Real-world Organizations Research Articles

How Much I Can Rely on You: Measuring Trustworthiness of a Twitter User

Trustworthiness in an online environment is essential because individuals and organizations can easily be misled by false and malicious information receiving from untrustworthy users. Though existing methods assess users’ trustworthiness by exploiting Twitter account properties, their efficacy is inadequate because of Twitter's restriction on profile and tweet size, the existence of missing or insufficient profiles, and ease to create fake accounts or relationships to pretend as trustworthy. In this paper, we present a holistic approach by exploiting ideas perceived from real-world organizations for trust estimation along with available Twitter information. Users’ trustworthiness is determined by considering their credentials, recommendation from referees and the quality of the information in their Twitter accounts and tweets. We establish the feasibility of our approach analytically and further devise a multi-objective cost function for the A* search to find a quasi-optimal path between the trust evaluator and the user whose trustworthiness is being evaluated. We also propose an incentive mechanism to increase user participation in the trust evaluation process, and a threat model and trustworthiness measure of referees to thwart the possibility of providing an untruthful recommendation to inflate one's trustworthiness. The efficacy of our proposed approach is validated through experiments using Twitter data and extensive simulation in various scenarios.

The Distribution of Emails In An Organization As A Proxy for Information Flow

The faster an organization is able to make decisions, the better capable an organization it is—but that requires that information transit the organization quicker. If so, organizations should be structured with a form ideally capable of transmitting information. I propose a method for measuring the closeness of a real-world organization to the ideal form.

Modelling the dynamics of organisational change in a Spanish industrial cooperative

There is increasing attention on the need for dynamic approaches to manage organisational change in order to sustain competitive advantage in changing business environments. Current frameworks and methods are misleading in terms of the fact that flexibility is a temporal and dynamic condition for survival in environments with a high degree of variability in most real-world organisations. This study aims to examine determinants underpinning organisational change strategies throughout the enterprise lifecycle in order to develop a predictive method that will help managers in the design of effective change options dealing with the complexity of organisational flexibility. A system dynamics model was constructed based on theoretical and empirical data from a case study of a Spanish cooperative company. Then, the predictive method shows the impact of managers’ decisions on organisational flexibility through simulations. The effectiveness of change strategies is investigated through the dynamic behaviour of key variables. These factors cause relevant delays on the desired results and could force firms to choose an inappropriate path for change. This study offers significant implications for theory and practice.

Research on Application of Mathematical Model in Cost Fuzzy Control

The main goal of mathematical modeling is to deal with the problems of economic and ecological environment, daily life, etc., and to extract real problems and abstract them into mathematical models, and then to obtain the solution of the model, verify the scientificity of the model, and use the answers obtained by this model. Explain real problems. Through a series of related studies, this article guides the internal work of many real-world organizations, such as saving costs, reducing wood, and improving economic efficiency.

The evolution of productive organizations.

Organizations devoted to the production of goods and services, such as guilds, partnerships and modern corporations, have dominated the economic landscape in our species' history. We develop an explanation for their evolution drawing from cultural evolution theory. A basic tenet of this theory is that social learning, under certain conditions, allows for the diffusion of innovations in society and, therefore, the accumulation of culture. Our model shows that these organizations provide such conditions by possessing two characteristics, both prevalent in real world organizations: exclusivity of membership and more effective social learning within their boundaries. The model and its extensions parsimoniously explain the cooperative nature of the social learning advantage, organizational specialization, organizational rigidity and the locus of innovation. We find supportive evidence for our predictions using a sample of premodern societies drawn from the Ethnographic Atlas. Understanding the nature of these organizations informs the debate about their role in society.

Facilitating efficient coordination in large groups: small incentive payments in nested groups

Most large real-world organizations contain multiple smaller groups, such as working groups within firms. However, can this sort of nested groups be used to alleviate coordination failures in the larger group? We report on a multi-player Stag Hunt experiment wherein we hierarchically structure a large group into mutually exclusive small groups. We offer varying incentive payments if efficient coordination is achieved at a large or small group level. The novelty of our design is that we hold the total payment size constant between treatments. In our nested incentive treatment, we reduce the reward for achieving large-group coordination by a small amount and reallocate the same amount to successful small-group coordination. The results reveal that incentive reallocations privileging small groups facilitate efficient large-group coordination in the nested group structure.

The Harry Potter Generation: Essays on Growing Up with the Series ed. by Emily Lauer and Balaka Basu

Reviewed by: The Harry Potter Generation: Essays on Growing Up with the Series ed. by Emily Lauer and Balaka Basu Michele D. Castleman (bio) The Harry Potter Generation: Essays on Growing Up with the Series. Edited by Emily Lauer and Balaka Basu. McFarland, 2019. The Harry Potter Generation speaks to the impact Rowling's book series has had upon readers and serves as a good companion to Gierzynski and Eddy's Harry Potter and the Millennials. Lauer and Basu's prologue introduces a myriad of topics in quick succession, drawing comparisons among Harry Potter, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the works of C. S. Lewis, before turning to focus on the Harry Potter Phenomenon. The editors have organized this collection of essays to address the phenomenon from readers' perspectives, its impact upon cultural memory, and its use within educational settings. The essays in each section of the collection complement one another nicely and will hold wide appeal. In "Yours to Keep," Vayo describes the franchise's impact on the lives of its film stars, discussing how Emma Watson's and Daniel Radcliffe's acting careers have evolved based upon their roles within the Potter film franchise, as Hermione Granger and Harry Potter respectively. Vayo notes how gender impacted their career trajectories and self-creation within the public sphere. McLeod and Payne's chapter turns its attention to Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom, examining these supporting characters within the book series and movies to assert the major impact the characters have had on fans. In the chapter "Harry Potter and the Book Burners' Mistake," Lauer examines two of the six times that Harry Potter novels have been burned in protest. She explores the underlying ideology of burning books within historical contexts, noting that both willingness to burn and outrage at book burning draws upon the "shared belief in the power of books" (60). She then discusses the founding of the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a real-world organization that works for progressive social justice, citing the power of the book series to spur people into action. The convergence of the topics feels a bit forced, but since the HPA is not addressed in other essays, I welcomed its mention. Yee's chapter on "The Disenchantment of Harry Potter" examines the [End Page 294] battle between Harry and Voldemort as a conflict between magic and modernity, discussing how magic is treated in scholarship when contrasted with science and religion. She describes how Hogwarts provides official and standardized education contrasting this with Voldemort's pursuit of marginalized and unauthorized magic. She asserts that since education helps to shape the future of a society, the battle over Hogwarts is "a battle to save the modern world that Hogwarts stands for" (79). Lohorn's "Cloaked in History" pairs nicely with Yee's preceding chapter. Lohorn examines magical heritage sites that would define the common experience of being a witch or wizard in Britain. She considers how industrial muggle technologies, such as trains, and clocks are able to interact with these magical locations while more recent technological advancements do not fare as well. She also examines the magical sites within Diagon Alley, and the memorials within Godric's Hollow as community institutions. The following chapter, "Wizarding World Tourism," extends this thoughtful consideration of place to the muggle realm. Siler conducted a survey of 100 responders about visiting Harry Potter tourist sites to determine to what extent visiting such places was a numerous experience in terms of escapism, feeling connected, and experiencing an authentic wizarding adventure. He uncovered interesting ramifications in terms of how the responders' ages contributed to clear patterns of preferences for why they visited a Harry Potter site. Urbanski examines how Harry Potter is represented on Tumblr in the chapter "Filling in Memory Gaps with Love." She explores how fans actively write between the lines of the franchise's canon, creating "headcanon" or a "private and personal mini-story" that "doesn't change the established narrative." Urbanski focuses on the stories shared by three Tumblr accounts and categorized the stories according to the content they explored: the events in the lives of characters between the conclusion of the battle for Hogwarts and the...

Understanding Engineering Students’ Behaviours when Writing Group Report using Wiki

The ability to operate as a group in workplace has become a key requirement in the globally connected workplace. As such, higher education institution needs to provide collaborative work experience in order to prepare their graduates to be ready for real world organization. In most situation, students learn to work collaboratively in an online environment via Wiki. This free tool allows student to write, edit and format manuscript in online manner. However, when working in a group, students does not always prepare to cope with the group dynamics. Therefore, students encounter challenges and difficulty to operate as a group. The aim of this study is to investigate whether students develop unique behaviour when trying to complete the group assignment. The research result reveals that group assignment does not always be a perfect working environment and they as consequences they develop several group behaviours in order to develop unique behaviour in order to be successfully complete their group task.

BPM and change management

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on the implementation of an ambidexterity strategy in a large Italian Company that works in the energy field. The aim of the study is to understand how contextual ambidexterity has been achieved during a business process management (BPM) approach by describing the main variables that interacted during the project implementation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors based their study both on primary (direct observation and interviews) and secondary (company manuals, books and procedures) qualitative investigations of BPM approach based on three business process re-engineering (BPR) projects and nine total quality management (TQM) projects, focused on change team behaviors, dynamics and dialogues.FindingsThe authors observed that the implementation of simultaneously radical and incremental change projects has been influenced by the exploration and exploitation activities related to every single TQM and BPR project considered. The findings suggest that the overall project has been influenced by four main underlying variables, which are task specialization and systems interoperability (knowledge transfer), identity and leadership (knowledge conversion) and two output variables (ambiguity and feedback to change), that, by interacting, enable ambidexterity.Research limitations/implicationsBPM is an important option to consider within the ambidexterity theory, being conceptually conceived as an approach in which TQM and BPR actually complement each other. Moreover, the results contextualize the importance of the change management team (CMT) to manage the connections between knowledge creation and refinement, and vice versa, depending particularly on the knowledge conversion process enabled by a flexible team culture. The focus of the study is mainly at the BPR and TQM project level. The authors consider structural ambidexterity and its enabling mechanisms as the framework in which BPM is implemented. Moreover, research limitations are related both to the specificity of the context, a large, highly specialized and mechanistic company and to the qualitative approach that may reduce the generalization of the empirical results.Practical implicationsManagers need to be cognizant and aware both of the BPM techniques, in order to sustain ambidexterity, and of ambiguity and change feedback as variables that enable the effective connection of the different steps of innovation or refinement strategy and, therefore, of ambidexterity. Moreover, the contextual factors such as leadership and people identity should be considered and managed as important variables related to change.Originality/valueThe originality of this paper is related to improving the understanding of how to implement the theoretical concept of ambidexterity in a real world organization, by providing new evidence that highlights the importance of contextual ambidexterity within a structural ambidexterity strategy during a BPM project.

Insider econometrics: a guide to management scholars

Purpose This paper aims to present a new trend in management research: the Insider Econometrics approach. Design/methodology/approach The authors argue that the use of internal organizational data not available in public sources can benefit both researchers interested in advancing theories and practitioners interested to improve the decision-making toward more solid and evidence-based grounds. Findings The authors demonstrate the subjects involved in Insider Econometrics realm and provide a framework to guide management scholars to successfully engage in research involving strong partnerships between academia and real world organizations. Originality/value This paper introduces a guide to Insider Econometric research to management scholars.

Mining user interaction patterns in the darkweb to predict enterprise cyber incidents

With the rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study, we attempt to build a framework that utilizes unconventional signals from the darkweb forums by leveraging the reply network structure of user interactions with the goal of predicting enterprise-related external cyber attacks. We use both unsupervised and supervised learning models that address the challenges that come with the lack of enterprise attack metadata for ground-truth validation as well as insufficient data for training the models. We validate our models on a binary classification problem that attempts to predict cyber attacks on a daily basis for an organization. Using several controlled studies on features leveraging the network structure, we measure the extent to which the indicators from the darkweb forums can be successfully used to predict attacks. We use information from 53 forums in the darkweb over a span of 17 months for the task. Our framework to predict real-world organization cyber attacks of three different security events suggests that focusing on the reply path structure between groups of users based on random walk transitions and community structures has an advantage in terms of better performance solely relying on forum or user posting statistics prior to attacks.

Applying Schema Resonance Model in live chat e-service

PurposeLive chat e-service provides a communication platform for online customers to make information inquiries and receive instantaneous assistance from a service representative. It is important for organizations to explore ways to improve their live chat e-service. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new organization–customer communication model (Schema Resonance Model), explicate how schema resonance can be achieved in live chat e-service, and investigate the impact of schema resonance on live chat e-service effectiveness, efficiency, customer satisfaction and intention of continued use.Design/methodology/approachA post-test only, between-subjects experiment was conducted. A total of 409 participants completed the experiment sessions, and 389 of these participants were used in the analysis.FindingsResearch results suggest schema resonance could improve the time efficiency of the live chat e-service while maintaining e-service effectiveness. Schema resonance could increase customer satisfaction with the overall e-service, the communication approach used by the representative and the information provided.Research limitations/implicationsBecause a convenience sample was used in the experiment, results cannot be generalized to all live chat e-service users. Future research should include observation of real-world organization–customer live chat e-service sessions.Practical implicationsOrganizations can consider applying the Schema Resonance Model in live chat e-service practices to enhance customer satisfaction and increase representatives’ service productivity.Originality/valueThis research proposes and tests a new organization–customer communication model to explore how organizations can improve live chat e-service in response to customers’ information inquiries.

Economics and ‘bad’ management: the limits to performativity

Abstract The performative power of mainstream economic theories (notably agency theory and transaction cost economics) has been criticised by researchers within management studies. The latter blame these theories for creating ‘bad’ management in real-world organisations and call for their removal from business schools. This paper questions this line of criticism. It argues that mainstream economic theories have condoned more than created ‘bad’ management. It also questions whether ‘bad’ management can be negated by ousting these theories from business schools. Rather it is argued that ‘bad’ management has deep roots within organisations—specifically, it reflects on how organisations are run by and in the interests of capital owners. The possibilities for securing comparatively enlightened or ‘good’ forms of management are seen as necessarily limited by capitalist ownership relations. The paper argues that the transformation of management will require wider reforms in—and importantly beyond—business schools.

The Utility of Healthcare Providers’ Online Biographies for First-Time Patients: A Year-Long Study within a Clinical Setting

ABSTRACT Despite recommendations to provide patient-centered care (i.e., empowering patients to take a greater role in their care), healthcare systems still lag behind in helping patients make arguably one of their most important decisions – their initial selection of a primary care provider. While prior highly-controlled, theoretically-guided, experimental research has tested how various presentations of provider information may impact patients’ decision-making processes, no studies to date have taken the next step to actually roll out improvements to providers’ online information in a real-world healthcare organization and assess their effects. Over the course of a year, the current study made improvements to the website of a health clinic (i.e., adding biographies of primary care providers, & including short video introductions). Post-consultation questionnaires completed by first-time patients revealed patients who naturally viewed online biographies prior to setting appointments indicated less uncertainty – which was mediated through increases in perceived similarity – and were more likely to purposely select their providers. Patients who purposely selected their providers also reported greater patient satisfaction, and were more likely to choose providers with whom they perceived greater similarity. Similarity and patient satisfaction were also positively related. Overall, findings indicate online provider biographies can help patients become more purposive participants in their care, which can lead to greater patient satisfaction.

Automated extraction of attributes from natural language attribute-based access control (ABAC) Policies

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has identified natural language policies as the preferred expression of policy and implicitly called for an automated translation of ABAC natural language access control policy (NLACP) to a machine-readable form. To study the automation process, we consider the hierarchical ABAC model as our reference model since it better reflects the requirements of real-world organizations. Therefore, this paper focuses on the questions of: how can we automatically infer the hierarchical structure of an ABAC model given NLACPs; and, how can we extract and define the set of authorization attributes based on the resulting structure. To address these questions, we propose an approach built upon recent advancements in natural language processing and machine learning techniques. For such a solution, the lack of appropriate data often poses a bottleneck. Therefore, we decouple the primary contributions of this work into: (1) developing a practical framework to extract authorization attributes of hierarchical ABAC system from natural language artifacts, and (2) generating a set of realistic synthetic natural language access control policies (NLACPs) to evaluate the proposed framework. Our experimental results are promising as we achieved - in average - an F1-score of 0.96 when extracting attributes values of subjects, and 0.91 when extracting the values of objects’ attributes from natural language access control policies.

Virtual Environments Testing as a Cloud Service: A Methodology for Protecting and Securing Virtual Infrastructures

Testing is a vital component of the system development life cycle. As information systems infrastructure move from native computing to cloud-based and virtualized platforms, it becomes necessary to evaluate their effectiveness to ensure completion of organizational goals. However, the complexity and scale of virtualized environments make this process difficult. Additionally, inherited and novel issues further complicate this process, while relatively high costs can be constraining. Enabling service-driven environments to provide this evaluation is therefore beneficial for both providers and users. No such complete service offering currently exists. This paper is therefore aimed to benefit industry and academia involved in areas involved with cloud-based testing of virtualized software and its environments. A review of current literature highlights a number of challenges in the domain. An analysis of the challenges aided in deriving requirements for developing a servitization framework for virtual infrastructure testing as a service. It is anticipated that this framework can further feedback into developing solutions to the aforementioned challenges. An evaluation of a real-world organization's servitization requirements case scenario indicates that the proposed framework provides potential solutions for associated use cases.

A new continuous time optimal control model for manpower planning with promotion from inside the system

The aim of this paper is to face the manpower planning problem from a continuous time optimal control perspective. A new continuous-time manpower planning model is proposed in which the promotions occur inside the system. The proposed model contains four main sections: applicants, newcomers, experienced employees and supervisors (or managers). Each of these sections has a target value which we try to attain them by applying appropriate control variables, such as lay off, degradation, promotion and retirement. To attain the targets, we formulated an optimal control problem using a linear system transition equation with a quadratic cost functional. Finally, the proposed model is applied for a real-world organization as a case study.

An optimisation approach for capacity planning: modelling insights and empirical findings from a tactical perspective

Abstract The academic literature presents a research-practice gap on the application of decision support tools to address tactical planning problems in real-world organisations. This paper addresses this gap and extends a previous action research relative to an optimisation model applied for tactical capacity planning in an engineer-to-order industrial setting. The issues discussed herein raise new insights to better understand the practical results that can be achieved through the proposed model. The topics presented include the modelling of objectives, the representation of the production process and the costing approach, as well as findings regarding managerial decisions and the scope of action considered. These insights may inspire ideas to academics and practitioners when developing tools for capacity planning problems in similar contexts.

How organisations leverage Big Data: a maturity model

Purpose While it is commonly recognised that Big Data have an immense potential to generate value for business organisations, appropriating value from Big Data and, in particular, Big Data-enabled analytics is still an open issue for many organisations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a maturity model to support organisations in the realisation of the value created by Big Data. Design/methodology/approach The maturity model is developed following a qualitative approach based on literature analysis and semi-structured interviews with domain experts. The completeness and usefulness of the model is evaluated qualitatively by practitioners, whereas the applicability of the model is evaluated by Big Data maturity assessments in three real-world organisations. Findings The proposed maturity model is considered exhaustive by domain experts and has helped the three assessed organisations to develop a more critical understanding of the next steps to take. Originality/value The maturity model integrates existing industry-developed maturity models into one single coherent Big Data maturity model. The proposed model answers the call for research on Big Data to abstract from technical issues to focus on the business implications of Big Data initiatives.

Interactive visual analysis of anomalous accounts payable transactions in SAP enterprise systems

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of implementing multi-view visualization methods to assist auditors in reviewing the integrity of high-volume accounting transactions. Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems record several thousands of transactions daily. This makes it difficult to find a few instances of anomalous activities among legitimate transactions. Although continuous auditing and continuous monitoring systems perform substantial analytics, they often produce lengthy reports that require painstaking post-analysis. Approaches that reduce the burden of excessive information are more likely to contribute to the overall effectiveness of the audit process. The authors address this issue by designing and testing the use of visualization methods to present information graphically, to assist auditors in detecting anomalous and potentially fraudulent accounts payable transactions. The strength of the authors ' approach is its capacity for discovery and recognition of new and unexpected insights. Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from the SAP enterprise (ERP) system of a real-world organization. A framework for performing visual analytics was developed and applied to the data to determine its usefulness and effectiveness in identifying anomalous activities. Findings – The paper provides valuable insights into understanding the use of different types of visualizations to effectively identify anomalous activities. Research limitations/implications – Because this study emphasizes asset misappropriation, generalizing these findings to other categories of fraud, such as accounts receivable, must be made with caution. Practical implications – This paper provides a framework for developing an automated visualization solution which may have implications in practice. Originality/value – This paper demonstrates the need to understand the effectiveness of visualizations in detecting accounting fraud. This is directly applicable to organizations investigating methods of improving fraud detection in their ERP systems.