Multilevel Nature Research Articles

Multilevel Behavioral Synchronization in a Joint Tower-Building Task

Human to human sensorimotor interaction can only be fully understood by modeling the patterns of bodily synchronization and reconstructing the underlying mechanisms of optimal cooperation. We designed a tower-building task to address such a goal. We recorded upper body kinematics of dyads and focused on the velocity profiles of the head and wrist. We applied recurrence quantification analysis to examine the dynamics of synchronization within, and across the experimental trials, to compare the roles of leader and follower. Our results show that the leader was more auto-recurrent than the follower to make his/her behavior more predictable. When looking at the cross-recurrence of the dyad, we find different patterns of synchronization for head and wrist motion. On the wrist, dyads synchronized at short lags, and such a pattern was weakly modulated within trials, and invariant across them. Head motion, instead, synchronized at longer lags and increased both within and between trials: a phenomenon mostly driven by the leader. Our findings point at a multilevel nature of human to human sensorimotor synchronization, and may provide an experimentally solid benchmark to identify the basic primitives of motion, which maximize behavioral coupling between humans and artificial agents.

How Can We Develop Contextualized Theories of Effective Use? A Demonstration in the Context of Community-Care Electronic Health Records

We contribute to the shifting discourse in the literature on information system use, towards context-specific (rather than general) theories and effective use (rather than just use). Organizations are under great pressure to use information systems effectively but they have few theories to turn to for insights. Motivated by this need, we propose an approach for developing context-specific theories of effective use. The approach suggests that effective use can be theorized by: (1) understanding how a network of affordances supports the achievement of organizational goals, (2) understanding how the affordances are actualized, and (3) using inductive theorizing to elaborate these principles in a given context. We demonstrate the approach in the context of a Canadian health authority’s use of a community-care electronic healthcare record (EHR). We discovered that effective use in this context can be viewed at a high level as the accuracy and consistency with which users work with the EHR, and how they engage in reflection-in-action across a network of nine affordances. The key, however, is understanding how those elements interact with the multiple levels of data needed to achieve the organization’s various goals. Overall, we contribute by offering an approach for developing context-specific theories of effective use, demonstrating its usefulness in an important context, and discovering the importance of understanding in a new way the multilevel nature of information systems. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0702 .

Longitudinal association between air pollution exposure at school and cognitive development in school children over a period of 3.5 years

IntroductionRecently, we showed that exposure to traffic-related air pollutants (TRAPs) at school was negatively associated with cognitive development, specifically working memory and inattentiveness, in primary schoolchildren during a course of 12 months. The persistence of such associations over longer periods remains as an open question. ObjectiveTo study the longitudinal association between TRAPs at school and cognitive development over a period of 3.5 years. MethodsIndoor and outdoor levels of TRAPs (elemental carbon (EC), dioxide nitrogen (NO2), particulate matter (PM2.5) from traffic sources and ultrafine particles (UFP)) were measured at 39 schools across Barcelona during 2012/2013. Working memory, as a measure of cognitive development, was evaluated 4 times in 2012/2013 assessment and was re-evaluated one more time in 2015 using computerized n-back test (3-back d′ as main outcome). Linear mixed effects models were used to test the association between TRAPs and 3-back d′, adding child and school as random effects to account for the multilevel nature of the data, and school air pollutants levels (one at a time) as predictor. ResultsWe found detrimental associations between all TRAPs and annual change in 3-back d′ (working memory) (i.e. slower development of working memory in children attending schools with higher levels of air pollution). The associations (per one interquartile range increase in exposure) were strongest for outdoor NO2 (Coefficient (Coef) = − 4.22, 95% confidence interval (CI), − 6.22, − 2.22) and indoor UFP (Coef = − 4.12, 95%CI, − 5.68, − 1.83). These reductions were equivalent to − 20% (95%CI, − 30.1, − 10.7) and − 19.9% (95%CI, − 31.5, − 8.4) change in annual working memory development associated with one interquartile range increase in outdoor NO2 and indoor UFP, respectively. ConclusionOur findings suggest the persistence of the negative association between TRAPs exposure at school and cognitive trajectory measured by n-back test over a period of 3.5 years.

Generative mechanistic explanation building in undergraduate molecular and cellular biology

ABSTRACTWhen conducting scientific research, experts in molecular and cellular biology (MCB) use specific reasoning strategies to construct mechanistic explanations for the underlying causal features of molecular phenomena. We explored how undergraduate students applied this scientific practice in MCB. Drawing from studies of explanation building among scientists, we created and applied a theoretical framework to explore the strategies students use to construct explanations for ‘novel’ biological phenomena. Specifically, we explored how students navigated the multi-level nature of complex biological systems using generative mechanistic reasoning. Interviews were conducted with introductory and upper-division biology students at a large public university in the United States. Results of qualitative coding revealed key features of students’ explanation building. Students used modular thinking to consider the functional subdivisions of the system, which they ‘filled in’ to varying degrees with mechanistic elements. They also hypothesised the involvement of mechanistic entities and instantiated abstract schema to adapt their explanations to unfamiliar biological contexts. Finally, we explored the flexible thinking that students used to hypothesise the impact of mutations on multi-leveled biological systems. Results revealed a number of ways that students drew mechanistic connections between molecules, functional modules (sets of molecules with an emergent function), cells, tissues, organisms and populations.

Trust in work teams: An integrative review, multilevel model, and future directions

SummaryThis article presents an integrative review of the rapidly growing body of research on trust in work teams. We start by analyzing prominent definitions of trust and their theoretical foundations, followed by different conceptualizations of trust in teams emphasizing its multilevel, dynamic, and emergent nature. We then review the empirical research and its underlying theoretical perspectives concerning the emergence and development of trust in teams. On the basis of this review, we propose an integrated conceptual framework that organizes the field and can advance knowledge of the multilevel nature of trust in teams. Our conclusion is that trust in teams resides at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously, is subject to factors across levels in organizations, and impacts performance and other relevant outcomes both at the individual and team levels. We argue that research should not only differentiate between interpersonal trust between members from collective trust at the team level but also emphasize the interplay within and between these levels by considering cross‐level influences and dynamics. We conclude by proposing 4 major directions for future research and 3 critical methodological recommendations for study designs derived from our review and framework.

The state of the heart: Emotional labor as emotion regulation reviewed and revised.

Emotional labor has been an area of burgeoning research interest in occupational health psychology in recent years. Emotional labor was conceptualized in the early 1980s by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) as occupational requirements that alienate workers from their emotions. Almost 2 decades later, a model was published in Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (JOHP) that viewed emotional labor through a psychological lens, as emotion regulation strategies that differentially relate to performance and wellbeing. For this anniversary issue of JOHP, we review the emotional labor as emotion regulation model, its contributions, limitations, and the state of the evidence for its propositions. At the heart of our article, we present a revised model of emotional labor as emotion regulation, that incorporates recent findings and represents a multilevel and dynamic nature of emotional labor as emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Advancing human resource management scholarship through multilevel modeling

HRM systems are an organization-level construct that affect outcomes at the firm, unit, and individual levels of analysis. The multilevel nature of the field creates a need for both theoretical and empirical modeling that cuts across levels to effectively understand the linkages between HRM systems and various operational and financial performance outcomes. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression which is designed to analyze the same level of data is not suited for analyzing such hierarchal data. Multilevel modeling accounts for variance among variables at different levels; dealing with sources of errors more rigorously than OLS. Multilevel structural equation modeling separately estimates between and within effects, takes into account measurement errors and allows for criterion variables that are situated at higher levels. Thus, multilevel modeling significantly advances HRM research by more accurately predicting HRM effects and estimating complex HRM models. The articles included in this collection demonstrate the value and application of multilevel modeling, both theoretically and empirically, to HRM research.

Cytogenetic and molecular cytogenetic investigations in relapse of B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Сhromosomal abnormalities have been analyzed in bone marrow cells of 61 patients with relapse of B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The cytogenetic results have allowed the structural stratification of the obtained karyotypes into ten groups of clones: normal, normal/near tetraploid, abnormal/normal, abnormal/ near tetraploid/normal, evolution of clonal chromosome abnormalities; evolution of clonal chromosome abnormalities/normal, evolution of clonal chromosome abnormalities/near tetraploid/normal, independent clones, independent/normal clones; and independent/near tetraploid/normal clones. The identified structural rearrangements included translocations, deletions, insertions, and duplications; however, deletions with the involvement of bands 17p12, 13q12–q14, 11q14, and 11q23 dominated (63.8%). The application of i-FISH helped to show the presence of one to four abnormalities per karyotype. The identified cytogenetic and molecular cytogenetic rearrangements may signify a multilevel nature of the process underlying the development of resistant karyotypes. The results obtained under both methods have revealed the presence of a heterogenic cell population with possibly different levels of chemotherapy resistance.

Struktura wieloznaczności poznawczej (na podstawie komunikowania w polityce)

The paper presents ambiguity phenomena in terms of cognitive categorization and blending processes. Politicians’ manifesto speeches are analysed based on Lakoff’s and Langacker’s semantics and Langacker’s grammar research investigation, resulting in describing ambiguity phenomena more as the sender’s or receiver’s mental concepts than as a linguistic property of the message. Moreover, cognitive points of view in the research on ambiguity reveals its multileveled nature due to the polysemic nature of mental categories or blends.

Student Perceptions About Their General Learning Outcomes

Aggregate survey responses collected from students are commonly used by universities to compare effective educational practices across program majors, and to make high-stakes decisions about the effectiveness of programs. Yet if there is too much heterogeneity among student responses within programs, the program-level averages may not appropriately represent student-level outcomes, and any decisions made based on these averages may be erroneous. Findings revealed that survey items regarding students’ perceived general learning outcomes could be appropriately aggregated to the program level for 4th-year students in the study but not for 1st-year students. Survey items concerning the learning environment were not valid for either group when aggregated to the program level. This study demonstrates the importance of considering the multilevel nature of survey results and determining the multilevel validity of program-level interpretations prior to making any conclusions based on aggregate student responses. Implications for institutional effectiveness research are discussed.

The Multilevel Nature of Customer Experience Research: An Integrative Review and Research Agenda

AbstractOver the last three decades, customer experience (CE) has developed from a burgeoning concept to a widely recognized phenomenon in terms of both research and practice. To account for the complexity of consumption decisions, the CE literature encompasses both the rational information processing approach to consumer decision‐making and the experiential approach, which includes emotions, feelings and sub‐consciousness. The authors classify and examine CE research on two levels. Studies on static CE analyze experiences during touchpoints at one point in time, while studies on dynamic CE assess how experiences evolve over time. Furthermore, both static and dynamic CE research take place from two distinct theoretical perspectives: the organization and the consumer. As both theoretical perspectives essentially deal with the same phenomenon – the organizational perspective with the creation of CEs and the consumer perspective with the perception of customer experiences – there is potential for a productive symbiosis between them. The authors propose that connecting insights from both perspectives can contribute to a better understanding of what constitutes a CE for consumers and how firms can effectively manage it. First, the authors discuss the development of CE and argue that it has evolved into a broad and fragmented ‘umbrella construct’. Second, after distinguishing and defining static and dynamic CE, they systematically evaluate the state of knowledge in both the organizational and consumer perspectives. Finally, they develop an agenda for future research that integrates the consumer perspective into organizational CE research.

The practice of ICT-enabled development

ABSTRACTWhile information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) research examines the diverse range of topics, settings, and technologies, there has been a lack of attention on theorizing the process of information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled development. This paper draws on Bourdieu’s practice theory to provide a framework for doing so. This framework captures the multi-level, generative, and processual nature of ICT-enabled development, and illustrates that ICT-enabled development is an ongoing activity that is recreated, reinforced, and restricted by the interaction between the dispositions of the stakeholders involved and changes in the various forms of capital that are valued in a community. The utility of the framework is illustrated by using practice theory to re-analyze three ICT4D initiatives from the literature.

Structural influences upon coordination and performance in multiteam systems

Building upon organizational design and boundary spanning and multilevel literatures, we propose a theoretical framework that extends previous work on the drivers of multiteam system (MTS) coordination and performance. Our proposal integrates aspects of functional process interdependence and different integration mechanisms used within MTSs to better elucidate how different coordination processes emerge. The framework exposes potential countervailing or confluent effects of coordination processes on performance and, thereby, reconciles seemingly incongruent findings regarding the effect of different approaches to coordination on MTSs performance. In addition, our framework helps managers consider the multilevel nature of MTS coordination processes in ways that assist them in selecting an approach to effectively address the coordination challenges inherent in these complex systems.

МЕЖДУНАРОДНАЯ ПОЛИТЭКОНОМИЯ: ПРЕДМЕТ И МЕТОД

The paper is focused on an inter-disciplinary field of academic research of international relations – international political economy (IPE). The author starts with a study of theoretical and methodological background and evolution of IPE with the aim to generalize the subject matter of the discipline and its method. These aspects of IPE are considered against the background of the subject matters and the methodologies of the traditional approaches to the study of international relations: the theory of international relations (TIR) and the international economics (IE). Eventually, the statement of IPE research fundamentals is articulated. Further on, the paper continues with a study of the conceptual and formal levels of the discipline. In the absence of a unified research design among the political economy scholars a general conceptual framework of IPE is formulated. The multi-level, multi-factor and multi-actor nature of international relations within this framework is analyzed in comparative way to the political and economic paradigms of international relations and further is verified by conceptualization of such a major phenomenon as the globalization. It is shown that from IPE premises the globalization is considered as a complex case that covers both material (goods, migration, etc.) and non-material (information, finances, etc.) processes involving all kinds of social formations in various fields of human activity. As a result, the IPE framework reveals more realistic causes and consequences of globalization to be compared with the theory of international relations or the international economics. Finally, the research realized in the paper concludes by stating the existence of a theoretical core in IPE and identifying its key elements. These elements are matched against the axiomatics of the traditional approaches to the study of international relations.

A corpus-driven approach to discourse organisation: from cues to complex markers

This paper reports on an experiment implementing a data-intensive approach to discourse organisation. Its focus is on enumerative structures envisaged as a type of textual pattern in a sequentiality-oriented approach to discourse. On the basis of a large-scale annotation exercise calling upon automatic feature mark-up alongside manual annotation, we explore a method to identify complex discourse markers seen as configurations of cues. The presentation of the background to what is termed "multi-level annotation" is organised around four issues: linearity, complexity of discourse markers, top-down processing, granularity and the multi-level nature of discourse structures. In this context, enumerative structures seem to deserve scrutiny for a number of reasons: they are frequent structures appearing at different granularity levels, they are signalled by a variety of devices appearing to work together in complex ways, and they combine a textual role (discourse organisation) with an ideational role (categorisation). We describe the annotation procedure and experimental framework which resulted in nearly 1,000 enumerative structures being annotated in a diversified corpus of over 600,000 words. The results of two approaches to the rich data produced are then presented: firstly, a descriptive survey highlights considerable variation in length and composition, while showing enumerative structure to be a basic strategy resorted to in all three sub-corpora, and leads to a granularity-based typology of the annotated structures; secondly, recurrent cue configurations---our "complex~ markers"---are identified by the application of data mining methods. The paper ends with perspectives for further exploitation of the data, in particular with respect to the semantic characterisation of enumerative structures.

The challenge of implementing European Union environmental law in the new member states: The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive in the Czech Republic and Poland

This article examines the problematic implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) in the Czech Republic and Poland from the perspective of the scholarly debate on European Union (EU) and post-accession compliance, focusing on the competing ‘goodness of fit’ and administrative-legal approaches to explaining variations in compliance with EU rules. It finds that administrative shortcomings of various kinds are a major reason for implementation problems in both countries, and that problems have also stemmed from the multilevel nature of the implementation process, which places a heavy administrative and financial burden on municipalities, and requires cooperation between national and local government authorities. In the Czech case, however, the ‘misfit’ between EU standards and contracting and regulatory practices in the Czech water sector has also undermined UWWTD compliance, through its negative impact on the country's ability to access EU funding.

The functional and developmental role of imitation in the (a)typical brain.

Keven & Akins (K&A) propose a biologically plausible view of neonatal imitation based on the analysis of sensorimotor development. Here, we consider imitation in the general context of motor cognition, taking examples from both typical and atypical development. Specifically, we will discuss the functional role of imitation, its multi-level nature, and its anomalous features in autism.

¿ES NECESARIA UNA TEORÍA MULTINIVEL DEL AGENTE?: LA PERSPECTIVA DE VERNON SMITH

Vernon Smith asserts that in order to realistically represent the multi-level nature of agents, it is necessary to go beyond economic theory. Drawing on resources from various disciplines, including the cognitive sciences, social psychology, and neuroscience, Smith builds two concepts: constructivist rationality (an individual's conscious, deliberate use of reason, which leads to variability) and ecological rationality (a spontaneous, unintentional emergent social order, which acts as a mechanism of evolutionary selection). Key to this explanation is a three-level conceptualization of the agent: 1) the internal order of the mind; 2) the external order of social exchange; and 3) the extended order of markets. The existence of these levels allows agents to respond in complex ways adapted to their environments, representing the multi-level nature of human beings.

To the Question of the Legal Nature of a Suspect Detention in Criminal Proceedings

This article discusses the problem of apprehending a suspect detention in criminal proceedings. Based on the analysis of various approaches to the detention of a suspect, scientific discussions and resulting conflicts of criminal procedure law, the article provides a conclusion about the multifaceted, multi-level nature of this doctrinal and legal categories, its manifestation in four different roles: as coercive measures, as procedural combinations, as tactical operations and as a set of sensitive activities. Such an approach, according to the author, makes it possible to reconcile existing viewpoint and gives impetus to further consolidated the development of the theory and practice of detention of a suspect.

War and Peace from Viewpoint of a Sociologist

Drawing on a review of global and risk studies as well as on studies in the history of modern western sociology, the author has organized his argument into the following theses. First, the modern world is highly interdepended, i.e. has a hybrid (multisided and multileveled) nature. Therefore, a war and peace are two sides of the same coin. The second, the global whole is actually a rather complex sociobiotechnical system (the SBT-system), and the '˜behavior' of its social and other actors are usually contradictory. Third, each subsystem of it has its own basic principles of structural-functional organization, a temporal order and mode of evolution, and a specific kind of relationships with other subsystems. Fourth, hence this hybrid is inherently contradictory and unstable.A high interdependence of the subsystems objectively raises a risk of a hybrid war emergence. Fifth, that is why the war-and-peace problem should be considered as hybrid as well. Sixth, the hybrid war may have a variety of social aims ranging from economic and political domination till total destruction of a probable adversary. Seventh, despite of technocratic orientation of the westernoriented capitalism the beliefs, values and social memories are still the mighty weapons in any hybrid war. Eighth, a very essence of hybrid war is multi-sided as well. It's a mix of fear and alienation with mass protest actions and military operations. In one cases such wars mobilized people while in the others demobilizes. Ninth, these hybrid structure and processes needs more close integration of social, natural and technical sciences, i.e. modern sociology should be capable to translate any SBT-transformations sociologically. Tenth, the media and social networks are the most powerful means for the shaping individual and mass consciousness. The media and social sciences use a social memory as a '˜peaceful' weapon. Eleventh, the role of civil society organizations and movements as well as of irregular military units is still an open question.