(Un)willing to resist? the discursive production of local workplace opposition*

This article compares and contrasts the findings of two case studies examining the prevalence and manifestations of resistance within the leisure industry. This study was based on workplace experience over a number of years and supported by thirty-six semi-structured interviews with employees at all levels of the two organisations studied. The author predicted that there would be a number of factors contributing to the employees resisting managerial controls. It was expected that the size of the organisation would, in part, determine managerial style. Managerial style would, in turn, influence employee perceptions of what were appropriate behaviours while in the workplace. However, the employment history and expectations of key managerial staff prove to be interesting complications in one case. It was found that in one organisation where middle-management culture was one of resistance to upper-managerial approaches, so-called deviant behaviours became more covert and damaging.

This article provides an overview and critique of the extant research on work-place resistance. It argues that much of this research has developed around an implicit duality of resistance and control. In other words, critical studies have highlighted either the growing ubiquity and subtlety of managerial control or have privileged workers’ abilities to carve out spheres of autonomy within these control mechanisms. It suggests that, in contrast to this implicit dualism of control and resistance, a dialectical approach better captures the notion of resistance and control as mutually constitutive, and as a routine social production of daily organizational life.

Organizational scholars have shown considerable interest in the rise of complex systems of organizational control, sometimes referred to metaphorically as the process of tightening the iron cage, as well as patterns of workplace resistance to it. More recently, the scholarly spotlight seems to have shifted from formal modes of employee resistance to more informal or routine forms of workplace resistance. This paper presents a detailed ethnographic account of informal resistance and its ability to limit managerial control in a health maintenance organization undergoing the computerization of its administrative functions. Our study adopts a more problematic approach to understanding routine resistance, tracing its discursive constitution in the workplace. Using the findings of an ethnographic study involving observation and interviews, we show how routine resistance was discursively constituted and how it limited organizational control in interesting and unexpected ways. This discursive constitution was achieved through (a) owning resistance, (b) naming resistance, and (c) designating indirect resistance. The paper also analyzes how these different discursive constructions limited managerial control by affirming autonomous self-identities, renegotiating roles and relationships, and reinterpreting dominant managerial discourses. Finally, broader implications for understanding routine resistance in organizations are drawn.

Toward abiotic sugar synthesis from CO2 electrolysis

Meaning, Intention, and Responsibility in Rai Divinatory Discourse Martin Gaenszle (bio) In linguistic theories of what constitutes meaning in communication, or the purpose of a “speech act,” the notion of intention has been a crucial ingredient. If there were no intentions, so the general argument in the field of linguistic pragmatics goes, one could not distinguish meaningless words, like babbling, from meaningful speech. This position has been expressed in formal terms by the language philosopher H. Paul Grice: “‘A meant something by x’ is (roughly) equivalent to ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of a recognition of this intention’” (Grice 1973:46, also Du Bois 1993, emphasis mine). According to speech act theory, as developed in ordinary language philosophy by J. L. Austin and later expanded by John Searle, speech acts are performances that can have an intended effect on other persons, as in illocutionary acts like ordering, threatening, or demanding.1 In these cases an appellative act solicits the addressee to respond in some way. But speech acts can also be performances that are merely expressive of certain intentions, as in sentences that use verbal expressions of fearing, wishing, or hoping (Searle 1983). Intentionality is, in any case, a basic aspect of all linguistic communication and interaction. In other words, speakers are persons who have an intention to convey something to other persons; they want to “affect” the other person in some way, and the speaker as an individual agent is therefore taken to be responsible for these intentional acts and their consequences. This view of language in early speech act theory has been criticized by linguistic anthropologists as culture-bound, because in other cultural contexts, where other notions of personhood are prevalent, the situation may be quite different.2 In the context of the Ilongot studied by Michelle Rosaldo, for example, it is not so much propositions by individual speakers, but directive speech acts in complex social settings that are the paradigmatic case in linguistic communication. As summarized by Rosaldo, speech act theorists “think of ‘doing things with words’ as the achievement of autonomous selves, whose deeds are not significantly constrained by the relationships and expectations that define their local world. In the end, I claim, the theory fails because it does not comprehend the sociality of individuals who use its ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ to act” (Rosaldo 1982:204). This has consequences for the notion of a speaker’s intention, as the “force” of a speech act is not located in the individual actor alone. In fact, more recent studies in linguistic anthropology have stressed the social embeddedness of meaning and intention in social interaction.3 One important issue that emerged is the notion of responsibility. Who is the speaker as the source of the statement? The person who intends to convey something to others through words is also the person who makes certain claims and takes responsibility for the consequences of what is being said. Thus speech is a complex social act, often highly ritualized, in which roles and positions are negotiated. As Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine point out in the introduction to their volume Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (1993), the focus on responsibility and the related notion of evidence (that is, claims to knowledge) in speech is in line with more dialogical approaches, which bring out the interactive and processual quality of the productions of meaning. One case in point in which the ordinary intentionality of the speaker is absent is in the context of divination, that is, divinatory speech or prophecy (Leavitt 1997). As John Du Bois stresses, non-intentionality is especially pronounced in so-called “mechanical divination,” which can be distinguished from “trance divination” (that is, oracular divination), but in both cases a suppression of intention, and thus “intentionless meaning” is involved (Du Bois 1993:53, 70 n. 8). But if it is not the speaker who has intentions, this does not mean that intentions are not involved at all. They can be attributed to a special kind of person, for example, a divinity. The following study of a shamanic divination in eastern Nepal deals with a form of speech...

The article is an introduction to a new concept of assembly features able to support intelligent design and manufacturing of complex products. An assembly feature is defined as a generic solution referring to two groups of parts that need to be related by a relationship so as to solve a design problem. The concept of assembly feature encompasses the notions of design intent, technical function, technological solution and manufacturing process as well as it provides a justification for the use of part features. After a general introduction and a justification of the interest of assembly features, some guidelines are provided to show how assembly features can be characterized in any domain of application concerned with engineering design of assemblies. As an illustration of the proposed methodology, the concept is finally applied to the engineering phase of aeroplane design.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to clarify the spatial multi‐criteria workflow for stakeholders and decision makers, for which feedback rankings are vital to the success of the transportation planning.Design/methodology/approachThe experimental approach was designed to integrate in a novel fashion both analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) within a geospatial information system (GIS) framework to deliver visual and objective tabular results useful to estimate environmental costs of the alignments generated. The method enables ranking, prioritization, selection, and refinement of preferred alternatives. The Interstate‐269, the newly planned bypass of Memphis‐TN, for which a recent environmental impact study (EIS) was completed, was selected as the experiment test‐bed.FindingsThe results indicate that the approach can automate the delivery of feasible alignments that closely approximate those generated by traditional approaches. Furthermore, via integration of local planning and ancillary spatial data, the method provided alignment results that avoided areas where local opposition was noted in the EIS. This enhanced method based on remote sensing and spatial information technologies delivers low or high‐predicted environmental costs per feature criteria and cumulative predicted costs while preserving local values and plans.Practical implicationsThe method is highly transferable and limited solely by the availability of sources of geospatial data and coordination with stakeholders. The approach was implemented to derive results similar to traditional approaches with benefits in time, costs, and quality of solutions.Originality/valueA novel adaptation of MCDM and AHD within a spatial decision‐making framework is presented. The paper suggests a clarification of multi‐criteria workflow to design and select least‐environmental‐cost corridors. The case study application provides a starting point to develop practical tools that delivers environmental benefits through a collaborative process capturing stakeholder values and decision maker opinions.

Local Content policies are enacted by governments to provide incentives to local industry so that it can develop and attain global competitiveness. The goals of the Brazilian local content policy are to increment participation of the national industry on a competitive basis, develop technologies in Brazil, increase the competence of the technical community and generate employment and income in Brazil (ANP, 2008). The additional dimension of local content directly affects both the schedule and cost of execution of the project. This makes the job of the project manager much more difficult and much more critical. The purchasing situation is much more complex than in traditional project management. Traditional tools such as Gantt Charts and S-Curves are no longer sufficient for the work of a project manager. Global sourcing of products is a pre-requisite for economic project execution in the competitive oil and gas equipment market. The requirement to meet a certain local content places restrictions on the purchase of the best available global option. Often the price of a product with high local content is also higher than the best available price in the global market. Local content requires the project management function to be good at evaluating the premium they are willing to pay for local content. Which option should a project manager select - A supplier with 50% Local Content and a price of 100 or another supplier with 60% Local Content and a price of 105? This is not a theoretical question but a very practical one. This paper proposes a framework that allows the project management personnel to optimize the three dimensions of Lead Time, Local Content and Cost. A recent study on the competitiveness of Brazilian O&G industry concluded, as confirmed by our experience, that equipment highly dependent on scale or with relatively small levels of sophistication present higher differences in prices between global and Brazilian sources. The marginal cost of local content increases with increasing local content. The slope of a graph of cost vs. Local Content is asymptotically increasing. If all the products that make up a system had a similar price vs. local content function, the optimal system price would be achieved when all the constituent products are purchased at the system required local content. Any other system is non-optimal. In case of complex systems, it is more advantageous to purchase higher local content for more complex products and lower local content in less complex products. This insight is counter intuitive. EPIC companies purchase their most complex systems first - at the best prices and try to make up LC in the lesser complex products. This results in a non-optimal system cost. At a more abstract level, this observation has significance for Brazil local content policy. It is much better to incentivize and focus on higher technology Local Content as this has a higher probability of being cost competitive on a global scale. The hurdles for achieving global competitivity for lower technology equipment are higher. If the government policies and the market economics are aligned, this policy could bear better results - faster.

Lymph node status is an important prognostic factor in multiple oncologic conditions in humans and companion animals. In addition, the resection of the affected nodes can have a substantial therapeutic effect on various cancer subtypes in both species. Given the impact on prognosis and management, it is paramount to identify and remove affected nodes. While this can be achieved by removing predefined patterns of nodes (regional lymphadenectomy/resection of defined lymphatic stations), modern approaches increasingly utilize sentinel node mapping to identify the draining nodes to decrease the mortality of lymphadenectomies. Recent studies have shown that dogs have more comparable anatomy of the lymphatic system to humans than other animal models such as rodents or pigs. Given the fact that dogs develop spontaneous cancer types that share several similarities to their human counterparts, they represent a valuable translational model. The management of the lymphatic basin and sentinel node mapping have gained increased attention in veterinary surgical oncology in recent years. The present review aims at summarizing the resulting findings and their impact on patient management.

Our understanding of where and how carbonate sediments are produced and accumulate has changed considerably in recent years and a more complex framework is emerging. The earlier concept invoking a limited range of productivity-depth models has now evolved into an appreciation that there is a continuum of different types of productive sites over wide depth ranges, influenced by complex factors and not simply water depth or temperature. Studies of the nature of lithofacies ordering in the stratigraphic record, and most recent studies of the spatial distribution of Holocene environments, raise the issue that at the lithofacies scale the sedimentary record represents, in part, the product of complex and mobile facies mosaics. Many of these mosaic elements are not depth dependent and can change through time as a consequence of subtle environmental changes. As the rates of change typically exceed rates of accommodation space creation, individual sites are likely to have sediments of different environments superimposed and mixed (palimpsest). Recent studies showing the extent that dissolution is capable of skewing sediment compositions suggest that many ancient microfacies are unrepresentative of their original sediments, and there is a need for a more critical approach to interpreting microfacies in terms of identifying habitats and especially water depth. The carbonate factory is spatially and temporally highly variable and is not simply a uniform production line. This fact, coupled with the likely importance of selective early dissolution, may in part explain why accumulation rates estimated from ancient strata are lower than the production rates measured over short time periods.

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Fourth Conference on Epileptogenesis, May 23–26, 2007, Pisa, Italy

Much medical device software is safety-related, and therefore needs to have high integrity (in other words its probability of failure has to be low.) There is a consensus that if you want to develop high-integrity software, you need a quality system. This is because software is a complex product that is easy to change and difficult to test, and the management system that handles these issues must include such quality system elements as: detailed traceable specifications, disciplined processes, planned verification and validation and a comprehensive configuration management and change control system. It is also agreed that software quality management systems need specific processes which are different from and additional to more general quality management systems such as that required by EN 13485. Historically, ISO 9000-3 Part 3: Guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:1994 to the development, supply, installation and maintenance of computer software states these additional processes very clearly, but is not mandatory. (This is now ISO 90003.) In both Europe and the USA there is therefore a gap in both regulations and standards for Medical Devices. There is no comprehensive requirement specifically for software development methods. In Europe, IEC 60601-1 Medical electrical equipment Part 1: General requirements for safety and essential performance, has specific requirements for software in section 14 Programmable Electrical Medical Systems (PEMS). This requires (at a fairly abstract level) some basic processes and documents, and includes an invocation of the risk management process of ISO 14971 Medical devices Application of risk management to medical devices In the US, there is an FDA regulation requiring Good Manufacturing Practice, with guidance on software development methods (strangely entitled Software Validat

Currently, there is a big discussion ongoing among both practitioners and scientists whether the benefits of the Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint (ACBC) analysis in comparison to (standard) Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) analysis are justifying the additional costs and efforts of ACBC. To answer this question, recent studies in literature are reviewed and a conducted ACBC (n=205) about e-commerce in an international context is analyzed with regards to several aspects, e.g. excluded attribute levels and stimuli used for the Choice Tasks section. The results indicate that CBC is generally able to provide the main information about the most preferred attribute levels with less effort compared to ACBC. However, ACBC is very suitable for more complex products or services and for gaining deeper insights, such as information about the second-best options or completely unacceptable features. Furthermore, CBC requires a bigger sample size and is often less precise. Still, the related context will remain the main factor for or against the usage of one or the other method.

Hydroxyapatite/Dolomite alkaline activated material reaction in the formation of low temperature sintered ceramic as adsorbent materials