Search results

The field of transportation research, and the World Conferences on Transport Research Society (WCTRS), has an illustrious history. The challenge today is to look to the future in a deep and thoughtful way, to identify emerging issues and opportunities for practice and for research.

This chapter identifies several critical issues in transportation research. We then explore one issue in depth, the need to increase individual and collaborative effectiveness.

This issue points to the need for a new direction in transportation research. Historically, transportation research has focussed on two major thrusts. The analysis thrust has focussed on predicting the consequences of a given transportation plan, project, or service proposal. Associated “design” research has dealt with algorithmic and heuristic techniques for finding “good” plans or policies. The policy thrust has focussed on the organizational issues and processes around making decisions on and implementing transportation plans, projects, or services. This thrust includes public policy issues and approaches, market structures and regulatory processes, organization design issues, distributional consequences, environmental policy issues, and related areas.

Today, we see the need to add a third major thrust to the field of transportation — cognition and action:

• to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

• to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

• to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

Research in cognition and action examines how people think and act, and aims to develop aids to thinking and acting that result in significant improvements in peoples' behaviours and performance. Promising research directions draw on cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and especially empirical research on managerial cognition and problem-solving. We introduce the theory of cognitive informatics, describe some applications to transportation management, and discuss relevant software tools.

On many occasions, organizational science research has been referred to as fragmented and disjointed, resulting in a literature that is, in the opinion of many, difficult to navigate and comprehend. One potential explanation is that scholars have failed to comprehend that organizations are complex and intricate systems. In order to move us past this morass, we recommend that researchers extend beyond traditional rational, mechanistic, and variable-centered approaches to research and integrate a more advantageous pattern-oriented approach within their research program. Pattern-oriented methods approximate real-life phenomena by adopting a holistic, integrative approach to research wherein individual- and organizational-systems are viewed as non-decomposable organized wholes. We argue that the pattern-oriented approach has the potential to overcome a number of breakdowns faced by alternate approaches, while offering a novel and more representative lens from which to view organizational- and HRM-related issues. The proposed incorporation of the pattern-oriented approach is framed within a review and evaluation of current approaches to organizational research and is supplemented with a discussion of methodological and theoretical implications as well as potential applications of the pattern-oriented approach.

Comparative studies have confirmed that the current types of cohabitation (defined as living together as a couple without being married) and the meanings attached to them differ across Europe. This variation could reflect differences in the levels of progress or the stages countries have reached in a common developmental process, as suggested by the theory of the Second Demographic Transition and Kiernan’s stage model of cohabitation. However, it may also indicate that countries are on different developmental paths, as suggested by path dependency theories. To examine whether changes in the prevalence of cohabitation follow a common script, this study analyses types of cohabitation within emerging family formation patterns over cohorts and across countries.

For this purpose, sequence methodology is applied to analyze cohort-specific family trajectories in France, western Germany, Norway, and Italy. In particular, using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and the Generation and Gender Survey (GGS), patterns of union status and co-residence with (own) children between ages 15 and 35 among the 1935–1969 birth cohorts (for Germany, among the 1940–1974 birth cohorts) are compared.

Our findings provide some support for the claim that there were common patterns of change. However, also country-specific variations in family trajectory patterns were detected, which suggests that general processes of change were mediated through country-specific institutions (path dependencies). The empirical evidence for convergence as well as for divergence indicates that both theoretical strands add to our understanding of the spread of cohabitation in European countries.

Our study examined whether work engagement follows a predictable pattern over the course of the work week and the role of personality traits in shaping this pattern.

We examined these questions with 131 employees from Canada and the United States who provided daily ratings of work engagement over the course of 10 work days.

Multilevel modeling revealed that employee engagement followed an inverted U-shaped curvilinear pattern from Monday to Friday, peaking midweek. Neuroticism moderated the change pattern of engagement across the work week, such that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism experienced lower and less stable levels of work engagement throughout the work week compared with individuals with lower levels of neuroticism. However, extroversion and conscientiousness did not moderate the change pattern of employee engagement.

These results provide insight into the entrainment of work to the work week and how this entrainment is further affected by the personality trait neuroticism.

Understanding the weekly pattern of work engagement will help leaders’ time work assignments, interventions, and training sessions to keep the levels of employee engagement high.

Our study revealed novel predictors of within-person engagement: weekly entrainment and neuroticism.

During the last decade or so, philosophers of science have shown increasing interest in scientific models and modeling. The primary impetus seems to have come from the philosophy of biology, but increasingly the philosophy of economics has been drawn into the discussion. This paper will focus on the particular subset of this literature that emphasizes the difference between a scientific model being explanatory and one that provides explanations of specific events. The main differences are in the structure of the models and the characteristics of the explanatory target. Traditionally, scientific explanations have been framed in terms of explaining particular events, but many scientific models have targets that are hypothetical patterns: “patterns of macroscopic behavior across systems that are heterogeneous at smaller scales” (Batterman & Rice, 2014, p. 349). The models with this characteristic are often highly idealized, and have complex and heterogeneous targets; such models are “central to a kind of modeling that is widely used in biology and economics” (Rohwer & Rice, 2013, p. 335). This paper has three main goals: (i) to discuss the literature on such models in the philosophy of biology, (ii) to show that certain economic phenomena possess the same degree of heterogeneity and complexity often encountered in biology (and thus, that hypothetical pattern explanations may be appropriate in certain areas of economics), and (iii) to demonstrate that Hayek’s arguments about “pattern predictions” and “explanations of the principle” are essentially arguments for the importance of this type of modeling in economics.

The multiple performance measures in strategic performance measurement systems should be selected to represent a set of causally linked strategic drivers and outcomes. The pattern of results thus can provide information concerning the proper execution of the strategy (i.e., the performance evaluation role) and the strength of the cause-and-effect linkages assumed by the strategy (i.e., the strategy evaluation role). Unfortunately, managers’ tendency to re-evaluate the strategy when performance falls short of target is low in practice. Possible explanations include motivational and cognitive biases. We experimentally examine two decision aids, an attribution aid, and a decomposition aid, designed to help managers ease these challenges. Study 1 shows the decision aids, individually and in combination, increase managers’ tendency to re-examine a problematic strategy. Study 2 demonstrates the effectiveness of the two decision aids, when used together, under a different pattern of results and among a sample of more experienced managers.