Grace Kistner, Michael Poláček, Ongelique Conflenti
et al.
The nursing profession was established in a spirit of individual policy entrepreneurship, yet this identity has been sparsely activated despite a recognized social contract with the public as a trusted advocate and a history of nurse policy entrepreneurs. The Nurse Policy Entrepreneur Café (NPEC) is an unaffiliated volunteer group that focuses on skill development, networking, innovative approaches to identifying barriers, and offering support and resources to empower interested nurses to create their personal and professional development strategy to become effective partners in health-care policy development, reform, and implementation. The NPEC was established in 2022, utilizing an online adaptation of The World Café Method to paint a picture of the Nurse Policy Entrepreneur identity, and has since expanded to include resources such as presentations, blogs, a newsletter, and support for global participant networking, supporting the needs of all nurses and nursing students worldwide.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Forohar Mansori, Christophe Van Linden, Anna Kania Widiatami
We respond to a call for more research on diversity and governance of cultural organizations. Our research aims to measure the representation of women in governance positions at Norwegian museum foundations, and we hypothesize and test an association with financial reporting quality. Psychology literature documents that women report higher dutifulness than men and management literature demonstrates that male and female directors have differing core values. Moreover, prior accounting literature posits that individual attributes of governance actors affect financial reporting. We predict a positive association between a museum foundation’s financial reporting quality and: 1. A female museum director 2. The proportion of female board members 3. A female external auditor. Our sample consists of all Norwegian museum foundations that have at least one employee in 2021–2023 and are being audited. Governance data for our observations are manually collected. Our main findings are as follows: Museum foundations’ financial reporting quality is positively associated with 1. Female museum directors with at least 3 years tenure 2. The percentage of women on museum foundations’ boards 3. Female external auditors. Our findings contribute to ongoing discussions on diversity in the museum sector and the gender equality goal for sustainable development as stipulated by the United Nations.
Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Cloud computing has been shown to be an essential enabling technology for public sector organizations PSOs and offers numerous potential benefits, including reduced information technology infrastructure costs, increased innovation potential, and improved resource resilience and scalability. Despite governments' intensifying efforts to realize the benefits of this technology, cloud computing adoption and usage proves to be challenging, posing a variety of organizational and operational issues for PSOs. This systematic analysis constitutes the initial phase of a larger research effort that involves forthcoming case studies of specific public sector cloud stakeholders; it aims to identify and synthesize the available knowledge on organizational cloud computing adoption and utilization in the public sector to provide public sector decision makers and stakeholders with reliable, evidence-based, actionable insights that inform and improve public sector IT practice and policy.
این پژوهش با هدف طراحی چارچوبی برای ارتقاء صلاحیتهای حرفهای در آموزش فنی و حرفهای استان مازندران با رویکرد انقلاب صنعتی چهارم انجام شده است. روش پژوهش، کیفی با رویکرد دادهبنیاد اشتراوس و کوربین است. جامعۀ آماری شامل متخصصان حوزۀ آموزشهای فنی و حرفهای با مرتبۀ علمی استادیار به بالا و حداقل ۸ سال سابقه بود که بهصورت هدفمند از نوع نمونهگیری فرد ماهر انتخاب شدند. از میان آنها، ۱۲ نفر تا رسیدن به اشباع نظری بهعنوان نمونه مورد مصاحبه قرار گرفتند. ابزار گردآوری دادهها، مصاحبۀ نیمهساختاریافته و فیشبرداری از متون علمی بود. برای بررسی روایی، یافتهها بهوسیلۀ مشارکتکنندگان و اساتید بازبینی و تأیید شد. اعتبار نتایج از طریق بازبینی مستمر، تحلیلهای مشارکتی و انطباق با مبانی نظری تأمین گردید. تحلیل دادهها با استفاده از رمزگذاری باز، محوری و انتخابی انجام گرفت و ۲۸۱ مقوله استخراج شد. نتایج نشان داد که پدیدۀ محوری «صلاحیت حرفهای» شامل مهارتهای فنی، نرم، مدیریتی و شناختی است و تحت تأثیر شرایط علّی (مانند تحولات فناورانه)، زمینهای (نظیر زیرساختهای آموزشی) و مداخلهگر (همچون چالشهای اجتماعی و قانونی) قرار دارد. همچنین، پژوهش حاضر نشان میدهد که مهارتآموزی سنتی دیگر پاسخگوی نیازهای پیچیده و در حال تحول بازار کار نیست.
Social sciences (General), Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Srishti Yadav, Lauren Tilton, Maria Antoniak
et al.
Modern vision-language models (VLMs) often fail at cultural competency evaluations and benchmarks. Given the diversity of applications built upon VLMs, there is renewed interest in understanding how they encode cultural nuances. While individual aspects of this problem have been studied, we still lack a comprehensive framework for systematically identifying and annotating the nuanced cultural dimensions present in images for VLMs. This position paper argues that foundational methodologies from visual culture studies (cultural studies, semiotics, and visual studies) are necessary for cultural analysis of images. Building upon this review, we propose a set of five frameworks, corresponding to cultural dimensions, that must be considered for a more complete analysis of the cultural competencies of VLMs.
In this paper, we propose a ``Generalization Stress Test" to assess Large Language Models' (LLMs) generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. We achieve novel and significant findings that, despite high benchmark scores, LLMs exhibit severe accuracy drops and unexpected biases (e.g., preference for longer distractors) when faced with these minor but content-preserving modifications. For example, Qwen 2.5 1.5B's MMLU score rises from 60 to 89 and drops from 89 to 36 when option lengths are changed without altering the question. Even GPT4o experiences a 25-point accuracy loss when problem types are changed, with a 6-point drop across all three modification categories. These analyses suggest that LLMs rely heavily on superficial cues rather than forming robust, abstract representations that generalize across formats, lexical variations, and irrelevant content shifts.
Thiago H Silva, Daniel Silver, Gustavo Santos
et al.
Why are some neighborhoods strongly connected while others remain isolated? Although standard explanations focus on demographics, economics, and geography, movement across the city may also depend on cultural styles and amenity mix. This study proposes a relational, cross-national model in which local culture and amenity mix alignment creates a "soft infrastructure" of urban mobility, i.e., symbolic cues and functional features that shape expectations about the character of places. Using ~650 million Google Places reviews to measure co-visitation between U.S. ZIP codes and ~30 million Canadian change-of-address to track residential mobility, results show that neighborhoods with similar cultural styles and amenities are significantly more connected. These effects persist even after controlling for race, income, education, politics, housing costs, and distance. Urban cohesion and segregation depend not only on who lives where or how far apart neighborhoods are, but on the shared cultural and material ecologies that structure movement across the city.
Culture is a rich and dynamic domain that evolves across both geography and time. However, existing studies on cultural understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) primarily emphasize geographic diversity, often overlooking the critical temporal dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hanfu-Bench, a novel, expert-curated multimodal dataset. Hanfu, a traditional garment spanning ancient Chinese dynasties, serves as a representative cultural heritage that reflects the profound temporal aspects of Chinese culture while remaining highly popular in Chinese contemporary society. Hanfu-Bench comprises two core tasks: cultural visual understanding and cultural image transcreation. The former task examines temporal-cultural feature recognition based on single- or multi-image inputs through multiple-choice visual question answering, while the latter focuses on transforming traditional attire into modern designs through cultural element inheritance and modern context adaptation. Our evaluation shows that closed VLMs perform comparably to non-experts on visual cutural understanding but fall short by 10% to human experts, while open VLMs lags further behind non-experts. For the transcreation task, multi-faceted human evaluation indicates that the best-performing model achieves a success rate of only 42%. Our benchmark provides an essential testbed, revealing significant challenges in this new direction of temporal cultural understanding and creative adaptation.
Hilda Hadan, Sabrina A. Sgandurra, Leah Zhang-Kennedy
et al.
Deceptive game designs that manipulate players are increasingly common in the gaming industry, but the impact on players is not well studied. While studies have revealed player frustration, there is a gap in understanding how cultural attributes affect the impact of deceptive design in games. This paper proposes a new research direction on the connection between the representation of culture in games and player response to deceptive designs. We believe that understanding the interplay between cultural attributes and deceptive design can inform the creation of games that are ethical and entertaining for players around the globe.
The discourse-historical approach (DHA) looks at how discursive practices have changed throughout time in political and historical contexts. This analysis is based on analyzing racist, discriminatory, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, sexist, and ethnically exclusionary discourses across multiple text types, alongside their subheadings in the historical and sociopolitical context. Texts use discursive tactics to establish ideological meaning at the linguistic level as components of discourse. The discourse constructed using these techniques arranges the language’s anti-democratic framework. For this reason, applying DHA in critical discourse analysis is crucial for language to establish democratic, equal, fair, and liberating communicative activity. The purpose of this study is to clarify the theoretical underpinnings, methodology, and discursive strategies of Ruth Wodak’s DHA, which is a component of critical discourse analysis. The study also aims to explain how analytical method is appliedand to provide examples of this. With this objective in mind, the study elucidates the application of Wodak’s analytical method while simultaneously revealing research papers that have utilized her DHA and analytical method in the Turkish national literature, as well as compilation pieces deliberating on the approach. In accordance with the scan results, the study presents 10 research articles that have used discursive strategies to apply the DHA analytical method four compilation pieces that have provided a descriptive treatment of the approach. In order to add to the national literature, this study describes the theoretical and practical applications of Wodak’s analytical method.
Print media, Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
In an era where cultural preservation is increasingly intertwined with technological innovation, this study introduces a groundbreaking approach to promoting and safeguarding the rich heritage of Taiwanese Hakka culture through the development of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-enhanced chatbot. Traditional large language models (LLMs), while powerful, often fall short in delivering accurate and contextually rich responses, particularly in culturally specific domains. By integrating external databases with generative AI models, RAG technology bridges this gap, empowering chatbots to not only provide precise answers but also resonate deeply with the cultural nuances that are crucial for authentic interactions. This study delves into the intricate process of augmenting the chatbot's knowledge base with targeted cultural data, specifically curated to reflect the unique aspects of Hakka traditions, language, and practices. Through dynamic information retrieval, the RAG-enhanced chatbot becomes a versatile tool capable of handling complex inquiries that demand an in-depth understanding of Hakka cultural context. This is particularly significant in an age where digital platforms often dilute cultural identities, making the role of culturally aware AI systems more critical than ever. System usability studies conducted as part of our research reveal a marked improvement in both user satisfaction and engagement, highlighting the chatbot's effectiveness in fostering a deeper connection with Hakka culture. The feedback underscores the potential of RAG technology to not only enhance user experience but also to serve as a vital instrument in the broader mission of ethnic mainstreaming and cultural celebration.
James G. March's celebrated agent-based simulation model for organizational learning [March, Organization Science \textbf{2}, 71 (1991)] has been extensively studied for the last decades. Yet the model was not fully understood due to the lack of analytical solutions of the model. We simplify the March model to take an analytical approach using master equations. We then derive exact solutions for some simplest yet nontrivial cases, and perform numerical estimation of master equations for more complicated cases. Both analytical and numerical results are in good agreement with agent-based simulations. These results are also compared to those of the original March model. Our approach enables us to rigorously understand the results of the simplified model as well as the original model to a large extent.
AbstractThe notion of organizational routine has been at the core of behavioral and evolutionary theories in economics, management and organization studies, but has also been a source of debate and controversy. The discussion has concerned the very definition of what organizational routines are (and are not), their nature, consequences, and units of observation and analysis. In this short introductory article, we try to establish some useful common grounds which, notwithstanding the diversity of definitions and approaches, could promote future useful lines of research. We see the contributions to this special section as moving forward the research on routines in that direction.
داستانهای پلیسی از بطن جامعه استخراج میشوند. با توجه به زمینۀ اجتماعی داستان پلیسی، در این مقاله با استفاده از منابع کتابخانهای و بهشیوۀ توصیفی-تحلیلی کوشش شدهاست تا نسبت داستانهای پلیسی و جامعه بررسی شود. داستانهای پلیسی جزو پرمخاطبترین آثار ادبی بهشمار میروند و بررسی ارتباط آنها با جامعه ازمنظر مطالعات فرهنگی ادبیات حائز اهمیت است. بیان کاربردهای داستانهای پلیسی در جامعه، مهمترین نوآوری و یافتۀ این پژوهش است. این نتایج بر این نکته تأکید میکنند که نگارش و انتشار داستانهای پلیسی و استفاده از شور و علاقۀ مخاطبان به این گونۀ ادبی، عاملی است که میتواند به پلیس در برقراری نظم و امنیت عمومی کمک کند، زیرا درخلال این داستانها، مخاطب هم از قدرت پلیس و کارآگاهان و بازپرسهای جنایی اطمینان مییابد و احساس امنیت میکند و هم آگاهی او از شگردها و شیوههای جرم و جنایت و راههای پرهیز از روبهروشدن و قرارگرفتن در چنین موقعیتهایی بیشتر میشود.
Social sciences (General), Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
The second issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS) in 2023 will explore and celebrate the relationship between partnership and innovation.
We are looking for innovations that advance science, technology, and invention; innovations supporting individuals or organizations; social, business, government and or policy innovations; and innovations that improve design, remove barriers, build inclusivity, and increase accessibility. Like Buckminster Fuller said, we are architects of our future and not its victims.”
The submission deadline is August 15, 2023.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Extant literature has extensively studied innovation-capability building in emerging economy firms (EEFs) from South Korea and China, but tends to neglect EEFs in somewhat less successful emerging economies, like Brazil and Turkey. Compared to the Asian countries, Brazil and Turkey liberalized and opened up their markets to global competition and the investments of multinational enterprises (MNEs) earlier, which implied other opportunities as well as restrictions for innovation-capability building in local firms. By analyzing different ways of catching-up in two Turkish firms, this study reveals that, unlike the East Asian cases, national factors such as state support did not significantly promote the innovation activities. Instead, sectoral and firm-level factors, such as competition, learning trajectories, and technological dynamics were the key ones affecting the studied firms’ processes of innovation-capability building. These factors, particularly the learning trajectories, were heavily influenced by ownership characteristics. In one of the cases, the involvement of a Turkish diversified business group played a vital role in a locally engineered and independent learning process; in the other case, the technological and organizational learning process exploited the advantages of being a joint venture between a foreign multinational and a Turkish owner group. The study suggests that technological catch-up alone is insufficient for emerging economy firms. To build an enduring competitive advantage, they also need to develop organizational and international marketing capabilities. Thus, the alignment among technology innovation, marketing, and organizational capabilities is vital for a firm catch-up in competitive market environments.
Management. Industrial management, Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Benjamin Lange, Geoff Keeling, Amanda McCroskery
et al.
We propose a "Moral Imagination" methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some of the distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular.
The increasing ubiquity of language technology necessitates a shift towards considering cultural diversity in the machine learning realm, particularly for subjective tasks that rely heavily on cultural nuances, such as Offensive Language Detection (OLD). Current understanding underscores that these tasks are substantially influenced by cultural values, however, a notable gap exists in determining if cultural features can accurately predict the success of cross-cultural transfer learning for such subjective tasks. Addressing this, our study delves into the intersection of cultural features and transfer learning effectiveness. The findings reveal that cultural value surveys indeed possess a predictive power for cross-cultural transfer learning success in OLD tasks and that it can be further improved using offensive word distance. Based on these results, we advocate for the integration of cultural information into datasets. Additionally, we recommend leveraging data sources rich in cultural information, such as surveys, to enhance cultural adaptability. Our research signifies a step forward in the quest for more inclusive, culturally sensitive language technologies.
David Elliott Loye was a pioneer in our modern understanding of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm. His contributions are discussed in the context of the most current evolutionary and cosmological views of science.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Organizational behaviour, change and effectiveness. Corporate culture
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is traditionally argued that cumulative culture relies on high-fidelity social transmission and advanced cognitive skills, here I show that a much simpler system suffices. Cumulative culture spontaneously emerged in artificial agents who navigate with a minimal cognitive architecture of goal-direction, social proximity, and route memory. Within each generation, naive individuals benefitted from being paired with experienced navigators because they could follow previously established routes. Crucially, experienced navigators also benefitted from the presence of naive individuals through regression to the goal. As experienced agents followed their memorised path, their naive counterparts (unhindered by route memory) were more likely to err towards than away from the goal, and thus biased the pair in that direction. This improved route efficiency within each generation. In control experiments, cumulative culture was attenuated when agents' social proximity or route memory were lesioned, whereas eliminating goal-direction only reduced efficiency. These results demonstrate that cumulative cultural evolution occurs even in the absence of sophisticated communication or thought. One interpretation of this finding is that current definitions are too loose, and should be narrowed. An alternative conclusion is that rudimentary cumulative culture is an emergent property of systems that seek social proximity and have an imprecise memory capacity, providing a flexible complement to traditional evolutionary mechanisms.