Profound Organizational Changes Research Articles

The importance of ISO management system standards in a scenario of profound changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic to Brazilian companies

Goal: The aim of this viewpoint is characterized by emphasizing the importance of the management standards of the International Organization for Standardization as an information base for improvements to Brazilian managers in a scenario of profound changes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
 Design / Methodology / Approach: Initially, a brief bibliographic research was carried out to base some information presented in the text. Later, the authors of this viewpoint discussed their ideas and established the reflections presented here, many of them based on their experiences and the Brazilian context. Finally, the final considerations were established.
 Results: The main reflections are directed in the sense that most Brazilian companies have felt harshly the consequences of the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic of Covid-19 and, in some way, they need to rethink some of their administrative practices. In this scenario of profound organizational changes, we believe that the management standards of the International Organization for Standardization can be characterized as an important knowledge base, since they present information of high credibility, widely debated by experts and that are easily accessible to Brazilian managers in different themes.
 Limitations of the investigation: Since it is a viewpoint, part of the information presented here are the perceptions and considerations of the authors.
 Practical implications: This viewpoint shows that the standards of the International Organization for Standardization can be used as an important tool for management systems focused on innovation and employee skills management.
 Originality / Value: We hope with this viewpoint to advocate for ISO management standards as important instruments of continuous improvement in a scenario of many organizational changes for Brazilian companies.

Amnesty International Language Resource Centre

Abstract In the wake of profound structural and organizational changes stemming from an institutional restructure as part of the Global Transition Programme and the Governance Reform undertaken to transform Amnesty International into a truly global movement, the Amnesty International Language Resource Centre examines the role it must play in order to align with the new operating model and evaluates the position it should reach so as to contribute to organizational aspirations for increased diversity and inclusion, as well as integrated approaches to working practices. This paper presents, in broad terms, the operational impact the structural changes have had on its language activities and reaffirms the Language Resource Centre’s crucial contribution to advancing the human rights agenda as a language service provider and strategic language advisor.

Diagnosis of Sustainable Business Strategies Implemented by Chilean Construction Companies

Construction companies need to formulate sustainable construction business strategies to create a competitive advantage and remain in the market. This requires that construction firms incorporate sustainability into their business model. However, the current situation of the firm must be known before following the path to be a sustainable construction firm. Therefore, the aim of this research is to identify sustainable business strategies and their level of implementation in Chilean construction companies. A survey was designed and applied to 245 construction firms to provide statistically valid and reliable information, thus supporting both the senior managers’ decision-making process and the companies’ strategic planning. The main results show that the companies do not pursue business strategies that promote profound organizational changes; instead, they focus their short-term efforts on urgent market demands. This is evidenced by the lack of the function of sustainability management as a permanent role in the organization. Also, this study found that only 32% of Chilean construction companies implement business strategies towards sustainability. Construction firms with higher turnover and subjected to stricter regulations, such as construction companies working in the mining sector, incorporate more sustainable business strategies across their organizations. The lack of a sustainability-oriented vision can affect the transformation of strategy into a competitive advantage, a step that is necessary to support both the company’s permanence in the market and its long-term sustainability.

Situated Knowledge Production, International Impact: Changing Publishing Practices in a German Engineering Department

In this paper, I analyze how recent calls to internationalize publication behavior affect research practices at an automotive engineering department in Germany. Automotive engineering is a field with traditionally rather scarce publication activity and strong connections to industry. Substantial authority to define suitable research problems and ways of organizing knowledge production on a daily basis was therefore reserved for local academic elites as well as corporate partners. However, as engineers are increasingly expected to prove their performance through publishing in international peer-reviewed journals, the judgment as to what should be considered “interesting” or “robust” research is partly relegated to a gradually globalizing community of academic peers. This generates a variety of tensions with established ways of coordinating epistemic work at the department studied here. For example, the thematic interests of journals tend to exert a disruptive centrifugal pull in the context of an otherwise highly modular research culture, and possibilities to publish in international venues are unequally distributed across individual research projects. But while department members agree that there is a lack of fit between current practices and new expectations towards their publishing behavior, their opinions about the conclusions that should be drawn differ significantly. Some researchers argue that profound organizational changes are necessary to foster the academic rigor of German engineering research. Others believe that evaluation criteria should simply be adapted. This situation is arguably characteristic for research areas with a traditionally strong orientation to local stakeholders, and it suggests a need for more deliberative, participatory approaches to research evaluation in such fields.

La mutualisation logistique concertée est-elle un espace de concurrence attractif pour les prestataires de services logstiques en france ?

Logistics service providers have used, since their emergence more than thirty years ago, logistics pooling for their own account, in order to fill, as best as possible, storage spaces and trucks in order to free up their margins. However, in recent years, in France, another form of pooling has appeared timidly: logistics pooling that we qualify as concerted. In fact, three players: manufacturers, logistics service providers and distributors participate in, or even set up, cooperation with a view to optimizing the supply chain. We ask ourselves the question of the attractiveness of concerted logistics pooling for logistics service providers, through interviews, among other things, with service providers engaged or having been active in concerted pooling solutions. Concerted pooling may, of course, appear to offer positive prospects for service providers, but it also involves profound organizational changes, due to the change in the economic model and the acquisition of specific resources and skills. This article summarizes avenues for logistics service providers wishing to invest in concerted logistics pooling.

¿Son posibles las alternativas políticas? La estatización partidaria en Argentina

Considering that one of the most significant aspects of the changes in contemporary democratic life has been the dilution of traditional party loyalties. This article argues that, in Argentina, this process hinders the installation and survival in time of new party organizations, to which the institutional constraints of its political system are added. This has led to profound organizational changes in political parties, which have grown from being representative agencies to government agencies, and where leaders that hold elective positions of an executive nature are the ones who concentrate the economic and symbolic resources.

Reflections: Why Old Social Theory Might Still be Useful

In the following, I first identify some of the breadth of concern raised within academe subsequent to the global financial crisis (GFC) and then move to identify what some mainstream financial press outlets have done recently to foster debate about the systemic nature of concerns increasingly manifest since 2007. In certain Marxist-oriented social science circles, the current crisis was well prepared but, unfortunately, hardly visible in business education. We need a sociological understanding of the market to augment the limited understanding of orthodox economics. To understand how the GFC came to be the contributions of the virtually forgotten social theory are retrieved as pointers to understanding how the profound social and organizational changes leading up to and creating the GFC occurred. The implications of this literature for the curriculum of the business school should be profound, it is argued.

In Praise of the Humanities in Academic Medicine

As the world looks to the promise of biomedical science against the backdrop of fi scal austerity, policymakers are ever more prone to look to quantitative outcome measures to steward resources and assess programs. Such review is necessary but certainly not suffi cient given the complexity of the tasks ahead. We will need more than the quantitative language of outcome measures to talk about values and not numbers, patient care and not effi ciency, and the balance between access and quality. Although policymakers have enveloped themselves in jargon that purports to answer such questions, the language of the clinic and health policy is often ill equipped to deal with these themes. Philosophy, history, literature, and the arts already offer a discourse instrumental to refl ective practice. These disciplines encourage introspection and a deeper understanding of how medicine operates within society. Such refl ection has a “transformative power,” enabling practitioners to, in John Dewey’s words, “reconstruct” the world. 1 In order to learn from the humanities, as profound organizational changes in the healthcare system begin, we must take several steps to sustain these disciplines in the healthcare setting. First, we must remind our medical and academic colleagues of the importance of the humanities writ large. Regaining a proper place for the humanities in medical school poses a signifi cant challenge, as some think it is achieved by displacing the sciences or by being oppositional to them. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation, and it must be stressed that the additional perspective offered by the humanities is not a zero-sum gain. It enriches, and grows from, scientifi c discovery. A deeper perspective on our shared work is achieved not by denigrating the sciences but by responding to them and by adopting a more inclusive approach that engenders support from our friends and colleagues in the sciences. Second, in order to garner this widespread support, we must assert the evolving place of the humanities, while sustaining the beachhead that medical or clinical ethics has already secured. We do not want to swap out one soft discipline for

Profound organizational change, psychological distress and burnout symptoms: The mediator role of collective relative deprivation

The reasons underlying some individuals’ negative reactions to profound societal and organizational changes are still unclear. We argue that collective relative deprivation (i.e., feelings of discontent arising from group-based threat) mediates the relationship between perceptions of change and employees’ psychological reactions. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that when employees perceive organizational change to be negative and rapid, they are more likely to sense collective relative deprivation. This sense of collective relative deprivation, in turn, leads to higher levels of psychological distress and burnout symptoms. We tested the mediator role of collective relative deprivation among a group of nurses, and confirmed these hypotheses through a path analysis and a bootstrap procedure. The discussion underlines both theoretical and applied contributions, particularly in the modern context of vast and profound organizational changes.

HRM in project-intensive firms: Changes and challenges

One of the most profound organizational changes currently under way is the application of project-based structures within and between firms. This change is happening in both growth and mature industries. Several management scholars have taken interest in the reasons why firms adopt project-based ways of working. However, the effect of project-based organizing on the firm's H R M is a recurrent problem and a challenge to many companies. We develop a framework for the analysis of HRM in project-intensive firms. Based on a study of four companies and the transformation of their organizational structures and processes, we identify four managerial issues and a number of questions that must be addressed to improve HRM in project-intensive firms. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Trends in hospital consolidation: the formation of local systems.

During the past decade the hospital industry has made profound organizational changes, including the extensive consolidation of hospitals through merger and the formation of hospital systems. Although the rate of hospital system acquisitions may be slowing, the local presence of hospital systems is growing. Locally concentrated systems have been formed by both for-profit and nonprofit hospitals. Researchers have tended to ignore acquisitions or have portrayed system formation as primarily an issue of hospital ownership conversion, thereby focusing on the expansion of national, for-profit systems. This has left a large gap in policymakers' understanding of how locally concentrated systems may affect patient care and competition.

Detección de Problemas Relacionados, Con el Alcohol en Atencion Primaria

The results of a survey of primary health care physicians in order to know which factors are associated with the efficacy in the detection and treatment of patients with alcohol-related problems are analyzed in this article. The number of diagnosed patients is related with previous formal education on alcohol-related problems of primary health care physicians. Primary health care physicians are very interested in this issue, but they don't feel satisfied nor gratified with their work with this type of patients. Gratifying feelings are directly related to previous formal education, and those who feel gratified diagnose more patients. Needs for formal education must be accompanied by profound organizational changes in the coordination of actions between primary health care, specialized services and social care.

Cytocontractile structures and proteins of smooth muscle cells during the formation of experimental lesions

The time course of structural changes in vascular smooth muscle cells (SMC) was investigated during the formation of an experimental lesion in response to balloon injury. We compared the filamentous organization, evaluated by quantitative electron microscopy, with the cellular content of two representative cytocontractile proteins (myosin and tropomyosin) as assessed by immunofluorescence. We found that the changes peak between 7 and 14 days after injury and that they are visible both in the neointima and to a lesser extent in the inner media. While virtually all SMC are of a filament-rich phenotype in the undisturbed media, after balloon injury SMC migrated into the intima and about 90% of these latter cells were either of a organelle-rich or an intermediate phenotype, with the remaining 10% being of the filament-rich phenotype. In the inner media about 40% of cells were either of organelle-rich or intermediate phenotype. In contrast to these profound organizational changes of responding SMC, histochemistry revealed only a slight and probably transient decrease of the cellular content of myosin and tropomyosin at that time point. Twenty-eight days after injury the discrepancies between the content and the organization of cytocontractile proteins became more apparent. While virtually all SMC showed a homogeneous intensive staining with both antibodies, indistinguishable from the media SMC, the organization of cytoplasmic filaments had not totally recovered. Even though this morphological study does not permit conclusions to be drawn on the contractile function of the cells, it shows that both the organization and the content of cytocontractile proteins have to be analyzed and compared for SMC changes to be evaluated during the formation of an experimental lesion.

Interaction of frog virus-3 with the cytoskeleton. I. Altered organization of microtubules, intermediate filaments, and microfilaments.

The progressive cytoskeletal alterations of frog virus 3-infected baby hamster kidney (BHK) and fathead minnow (FHM) cells were studied by immunofluorescence and electron microscopy. The virus assembly sites, which contain viral genomes and viral proteins, were detected in the cytoplasm at 4 h (FHM) or 6 h (BHK) and mature virions appeared 2 h later. When infected cells were treated with Triton X-100, the assembly sites were found in association with the cytoskeleton. In infected cells, the number of microtubules progressively decreased but a few microtubules traversing in the vicinity of the assembly sites remained intact. Early in infection, the intermediate filaments retracted from the cell periphery, delimited the forming assembly sites, and remained there throughout infection. We suggest that intermediate filaments are involved in the formation of assembly sites. In addition, the filaments either by themselves or in conjunction with microtubules may anchor the assembly sites near the nucleus. The microfilament bundles (stress fibers) disappeared with the formation of assembly sites, and late in infection many projections containing microfilaments and virus particles appeared at the cell surface. The observation suggests a role for microfilaments in virus release. Taken together, these results provide the first example of a virus-infected cell in which all three cytoskeletal filaments show profound organizational changes and suggest an active participation of the host cytoskeleton in viral functions.