Informal Expectations Research Articles

Trust in context: The impact of regulation on blockchain and DeFi

AbstractTrust is a key resource in financial transactions. Traditional financial institutions, and novel blockchain‐based decentralized financial (DeFi) services rely on fundamentally different sources of trust and confidence. The former relies on heavy regulation, trusted intermediaries, clear rules (and restrictions) on market competition, and long‐standing informal expectations on what banks and other financial intermediaries are supposed to do or not to do. The latter rely on blockchain technology to provide confidence in the outcome of rules encoded in protocols and smart contracts. Their main promise is to create confidence in the way the blockchain architecture enforces rules, rather than to trust banks, regulators, and markets. In this article, we compare the trust architectures surrounding these two financial systems. We provide a deeper analysis of how proposed regulation in the blockchain space affects the code‐ and confidence‐based architectures which so far have underwrote DeFi. We argue that despite the solid safeguards and guarantees which code can offer, the confidence in DeFi is still very much dependent on more traditional trust‐enhancing mechanisms, such as code governance, and antifraud regulation to address some of the issues which currently plague this domain, and which have no immediate, purely software‐based solutions. What is more, given the risks of bugs or scams in the DeFi space, regulation and trusted intermediaries may need to play a more active role, in order for DeFi to gain the trust of the next generation of users.

The ‘Datafication’ of Borders in Global Context: The Role of the International Organization for Migration

ABSTRACT This article examines the transnational politics of datafication in migration management through a case study of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Datafication, such as the automation of border processes, the use of biometrics and the deployment of large-scale statistical techniques, is increasingly central to the management of migration. Much of the current focus on these processes for migration management is focused on state-level policies or on supranational institutions such as the EU. There is relatively little work on the role of international organisations in this area, despite their well-researched role in setting formal standards and informal expectations around migration and mobility. The article’s first main argument is that focusing on the global level of governance yields new insights on the promotion and diffusion of data-intensive practices of migration management. The second argument is that the emerging global context of datafication around border management fits into a broader managerial agenda in which international organisations seize agenda-setting power and act as transmission mechanisms for datafication projects and ideas. The third portion of the argument is that the IOM’s projects in this area reinforce its role as a service provider and consolidate its emerging role as an orchestrator of data-driven approaches to migration governance. The article thus contributes to ongoing work on the IOM’s shifting identity as well as interdisciplinary scholarship on the role of data in migration management.

Work-life balance of academic parents: expectations and experiences of mothers and fathers

PurposeThis study was conducted to fill gaps in the literature based on institution type, career level, and gender identity.Design/methodology/approachFaculty often struggle with achieving work-life balance. This struggle is exacerbated for faculty parents. Most academic parent research has been conducted on early-career women and at research-intensive universities. Although these groups are important, it is also important to understand experiences of academic parents at different career levels and types of institutions. The authors conducted a qualitative thematic analysis from focus groups with faculty from a mid-sized master's level university about work-life balance expectations and experiences in their roles as academics and parents. These four groups included early-career mothers (n = 5), early-career fathers (n = 4), mid-career mothers (n = 4), and mid-career fathers (n = 7).FindingsFaculty expressed having a high workload based on an intersection of high work expectations, unclear work expectations, and lack of equity. Consequences of the high workload included lower work-life balance, dissatisfaction at not doing more, the loss of flexibility as an advantage, and lower organizational commitment.Originality/valueAlthough results are limited in generalizability, it is useful to examine one institution, with all participants sharing the same culture and policies, in-depth. The authors discuss recommendations for educational administrators for assisting academic parents and suggest institutions work to examine informal expectations and formal policies at their institutions. Working together, faculty and staff can help enhance alignment of expectations and perceptions of work-life balance, hopefully leading to happier, more satisfied employees.

16. Knowledge is Power – Designing a Pilot Plastic Surgery Residency “Curated Wiki” to Improve Efficiency and Spread Institutional Knowledge

Background: While the literature has examined plastic surgery formal curricula, institutional knowledge and the informal curriculum are less explored. The “curated wiki” concept, an end user-driven comprehensive resource for institutional knowledge and informal expectations, is heavily used in industry and scientific fields, and is proven to improve employee efficiency and reduce person-hours per unit production. However, this concept has only recently been adopted by residency programs. Studies from internal medicine, pathology, and radiology residencies show that curated wikis significantly improve education, efficiency, overall experience, and exam scores. We present a framework for program-specific curated wikis, based on 3 current practices. Methods: Plastic surgery residents and academic faculty, who previously expressed interest in curated resources for plastic surgery education, were informally interviewed. Questions targeted plastic surgery-specific resources used to curate and disseminate medical and institutional knowledge, and informal curriculum components. Follow-up questions were asked to explore participant needs/suggestions, to determine specific components a curated wiki should contain, and to develop a formal questionnaire for future research. Results: Thirteen residents and faculty at 8 programs participated. No programs had a comprehensive curated resource. Two programs had limited resources produced by a single attending, and 1 program had a comprehensive guide to surgical cases, maintained by one resident without institutional support. Five programs had no curated plastic surgery resource. Programs sometimes offered a physical “general intern’s guide” produced by general surgery departments. Residents and faculty both believed curated wikis would speed the learning curve for new residents, could streamline “instrument card” issues, and would reduce burnout. Residents cited reduction in personal stress and a smoother return from off-service rotations as benefits, while faculty cited reduction in resident errors and clearer expectations of residents/more explicit resident duties as benefits. Participant recommendations for content are presented. Conclusion: The curated wiki concept has significant, proven value in industry, scientific fields, and other residency specialties. Given this value, implementing a curated wiki in a plastic surgery residency program has high potential value. We present content guidelines for an internal curated wiki, which can easily be adopted by residency programs.

Experiencing Being Judged: Making Visible School Community Expectations of Rural Principals

Judgements of the work of school principals may be formal through an appraisal process or informal from students, teachers, parents, and members of the community in which the school operates. This article focuses on New Zealand rural primary school principals’ experiences of informal expectations—and judgements about whether they meet these expectations—from school community members. The aim of this study is to illustrate principals’ work in responding to community expectations and the contextual factors of school settings, and to advocate for more overt policy and process attention to such work in the formal appraisal of principals. Using Deweyan pragmatism for a theoretical approach, research evidence was generated from semi‑structured interviews with principals and ex‑principals of small rural schools. Abductive analysis was used. Not only do principals’ relationships with individuals and groups within their communities impact on their work and ability to succeed in their professional ambitions for school and students, but relationships between groups in the school community may also influence local judgements of that work. These relationships can be important aspects of schools’ historical contexts. The time principals spend prioritising and responding to community expectations is notable and should be reflected in policy and processes of principal appraisal. Insights from this research are likely to be useful for principals and their mentors, as well as for facilitators of preparation programs and inservice professional learning for principals and aspiring principals.

The ABC of Governance Principles for Carbon Dioxide Removal Policy

Climate change mitigation actions, including those aimed at developing and scaling carbon dioxide removal (CDR) activities spanning the industrial, energy, and agroforestry sector, emerge in a context of internationally shared norms that include governance objectives, legal provisions and informal expectations, and societal expectations. Established governance principles provide normative orientation for policy including when targeting the development and scaling of CDR. Knowledge of these principles can guide effective discussion and evaluation of policy options. To facilitate discussion of mitigation options among experts and CDR practitioners, this study excerpts governance principles from legislative texts, the climate governance literature, and the CDR literature with relevance to CDR policy considerations. To illustrate the relevance of the governance principles found for evaluating policy options, we apply them to three technology groups of CDR: Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS), and forestry. This exercise indicates the importance of more intensive attention to the normative dimension of mitigation policies in ongoing deliberative and planning processes. Such efforts can help disentangle normative and factual dimensions and sources of (dis)agreement on the role of CDR in specific climate policy contexts.

Great expectations: Adapting a research agenda to changing scholarship requirements

When leaving initial professional librarian positions to join new organizations, the authors considered several common factors: salaries and benefits, livability of potential cities, and new colleagues. However, thriving early- and mid-career librarians taking the step into different roles must be able to navigate one less commonly discussed aspect of a workplace transition: differing expectations of original research among institutions and according to job classification.When moving from one tenure track position to another, librarians are likely to encounter different formal tenure requirements and support mechanisms at a new institution. Small universities might weigh the successful completion of day-to-day duties more heavily, with less emphasis on research output. Often larger research institutions are the inverse, with a much heavier emphasis on what research is published or presented, and where. Since expectations can be informally relayed and not expressly stated in job postings or during interviews, understanding an employer's idea of what constitutes significant scholarship is often developed over the course of the first year at an organization.This column will discuss the two main characteristics that typically inform expected research output: the type of institution for which the librarian works and the classification of the individual's position. The authors draw on recent experiences assessing different research expectations when changing employers, as well as current research on the topic. Expectations can also change moving from non-research-intensive positions into tenure-track or continuing-status-eligible positions at the same institution, and librarians in these situations often will have to deal with differing expectations around output metrics or impact factors in their research. Successful librarians changing roles will recognize that research expectations are a continuum, and will be able to assess where their current job falls on the library research spectrum. Once readers determine whether their new position requires a low, medium, or high level of scholarship and service, they can then strategize to adapt their existing agenda to meet expectations.Lastly, the column will help early- and mid-career librarians identify and assess the resources and support available to assist them in continuing their research agendas, regardless of positional research and scholarship expectations. Formal mentors, peer researchers in one's professional network, and new colleagues can all help with the stated and informal expectations of research.

The Only Constant is Change: Exploring Shifting Relationships in Sport Overconformity through a Narrative Identity Lens

In sport, athletes are socialized to the expectations of the athlete role (i.e., sport ethic), including those expectations that require them to sacrifice themselves and prioritize their sport. Through the socialization process, athletes learn the implications of their ability to sacrifice and focus to fulfill identity related expectations. For some athletes, informal expectations become mandates, and overconforming athletes utilize maladaptive efforts to meet those mandates (e.g., disordered eating behaviors, playing injured, performance enhancing substance use). As athletes’ identities evolve over time, their relationships with the sport ethic changes, requiring various interventions (e.g., narrative therapy, identity exploration/reorganization, motivational interviewing, acceptance and commitment therapy) from skilled professionals as they navigate their sport cultures. Therefore, practitioners working with athletes to navigate the sport ethic should be mindful of several considerations, including identity foreclosure and the sport subculture, which will inevitably have impact on their work.

The revolution is conditional? The conditionality of hydrogen fuel cell expectations in five European countries

The sociology of technological expectations examines, amongst other questions, the way in which expectations of new technologies help to mobilise or hinder commitment and investment. In this and other regards, studies have referred to a ‘sea’ of informal, individual expectations, contrasting these with formal visions such as roadmaps. Here we first identify and document those less formal, individual expectations of static and mobile applications for hydrogen fuel cells (H2FCs), as held by innovation system actors. We then show that these typically involve conditionalities and uncertainties that relate as much to policy and society as to technology. In contrast, formal roadmaps set out bold possibilities premised on heroic policy assumptions that elide the social and policy uncertainties that informal expectations admit to. We argue that there is policy value in informal expectations: that they reveal issues that need to be addressed and conditions that need to be met. Moreover these are often social and political, as well as technological. We illustrate the variety of such issues with expectations-related data from interviews with 145 hydrogen fuel cell innovation system actors in Spain, Germany, Slovenia, France and the UK.

Prosocial Values as a Source of Competitive Advantage: Insights from B2B Cleaning Services

This paper investigates customers’ valuation for prosocial services offered in a business-to-business relationship, specifically the cleaning service industry in Sweden. Through an experimentally oriented survey of service purchasing activity, we find a significant willingness to pay a 10-17 % price premium for an offer signaling a supplier commitment to good working conditions. We find evidence that this willingness is driven by a combination of 1) formalized requirements, 2) informal expectations, and 3) associations between working conditions and service quality. The presence of informal expectations is particularly important when signaling social ambitions beyond compliance with existing certifications. We also investigate whether a prosocial firm could gain an advantage by presenting good working conditions as a driver of service quality. Our results suggest that while this type of argument would not effectively shift preferences from a low-cost offer to a more expensive offer signaling good working conditions, it is useful when addressing customers with an intrinsic motivation for requiring good working conditions from suppliers.

Nurses' organizational roles—Stakeholders’ expectations

In this study, we analysed stakeholders’ organizational role expectations for nurses. We defined organizational role expectations as a set of informal expectations in behavioural patterns and formal expectations in work tasks related to a certain position in the organization. A qualitative study was conducted, and content analysis was applied to 150 articles published in a Finnish nursing trade journal. We identified five general organizational role expectations of patients and their relatives, physicians and other healthcare professionals, the work community, the nursing association, and legislators in our analysis: “the alongside stroller,” “the patients’ advocate,” “the reliable colleague and team member,” “the expert and skills developer,” and “the organizational underdog.” This study explores these nursing roles and links stakeholder perspective to the organizational role expectations in professional services.

AMA Code of Medical Ethics' Opinions Related to Moral Distress

The formal policies of health care institutions, as well as informal expectations and practices, can create moral distress for patients and health care professionals in a variety of ways. For example, financial incentives or tools intended to influence decision making can put patients’ interests at odds with those of the institution or physicians who are employed by or have privileges within the institution. The AMA Code of Medical Ethics addresses situations that can create moral distress in several opinions.

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Oil Industry in the Russian Arctic: Global Norms and Neo-Paternalism

Examining the oil and gas industry in the Russian Arctic, this article investigates the gap between corporate social responsibility (CSR) as articulated in corporate offices and implemented at the local level. In Russia, global CSR norms interact with weak formal institutions and the strong informal expectations of state officials and local communities that companies bear responsibility for welfare and infrastructure. As a result, the concept of citizens as ‘stakeholders’ is underdeveloped. Instead, local residents remain subjects within a neo-paternalist system of governance that mimics some elements of the Soviet past. Compensation for damages to indigenous peoples has blurred legal obligations and the voluntary nature of CSR. However, the CSR in the region is constantly developing and formal methods of compensation may assist in clarifying the scope and practice of CSR.

Encounters and (in)tolerance: perceptions of legality and the regulation of space

Modern western societies are becoming increasingly diverse, undergoing rapid demographic change as a product of new patterns of migration driven by processes of globalization. As populations and cultures have become more heterogeneous in this way, public space has been increasingly defined as a space of encounter. The growing focus on the significance of everyday contact with difference raises questions about the frameworks within which such encounters occur and, specifically, the extent to which incidental encounters are shaped or regulated by perceptions of formal obligations to comply with legislative frameworks, or informal expectations about appropriate ways of behaving in public space. Using original empirical data about what ordinary people think about equality laws, the paper contributes to social geographies by considering the spatial sensitivities and regulatory frameworks that shape encounters with difference.

By Librarians, For Librarians: Building a Strengths-Based Institute to Develop Librarians' Research Culture in Canadian Academic Libraries

In spite of the increase in formal and informal expectations for research by Canadian librarians, there have been few—if any—Canada-wide initiatives to help support librarians in meeting research expectations. Moreover, there have been few opportunities to address academic librarians' needs and Canadian librarian research culture in any systematic way, especially on a national scale. As a way of redressing these absences and filling this need, a four-day nation-wide institute was proposed and conducted in order to bring together Canadian librarians interested in developing their own research programs and working toward fostering a positive and productive research culture in Canadian academic libraries. This article describes the principles informing the institute's development and locates the institute's objectives within discussions of research culture, mentorship, and strengths-based approaches.

The Community College Accountability Network: Understanding Institutional Accountability at Aspen Grove Community College

This article reports on a qualitative, interpretive case study examining how trustees, administrators, faculty members, and staff members at a rural community college understand their institution’s accountability environment. Data analysis and interpretation established that participants conceptualized institutional accountability as dialogic, involving ongoing communication with state authorities, employers, students, high schools, and universities about the formal and informal expectations assigned to the college. In addition, participants’ understandings of accountability were shaped by their specific roles and responsibilities within the institution. The study’s findings suggest the need for further research on how local institutional contexts influence institutional responses to accountability expectations.

The Effects of Ethics Institutionalization on Marketing Managers: The Mediating Role of Implicit Institutionalization and the Moderating Role of Socialization

Because of increasing ethical problems in business during the last two decades, many organizations have implicitly and/or explicitly institutionalized ethics. Implicit ethics institutionalization refers to a work climate where ethical behavior is either implied or understood to be crucial to the functioning of the firm (e.g., informal expectations that all employees demonstrate a high level of professionalism, honesty, and integrity). In contrast, explicit ethics institutionalization refers to the formal codification of ethical behavior in terms of policy manuals, orientation programs, and ethics committees. It has been argued that the upsurge of ethics institutionalization was a result of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines first approved by Congress in the early 1990s, which essentially provides for reduced penalties for organizations that demonstrate an adequate degree of ethics compliance. Specifically, the main objective of this research is to empirically demonstrate the direct and indirect effects of different forms of ethics institutionalization (implicit and explicit) on marketing managers’ behavioral responses, such as perceived importance of ethics, quality of work life (QWL), job satisfaction, esprit de corps, and organizational commitment. Demonstrating the significant effects of ethics institutionalization is important from a macromarketing perspective, because findings highlight the moral premise that institutionalizing ethics in the organization (thus benefiting society at large) is likely to influence employee behavioral responses that are traditionally related to the financial health of the organization.

Consenting to the Consent Form

Grounded in the author's dissertation study, this article presents the negotiations of the formal and informal expectations arising out of interpretations of the consent form. These negotiations disrupt the structure of qualitative inquiry and its associated guidelines for academic rigor, trustworthiness, and transferability. If the understanding of the consent form and its meaning is contingent and permanently deferred, then how does the relationship between the researcher and the researched inform de/colonizing methodologies? Using a vignette, the author explores how member checks and re-presentation are affected by the intersection of colonizing and decolonizing epistemologies within the current context of troubled “scientific” inquiry. She also discusses how a fluid process of consenting, insider-outsider kinship relations between the researcher and the researched, and the inadequacy of Western structures of inquiry open up alternate spaces of discussion for scientific inquiry that is responsive to the space of blurred relationships, messy methodology, and collaborative designs often present in qualitative research.

The Institutionalization of an Elite Sport Organization in Norway: The Case of “Olympiatoppen”

In this article, we argue that neoinstitutional theory can increase our understanding of the different ways nations develop structures for top-level sport. Theorists of the neoinstitutional school concentrate on how and to what degree organizations adapt to both formal and informal expectations in their institutional environment. Elite sports organizations participate in different organizational fields, and that pulls the organization in different directions. The empirical case for our discussion is the organization of elite sport in Norway. We will attempt to place elite sport in Norway in an international context by relating its development, structure, and working procedures to the development of corresponding elite sport systems in other Western countries. In addition to striking similarities among various national models for the organization of top-level sport, there are distinguishing national features that result from different cultural and political traditions.

The compatibility of construction companies' human resource development policies with employee career expectations

In order to retain and motivate employees, organizations must respond to their expectations, both in terms of meeting formal aspects of their employment contracts and in addressing their less formal expectations of the employment relationship. Within the current human resources management (HRM) literature, these informal expectations are known as psychological contracts. This paper reports on research that explored psychological contracts within the construction industry. In‐depth interviews were held with more than 80 construction managers and professional staff who worked for five large UK contracting organizations. The interviewees were asked to describe their career histories, and to discuss any tensions between the personnel policies of their organizations and their personal career aspirations and expectations. It emerged that responsibility for human resource development (HRD) had been largely devolved to divisional and operational management. This led to HRD becoming fragmented and unresponsive, and to employees becoming disillusioned by their employers' failure to meet their expectations. It is argued that construction companies require a more sophisticated understanding of their employees' expectations of the employment relationship if they are to be retained in the long term.