Decision-making Actions Research Articles

Cultural dissonance: ethical considerations from Afghanistan

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) includes ethical decision-making as part of its professional development program. However, the limitations of the CAF professional development program in ethical decision-making become evident when CAF members must deal with coalition members whose ethical norms differ significantly from those of the CAF. A number of recent cases in the Afghanistan mission highlight these limitations. This article examines the ethical dilemmas faced by senior Canadian decision-makers in one such case. When confronted with numerous reports, starting as early as 2005, by members of the CAF to the chain of command of incidents of sexual assault of boys by Afghan forces, senior decision-makers were faced with choices that could fall within a continuum of actions. At one end of the continuum was to take immediate and forceful action based on Canadian values. At the other end was to take no action since the attitude of most coalition partners was to do nothing because they accepted that this practice had been “common” in Afghanistan’s culture. The article discusses the actions of senior Canadian decision-makers in this case and focuses on whether or not the CAF professional development program adequately prepared them for their decision-making role in this type of ethical dilemma.

Evaluation of a Decision-Making Curriculum for Teaching Adolescents with Disabilities to Resist Negative Peer Pressure.

This study was designed to assess the impact of a decision-making curriculum (PEER-DM) on the social peer relationship knowledge and self-protective decision-making skills of adolescents with disabilities in hypothetical situations involving negative peer pressure. A randomized design was used to assign students with disabilities from self-contained special education classes to an intervention group (n=22) or a wait-list control group (n=20). ANCOVA analyses, using pretest scores as covariates, indicated that students who were trained on PEER-DM had significantly higher effective decision-making action and correct risk perception scores, relative to participants in the control group. This study provides supporting evidence that PEER-DM is a promising intervention for students with disabilities, including those with identified autism spectrum disorders, during transition years to help them develop a better understanding of positive and negative peer relationships and learn systematic decision-making skills for improved handling of social situations in the school and community, especially situations involving negative peer pressure. The study adds credence to using systematic, strategy-based decision making interventions designed to address the cognitive, emotional and motivational processes underlying adolescent decision making in sensitive interpersonal situations involving peer pressure. The study points to the lack of preparedness to handle situations of negative peer pressure as a serious social and health risk for adolescents with disabilities that deserves urgent and concerted attention in transition services programming. Implications for future curriculum-development efforts and replication of treatment findings are discussed. Future research examining disability-specific patterns of decision-making in peer situations and comparisons with typically developing populations is recommended.

Boycott and racism: a loaf of bread is just a loaf of bread

Subject area This case study can be used for courses under marketing management, international marketing or public relations. Study level/applicability This case study may be suitable for courses which discuss decision-making and/or executive actions and execution, at both undergraduate and graduate levels. It could also be used in graduate classes as some open-ended questions are also included to illicit critical thoughts and fresh ideas. Case overview Companies can be boycotted for many reasons; for example, a company may be associated with or engage in egregious acts which trigger a consumer boycott. However, it is unusual for racial and political elements to form the basis of a consumer boycott. This paper describes how a current leader in the packaged bread market, Gardenia Bakeries Sdn Bhd (GBKL), responded to one such online campaign. This case study highlights the importance of effective communications and marketing strategies for responding to sensitive issues involving racism and politics. Expected learning outcomes Students are introduced to the concept of consumer boycotts and how this may affect a business. Students are exposed to the development of appropriate public relation strategies and explore creative methods to combat bad publicity and/or a smear campaign. Students can learn to appreciate the sensitivity of allegations of racism in a multi-ethnic country and understand how multi-ethnic consumers respond to these types of issues. Students are exposed to the effects of political and socio-demographic influences on purchase behavior in a particular market or country. Students may explore the effects of consumer activism on a company's brand image. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Choosing Wisely: Decision Making and Scientific Evidence

The medical practice is associated with dozens of decision-making actions in the daily routine. In 2014, Linder et al.1 published an article stating that doctors suffer from a condition known as decision fatigue, defined as a reduction in the ability to make choices resulting from fatigue. In the study, the authors demonstrated that medical appointments at the end of a working day were more associated with the prescription of inappropriate treatment1.

Integrating intensive care unit (ICU) surveillance into an ICU clinical care electronic system

The intensive care unit (ICU) is the specialty with the highest prevalence of healthcare-associated infection (HCAI) in European hospitals and therefore a priority for surveillance of HCAI. Whereas surveillance is an essential part of an effective infection prevention and control (IPC) programme, all too often it consumes too much clinician and IPC team time, limiting the time available for quality improvement. The case for electronic surveillance is made in the literature from several countries on this basis. These studies indicate that electronic surveillance can improve validity, reduce time spent on surveillance, and provide opportunities for improvement in clinical decision-making and IPC action arising from surveillance. The Scottish ICU HAI surveillance system was established as part of an integrated audit and clinical care system. Investment in this technology infrastructure reduced the burden of data collection and has resulted in a focus on driving improvement in all Scottish ICUs. The experience in Scotland indicates that several critical components are necessary to optimize ICU HCAI surveillance, including: nationally agreed definitions and methods; national investment in information technology infrastructure to make it easier to follow clinical care pathways; leadership of surveillance by intensivists; piloting and validation to ensure confidence in the system; and strategic integration of national and local programmes. These elements have helped improve surveillance data locally, nationally, and at a European level, allowing clinical attention to be focused on the data rather than on the process of data collection.

Epilogue

This article explores the need for a paradigm shift in the policy and project decision analysis process of the development assistance industry in order to meet the challenges of global governance. The essay argues that such shifts will require the intentional use of narrative foresight to inform the leadership and engage followers in a shared vision of the desired future, and lays out a call to action for decision makers in the global commons that envisages seven key elements.

An options-based approach to coordinating distributed decision systems

Engineering and operations management decisions have become increasingly complex as a result of recent advances in information technology. The increased ability to access and communicate information has resulted in expanded system domains consisting of multiple agents, each exhibiting autonomous decision-making capabilities, with potentially complex logistics. Challenges regarding the management of these systems include heterogenous utility drivers and risk preferences among the agents, and various sources of system uncertainty. This paper presents a distributed options-based model that manages the impact of multiple forms of uncertainty from a multi-agent perspective, while adapting as both the stream of information and the capabilities of the agents are better known. Because the actions of decision makers may have an impact on the evolution of underlying sources of uncertainty, this endogenous relationship is modeled and a solution approach developed that converges to an equilibrium system state and improves the performance of agents and the system. The final result is a distributed options-based decision-making policy that both responds to and controls the evolution of uncertainty in large-scale engineering and operations management domains.

Foreword [to special issue: Geographical evidence in changing Europe

This is perhaps the most ‘political’ moment of the Europe life because it is directly related to the addresses, themes, projects and activities that states and regions and territories should dictate in order to harmonize their needs and diversities with the challenges to be again competitive in the global world. It is no coincidence that several research projects have followed and supported European development for more than a decade, drawing from research and analysis many important insights for the understanding of the local socio-economic effects of the crisis, which proved useful for the actions of decision-makers at the local level. Studying the effects of the European crisis at the territorial level, starting by empirical evidence, and analyzing the different impacts on regional and local trends are already a breakthrough for countries because they have allowed us to highlight the regional experience and how these realities, although characterized by some critical issues, were able to better react to the crisis by bringing into play their own territorial capital. Taking inspiration from geographical and economic research results from several European programmes in the field of geographical applied researches, the issue proposes a critical analysis and discussion on the so defined “territorial evidence” in policy planning processes. In this regard, experiences on the planning process of European Territorial Agenda 2020, transnational planning cooperation and also national level documents are included.

Using Statistical and Probabilistic Methods to Evaluate Health Risk Assessment: A Case Study

The toxic chemical and heavy metals within wastewater can cause serious adverse impacts on human health. Health risk assessment (HRA) is an effective tool for supporting decision-making and corrective actions in water quality management. HRA can also help people understand the water quality and quantify the adverse effects of pollutants on human health. Due to the imprecision of data, measurement error and limited available information, uncertainty is inevitable in the HRA process. The purpose of this study is to integrate statistical and probabilistic methods to deal with censored and limited numbers of input data to improve the reliability of the non-cancer HRA of dermal contact exposure to contaminated river water by considering uncertainty. A case study in the Kelligrews River in St. John’s, Canada, was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and capacity of the proposed approach. Five heavy metals were selected to evaluate the risk level, including arsenic, molybdenum, zinc, uranium and manganese. The results showed that the probability of the total hazard index of dermal exposure exceeding 1 is very low, and there is no obvious evidence of risk in the study area.

Reconnecting Nature and Culture: A Model of Social Decision-making in Innovation

Social decision-making is the process of consciously or unconsciously choosing between alternative courses of action in social contexts. This process non-linearly connects the past, present, and the unknown future. It is the connection of these different times that allows action to proceed under uncertainty. This is the case since the outcomes of decision-making and subsequent social action are inaccessible to strictly rational calculations. As such, decision-making integrates rational and emotional components. These components are socially and somatically framed. Consequently, the understanding of decision-making processes requires an integrative approach encompassing both dimensions of decision-making that are generally addressed under disciplinary studies. This paper starts by conceptualizing decisionmaking processes and discussing the social and natural sciences' inputs to this conceptualization. An interdisciplinary approach is then mobilized in the design of a rational-emotional model of decision-making. This model is developed for the study of decision-making during innovation development, a complex social change process that is triggered by strategic social decision-making processes. Simultaneously addressing the social and somatic dimensions of decisionmaking, this approach will additionally characterize the connections between them, a layer of complexity that is absent in disciplinary studies. This multi-layer approach should critically contribute to a broad understanding of decision-making processes.

Ontology Based Data Analysing Approach for Actionable Knowledge Discovery

In Data Mining, the effectiveness of association rules is limited by the huge quantity of delivered rules. In this manuscript, we propose a new approach to prune and filter discovered rules. An interactive and iterative framework is designed to assist the user along the analyzing task. The manuscript focus on medical data test set for detailed analysis and formation of the ontologies. In the proposed approach, the data set of medical records is entered in the back - end database. The development of associations and the ontology is fully dynamic. In case, any symptom is searched, the proposed approach search from the back end database and creates the ontology that is dynamic in execution. It refers that the unsupervised approach of ontology generation is implemented so that the unbiased results can be achieved. The implementation of proposed work shows the dynamic results in terms of rules found and their effectiveness in the real world scenario. 3 M) which is intended to make data mining workable in supporting decision-making actions in the real world. Current data mining tools and techniques drive a paradigm shift from traditional data-centred hidden pattern mining to domain-driven actionable knowledge discovery (AKD). AKD must cater for domain knowledge and environmental factors, balance technical significance and business expectations from both objective and subjective perspectives and support automatically converting patterns into deliverables in business friendly and operable forms such as actions or rules. In domain-driven framework, data mining analysts and domain-specific business analysts complement each other with regard to in-depth granularity and constrained environment through interactive system support. The involvement of domain experts and their knowledge can assist in developing highly effective domain specific data mining techniques, and reduce the complexity of knowledge discovery. The involvement of domain-related social intelligence into KDD process not only strengthens technical development and performance, but highlights business expectations and actionable capability of the identified results. In Data Mining, the effectiveness of association rules is strappingly limited by the huge quantity of delivered rules. In this manuscript, we propose a new approach to prune and filter discovered rules. An association rule is described as the implication X → Y where X and Y are sets of items and

Media relations in the Council of the European Union: insights into the Council press officers' professional practices

Government communication plays a key role in democratic societies as it helps public understanding of government policies and raises awareness of the roles and actions of decision makers. Within the European Union (EU) polity, communication plays a crucial role for citizens' support for the European integration process. Despite the increasing relevance of communication about major activities of the EU, studies on the EU institutions' communications are scarce, and very little is currently known about the external communication of the Council of the EU. Focusing on the media relations activities of the Council, this paper investigates the communication practices and roles of press officers working in the Council's General Secretariat as perceived by these government communicators themselves. Qualitative interviews with the press officers, analysis of Council documents, participation in their work processes and observations of their professional behaviour were used to establish the empirical basis of the study. The findings highlight the apolitical and reactive nature of these European civil servants' communication activities and identify some of the institutional and political challenges that they face in the performance of their professional duties. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Risk communication and trust in decision-maker action: a case study of the Giant Mine Remediation Plan

BackgroundThe development and implementation of a remediation plan for the residual arsenic trioxide stored at the former Giant Mine site in the Canadian Northwest Territories has raised important issues related to trust. Social and individual trust of those responsible for making decisions on risks is critically important in community judgements on risk and the acceptability of risk management decisions. Trust is known to be affected by value similarity and confidence in past performance, which serve as interacting sources of cooperation in acting toward a common goal.ObjectiveTo explore the elements of trust associated with the development and implementation of the Giant Mine Remediation Plan.DesignSemi-structured interviews were conducted with eight purposively selected key informants representing both various interested and affected parties and the two government proponents.ResultsFive primary issues related to trust were identified by the participants: (1) a historical legacy of mistrust between the community (particularly Aboriginal peoples) and government; (2) barriers to building trust with the federal government; (3) limited community input and control over the decision-making process; (4) the conflicted and confounded role of the government agencies being both proponent and regulator, and the resulting need for independent oversight; and (5) distrust of the government to commit to the perpetual care required for the remediation option selected.ConclusionsThe dual-mode model of trust and confidence was shown to be a useful framework for understanding the pivotal role of trust in the development of the Giant Mine Remediation Plan. Failure to recognize issues of trust based on value dissimilarity and lack of confidence based on past performance have resulted in a lack of cooperation characterized by delayed remediation and a prolonged and expensive consultation process. Government recognition of the importance of trust to these issues will hopefully improve future communication and public engagement endeavours.

Predicting individual differences in decision-making process from signature movement styles: an illustrative study of leaders

There has been a surge of interest in examining the utility of methods for capturing individual differences in decision-making style. We illustrate the potential offered by Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA), an observational methodology that has been used in business and by the US Department of Defense to record body movements that provide predictive insight into individual differences in decision-making motivations and actions. Twelve military officers participated in an intensive 2-h interview that permitted detailed and fine-grained observation and coding of signature movements by trained practitioners using MPA. Three months later, these subjects completed four hypothetical decision-making tasks in which the amount of information sought out before coming to a decision, as well as the time spent on the tasks, were under the partial control of the subject. A composite MPA indicator of how a person allocates decision-making actions and motivations to balance both Assertion (exertion of tangible movement effort on the environment to make something occur) and Perspective (through movements that support shaping in the body to perceive and create a suitable viewpoint for action) was highly correlated with the total number of information draws and total response time—individuals high on Assertion reached for less information and had faster response times than those high on Perspective. Discussion focuses on the utility of using movement-based observational measures to capture individual differences in decision-making style and the implications for application in applied settings geared toward investigations of experienced leaders and world statesmen where individuality rules the day.

Uprooting: mega-real estate and the exacerbation of the ‘demographic disorder’ in the GCC

This study focuses on what has become commonly known as the ‘demographic disorder’ in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). At the general level, the ‘demographic disorder’ refers to the over-reliance on expatriates – in various areas and prominently within labour forces (both highly specialized as well as unskilled) – in GCC societies, where expatriates constitute a majority of the population in four of the GCC countries and a majority of the labour force in all six member states. This study focuses particularly on demographic developments and trends over the first decade of the new millennium, especially the phenomenon of ‘international mega-real estate’ projects aimed at expatriates. This phenomenon has taken central stage in four countries of the GCC (Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the UAE), where the policies and actions of decision-makers have been squarely directed towards making these projects primary engines of growth in their respective economies. The central thesis of this study holds that these mega-real estate projects signal a qualitative shift in the manner in which decision-makers view the issue of the ‘demographic disorder’. While the overreliance on expatriates was previously seen as a necessary and unavoidable by-product of economic growth that had to be tolerated and regulated in order to meet the dictates of economic production, migrant inflow of a very specific and peculiar kind has now been adopted as a central goal required in order to fill these newly constructed cities and to boost economic demand and consumption in the region.

A New Era in the ICU

Management of the patient in the intensive care unit requires constant vigilance and monitoring. The nursing staff, and physicians must be readily available to alter therapy in response to adverse physiological changes and life-threatening events. In the face of limited staffing and overwhelming workloads, telemedicine has become a mainstay in ensuring safety for the critically ill patient. Nurses must respond to the challenge to utilize every aspect of this technology, and to become an active partner in improving the utilization of this tool for accessing physician interface and ensuring support when decision-making and immediate actions are required for optimum clinical outcomes.

Lessons from the Arab Awakening of 2011

This article is based partly on events of the Arab Awakening that began in 2011. When considering the ripple effects of the tumult in the Middle East, a question arises: How can any policy-maker keep up with the vast amount of information coming from a vast number of sources? The public's political expectations are geared to the speed of the information flow, but that does not necessarily mean that those who govern should try to match the pace of this flow as they design and implement policy. Fast policy-making is often unwise policy-making, but that observation is unlikely to satisfy those who are accustomed to getting their news with the click of a mouse and expect to see crises resolved by the next time they click. This article does not endorse trying to match the pace of diplomacy to the speed of social and other media, but it does suggest that policy-makers must do a better job of addressing the political realities and technological capabilities of a social-media-oriented society that relies heavily on networks of various kinds to acquire the information used in decision-making and political action within the public sphere. Although no precise how-to-do-it formula emerges from consideration of these matters, this article may help establish the context in which policy makers and the public will be considering and responding to political events for years to come. The Arab Awakening of 2011 was just a starting point, and a long path lies ahead.

A Proclivity to Cheat: How Culture Influences Illegal Insider Trading

We examine the role of culture on the prevalence of illegal insider trading. Recent literature suggests that decisions and actions of economic decision-makers, including CEOs and managers, are influenced by behavioural biases (Shefrin, 2007). We hypothesize that nations where individuals are more risk-averse and less individualistic engage in less illegal insider trading. We employ the uncertainty avoidance and individualism cultural dimensions of Hofstede (2001) as a proxy for culture. Using price run ups and abnormal volume data, as a proxy for illegal insider trading, from 7,853 target firms in 28 countries for the period January 1990 to August 2008, we show that uncertainty avoidance, a country-level proxy for risk aversion, is negatively related to insider trading, while individualism appears to have less connection with insider trading. Our findings suggest that law makers may need to consider cultural aspects within a country when developing insider trading laws.

Emergency evacuation model: accessibility as a starting point

In evacuation scenarios, assuming evacuees’ potential location before a hazard situation is an initial step for any simulation model. This initial step is crucial in analysing evacuation in urban open spaces, which is a less controllable environment than enclosed spaces, such as analysing evacuation inside buildings. There are problems with conventional models dealing with evacuation in urban spaces. They start with a random distribution of evacuees or give an equal distribution to their location with speculated weighting factor for specific exits. Moreover, these models focus on the hazard area without appropriate consideration to the surrounding context that affects the evacuation process. Their simulation outcomes give an erroneous result that would affect the decision-maker's actions in real evacuation conditions. The paper examines an alternative starting point to analyse evacuation models in urban open spaces. It verifies evacuees' potential location before starting the simulation scenarios based on accessibility analysis. A space syntax geographic information system and field survey are used as triangulation methods for analysing the evacuees' potential location and movements in urban spaces surrounding the hazard place. United Arab Emirates university campus (Islamic Institute) in Al-Ain city is used as a case study for applying the paper's suggested methods.

Combined Mining: Discovering Informative Knowledge in Complex Data

Enterprise data mining applications often involve complex data such as multiple large heterogeneous data sources, user preferences, and business impact. In such situations, a single method or one-step mining is often limited in discovering informative knowledge. It would also be very time and space consuming, if not impossible, to join relevant large data sources for mining patterns consisting of multiple aspects of information. It is crucial to develop effective approaches for mining patterns combining necessary information from multiple relevant business lines, catering for real business settings and decision-making actions rather than just providing a single line of patterns. The recent years have seen increasing efforts on mining more informative patterns, e.g., integrating frequent pattern mining with classifications to generate frequent pattern-based classifiers. Rather than presenting a specific algorithm, this paper builds on our existing works and proposes combined mining as a general approach to mining for informative patterns combining components from either multiple data sets or multiple features or by multiple methods on demand. We summarize general frameworks, paradigms, and basic processes for multifeature combined mining, multisource combined mining, and multimethod combined mining. Novel types of combined patterns, such as incremental cluster patterns, can result from such frameworks, which cannot be directly produced by the existing methods. A set of real-world case studies has been conducted to test the frameworks, with some of them briefed in this paper. They identify combined patterns for informing government debt prevention and improving government service objectives, which show the flexibility and instantiation capability of combined mining in discovering informative knowledge in complex data.