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A discussion of call center agent work selection preferences is presented in the context of what is referred to herein as the accept–avoid decision. In call centers where agents are given autonomy to select calls from a shared queue for work without a standard routing mechanism, it is likely that each agent uses a different set of criteria and has different preferences which influence their decision to accept a call or avoid it. In order to understand such preferences, simple heuristics are developed and implemented into an additive linear model as an example to estimate the derived utility an agent may receive from the decision to accept a call. The game theoretic implications of such decision making by a group or team of agents are also discussed to illustrate the dilemma of the universally avoided call, and how agents may compete for acceptance or avoidance of particular calls.

Talking about smart cities also entails talking about new ways of mobility. Various concepts compete for reimagining future mobility, most prominently connected cars, robo taxis, and other forms of shared mobility. New digital technologies, changing customer requirements, but also new competitors are dynamically affecting previous market logics. To stay future-proof in this new world of mobility, the automotive sector, which is an important nucleus for developing such mobility solutions, is currently undergoing fundamental digital transformation processes. Established car manufacturers have to find their path to choose out of the many possibilities on the rise. Against this backdrop, they face the major challenge to find an answer to the question: Who are we and who do we want to be in the future? Therefore, we argue that organizations’ digital transformation is highly entangled with questions on organizational identity and discuss digital transformation as a potential identity threat for established organizations.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of organizational identity. Afterward, we will continue with applying it to the practical context of car manufacturers: After depicting the major trends of digitalization in the mobility and automotive sector, we will focus on the digital transformation processes of established automotive companies and discuss their impact on organizational identity. Empirical illustrations of the Volkswagen case depict our theoretical considerations.

We provide theoretical ideas for better understanding the impact of digital transformation on organizational identity, as well as suggestions for practitioners concerned with organizations’ digital transformation processes.

Past research has highlighted multiple interrelations between technology and social cognition. In this chapter, building on past studies, as well as on our own research, we advance propositions about the conditions under which technological features are likely to serve as cues for the construction of organizational identity and about the consequences of this fact for the enduringness of these features. In doing so, our emerging framework may contribute to increase more general understanding of how organizational features come to be perceived as part of organizational identity.

This chapter shares the findings of a research study that investigated how organizations managed critical incidents that had the potential for dramatic economic impact and why those organizations chose to pursue certain issues. The findings expose organization identity’s role in stabilizing organizations. Understanding this role creates an opportunity to improve organization change efforts by examining and understanding a subject’s organization identity. Armed with this understanding, a change agent may design interventions in such a way as to align with identity or, when necessary, to specifically alter identity.

1. Introduction to the German Language Session. The German session (rather, the German language session) at the 18th International Online Conference in London, 6–8 December 1994, was on the subject of German or German language databases for national and international users. This subject is best shown using environmental sciences as an example.

Postmerger integration processes have been studied from the perspectives of organizational identity and organizational culture, but these two perspectives have rarely been integrated. We argue that organizational identification and organizational culture differences give rise to two different sets of individual responses that are both important, but for different types of outcomes. An empirical analysis of a large-scale merger between two service sector companies shows that identification with the postmerger organization positively relates to both behavioral intentions and key attitudinal variables. In contrast, our results show that perceived organizational culture differences are negatively related to attitudinal variables. The effect of perceptions of cultural differences on behavioral intentions is mediated by organizational identification.

Although it is widely acknowledged that health care delivery systems are complex adaptive systems, there are gaps in understanding the application of systems engineering approaches to systems analysis and redesign in the health care domain. Commonly employed methods, such as statistical analysis of risk factors and outcomes, are simply not adequate to robustly characterize all system requirements and facilitate reliable design of complex care delivery systems. This is especially apparent in institutional-level systems, such as patient safety programs that must mitigate the risk of infections and other complications that can occur in virtually any setting providing direct and indirect patient care. The case example presented here illustrates the application of various system engineering methods to identify requirements and intervention candidates for a critical patient safety problem known as failure to rescue. Detailed descriptions of the analysis methods and their application are presented along with specific analysis artifacts related to the failure to rescue case study. Given the prevalence of complex systems in health care, this practical and effective approach provides an important example of how systems engineering methods can effectively address the shortcomings in current health care analysis and design, where complex systems are increasingly prevalent.

Failure to rescue events, or events involving preventable deaths from complications, are a significant contributor to inpatient mortality. While many interventions have been designed and implemented over several decades, this patient safety issue remains at the forefront of concern for most hospitals. In the first part of this study, the development and implementation of one type of highly studied and widely adopted rescue intervention, algorithm-based patient assessment tools, is examined. The analysis summarizes how a lack of systems-oriented approaches in the design and implementation of these tools has resulted in suboptimal understanding of patient risk of mortality and complications and the early recognition of patient deterioration. The gaps identified impact several critical aspects of excellent patient care, including information-sharing across care settings, support for the development of shared mental models within care teams, and access to timely and accurate patient information.

This chapter describes the use of several system-oriented design and implementation activities to establish design objectives, model clinical processes and workflows, and create an extensible information system model to maximize the benefits of patient state and risk assessment tools in the inpatient setting. A prototype based on the product of the design activities is discussed along with system-level considerations for implementation. This study also demonstrates the effectiveness and impact of applying systems design principles and practices to real-world clinical applications.

A creative identity, the incorporation of creativity into self-definition, is associated with creative outcomes. Given the importance of creativity to organizational success, understanding creative identity and in particular creative identity work (the formation and maintenance of creative identity) can be useful in understanding creatives within organizations. To be considered creative, individuals need to not only produce unique artefacts, but these artefacts need to be assessed by legitimate judges as being creative. Judges may be within an organization (e.g., senior researchers within a laboratory) or may be external to an organization (e.g., award judges in international advertising competitions). Underpinning creative identity work is the creative assessment, however this assessment is ambiguous and contextual. In other words, what is considered creative in one context or by one judge may not be considered creative in another context or by different judges. The ambiguity of the creative assessment makes creative identity work a precarious undertaking. Based on two case studies – a R&D laboratory and an advertising agency – this research explores the strategies which creative individuals employ in their creative identity work in response to the ambiguity of the creative assessment. This research contributes to the growing area of creative identity research by unpacking three specific strategies used as part of identity work of creatives: defending, emotional distancing and differentiating. These strategies assist the creatives in maintaining a coherent sense of who they are within the organizational context despite the unpredictability of the creative assessment.

How do organizations manage multiple logics in response to institutional complexity? In this paper, we explore how intraorganizational problems related to multiple logics may be addressed via the mechanism of institutional bricolage – where actors inside an organization act as “bricoleurs” to creatively combine elements from different logics into newly designed artifacts. An illustrative case study of a global brewery group’s development of such an artifact – a Responsible Drinking Guide Book – is outlined. We argue that intraorganizational institutional bricolage first requires the problematization of organizational identity followed by a social process involving efforts to renegotiate the organization’s identity in relation to the logics being integrated. We show that in response to growing pressures to be more “responsible,” a group of organizational actors creatively tinkered with and combined elements from social responsibility and market logics by drawing upon extant organizational resources from different times and spaces in an effort to reconstitute their collective organizational identity.