Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluating Success Factors In Implementing E-Maintenance In Maintenance, Repair, And Overhaul (Mro) Organizations, Peter Rocky Toves

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite more than a decade-long process to transition aircraft maintenance practices from paper-to electronic-based systems, some organizations remain unable to complete this transition. Researchers have indicated that while organizations have invested resources in technology improvements, there remains a limited understanding of the factors that contribute to effectively managing technology-enabled change. The purpose of this case study was to identify and explore socio-technical (ST) factors that inhibit an effective transition from a paper-based system to an electronic-based system for aircraft maintenance. A conceptual model applying theories of change management, technology acceptance, systems thinking, and ST theory informed the research. Thirteen participants …

Exploring Consumers' Experiences With Corporate Greenwashing, Mark Emerson Wood

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Greenwashing means the advertisement of goods and services that are alleged to be of benefit to the environment, and is a phenomenon that persists as an advertising tactic in corporate marketing. Research has found that consumers are distrustful of greenwashing, as many claims of eco-friendly products have been shown to be false. This crisis of confidence recalls scandals of the past decade related to insider trading, price fixing, and lack of corporate social responsibility placing the brand equity of major corporations at risk. Given a limited understanding among corporate leaders of consumers' experiences with greenwashing, the purpose of this phenomenological …

Locating Universities Within The Phases Of Escalation Of Commitment To Intercollegiate Athletics, Calvin Nite, Michael Hutchinson, E. Nicole Melton, Adrien Bouchet

Journal of Applied Sport Management

Escalation of commitment has been studied extensively within management and has been found to be particularly prevalent within intercollegiate athletics. The purpose of this study was to broaden the scope of traditional escalation of com-mitment research by developing effective means for locating sport organizations within Staw and Ross's (1987) temporal model. In doing so, we moved beyond the typical qualitative case study approach and sought to provide more general-ized findings, both within the context of intercollegiate athletics and within the broader sport industry. Through identifying relevant factors within our data and combining those with other descriptive variables, we were able …

Assessing Organizational Data Culture To Create An Ideal Data Ecosystem, Lauren M. Leary

Capstone Collection

The year 2015 marks a critical turning point in the global development arena. The Millennium Development Goals galvanized support and collaboration across sectors and now the world is recalibrating focus to prepare for the final push with the forthcoming Sustainable Development Goal Framework. We are also in the midst of a data revolution that aims to hold governments and organizations accountable to these goals and to ultimately create synergy between systems and processes in an ever-globalizing world. This paper intends to prompt discussion and learning around organizational readiness and preparedness for these imminent changes. Drawing from best practices within the …

Exploring Principal Leadership In Improving Elementary Schools, Brian A. Porter Phd

All Student Scholarship

As schools in Maine, and across the nation, are increasingly held to greater standards of accountability in terms of insuring higher levels of student academic growth and achievement, some schools are improving and some are not. Even beyond the constraints of tightening financial impositions and increasing accountability mandates, some are "defying the odds" and producing positive results. This research study sought to explore and understand the characteristics of principal leadership in improving elementary schools in Maine.

Linking Patent Reform And Civil Litigation Reform, Greg Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

Patent reform increasingly focuses on discovery. Discovery is perceived as disproportionately expensive and burdensome in patent cases. Excessive discovery is said to fuel so-called “patent trolls” and impose an unhealthy tax on innovation and competition. These supposedly exceptional problems have led to exceptional patent-only reform proposals, such as delaying most discovery for over a year and reversing the seventy-five-year-old allocation of discovery costs.

Treating patent litigation as exceptional has a siloing effect. Patent reform debates ignore parallel debates over general civil litigation reform that raise the same arguments about disproportionately expensive and burdensome discovery and propose their own set of …

Twenty Years Of Virginia Organizing: A Historical Analysis, Ruth Berta

Graduate Research Posters

Virginia Organizing is a non-profit, non-partisan statewide grassroots community organization aimed at empowering people to affect change in their communities. They celebrated their 20^th anniversary in 2015 and this process evaluation identifies the unique role that the Virginia Organizing State Governing Board has had in governing the organization. It determined the historical themes from this governing body’s 20 years of meeting minutes and assessed its membership diversity over time. In attempting to answer these questions: What themes emerge from the first 20 years of Virginia Organizing State Governing Board meeting minutes? How has the diversity of the membership of …

Journal Of Sociology And Social Welfare Vol. 42 No. 2 (June 2015)

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE: NEW SCHOLARSHIP IN INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan

CAPTURED BY CARE: AN INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY ON THE WORK OF BEING IN A REHABILITATION PROCESS IN NORWAY Janne Paulsen Breimo

A SERVICE DISPARITY FOR RURAL YOUTH: THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIAL SERVICES ACROSS THE URBAN YOUTH CENTRE AND ITS RURAL BRANCH Jessica Braimoh

CATEGORIES OF EXCLUSION: THE TRANSFORMATION OF FORMERLY INCARCERATED WOMEN INTO "ABLE-BODIED ADULTS WITHOUT DEPENDENTS" IN WELFARE PROCESSING Megan Welsh

INTERROGATING THE RULING RELATIONS OF THAILAND'S POST-TSUNAMI RECONSTRUCTION: EMPIRICALLY TRACKING SOCIAL RELATIONS IN THE ABSENCE OF CONVENTIONAL TEXTS Aaron Williams …

Captured By Care: An Institutional Ethnography On The Work Of Being In A Rehabilitation Process In Norway, Janne I. Paulsen Breimo

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The Norwegian rehabilitation policies and new public management reforms share some features and are divided by others. The features that divide them are so contradictory that they create difficulties for people who are in a process of rehabilitation. Having studied the everyday life of people being in a process of rehabilitation, I argue that the continuous change in organizational structures in general makes the processes hard to endure for service users, specifically the reforms characterized by neoliberalism, because they, to a large extent, contradict the holistic rehabilitation ideology. This further illuminates the paradox that the greater and more complicated the …

Programming Errors: Understanding The Constitutionality Of Stop-And-Frisk As A Program, Not An Incident, Tracey L. Meares

University of Chicago Law Review

No abstract provided.

Naming Men As Men In Corporate Legal Practice: Gender And The Idea Of “Virtually 24/7 Commitment” In Law, Richard Collier

Fordham Law Review

This Article seeks to reframe and turn the conversation about gender equity in the legal profession on its head, taking up Hannah Brenner’s recent call to reconceptualize problems and rethink solutions around gender equity in the profession. It does so by moving beyond the frame of the retention of women and exploring selected aspects of the gendered practices of men in relation to this notion of the ideal legal professional in large transnational “city” law firms. The Article traces how particular ideas about men and gender are, on closer examination, implicated in a broader recasting of lawyer professionalism within the …

Examining The Impact Of A Fatigue Intervention On Job Performance: A Longitudinal Study Across United States Hospitals, Megan Gregory

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Fatigue in healthcare providers has been linked to dangerous outcomes for patients, including medical errors, surgical complications, and accidents. Resident physicians, who traditionally work long hours on minimal sleep, are among the most fatigued. In attempt to mitigate the impact of fatigue on resident physician performance and improve patient safety, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented a fatigue intervention program in 2011 for medical residency programs in the United States. This caused a significant decrease in the number of hours that first-year residents were permitted to work, compared with hours worked by first-year residents in prior years. …

Satisfaction Data Collected By Email And Smartphone For Emergency Department (Ed) Patients: How Do Responders Compare To Non-Responders?, Jeffrey Charles Strickler

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

The University of North Carolina ED developed an electronic survey method (Bivarus) which sends a web-link by email or text to patients. This study evaluated this method by considering differences between the key characteristics (age, gender, disposition, race, ethnicity, and payor classification) of the responders and non-responders to this survey from July to December 2013 (22,750 records). An evaluation of the key characteristics showed no difference related to age and disposition, but differences related to sex, race, ethnicity, and payor classes. This difference could therefore lead to under representation of the patient experience from those populations.

Career Goals And Expectations Of Female Intercollegiate Athletic Administrators, Meg G. Hancock, Mary A. Hums

Global Sport Business Journal

Sport management researchers have sought to understand and address the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in intercollegiate athletic departments. Studies suggest a male-dominated organizational structure and socio-cultural barriers as factors related to women’s inability to advance to senior leadership positions. This qualitative study provides a better understanding of the dynamic processes contributing to women’s career expectations and goals in intercollegiate athletic administration. Twenty female NCAA Division I assistant and associate athletic directors were interviewed. The findings of this study suggest professional interests and values play important roles in a woman’s choice to pursue the title of Athletic Director.

Online Knowledge Sharing: Investigating The Community Of Inquiry Framework And Its Effect On Knowledge Sharing Behavior In Online Learning Environments, Anne Doring

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the CoI framework can predict self-reported knowledge sharing behaviors within graduate-level online courses. The overall goal was to determine if high levels of social, teaching, and cognitive presence can lead to increased knowledge distribution within online learning environments, leading to the co-construction of knowledge among learners. As part of the study, graduate students from the field of education were asked to complete a survey, which combined Swan et al.'s (2008) CoI survey instrument and Yu, Lu, & Liu's (2010) knowledge sharing survey tool. The survey assessed students' perceptions of social, teaching, …

Behavioral Ethics: Can It Help Lawyers (And Others) Be Their Best Selves?, Robert A. Prentice

Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy

Using the principles of behavioral psychology and related fields, marketers have changed human behavior in order to increase sales. Governments have used these same principles to change human behavior in order to advance policy goals, such as increasing savings behavior or organ donations. This article surveys a significant portion of the new learning in behavioral ethics in support of the claim that by teaching behavioral ethics we have a realistic chance to improve the ethicality of human decisionmaking and actions.

Bridging The Research-To-Practice Gap: Factors Affecting Teachers' Efficacy About Instruction, Tiana J. Tucker

Doctor of Education (EdD)

No abstract provided.

Assessing Climate For Systems Improvement Initiatives In Healthcare, Keerthi S. Suryadevara

Open Access Dissertations

Increasing medical costs have made healthcare organizations look at reducing their operating costs while meeting their demands, which made them move towards adopting systems improvement methodologies that have been successful in other business sectors, especially from manufacturing industries. The success of these improvement methodologies is contingent on employees of the organization being ready to adopt and embrace them which necessitates behavior change of employees. This study aimed to develop measures based on the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) to assess employees’attitudes and readiness to adopt improvement methodologies and the effects of employees’ demographics like supervisory level, length of service, work group and …

“. . . And We Are A-Changing, Too”, James S. Ruebel

Honors in Practice Online Archive

From antiquity to now, “All things change” has been a common aphorism. The Romans ascribed the comment first to Heraclitus, who did indeed assert—along with statements such as “you cannot step into the same river twice”—that all things change (πάντα ῥεῖ, panta rhei: after Plato, Cratylus 401d). The Romans translated the aphorism as omnia mutantur, which appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (15.165) as “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit” (“Everything changes, nothing dies”). Ovid’s comment is hardly surprising in a book titled Metamorphoses.

Making Continuous Improvement A Reality: Achieving High Performance In The Ottawa County, Michigan, Circuit And Probate Courts, Brian J. Ostrom, Matthew Kleiman, Shannon Roth, Alicia Davis

Court Review: Journal of the American Judges Association

Today, a well-functioning court is expected to resolve large volumes of work in a fair and orderly way within demanding time frames. The overall goal is quality administration in all phases of court operations, yet achieving this goal in practice means navigating the shoals of tight budgets, workplace politics, and the heavy press of daily business. Courts are under enormous stress these days, and as a result it should come as no surprise that too many courts are infected with pessimistic court leadership. Winston Churchill is often reported to have said, “The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, the optimist …

Strategic Priorities: A Roadmap Through Change For Library Leaders, Anne M. Casey

Publications

Twenty-first century academic libraries need to adapt on a regular basis because external forces such as increased pressures from the institution and accreditation organizations, emerging technologies, or budget reductions create new conditions. In a twenty-year period ending in 2008, academic library spending shifted substantially from physical to electronic resources and from staff and student salary lines to professionals, signaling profound changes in the way libraries do business. “Then just as academic … libraries were settling into these new behaviors, the worst recession in seventy-five years occurred, forcing many … to concern themselves with survival and making difficult decisions based on …

Systems Alignment For Comprehensive Faculty Development In Liberal Arts Colleges, Vicki L. Baker, Laura G. Lunsford, Meghan J. Pifer

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Using an alignment framework, the authors explore faculty development initiatives in liberal arts colleges in order to understand the connection between organizational priorities and processes as connected to faculty members’ stated needs. The study draws on mixed methods data from The Initiative for Faculty Development in Liberal Arts Colleges (IFDLAC), including survey andinterview data from the 13 member institutions of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA).The authors offer future implications for faculty development practice.

Creating A Supportive Teaching Culture In The Research University Context: Strategic Partnering And Interdisciplinary Collaboration Between A Teaching Centerand Academic Units, Marie Kendall Brown, Patricia A. S. Ralston, Kathy B. Baumgartner, Melissa A. Schreck

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This paper describes 2 “strategic partnering” and “interdisciplinary collaboration” case studies between a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and an academic unit at a mid-sized metropolitan research university in the American Midwest. These faculty development partnerships were developed to meet the unique needs of faculty members who share a discipline area, present current information on specific teaching topics in order to deepen pedagogical knowledge and skills, provide opportunities for faculty to form a collegial group, and advance unit-specific goals relative to faculty development. The work is grounded in literature about the characteristics of a supportive teaching culture, characteristics of …

Encouraging Faculty Attendance At Professional Development Events, Dakin Burdick, Tim Doherty, Naomi Schoenfeld

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

For faculty development events to have the greatest impact on campus practice, faculty developers need to attract and include as many faculty members as possible at their events. This article describes the testing of a checklist regarding faculty attendance at professional development events through a survey of 238 faculty members at small colleges in the United States. The results demonstrate the influence of social relationships upon faculty attendance at teaching and learning events, the difficulties of scheduling such events, and motivational differences between full-time and adjunct faculty. The use of food as a motivator for attendance is also appraised. The …

Mentoring Within A Community Of Practice For Faculty Development: Adding Value To A Ctl Role, Patricia E. Calderwood, Suzanna Klaf

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

E. R. Smith, P. E. Calderwood, F. Dohm, and P. Gill Lopez’s (2013) model of integrated mentoring within a community of practice framework draws attention to how mentoring as practice, identity, and process gives shape and character to a community of practice for higher education faculty and alerts us to several challenges such a framework makes visible. In this exploratory study, we apply the model, and the consideration of the challenges it highlights, to consider how mentoring might figure in and configure a community of practice for faculty development localized in a university Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) for …

A View From The Margins: Situating Ctl Staff In Organizational Development, Emily O. Gravett, Lindsay Bernhagen

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

The authors explore assumptions that underlie work on organizational development in their field, which reveal hierarchical and homogenizing tendencies, despite commitments to inclusivity. Given that the aim of recent literature, such as Schroeder and Associates’ Coming in from the Margins, is to situate educational developers in relation to organizational development, and given the field’s values, then both staff and directors must be considered. The authors examine how the margins can be valuable sites of knowledge production, highlighting the ways staff might contribute to organizational development. The authors hope that readers will gain several ideas for how to incorporate staff into …

Negotiating A Seat At The Table: Questions To Guide Institutional Involvement, Gregory J. Siering, Suzanne Tapp, Debra Rudder Lohe, Micah Meixner Logan

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

In addition to traditional roles, educational developers increasingly find themselves considering their involvement in issues of institutional change. However, this evolution leads to new challenges as educational developers attempt to discern whether and how to be involved inparticular organizational change efforts. This chapter provides a framework that can help centers of all types reflect on the broader risks and rewards of institution-level leadership. Through a series of context-based reflective questions, the authors hope to promote strategic thinking among educational developers (particularly center directors) and to spur new questions and research as our field continues to evolve.

Combining Resources, Combining Forces: Regionalizing Hospital Library Services In A Large Statewide Health System., Heather J Martin, Basia Delawska-Elliott

Articles, Abstracts, and Reports

After a reduction in full-time equivalents, 2 libraries in large teaching hospitals and 2 libraries in small community hospitals in a western US statewide health system saw opportunity for expansion through a regional reorganization. Despite a loss of 2/3 of the professional staff and a budgetary decrease of 27% over the previous 3 years, the libraries were able to grow business, usage, awareness, and collections through organizational innovation and improved efficiency. This paper describes the experience--including process, challenges, and lessons learned--of an organizational shift to regionalized services, collections, and staffing. Insights from this process may help similar organizations going through …

Key Factors Driving Personnel Downsizing In Multinational Military Organizations, Ilksen Gorkem, Resit Unal, Pilar Pazos

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Although downsizing has long been a topic of research in traditional organizations, there are very few studies of this phenomenon in military contexts. As a result, we have little understanding of the key factors that drive personnel downsizing in military setting. This study contributes to our understanding of key factors that drive personnel downsizing in military organizations and whether those factors may differ across NATO nations’ cultural clusters. The theoretical framework for this study was built from studies in non-military contexts and adapted to fit the military environment.

This research relies on historical data from one of the largest multinational …

Energy, Consumption, And The Amorality Of Energy Law, Lincoln L. Davies

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores the connection between energy consumption and energy law and policy. It argues that the energy law and policy system is configured to promote consumption, almost blindly, so that energy seems nearly infinite and invisible to consumers. This regulatory structure thus creates a kind of amorality for energy consumers. That is, when individuals choose to consume power, those decisions are divorced from their consequences. The essay relies on Pope Francis's encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si', to build its argument, and offers observations about the importance of COP21 in Paris to transform how energy is produced and consumed.