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Communication is one team process factor that has received considerable research attention in the team literature. This literature provides equivocal evidence regarding the role of communication in team performance and yet, does not provide any evidence for when communication becomes important for team performance. This research program sought to address this evidence gap by a) testing task complexity and team member diversity (race diversity, gender diversity and work value diversity) as moderators of the team communication — performance relationship; and b) testing a team communication — performance model using established teams across two different task types. The functional perspective was used as the theoretical framework for operationalizing team communication activity. The research program utilised a quasi-experimental research design with participants from a large multi-national information technology company whose Head Office was based in Sydney, Australia. Participants voluntarily completed two team building exercises (a decision making and production task), and completed two online questionnaires. In total, data were collected from 1039 individuals who constituted 203 work teams. Analysis of the data revealed a small number of significant moderation effects, not all in the expected direction. However, an interesting and unexpected finding also emerged from Study One. Large and significant correlations between communication activity ratings were found across tasks, but not within tasks. This finding suggested that teams were displaying very similar profiles of communication on each task, despite the tasks having different communication requirements. Given this finding, Study Two sought to a) determine the relative importance of task versus team effects in explaining variance in team communication measures for established teams; b) determine if established teams had reliable and discernable team communication profiles and if so, c) investigate whether team communication profiles related to task performance. Multi-level modeling and repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that task type did not have an effect on team communication ratings. However, teams accounted for 24% of the total variance in communication measures. Through cluster analysis, five reliable and distinct team communication profiles were identified. Consistent with the findings of the multi-level analysis and repeated measures ANOVA, teams’ profiles were virtually identical across the decision making and production tasks. A relationship between communication profile and performance was identified for the production task, although not for the decision making task. This research responds to calls in the literature for a better understanding of when communication becomes important for team performance. The moderators tested in this research were not found to have a substantive or reliable effect on the relationship between communication and performance. However, the consistency in team communication activity suggests that established teams can be characterized by their communication profiles and further, that these communication profiles may have implications for team performance. The findings of this research provide theoretical support for the functional perspective in terms of the communication – performance relationship and further support the team development literature as an explanation for the stability in team communication profiles. This research can also assist organizations to better understand the specific types of communication activity and profiles of communication that could offer teams a performance advantage.

Purpose - Research on punk culture often falls prey to three main dilemmas. First, an ageist bias exists in most popular music research, resulting in the continued equating of music and youth. Second, punk culture research often uses a Marxist economic lens that implies fieldwork reveals already known conceptions of class and culture. Third, research on punk culture lacks ethnographic and narrative examinations. This ethnographic project explores my reentry into punk culture as an adult, exploring it from a new researcher perspective. It provides an insider's view of emerging cultural themes at the site that disrupts these traditional research approaches. Methodology/approach - This ethnography examines punk culture at an inner city nonprofit arts establishment. Through grounded theory and using a fictional literary account, this research probes how rituals and cultural narratives pervade and maintain the scene. Findings - Concepts such as carnival, jamming as an organizing process - and as an aesthetic moment - emerged through the research process. This ethnography found narratives constituted personal and communal identity. Research limitations/implications - As a personal ethnography, this research contains experiences in one local arts center, and therefore is not necessarily generalizable to other sites or experiences. Originality/value of paper - Using ethnography, I explored punk as one of my primary identities in tandem with younger members of the scene. It critiques Marxist and youth approaches that have stunted music scene research for decades.

In this essay I explore the importance of beef consumption in performing a traditional masculinity that defies the supposed effeminization embodied in the image of the metrosexual. Research on perceptions of men and women eating demonstrates cultural visions of eating as a masculine activity. Furthermore, cultural analysis bears out the link between meat consumption and masculine identity. The recent popularization of metrosexual masculinity has challenged the harsh dichotomies between masculine and feminine gender performances. Against such a trend, burger franchise advertising portrays burger consumption as men's symbolic return to their supposed essence, namely, personal and relational independence, nonfemininity, and virile heterosexuality. In all, I demonstrate the relationship between men and food as productive of a masculinity that perpetuates a male-dominant ideology in juxtaposition to women and metrosexual masculinity.

Sensor nodes are deployed over sensing fields for the purpose of monitoring certain phenomena of interest. The sensor nodes perform specific measurements, process the sensed data, and send the data to a base station over a wireless channel. The base station collects data from the sensor nodes, analyses this data, and reports it to the users. Wireless sensor networks are different from traditional networks, because of the following constraints. Typically, a large number of sensor nodes need to be randomly deployed and, in most cases, they are deployed in unreachable environments; however, the sensor nodes may fail, and they are subject to power constraints. Energy is one of the most important design constraints of wireless sensor networks. Energy consumption, in a sensor node, occurs due to many factors, such as: sensing the environment, transmitting and receiving data, processing data, and communication overheads. Since the sensor nodes behave as router nodes for data propagation, of the other sensor nodes to the base station, network connectivity decreases gradually. This may result in disconnected sub networks of sensor nodes. In order to prolong the network's lifetime, energy efficient protocols should be designed for the characteristics of the wireless sensor network. Sensor nodes in different regions of the sensing field can collaborate to aggregate the data that they gathered. Data aggregation is defined as the process of aggregating the data from sensor nodes to reduce redundant transmissions. It reduces a large amount of the data traffic on the network, it requires less energy, and it avoids information overheads by not sending all of the unprocessed data throughout the sensor network. Grouping sensor nodes into clusters is useful because it reduces the energy consumption. The clustering technique can be used to perform data aggregation. The clustering procedure involves the selection of cluster heads in each of the cluster, in order to coordinate the member nodes. The cluster head is responsible for: gathering the sensed data from its cluster's nodes, aggregating the data, and then sending the aggregated data to the base station. An adaptive clustering protocol was introduced to select the heads in the wireless sensor network. The proposed clustering protocol will dynamically change the cluster heads to obtain the best possible performance, based on the remaining energy level of sensor nodes and the average energy of clusters. The OMNET simulator will be used to present the design and implementation of the adaptive clustering protocol and then to evaluate it. This research has conducted extensive simulation experiments, in order to fully study and analyse the proposed energy efficient clustering protocol. It is necessary for all of the sensor nodes to remain alive for as long as possible, since network quality decreases as soon as a set of sensor nodes die. The goal of the energy efficient clustering protocol is to increase the lifetime and stability period of the sensor network. This research also introduces a new bidirectional data gathering protocol. This protocol aims to form a bidirectional ring structure among the sensor nodes, within the cluster, in order to reduce the overall energy consumption and enhance the network's lifetime. A bidirectional data gathering protocol uses a source node to transmit data to the base station, via one or more multiple intermediate cluster heads. It sends data through energy efficient paths to ensure the total energy, needed to route the data, is kept to a minimum. Performance results reveal that the proposed protocol is better in terms of: its network lifetime, energy dissipation, and communication overheads.

Quality of Service (QoS) routing considered as one of the major components of the QoS framework in communication networks. The concept of QoS routing has emerged from the fact that routers direct traffic from source to destination, depending on data types, network constraints and requirements to achieve network performance efficiency. It has been introduced to administer, monitor and improve the performance of computer networks. Many QoS routing algorithms are used to maximize network performance by balancing traffic distributed over multiple paths. Its major components include bandwidth, delay, jitter, cost, and loss probability in order to measure the end users' requirements, optimize network resource usage and balance traffic load. The majority of existing QoS algorithms require the maintenance of the global network state information and use it to make routing decisions. The global QoS network state needs to be exchanged periodically among routers since the efficiency of a routing algorithm depends on the accuracy of link-state information. However, most of QoS routing algorithms suffer from scalability problems, because of the high communication overhead and the high computation effort associated with marinating and distributing the global state information to each node in the network. The goal of this thesis is to contribute to enhancing the scalability of QoS routing algorithms. Motivated by this, the thesis is focused on localized QoS routing that is proposed to achieve QoS guarantees and overcome the problems of using global network state information such as high communication overhead caused by frequent state information updates, inaccuracy of link-state information for large QoS state update intervals and the route oscillating due to the view of state information. Using such an approach, the source node makes its own routing decisions based on the information that is local to each node in the path. Localized QoS routing does not need the global network state to be exchanged among network nodes because it infers the network state and avoids all the problems associated with it, like high communication and processing overheads and oscillating behaviour. In localized QoS routing each source node is required to first determine a set of candidate paths to each possible destination. In this thesis we have developed localized QoS routing algorithms that select a path based on its quality to satisfy the connection requirements. In the first part of the thesis a localized routing algorithm has been developed that relies on the average residual bandwidth that each path can support to make routing decisions. In the second part of the thesis, we have developed a localized delay-based QoS routing (DBR) algorithm which relies on a delay constraint that each path satisfies to make routing decisions. We also modify credit-based routing (CBR) so that this uses delay instead of bandwidth. Finally, we have developed a localized QoS routing algorithm for routing in two levels of a hierarchal network and this relies on residual bandwidth to make routing decisions in a hierarchical network like the internet. We have compared the performance of the proposed localized routing algorithms with other localized and global QoS routing algorithms under different ranges of workloads, system parameters and network topologies. Simulation results have indicated that the proposed algorithms indeed outperform algorithms that use the basics of schemes that currently operate on the internet, even for a small update interval of link state. The proposed algorithms have also reduced the routing overhead significantly and utilize network resources efficiently.

This thesis is based around five studies examining the psychology of interpersonal communication applied to organizational settings. The studies are designed to examine the question of how the way that people in positions of power in organizations communicate with subordinates, affects various measures of health, well-being and productivity. It is impossible to study modern organisational communication without recognising the importance of electronic communication. The use of e-mail and other forms of text messaging is now ubiquitous in all areas of communication. The studies in this thesis include the use of e-mail as a medium of communication and examine some of the potential effects of electronic versus face-to-face and verbal communication. The findings of the studies support the basic hypothesis that: it is not what is said that matters but how it is said. The results showed that an unsupportive, formal, authoritarian style of verbal or written communication is likely to have a negative effect on health, well-being and productivity compared with a supportive, informal and egalitarian style. There are also indications that the effects of damaging communications may not be confined to the initial recipient of the message. Organizational communication does not take place in a vacuum. Any negative consequences are likely to be transmitted by the recipient, either back to the sender or on to other colleagues with implications for the wider organisational climate. These findings are based on communications that would not necessarily be immediately recognised as obviously offensive or bullying, or even uncivil. The effects of these relatively mild but unsupportive communications may have implications for the selection and training of managers. In the final section of the thesis there is a discussion of how examples of various electronically recorded messages might be used as training material.

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This text takes a new approach to autoethnography by using personal narratives to analyze our work across multiple disciplines and subdisciplines. These stories feature authors working at the intersections of autoethnography and critical theory within a given organizational context. Organizations are not simply entities, but systems of meaning. As such they are sites of cultural practices and performances, and of domination, resistance and struggle. Working at the intersection of organizational studies and autoethnography, this book explores the ability of autoethnographic and personal narrative approaches to generate important, innovative, and empowering understandings of difference, discourses, and identities, while attending to the various powerful dynamics that are at play in organizations. These are stories of work, at work, and help to finally bring theory and direct exemplars together. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1130/thumbnail.jpg