Pre-existing Organization Research Articles

Applying the six-dimensional food security framework to examine a fresh fruit and vegetable program implemented by self-help groups during the COVID-19 lockdown in India

To alleviate impacts of novel coronavirus lockdowns on food security and agri-food value chains, governments implemented various policy responses, yet there is limited evidence as to their effectiveness to build resilience in food systems and improve food security. One of these programs was implemented by self-help groups (SHGs) in Odisha, India, linking fresh fruit and vegetable (FFV) producers to consumers. This study integrates the concept of resilience into the six-dimensional food security framework (food availability, access, utilization, and stability, agency, and sustainability) and applies the framework to examine whether a FFV procurement program affected all six dimensions of food security and helped build resilience in food systems. Based on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions, the results show that by enabling SHGs to fulfill the role of value chain actors prohibited from operating during the lockdown, the program had positive effects on availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability, with mixed effects on agency and sustainability. Applying the six-dimensional food security framework allowed us to show that despite some tradeoffs both across and within the dimensions for various actors, overall the program was able to build more resilient food systems. Activating preexisting organizations to reestablish fractured value chains can provide a model to replicate in times of crisis, such as pandemics and extreme climate events, when both rural and urban value chain actors can operate only at limited capacity and the public sector is overwhelmed. To accelerate the transformation of food systems towards healthier diets and greater resilience to shocks and crises, we recommend strengthening existing and establishing new organizations to help respond to crises and future shocks. A multifaceted approach will help ensure that the most vulnerable will not be left behind.

‘Neoliberalism is dead’: Traversing neoliberal planning education is an exigency

Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology that has fundamentally transformed planning over the last four decades. Neoliberalism has significantly restructured pre-existing organisations, such as universities that were initially expanded during the period of industrial capitalism. From Foucault’s perspective, universities work as components of the dominant control apparatus to subjectively normalise people to docile bodies in the capitalist society. In planning schools, new planning students are introduced to the discipline and its values, norms, knowledge, and practices. This article explores how neoliberalism has changed planning education and subsequently practice in favour of the market operation by detaching planning from its intellectual and theoretical context, and used planning as its scapegoat to conceal its failures. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 and the global pandemic of COVID-19, several thinkers, economists and politicians have declared that ‘neoliberalism is dead’ and pointed to the necessity of a new doctrine to address the adverse side effects of neoliberalism that include social inequality and climate change. Planning was initially developed to address the environmental issues and social inequality that resulted from industrial capitalism. This article suggests that planning education should traverse neoliberalism by retrieving its critical and theoretical knowledge to redefine its role in the post-neoliberal era.

The born global and international new venture revisited: An alternative explanation for early and rapid internationalization

We revisit the empirical origins of a popular research topic: the phenomenon of early and rapid internationalization. By means of a qualitative case study, we re-examine the samples of firms used in two of the seminal studies on ‘born globals’ and ‘international new ventures’. A dominant pattern characterizing both samples, but not reported by the original authors, was that incumbent organizations were involved in the founding of the new ventures. Given this unexpected finding, we empirically investigate how being reproduced from pre-existing organizations affected the internationalization pathways of the new ventures, collecting data that extend beyond the scope and time period examined in the original studies. Our analysis shows how the evolution of the relationship between old and new generations of organizations is critical to explaining how new venture internationalization proceeded. Although the incumbent’s presence prior to foundation enabled early and possibly even rapid internationalization, it was also the source of discontinuity and instability. Based on these findings, we offer a relational perspective on the incumbent’s involvement in founding and internationalizing new ventures. Our study illustrates how applying the methodology of a case study revisit can generate new theoretical insights in existing research fields.

Case Study: COVID-19 Brain Fog or Auditory Processing Disorder?

Case Study: COVID-19 Brain Fog or Auditory Processing Disorder?

Institutional Overlap in Global Governance and the Design of Intergovernmental Organizations

How does the increasingly dense network of overlapping institutions in global governance affect the design of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)? We argue that institutional overlap can unleash mimicking dynamics whereby states design new IGOs using the design of existing organizations that engage in similar issue areas and perform similar governance tasks for similar member states as templates. Using design templates from the reference group of overlapping institutions is a strategy for boundedly rational designers in situations of complexity because it reduces uncertainty and lowers the costs of identifying suitable institutional solutions. Overlap therefore increases the design similarity between new and pre-existing IGOs, specifically where pre-existing organizations have institutional designs that made them endure. Introducing a new measure of institutional overlap in global governance and new data on the design and governance tasks of the 534 IGOs from the Correlates of War Project, we corroborate our argument using regression analyses. Our results hold important lessons for theories of institutional design, regime complexity, and global governance more broadly.

Carnet de bord pour la mise en place d’une PUI territoriale assurant une dispensation nominative robotisée des traitements pour deux sites extérieurs : Un EHPAD et un SSR

The territorial hospital pharmacy (PUI) of the West of Paris, dispenses treatments for a follow-up care instituion (SSR) and adependentold people's home (EHPAD) via a hospital pharmacy equipped with an automatic machine producing dry oral forms packaged in labeled pillboxes. This project was completed with the support of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) and aims to secure the medication circuit. The methodology for qualifying the computer system and production, the implementation of the medication circuit and the inter-site logistical organization are presented. The prescription software was interfaced with the management software, which is itself interfaced with the robot's, and with the automatic machine's software. Tests and developments allowed to convert dispensing units into prescription units over a period of time. Also, the drugs consumed by these two institutions allowed to establish the therapeutic bookletand drug provision as well as anticipating the automaton filling. Medical devices, solutions and narcotics are exclusively managed as supplies with a specific circuit. Treatments are dispensed weekly (pillboxes and off-robot). For the SSR, an additional daily production concerns the entries of new patients and the modifications of treatment. Automation saves time and security, but human intervention is involved on a daily basis. The institutions have adopted the new organization over about 6months and the production activity is now smoothed out. In the next few weeks, two other EHPADs with 100patients will be integrated into the PUI territorial. One of the main challenges is to integrate them into our pre-existing organization, while maintaining their habits.

Primary healthcare and COVID-19 in France: contributions of a research network including practitioners and researchers

The COVID-19 epidemic represented a major challenge for the primary care sector. We present the results of an interprofessional collaborative research endeavor conducted by the ACCORD network to describe primary care actors' and organizations' response to the first wave of the epidemic and national lockdown in France. This work draws from quantitative and qualitative material. The quantitative data results from the cross-analysis of the six online surveys carried out by the ACCORD network between March and May 2020, among general practitioners, midwives, and multi-professional primary care organizations in France. This data was enriched by collective multi-professional and multi-disciplinary exchanges conducted in virtual focus groups during an online seminar. There was a significant decrease in primary care activity during the first wave of the epidemic. Many primary care actors adapted their organizations to lower the risk of coronavirus transmission while maintaining access and continuity of care. Professionals received and used information from multiple sources. The crisis revealed both the importance and the diversity of local networks of exchange and collaboration. Primary care actors adapted quickly and with important local variability to the COVID epidemic, highlighting the importance of pre-existing organizations and collaborations at the local level.

The Tendency of Terrorist Organizations to Explosive Attacks: An Institutional Theory Perspective.

Focusing on the tendency of terrorist organizations to explosive attack, this article applied the institutional theory as the basis to explain the inherent logic of attack type similarity from the perspective of mimetic, coercive, and normative isomorphism. Subsequently, the study conducted an empirical analysis of the data onto 1825 terrorist organizations recorded in the Global Terrorism Database with the logistic regression method. The results show that: (1) Terrorist organizations will learn from pre-existing terrorist organizations' experiences, and mimetic isomorphism will promote explosive tendency; (2) Due to the normative isomorphism effect, terrorist groups' tendency to explosive attacks is weakened by their increased duration; (3) If terrorist organizations are hostile to a strong government, coercive isomorphism positively moderates the negative effects of increasing duration. The study suggests that counter-terrorism approaches such as destroying the learnable experience of attacks, addressing the root causes of terrorism, and maintaining a strong government may be helpful in stopping increasing terrorist activities, which is essential for reducing terrorist organizations' vivosphere, blocking the inter-flow and imitation between terrorist organizations, and ultimately interrupting the terrorist propagation chain.

INDIVISIBLE AGAINST TRUMP: COALITION STRATEGIES AND MOVEMENT SUCCESS ACROSS CITY CONTEXTS

Coalitions can be critical to social movement success. This article compares thirty-five Indivisible groups founded after the 2017 Women’s March in ten U.S. cities. Through analysis of Facebook pages and interviews with activists, I find that groups that work more often in coalition mobilize more events and are more likely to survive. In cities with long histories of activism, groups tend to engage in more coalitions and a particular type of deep coalition work I call “supercoalitions” that strategically coordinate across a city and work to accumulate and channel resources to pre-existing organizations. In cities without long histories of activism, groups are less likely to engage in coalitions. However, when they do, they tend to organize into broad civil society coalitions that bring together a diversity of political and nonpolitical actors which can be very successful over time. This analysis highlights how coalitions are shaped by local political context.

Analyzing the Civil Rights Movement: The Significance of Nonviolent Protest, International Influences, the Media, and Pre-existing Organizations

This essay is an analysis of the success of the mid-20th century civil rights movement in the United States. The civil rights movement was a seminal event in American history and resulted in several legislative victories, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After a brief overview of segregation and Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S., I will argue that the success of the civil rights movement can be attributed to a combination of factors. One of these factors was the effective strategy of nonviolent protests, in which the American public witnessed the contrasting actions of peaceful protestors and violent local authorities. In addition, political opportunities also played a role in the movement’s success, as during the Cold War the U.S. federal government became increasingly concerned about their international image. Other reasons for the movement’s success include an increased access to television among the American public, and pre-existing black institutions and organizations. The civil rights movement left an important legacy and ensuing social movements have utilized similar framing techniques and strategies.

Advanced practice: students' opinions on the future emergency medicine specialisation

In the context of the rebuilding of the emergency services a new health care provider has been identified to reorganize emergency medicine in order to meet the expectations of the population, institutions and professionals. The nurse in advanced practice with extended skills must be able to fit into a pre-existing organization, in collaboration with the actors already present, but also represent an innovative care offer with regard to intra-hospital and pre-hospital needs as well as in terms of regulation. Student proposals.

Student Response Initiatives: A Case Study of COVID-19 at Washington University.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted medical education worldwide, leading medical students to organize response initiatives. This paper summarizes the Washington University Medical Student COVID-19 Response (WUMS-CR) and shares lessons to guide future initiatives. We used a three-principle framework of community needs assessment, faculty mentorship, and partnership with pre-existing organizations to address needs in St. Louis, including contact tracing and childcare. In total, over 12,000 h were volunteered across 15+ projects. Overall, student response initiatives should use appropriate frameworks to guide projects and should capitalize on volunteer participation, speed and flexibility, and the diversity of student interests and skills for maximal impact.

Civil Society and Social Mobilizations in the Context of the Rio Doce Socioenvironmental Disaster.

To explain how social movements and organizations changed in the context of the Rio Doce, Brazil socioenvironmental disaster, this article identifies a process of organizational innovation. The research is based on documental data and interviews with activists over the 3 y of the disaster. The main argument is that organizational innovation consists of changes in organizational forms and repertoires of collective action, based on existing organizational models and tactics. On the one hand, the innovation occurred through the territorialization of novel organizational forms, intermediated by social movements that act as incubators. On the other hand, it consisted of the combination among extrainstitutional, institutional, and multiscalar repertoires and in the innovation in tactics and performances. Mechanisms of adaptation, imitation, and negotiated diffusion are identified which operated in this innovation process. It is argued that the organizational innovation of social movements was propelled by political constraints of disaster governance, which pushed them to innovation, in addition to the role of preexisting organizations. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;16:681-690. © 2020 SETAC.

Mobilizing From Scratch: Large-Scale Collective Action Without Preexisting Organization in the Syrian Uprising

Core social movement research argues that large-scale challenges to authority build upon preexisting organization and civil society resources. How do dissenters mobilize masses in repressive settings where, given curtailment of civil society, autonomous associations scarcely exist and norms discourage trust more than encourage it? Testimonials from the Syrian uprising illustrate how protest can become widespread under such conditions, yet occurs through processes different from what dominant theory expects. Activists get demonstrations off the ground by planning around awareness of their organizational deficits. Once in motion, contention propels both organization and increasing organizational sophistication. To be effective, mobilization sometimes evades or obscures established social relationships, even as it produces new forms of sociability. Bridging literatures on mass and clandestine mobilization, this research reconsiders the assumed sequential logic of movement development from organization to protest, rather than vice versa. It also shifts attention from movement antecedents toward the resourcefulness and strategy that enable mobilizing both from scratch and at grave risk.

Navigating Formal and Informal Processes: Civic Organizations, Armed Nonstate Actors, and Nested Governance in Colombia

ABSTRACTDespite the recent surge of scholarship on the role that civic organizations play in armed conflicts and postconflict settings, there is little consensus on how they interact with armed nonstate actors. This article examines how disparate armed nonstate actors can co-opt and manage preexisting civic organizations, and even create new ones, to embed themselves in civilian communities and perform governance functions while simultaneously advancing their ideological agendas. Employing a comparative historical analysis between two armed nonstate units in Colombia, one from a Marxist insurgent group and the other from a counterinsurgent paramilitary organization, the study demonstrates that regardless of their different ideological motivations, regional settings, and repertoires of violence, these actors could navigate formal processes related to legal economies, electoral contests, and bureaucratic-administrative institutions, and informal processes tied to illicit rackets and territorial and population control, more efficiently through their skilled management of local civic organizations.

When Organizations Rebel: Introducing the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (FORGE) Dataset

AbstractScholars have spent decades investigating various sources of rebellion, from societal and institutional explanations to individual motivations to take up arms against one's government. One element of the civil war process that has gone largely unstudied from a cross-national perspective is the role preexisting organizations in society play in the formation of rebel groups, principally due to a lack of comparable data on the origins of these armed actors across conflicts. In an effort to fill this gap, we present the Foundations of Rebel Group Emergence (FORGE) dataset, which offers information on the “parent” organizations and the founding processes that gave rise to rebel groups active between 1946 and 2011 in intrastate conflicts included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's Armed Conflict Database. The new information on rebel foundations introduced in this research note should help scholars to reconsider and newly explore a variety of conditions before, during, and after civil wars including rebel-civilian interactions, structures of rebel organizations, bargaining processes with the government, participation in postwar governance, and more.

Firm Organization in the Digital Age: IT Use and Vertical Transactions in U.S. Manufacturing

We investigate whether the organizational design of manufacturing production is sensitive to important advances in information technology (IT) – and under what conditions. Using U.S. Census Bureau data for over 5,600 plants from 1992 to 2002, we observe both specific uses of IT and whether plants outsource downstream value-chain activities or keep them within the firm. Taking advantage of the sudden introduction of the commercial internet in the mid-1990s and within-plant changes over this period, we find that externally-focused coordination over the internet was associated with a significant net shift towards market-based exchange. The magnitude of the response depends, however, on the pre-existing organization of internal production processes – which varies widely not only across, but also within firms. Moreover, the effects vary by the particular application(s) of general-purpose internet technology. By studying vertical integration at the level of transaction flows and considering important features of how production is organized inside firms, we surface new facets of the relationship between IT and firm organization in an increasingly digital age.

Comparative Principles for Next-Generation Neuroscience.

Neuroscience is enjoying a renaissance of discovery due in large part to the implementation of next-generation molecular technologies. The advent of genetically encoded tools has complemented existing methods and provided researchers the opportunity to examine the nervous system with unprecedented precision and to reveal facets of neural function at multiple scales. The weight of these discoveries, however, has been technique-driven from a small number of species amenable to the most advanced gene-editing technologies. To deepen interpretation and build on these breakthroughs, an understanding of nervous system evolution and diversity are critical. Evolutionary change integrates advantageous variants of features into lineages, but is also constrained by pre-existing organization and function. Ultimately, each species’ neural architecture comprises both properties that are species-specific and those that are retained and shared. Understanding the evolutionary history of a nervous system provides interpretive power when examining relationships between brain structure and function. The exceptional diversity of nervous systems and their unique or unusual features can also be leveraged to advance research by providing opportunities to ask new questions and interpret findings that are not accessible in individual species. As new genetic and molecular technologies are added to the experimental toolkits utilized in diverse taxa, the field is at a key juncture to revisit the significance of evolutionary and comparative approaches for next-generation neuroscience as a foundational framework for understanding fundamental principles of neural function.

From mobilization to improvisation: the lessons from Taiwan’s 2014 sunflower movement

The recent global eruption of large protests calls for a rethinking of the question of movement participation. The conventional model of movement as organized mobilization led by pre-existing organizations and top–down leadership clearly fails as an adequate portrait. As an alternative, horizontality with its emphasis on direct democracy, decentralized decision-making, and prefigurative politics (the rejection of instrumental view of participation) emerges in the global justice movement. This article explores an intermediate pattern of movement participation between these two extremes. Analyzing the protest occupation of Taiwan’s national legislature in 2014, the so-called Sunflower Movement, I theorize the mechanism of improvisation, defined as ‘strategic responses without prior planning,’ as a vital process that facilitates coordination in a large-scale protest. Improvisation involves decentralized decision-making, but it proceeds as a means to a clearly defined and consensual movement goal. The creative collaboration by dispersed, but experienced activists plays a critical yet often neglected role during contentious confrontations against the government. Improvisation is capable of orchestrating large-scale protests because movement leadership is oft constrained by the lack of real-time information and their command is more effective when it provides room for improvisation from below.

Cytoskeleton dynamics control the first asymmetric cell division in Arabidopsis zygote

The asymmetric cell division of the zygote is the initial and crucial developmental step in most multicellular organisms. In flowering plants, whether zygote polarity is inherited from the preexisting organization in the egg cell or reestablished after fertilization has remained elusive. How dynamically the intracellular organization is generated during zygote polarization is also unknown. Here, we used a live-cell imaging system with Arabidopsis zygotes to visualize the dynamics of the major elements of the cytoskeleton, microtubules (MTs), and actin filaments (F-actins), during the entire process of zygote polarization. By combining image analysis and pharmacological experiments using specific inhibitors of the cytoskeleton, we found features related to zygote polarization. The preexisting alignment of MTs and F-actin in the egg cell is lost on fertilization. Then, MTs organize into a transverse ring defining the zygote subapical region and driving cell outgrowth in the apical direction. F-actin forms an apical cap and longitudinal arrays and is required to position the nucleus to the apical region of the zygote, setting the plane of the first asymmetrical division. Our findings show that, in flowering plants, the preexisting cytoskeletal patterns in the egg cell are lost on fertilization and that the zygote reorients the cytoskeletons to perform directional cell elongation and polar nuclear migration.