emotions differently. That is, when managers use collaborative negotiation style, employees’ relational justice perceptions may positively predict their hope but not optimism, whereas when managers use competitive negotiation style, employees’ relational justice perceptions may positively predict their optimism but not hope. Furthermore, the positive relationship between employees’ relational justice and their optimism is stronger when their trust in manager is low than when it is high.

Originality/value

The study is of value for performance management theorists who aim to address the issue of ineffectiveness of the practice through relational means. The study includes the recently explicated concept of relational justice and examines its links with employee emotional reactions to performance reviews. Moreover, the study unveils how managers’ negotiation styles in performance review meetings cause variations in the links between employees’ perceptions of relational justice and their emotional experiences.

Details

International Journal of Conflict Management, vol. 34 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1044-4068

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 19 August 2019

Peter J. Boettke

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth…

Abstract

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

Details

Including a Symposium on Ludwig Lachmann
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78769-862-8

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 27 December 2013

Graham Parkes

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to show how the financial power of the fossil fuel industries and the prevalence of religious ideology in Congress are the two major…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to show how the financial power of the fossil fuel industries and the prevalence of religious ideology in Congress are the two major obstacles preventing the U.S. government from taking action to slow down global warming. Then to evaluate various approaches to ‘satisfying our energy needs’, by showing a crucial dynamic behind our insatiable drive to consume energy, and to propose some ways of circumventing the current obstacles.

Methodology/approach

The approach is through a comprehensive study of the relevant evidence and academic literature, interwoven with philosophical reflections on their significance.

Findings

The findings are as follows: a major root of the current problem is the dysfunctional political system in the United States, which is corrupted by vast infusions of money from the fossil fuel industries and the dogmatic religious beliefs of Republicans in key positions on Congressional committees.

Social implications

The implications are several. The proposed technological solutions to the ‘energy problem’ – nuclear power, carbon sequestration, fracking for natural gas and geo-engineering – only address the symptoms and ignore the dynamic that underlies them, exemplified in the story of Prometheus. If we continue to be driven by the Promethean spirit, we risk being subject to excruciating punishment as a result. The solution to our problems is a transition to clean and renewable sources of energy, accompanied by the kind of reduction in material desires that evidently makes for lives that are more fulfilled.

Originality/value

The value of the philosophical perspective on this topic is that it highlights questions of value that otherwise remain inexplicit.

Details

Environmental Philosophy: The Art of Life in a World of Limits
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78350-137-3

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 June 2019

Shaghayegh Rezaei Arangdad, Kristin Thoney-Barletta, Jeff Joines and Lori Rothenberg

The purpose of this paper is to study clothing and shoes disposal behavior of US consumers in an attempt to understand how to divert more clothing and shoes from the landfill.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study clothing and shoes disposal behavior of US consumers in an attempt to understand how to divert more clothing and shoes from the landfill.

Design/methodology/approach

A survey was administered to 209 consumers from the general US population. The survey includes questions on demographics, methods of disposal and factors that motivate or prevent consumers from choosing methods other than throwing unwanted clothing in the trash.

Findings

Analysis of demographic data from the survey indicates that gender, income, marital status, living arrangement and type of dwelling have an effect on whether consumers recycle textiles. Other survey results indicate that helping factors are more influential in motivating consumers to recycle clothing and shoes than economic factors. The condition of clothes and shoes and lack of awareness are the most prominent reasons preventing consumers from recycling more textiles. The results also show that there are statistically significant differences between households with and without children when it comes to disposing adults’ clothing and shoes.

Originality/value

These results may help policymakers who want to motivate consumers to recycle or develop recycling programs.

Details

Research Journal of Textile and Apparel, vol. 23 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1560-6074

Keywords

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