Search results

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to examine the field of criminal justice and assess how diversity influences what is taught and, how research is conducted in the field.

Methodology/approach – This chapter looks at the historical exclusion of feminist and integrative theories on crime and criminal justice. A socio-legal analysis of how the increase in the number of women faculty and faculty of color has influenced teaching and research in the field of criminal justice.

Findings – As more women and persons of color become faculty and practitioners in the field of criminal justice, then more diverse perspectives will be promoted. It is not enough to change a discriminatory law or engage in affirmative action to hire more women and persons of color, it is important to understand how preconceived biases about women and non-white persons impact who we define as criminal, how we educate students in the field, and how we respond to the needs of offenders and victims.

Originality/value – Research on diversity in the field of criminal justice has focused on historical discrimination. More research is needed on the impact that diversity has in research performed and what is being taught in the field of criminal justice.

In this unashamedly polemical piece it is argued that we should not jump into bed with virtue too quickly. It is suggested that the concept of virtue is dangerously ill defined, so it becomes what those in power hegemonically define it to be; that virtue’s rise may serve factional political purposes within social science; that system implications are frequently missed, side-lined or minimised so that virtue niavely becomes a purely individual construct; that aspirational codes, which expect a-contextual demonstration of ‘virtue’ from practitioners, need to be tempered with a dose of reality; and that the achievable ‘good enough’ is better than the unrealisable and idealised virtuously ‘perfect’. It is suggested that the implied centrality of ‘virtue’ in research is problematic, that being ‘critically virtuous’ has limits, and that better education will not necessarily lead to morality and integrity in research – any more than it does in the general population. Finally it is argued that ethics committees should focus on (probable) behaviours, rather than rather than imagined motives or vague character traits. Locating virtue in an individual is dangerous because it allows the system to blame and punish an individual, rather than acknowledge the collective responsibility of the whole system. It is suggested that we need to move from a purist pursuit of virtue to a more realistic and nuanced appreciation of the real world consequences of its adoption. Whilst the present emphasis on sound research ethics and responsibility is a positive development, we need to slow down.

Like popularized stories amplifying the dangers associated with stranger-predator street crime, immigrant-as-criminal narratives are as widespread as they are inconsistent with the best available data. A growing body of research suggests that immigration not only does not increase crime, it may reduce it. Building on what Scheingold referred to as political criminology, our analysis suggests that the continued salience of immigrant-as-criminal narratives tells us more about politics and power, the symbolic life of the law, and the multifaceted importance of proximity to understanding debates about crime and punishment, than it tells us about how to construct more effective immigration or crime control policies.

This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

To develop a framework for systematically defining the relevant market for intermediate goods that incorporates downstream market conditions.

We combine the well-established “Hicks-Marshall” conditions of derived demand for inputs with “critical loss/critical elasticity of demand” to yield insights into the definition of antitrust markets for intermediate goods and the competitive effects from a merger.

We show that examining “Hicks-Marshall” conditions can provide a more rigorous framework for analyzing relevant markets for intermediate goods. We also show that solely examining demand substitution possibilities for direct customers of an input can lead to an incorrect market definition.

Our framework may be difficult to apply in circumstances when several different downstream products use the input being examined and each of those downstream products has a different elasticity of demand.

We illustrate how reasonable ranges for key parameters relating to the ability of firms to substitute to other inputs and to adjust to downstream market conditions will often be sufficient to define antitrust markets for intermediate goods in practice.

Previous antitrust analysis has not systematically analyzed the impact of downstream market conditions in assessing market definition for intermediate goods. The framework we develop will be useful to future researchers attempting to define relevant markets for intermediate goods and evaluating the competitive effects of a merger.

This chapter focuses on aspects of community restorative justice practices in Northern Ireland that have been central in challenging embedded cultures of violence within the current transitional context. It is argued that a strict adherence to restorative justice values, in combination with a flexible approach to the process used, are two core strengths of practice that have facilitated such a possibility. Moreover, these grassroots initiatives work well with organised, structured, and hierarchical communities, which in the Northern Irish context translate to paramilitary organisations. They are arguably less effective in relation to looser community structures, such as vigilante groups and individual violent responses to crime and conflict.

Scholars of ambidexterity focus on the need for strategic leaders to explore and exploit opportunities synergistically. Yet it remains unclear how such dynamic capabilities develop. Addressing this question, this chapter investigates the role of social cognitive self-regulation in fostering ambidexterity as a dynamic capability among entrepreneurs. Results of a mixed method, multiple case study of founder managers suggest that complex patterns of self-regulation are associated with ambidextrous thinking and decision making among entrepreneurs, often in combination with strong values and a sense of emotional engagement. I propose a new model of these processes and discuss its implications.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

We propose that group affective tone may be dysfunctional for teams faced with complex, equivocal, and dynamically changing tasks and environments. Group affective tone (and in particular, a positive affective tone) may exacerbate pre-existing tendencies of teams to develop a single-shared reality that team members confidently believe to be valid and to be prone to group-centrism. Alternatively, heterogeneity in member mood states within teams may lead to the development of multiple-shared realities that reflect the equivocality of the teams’ tasks and circumstances and other functional outcomes (e.g., multiple perspectives and minority dissent), which ultimately may enhance team effectiveness.