Search results

Interest in employee mindfulness has increased dramatically in recent years, fueled by several important conceptual articles, numerous studies documenting the benefits of mindfulness for employee outcomes, and the adoption of mindfulness-based practices in many Fortune 500 organizations. Despite this growing interest, the vast majority of research on employee mindfulness has taken an intrapersonal focus, failing to appreciate the ways in which mindfulness may enhance work-related relational processes and outcomes. The authors explore possible associations between mindfulness and relationally oriented workplace phenomena, drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship examining mindfulness in romantic relationships, child–parent relationships, patient–healthcare provider relationships, and student–teacher relationships. A framework is proposed that links mindfulness to three distinct relationally oriented processes, which are expected to have downstream effects on work-related relational outcomes. The authors then take the proposed framework and discuss possible extensions to a variety of unique workplace relationships and discuss critical next steps in advancing the relational science of mindfulness.

The research presented here contributes to our understanding of strategic planning and its relationship to performance in nonprofit organizations. Based on a sample of 303 nonprofit organizations, the study emphasizes individual and diverse elements of the planning process. Multiple measures of performance highlight a nonprofits need to garner resource contributions from several constituencies. Using factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis, we find a positive association between scope of planning and executive satisfaction and a negative association between administrative informality and volunteer involvement. Our results suggest that two critical resource contributors, executive directors and donors, may not value formalized decision-making and planning to the extent previously assumed.

The purpose of this paper is to present a typology of the treatment of ethical issues in recent studies using visual participatory methods with immigrants and refugees and provide insights for researchers into how these issues can be more adequately addressed.

The paper presents the results of a scoping study as a typology of ethical considerations, from standard IRB approval to complete ethical guidelines/frameworks for research with refugee/migrant populations.

The review reveals that there is a broad spectrum of ethical considerations in the use of visual participatory methods with migrants, with the majority only giving cursory or minimal attention to the particular vulnerabilities of these populations.

This paper encourages university-based researchers conducting participatory inquiry with migrant populations to engage in deeper critical reflection on the ethical implications of these methods in keeping with PAR's ethico-onto-epistemological roots, to make intentional methodological choices that are congruent with those roots and to be explicit in their description of how they did this as they disseminate their work.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of a computer system designed to aid historians in the reading of the stylus tablets from the Roman fort of Vindolanda. It proposes outlining the different stages in developing the system, and giving the preliminary results.

The paper provides a literature review regarding Vindolanda, stylus tablets, and the process of reading an ancient document. Knowledge elicitation techniques are used to model explicitly expert processes used to read an ancient document. A corpus of character forms and lexicostatistics is gathered. An advanced cognitive imaging system utilising artificial intelligence techniques is implemented to produce plausible interpretations of the document.

This paper describes the developmental stages undertaken to construct a system that can read in images of an ancient document and produce plausible interpretations of the document, to aid the historians in the lengthy process of reading an ancient text. In carrying out the development, an explicit representation of how experts approach and reason about damaged and deteriorated texts was formulated, and a large corpus of letter forms and linguistic data were captured. Preliminary results from the resulting computer system are presented which demonstrate the usefulness of the technique, although more work is needed to develop this into a stand‐alone computer system.

The study is focused on the Roman stylus tablets from Vindolanda, near Hadrian's Wall, although the technique could be extrapolated to cover other types of ancient documents from any period.

It is demonstrated that using techniques from artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology can result in further explicit understanding of humanities expert processes, which allow computational systems to be constructed. The resulting computational system is a tool for the humanities expert, which carries out a task in a similar manner, allowing for faster reasoning time and quicker hypotheses development.

The paper presents the first known system to intake an image of an ancient text and output a plausible interpretation of the text in a reasonable time frame, assisting the papyrologist in resolving ambiguities in the damaged and abraded text.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the microgeneration between Generation X and the Millennial generation. The research question addressed was “What makes the Xennial generation unique and how might the knowledge of these differences be beneficial to organizations?”

The research question was analyzed by a review of literature through the lens of generational theory. This study reviewed current literature on generational theory, years encompassing specific generations, and differences between recent generations in the workplace.

It was discovered the exact years distinguishing generations were unclear because generations fade into one another without a distinct starting and stopping point. This overlap creates a cusp generation or microgeneration. The presented findings suggest microgeneration employees could aid in reducing workplace generational tensions.

Organizations can benefit from creating flexible workplaces accommodating the desires of multi-generational employees while still meeting the goals of the organization as a whole. It is important managers approach generational differences with a clear perspective of what information is valid and what may simply be popular. It is crucial to remember employees are individuals who never completely fit a stereotype, generational, or otherwise.

Very few academic articles on generational differences mention cusp generations and none address their unique opportunities for organizations in the workplace. Members of microgenerations between major generational cohorts may be a key to reducing workplace friction between employees of different generations.

Purpose – This chapter explores how a group of African academics at a university in South Africa experience belonging at varying levels of geographical scale. It considers how race, class and professional status intersect to influence the scholars’ experiences.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Narrative interviews were conducted with 24 individuals from nine African countries. All were current doctoral or postdoctoral fellows at the University of the Free State. The focus is decidedly qualitative in approach, with an emphasis on understanding the subjectivity of the people under study.

Findings – The interviews reveal that, while participants have struggled to forge a sense of belonging to South African society due to high levels of xenophobia and structural racism, they have found other spaces to validate their professional identities and, hence, forge a sense of belonging. These spaces include certain university departments and meeting places at the university. Importantly, these spaces have a very specific, local location, but are international in their linkages and their orientation. The professional identity of the scholars helps them overcome challenges to traditional modes of belonging based on race and class in the South African context.

Originality/Value – The findings contribute to broader discussions on the scale of migrant belongings and on the increasingly complex ways migrants relate to space and place. It also offers a new perspective on the belonging(s) of international scholars, which is largely understudied in the South African context.

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience significant health-care disparities across physical and mental health domains resulting in poorer health and quality of life. Poor transitions to adult care negatively impact the health of adults with ASD. Current research focuses on personal factors in research samples that lack diversity. The purpose of this study is to examine the lived health-care experiences of geographically and ethnically diverse young adults with ASD in adult care settings in the USA to understand provider and system-level factors affecting their health.

Nine caregivers of young adults with ASD participated in key informant interviews describing their experiences in navigating the health-care system. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

The data indicated that limited quantity of services, poor quality of services, and high cost of services had a negative effect on the health of adults with ASD. Issues cascaded to become more complex.

Practical implications for payors, providers, persons with ASD and their families are discussed in this paper.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study answers the call to better understand system-level factors affecting the health of geographically and ethnically diverse people with ASD.