Interplay Of People Research Articles

Terrain park participants’ perceptions of contributing factors in injury events and risk management suggestions

Abstract Snowsport injury research has been dominated by epidemiology and engineering, with little insight from behavioural sciences that may help explain why injuries occur. Terrain parks present a challenge to snowsport resort managers who look to design an appealing terrain park, but minimizing the injury risk for a cohort that is often, younger, male and snowboarders. Using a mixed-methods design informed by a human factors approach, this research explored terrain park users’ perception of the contributing factors to injuries and recommendations for terrain park safety. Data was collected via two focus groups of teenaged terrain park participants and a survey of 78 adult terrain park users which was analyzed via a Principal Component Analysis. A key insight was the interplay between people, equipment and environment (both built and natural) as contributing factors to injury events in terrain parks as well as the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic, modifiable factors. Respondents’ recommended risk management strategies were dominated by three themes: controlling terrain park access, terrain park design and information/education. The latter highlighting the importance of effective and relevant communication strategies for this cohort. Ongoing research and monitoring are needed to understand the complex system and the interplay of people, equipment and environment in terrain parks as part of an iterative process to gain the best terrain park experience design to minimize injury risk and maximize continuing participation.

Society and sediment in the Mining Rivers of California and Australia

People and water intersect in the movement of sediment downstream in rivers. Social processes and geomorphological processes become entangled as each system moves in ways that trigger corresponding responses from the other. Long-term dialectical relationships emerge that span multiple human generations. The power of sediment and water to change physical environments is in constant tension with the power of human actions informed by social, cultural, legal, economic and engineering imperatives. The Pacific Rim gold rushes that began in the mid-nineteenth century provide an opportunity to examine how the interplay of people, water and sediment unfolds over historic time. The mass discharge of mining sediment in California and Victoria that began over 150 years ago was a catastrophic human alteration of river systems. Subsequently, mining sediment has had a long and complex entanglement with society and rivers in both regions and continues to be an active agent in reshaping riparian environments. Mining sediments also have a toxic legacy as associated contaminants, including mercury and arsenic, that are discharged into waterways and dispersed in windblown dust. The changes to river systems caused by gold mining committed societies and rivers to new trajectories of mutual engagement. Anthropogenically induced sedimentation that resulted from mining is an issue that will continue to impact watersheds for generations to come.

Algorithmic Decision-Making: Examining the Interplay of People, Technology, and Organizational Practices through an Economic Experiment

Human experts are being increasingly required to work with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in organizational decision-making. Using a large-scale historic dataset, we design and run an economic experiment where financially incentivized participants evaluate loan applications with the aid of an AI/ML. We find that humans and AI working together can surpass the AI itself and the humans working alone, under the right conditions. The performance of human-machine teams depends crucially on quality AI technology and well designed organizational practices. Importantly, when both are jointly put into place, firms most significantly increase their profits. We also find that, only when the AI/ML in use has adequate accuracy can the human-machine teams excel humans operating on their own. Otherwise, humans are actually better off working by themselves. We contribute to the emerging algorithmic decision-making literature by examining the properties of both AI/ML technology and organizational policies, in addition to accounting for the human decision makers' characteristics. Importantly, we highlight the importance of their interdependent effect on maximizing organizational outcomes. We especially contribute to the automation literature which investigates which tasks should and should not be automated. Our comparison of human-machine teams vs. machine goes beyond merely pitting human against the machine and is especially important given rising concerns about AI replacing human workers, exacerbating inequality, even eradicating the need for organizational structure. Our findings hold implications for firms wishing to build sustainable human-machine collaboration, that not only serves to increase organizational financial gains, but more importantly, also to understand more clearly the role of humans in the current constantly changing employment landscape due to the rapid advances in AI/ML every day.

Creative decision making in leaders: A case of beer game simulation

The leaders play a vital role in the decision scenarios in any organization. A qualitative study was conducted using "Beer distribution game" simulation to create an environment of novel and uncertain conditions. Additionally, the study followed the group interviewing technique to explore the underlying patterns in the creative decision-making phenomenon taken by the leaders in complex situations. The findings of the study revealed three categories of factors that contribute to the creative decision making of the leaders. These categories consist of factors related to individuals personal characteristics, team-level factors, and process related factors. The study revealed during the group discussion that creative decision making occurs through a unique interplay of people, process and technology in the Pakistani context. Keywords: Creative decision making, beer game, simulation, group interview technique

Understanding pro‐environmental intentions by integrating insights from social mobility, cosmopolitanism, and social dominance

To offer an integrative account bridging individuals’ sociocultural orientations with pro‐environmentalism, the current research tested the mediating and moderating relationships among pro‐environmental intentions and three person‐level factors: perceived social mobility, cosmopolitan orientation, and social dominance orientation (SDO). With a Singaporean college student sample (N = 220), we found support for the hypothesized second‐stage moderation model that perceived social mobility positively predicts cosmopolitan orientation, and in turn, cosmopolitan orientation is moderated by SDO to positively predict pro‐environmental intentions. Specifically, lower levels of SDO strengthen the pro‐environmental advantages of endorsing higher levels of cosmopolitan orientation. These findings add novel knowledge to the environmental psychology literature by advancing an integrative approach that demonstrates how the interplay of people's perceptions about the social, cultural, and group standing impacts their likelihood to engage in pro‐environmental actions. We discuss the implications that an egalitarian worldview toward other cultures, social groups, and human–nature relations might be the key to addressing the global challenge of climate change.

Priced to care: Factors underpinning missed care

This article examines missed care through dialogues examining the perceptions of nurses in regard to missed care occasions. Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA), the study explores the truth claims of participants who describe the challenges they encounter in daily attempts to deliver what they consider effective patient care. These are compared to the mandates of state and organisational policy prescribing clinical practice. The boundaries of tension that are expressed by nurses within the milieu of missed care are explored through in-depth interviews. CDA is interested in social organisation and the interplay of people's activities within it, the focus being on how they construe and internalise such activity. Nurses' perceptions and realities become central to any investigation because they are often organised by more than their own intentions or motivations, with influences such as professional standards or organisational rules subconsciously locating their reality. Instead of identifying occasions of omitted care, nurses spoke of constraints related to budget, staffing, skill mix and mandated policy as constraining their ability to complete care activities. Factors emerged that suggest that missed care is the consequence of routinised and standardised practice, cited as cost effective care, at the expense of professional autonomy.

Who Takes Procedural Fairness as a Trust Heuristic? Effects of Need for Control and Need to Belong

This article investigates how the interplay of people’s three types of psychological needs, i.e., need for positive self-regard, need for control, and need to belong affect people’s procedural fair...

American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond

Gregg D. Kimball offers a rich study of Richmond's antebellum society and culture that explores the manners, styles, and outlooks of its inhabitants. He reveals Richmond's diverse urban culture through the stories of the men and women of the native-born merchant and manufacturing elite, German artisans and shopkeepers, British ironworkers, and enslaved black workers as well as free. Such diversity made antebellum Richmond a complex place, much like the fast-growing commercial cities of the North at midcentury. Consequently, Richmonders did not possess a single identity that might be characterized as southern. Instead, they constructed multiple identities shaped by the cultural, economic, and social relationships created in the city's hotels, churches, workshops, parade grounds, and countinghouses. In this complexity and diversity, antebellum Richmond possessed the elements of American urban culture. To understand the urban culture of antebellum Richmond, Kimball rejects the methodologies and sources of urban history as social history. He eschews the social historian's reliance on census data, city directories, and tax lists, which he blames for the failure of urban social history to reveal the true story of American cities found in the interplay of people and ideas. Instead, he adopts the tools of the biographer and the historian of ideas. Scouring the impressive array of diaries, letters, and memoirs of those who made Richmond in the 1850s, Kimball ably uncovers the complexity of individual lives and the rich textures of antebellum urban culture to reveal the social and cultural contours of the Richmond community.

Diagnosis of safety culture in safety management audits

Based on the sociotechnical systems approach, an understanding of safety culture as deeply rooted assumptions about the interplay of people, technology, and organization in their relation to safety is presented. As a complement to audit methods aimed at assessing formal safety management, a questionnaire was developed which allows some indications of these assumptions to be captured by providing data on perceptions regarding operational safety, safety and design strategies, and personal job needs. Analyzing response patterns of different occupational, hierarchical, and organizational groups within a company in combination with formal audit results and the communicative validation of both in a feedback meeting can help the auditors as well as the members of the company to gain a deeper understanding of safety management and safety culture in that company. Results from seven audits in petrochemical plants are presented and discussed with respect to the validity and practicability of the chosen approach.

The Experience and Evolution of Trust: Implications for Cooperation and Teamwork

In this article we analyze the way that trust evolves in organizations and how it influences cooperation and teamwork. We propose that the experience of trust is determined by the interplay of people's values, attitudes, and moods and emotions. Then, using the perspective of symbolic interactionism, we examine how trust evolves and changes over time, describing two distinct states or forms of trust: conditional and unconditional. We look, too, at the factors involved in the dissolution of trust. Finally, we explore the relationship between trust and an important component of organizational performance and competitive advantage: interpersonal cooperation and teamwork.

Quality assurance principles for the laboratory--a brief overview.

Under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986, the United States Congress has called for a study of the quality of care of Medicare beneficiaries and a strategy to assure it. The quality of laboratory services is an important component of that assessment and assurance, and hospitals need a methodology for it. The Guidelines for Quality Assessment of the Council on Medical Service of the American Medical Association can be used as a basis for a model that links structure, process, and outcome criteria to the interplay of people, equipment, and systems that comprise the laboratory. This can then support the development of a monitoring and evaluation program for its services.

Sex Liberalization and Liberation of the Female: Implications for Romantic Love

This study explores the effect of recent liberalization of sex attitudes and liberation of the female upon perceptions and conceptions of roman tic love. In short, have changing sex attitudes and equalization of the sexes led to a diminution of romantic love as an integral part of heterosexual relations? What is happening to romantic love in an age of sex and sexual revolution? Romantic love has historically been the subject of much prose and poetry. Few writers have been able to resist the temptation to describe it or sing its praises. Goode (1959:38-41) points up that: For obvious reason, the printed material on love is im mense . . . Poetic, literary, erotic, pornographic: By far the largest body of all literature on love views it as a sweeping ex perience. The poet arouses our sympathy and empathy. The essayist enjoys, and asks the reader to enjoy, the interplay of people in love. The storyteller ? Bocaccio, Chaucer, Dante ? pulls back the curtain of human souls and lets the reader watch the intimate lives of others caught in an emotion we all know. Others ? Vatsyayana, Ovid, William IX Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, Marie de France, Andreas Capellanus ? have written how-to-do-it books, that is, how to conduct oneself in love relations, to persuade others to succumb to one's love wishes, or to excite and satisfy one's sex partner. Decades ago, Willard Waller defined romantic love as idealized passion which developed from the inhibitions of sexual impluse (1938:189-92). The emotional and ideational context of romantic fervor was said to grow with the frustrations of sexual desire. Havelock Ellis has referred to a cycle of tumescence and detumescence. Courtship was described as the stage of the cycle connected with tumescence whereby sexual tensions were increased by a variety of secondary stimuli. Marriage represented the stage of detumenscence where the sexual ten sions were relieved under socially approved circumstances (Merril, 1959:43-44). Malinowski and others noted that where sexual freedom

The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania

In many respects early Pennsylvania was prototype of North American development. Its conservative defense of liberal individualism, its population of mixed national and religious origins, its dispersed farms, county seats, and farm-service villages, and its mixed crop and livestock agriculture served as models for much of rural Middle West. To many western Europeans in eighteenth century, life in early Pennsylvania offered a veritable paradise and refuge from oppression. Some called it the best poor man's country in world. The role of cultural backgrounds is important in this study of development of early southeastern Pennsylvania, and as important is interplay of people with land. Lemon discusses settlement of land by western Europeans; geographical and social mobility of people; territorial organizations of farmlands, towns, and counties; and regional variations in land use, especially farming practices. Providing deeper access into processes of social change, The Best Poor Man's Country remains a significant addition to literature on colonial American historiography.