Yes / Purpose This study explored the effect of power-based behaviours on pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) resilience. Design/methodology/approach This study used a mixed-method approach to explore the role of power-based behaviours in PSC resilience. Qualitative interviews from 23 key PSC stakeholders, followed by thematic analysis, revealed the underlying perceptions regarding PSC resilience. Quantitative propositions were then developed based on the themes adopted from PSC resilience literature and the qualitative findings. These were tested via a survey questionnaire administered to 106 key stakeholders across the various levels in the PSC. Structural equation modelling with partial least squares was used to analyse the data. Findings The data analysed identified proactive and reactive strategies as resilience strategies in the PSC. However, power-based behaviours represented by quota systems, information and price control influenced these resilience strategies. From a complex adaptive system (CAS) perspective, we found that when power-based behaviours were exhibited, the interactions between PSC actors were mixed. There was a negative influence on reactive strategies and a positive influence on proactive strategies. Our analysis also showed that PSC complexities measured by (stringent regulations, long lead times and complex production) moderated the effect of power-based behaviour on reactive strategies. Thus, the negative impact of power-based behaviours on reactive strategies stemmed from PSC complexities. Research implications Our research particularly reveals the role of power-based behaviours in building PSC resilience. By evaluating the nexus from a CAS perspective, the analysis considered powerbased behaviours and the moderating role of PSC complexities in developing resilience strategies. The study considers the interactions of PSC actors. It shows that power asymmetry is a relational concept that inhibits the efficacy of reactive strategies. This study thus advocates the importance of power in achieving a more resilient PSC from a holistic perspective by highlighting the importance of the decision-making process among supply chain partners. Our findings are particularly relevant if PSC resilience is viewed as a complex adaptive system (CAS). All the interactions and decision-making processes affect outcomes due to their inherent complexities. Although this study focused on the PSC, its implications could be extended to other SCs (supply chains). Practical implications We identified that power-based behaviours influenced resilience strategies. It was detrimental to reactive strategies due to the complexities of the PSC but beneficial to proactive strategies through resource-sharing. PSC actors are therefore encouraged to pursue proactive strategies as this may aid in mitigating the impact of disruptions. However, power-based behaviours bred partner dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction may occur even within strategic alliances indicating that power could be detrimental to proactive strategies. Therefore, it is pertinent to identify conditions that lead to dissatisfaction when pursuing strategic partnerships. This study provides insight into actual behaviours influencing resilience and quantifies their effects on the PSC. These insights will be valuable for all supply chain partners wanting to improve their resilience strategies. Originality/value Previous PSC management and resilience studies have not examined the role of power in building resilience in the PSC. This paper thus provides a unique contribution by identifying the role of power in PSC resilience, offers empirical evidence and a novel theoretical perspective for future practice and research in building PSC resilience strategies.

Thesis advisor: Patrick McQuillan / Urban school districts' educational leaders face what seem to be an endless number of challenges, such as closing the achievement gap, enhancing student performance, building teacher capacity, creating leadership opportunities, and adapting to a student population that is changing rapidly and increasingly made up of students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds who are limited English speakers and/or English language learners. Through the lens of complexity theory, this three-year instrumental case study examined the leadership practices of two Lynch Leadership Academy Principal Fellows in relation to their leadership growth project that they determined would benefit from improvement and, as a result, would be implemented in their urban schools. Using principal and teachers’ interviews and observation fieldnotes of the professional learning communities meetings at the schools, this study chronicled the actions and behaviors of the principals and teachers through their interdependent and mutual relationships as they developed a theory of action and conducted their Leadership Growth Project, taking into account the concepts of complexity theory and the influence on the school community. The findings demonstrate that principals, through their leadership and relationships with their teachers and their engagement in professional learning community activities, complicated and disrupted the complacency, compliance, and comfort of the teachers. The formation of a theory of action, however, which was a way for the teachers and the principals to satisfy the needs of their urban school community in response to the challenges they faced, was sparked by such disruptions. Additionally, teachers had to reconsider how they interacted with their students as a result of their capacity for self-organization at the edge of chaos. A conclusion of this research is that in order to achieve successful professional learning outcomes and emergence through adapted change that incorporate the principal's leadership, teachers must be willing to communicate practice-related issues and to offer and accept constructive criticism in an environment of disequilibrium. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

The growing need for a trustworthy Future Internet demands evolutionary approaches unfettered by legacy constrains and concepts. The networking community is calling for new network architectural proposals that address the deficiencies identified in present network realizations, acknowledge the need for a trustworthy IT infrastructure, and satisfy the society's emerging and future requirements. Proposed architectures need to be founded on well-articulated design principles, account for network operational and management complexities, embrace technology and application heterogeneity, regulate network-inherent emergent behavior, and overcome shortcomings attributed to present network realizations. This dissertation presents our proposed clean-slate Concern-Oriented Reference Model (CORM) for architecting future computer networks. CORM stands as a guiding framework from which network architectures can be derived according to specific functional, contextual, and operational requirements or constraints. CORM represents a pioneering attempt within the network realm, and to our knowledge, CORM is the first reference model that is bio-inspired and derived in accordance with the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) engineering framework. CORM conceives a computer network as a software-dependent complex system whose design needs to be attempted in a concern-oriented bottom-up approach along two main dimensions: a vertical dimension addressing structure and configuration of network building blocks; and a horizontal dimension addressing communication and interactions among the previously formulated building blocks. For each network dimension, CORM factors the design space into function, structure, and behavior, applying to each the principle of separation of concerns for further systematic decomposition. In CORM, the network-building block is referred to as the Network Cell (NC), which represents CORM's first basic abstraction. An NC's structure and inherent behavior are bio-inspired, imitating a bacterium cell in a bacteria colony, thus it is capable of adaptation, self-organization and evolution. An NC's functional operation is defined by CORM second basic abstraction; the ACRF framework. The ACRF framework is a conceptual framework for network-concerns derived according to our interpretation of computer network requirement specifications. CORM networks are recursively synthesized in a bottom-up fashion out of CORM NCs. CORM addresses the multi-dimensionality of computer networks by modeling the network structure and behavior using a network structural template (NST), and an information flow model (IFM), respectively. Being developed according to a complex system paradigm, CORM refutes the long endorsed concept of layering, intrinsically accounts for emergent behavior, and ensures system integrity and stability. As a reference model, CORM is more typical of conventional engineering. Therefore it was validated using the FBS engineering framework. However, the behavior to be realized in CORM-based networks was substantiated and evaluated by deriving CellNet, our proposed CORM-based network architecture. CellNet-compliant protocols' behavioral adaptation and modification were illustrated and evaluated through simulation. CORM will have a profound impact on the operation and behavior of computer networks composing the Internet. By introducing awareness adaptability and evolvability as network intrinsic features, CORM-based Internet will proactively respond to changes in operational contexts, underlying technologies, and end user requirements. A major direction in CORM future work would be to detail the IFM component. / Ph. D.

Linkages between Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) thinking and efficiency analysis remain in their infancy. This research associates the basic building blocks of the CAS 'flocking' metaphor with the essential building block concepts of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Within a proposed framework DEA "decision-making units" (DMUs) are represented as agents in the agent-based modeling (ABM) paradigm. Guided by simple rules, agent DMUs representing business units of a larger management system, 'align' with one another to achieve mutual protection/risk reduction and 'cohere' with the most efficient DMUs among them to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the least possible time. Analysis of the resulting patterns of behavior can provide policy insights that are both evidence-based and intuitive. This research introduces a consistent methodology that will be called here the Complex Adaptive Productive Efficiency Method (CAPEM) and employs it to bridge these domains. This research formalizes CAPEM mathematically and graphically. It then conducts experimentation employing using the resulting CAPEM simulation using data of a sample of electric power plants obtained from Rungsuriyawiboon and Stefanou (2003). Guided by rules, individual agent DMUs (power plants) representing business units of a larger management system,'align' with one another to achieve mutual protection/risk reduction and 'cohere' with the most efficient DMUs among them to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in the least possible time. Using a CAS ABM simulation, it is found that the flocking rules (alignment, cohesion and separation), taken individually and in selected combinations, increased the mean technical efficiency of the power plant population and conversely decreased the time to reach the frontier. It is found however that these effects were limited to a smaller than expected sub-set of these combinations of the flocking factors. Having been successful in finding even a limited sub-set of flocking rules that increased efficiency was sufficient to support the hypotheses and conclude that employing the flocking metaphor offers useful options to decision-makers for increasing the efficiency of management systems. / Ph. D.

Intresset för hur HR och ledning kan påverka medarbetarnas beteendemönster och den sociala strukturen inom organisationer har gett upphov till denna undersökning. Med utgångspunkt i teorier om komplexa adaptiva system som perspektiv har jag försökt fånga medarbetarnas förutsättningar att nå organisationers vision och därmed förverkliga medarbetarpolicyn i praktiken. Tillsammans med kontaktpersoner från den undersökta kommunen har jag gjort en djupdykning i en offentlig organisation i syfte att förklara byråkratins inverkan på beteendemönstret hos medarbetarna och hur de tillsammans skapar en social struktur vilken speglar organisationens vision. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur det adaptiva systemet fungerar i en byråkratisk organisation och vad det betyder för medarbetarnas möjligheter att förverkliga organisationens vision och medarbetarpolicy. Undersökningen har genomförts på en socialförvaltning i en kommun i mellan Sverige och med en kvalitativ metod och semistrukturerade intervjuer har sex respondenter deltagit i undersökningen. Samtliga respondenter har olika befattningar inom organisationen och bidrar därmed med olika perspektiv på samma fenomen. Undersökningens resultat visar att den offentliga verksamhetens byråkratiska organisationsstruktur bidrar till att det bildas olika adaptiva system inom organisationen, där medarbetarnas beteendemönster bildar en social struktur som leder till att visionen och medarbetarpolicyn inte förverkligas. Undersökningen visar även att de adaptiva systemen inom organisationen inte påverkar varandra, då de inte interagerar med varandra inom organisationen. Det som ligger till grund för hur medarbetarnas beteendemönster etableras inom organisationen är kraven från omvärlden, hög arbetsbelastning och avsaknaden av stabilitet i den organisatoriska och sociala arbetsmiljön och inte vad tidigare forskning visat; att det skulle vara hög regelstyrning som ligger till grund för beteendemönstret inom den offentliga sektorn. Slutsatsen är att för att medarbetarna ska kunna förverkliga organisationens vision och medarbetarpolicy kräver det att HR, ledning och medarbetare alla ingår i samma adaptiva system. För att det ska vara möjligt behöver HR upprätta strategier för hur samtliga inom organisationen ska interagera med varandra i det dagliga arbetet. Ledningen och medarbetarna behöver även ha goda möjligheter att kommunicera med varandra regelbundet i en större omfattning än vad de gör idag. Konkreta åtgärder för hur det lämpligen bör genomföras presenteras under diskussionen. / The significance of how Human Resources, HR, and management can cooperatively effect the behavioural pattern of co-workers and the social structure within organizations originated this study. With the perspective of complex adaptive systems as the starting point, the purpose has been to establish the requirements for co-workers to implement the organizations’ vison and policies in practice. In cooperation with the contacts of the studied municipality, I made an in-depth study within a public organization to explain the bureaucracy's effect on the behaviour pattern of the co-workers and how they together create a social strucutre reflecting the organization's vision. The purpose with the study is to examine how the complex adaptive systems functions within a bureaucratic organization and its effect on co-workers’ possibilities to implement the vision and policy of the organization. The study was made within a social welfare service in a municipality in Middle Sweden, using a qualitative method and semi structured interviews six respondents have participated, all with different positions in the organization contributing to several perspective of the same phenomena. The results of the study points to the public sector’s bureaucratic organization structure conduces’ of the creating different adaptive systems within the organization where co-workers’ behaviour pattern create a social structure which leads to failure of implementing the vision and policy. The study also presents that the adaptive systems within the organization does not affect each other as they do not interact with each other in the organization. The basis of how co-workers’ behaviour pattern establishes within the organization is the demands from the surrounding world, high workload, and of the lack of stability in the organizational and social working environment and not as the previous research have showed; that high ruling would underlie to behavioural pattern within the public sector. In conclusion, for co-workers to implement the vision and policy of the organization it requires for HR, management and co-workers all are in the same adaptive systems. To make that possible HR needs to form strategies on how all within the organization will interact with each other in daily work. Management and co-workers also needs great possibilities to communicate with each other regularly to an increasing extent. Concrete proceedings for how this should be done most suitably is presented in the discussion.

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The delivery of supply in combat operations is very important and often results in success or failure of a mission. This activity, as well as other transportation problems, has traditionally been modeled using global optimization techniques, such as linear programming. However, the goal of this thesis is to examine the feasibility of an agent-based solution to study the movement of material through a road network. The requirement is to build an agent-based system that finds the optimal route through a given road network and is capable of adapting to disruptions introduced to the network and then find alternative routes through the network. The agents act from a local perspective, and can represent more realistically the decisions being made throughout the delivery process. This thesis implements an analysis environment for road networks and develops an agent-based model to build truck-driver agents that are capable of delivering supplies through a changing road network. / Captain, German Army

abstract: Design is a fundamental human activity through which we attempt to navigate and manipulate the world around us for our survival, pleasure, and benefit. As human society has evolved, so too has the complexity and impact of our design activities on the environment. Now clearly intertwined as a complex social-ecological system at the global scale, we struggle in our ability to understand, design, implement, and manage solutions to complex global issues such as climate change, water scarcity, food security, and natural disasters. Some have asserted that this is because complex adaptive systems, like these, are moving targets that are only partially designed and partially emergent and self-organizing. Furthermore, these types of systems are difficult to understand and control due to the inherent dynamics of "wicked problems", such as: uncertainty, social dilemmas, inequities, and trade-offs involving multiple feedback loops that sometimes cause both the problems and their potential solutions to shift and evolve together. These problems do not, however, negate our collective need to effectively design, produce, and implement strategies that allow us to appropriate, distribute, manage and sustain the resources on which we depend. Design, however, is not well understood in the context of complex adaptive systems involving common-pool resources. In addition, the relationship between our attempts at control and performance at the system-level over time is not well understood either. This research contributes to our understanding of design in common-pool resource systems by using a multi-methods approach to investigate longitudinal data on an innovative participatory design intervention implemented in nineteen small-scale, farmer-managed irrigation systems in the Indrawati River Basin of Nepal over the last three decades. The intervention was intended as an experiment in using participatory planning, design and construction processes to increase food security and strengthen the self-sufficiency and self-governing capacity of resource user groups within the poorest district in Nepal. This work is the first time that theories of participatory design-processes have been empirically tested against longitudinal data on a number of small-scale, locally managed common-pool resource systems. It clarifies and helps to develop a theory of design in this setting for both scientific and practical purposes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2018

This thesis encompasses research on Artificial Intelligence in support of automating scientific discovery in the fields of biology and medicine. At the core of this research is the ongoing development of a general-purpose artificial intelligence framework emulating various facets of human-level intelligence necessary for building cross-domain knowledge that may lead to new insights and discoveries. To learn and build models in a data-driven manner, we develop a general-purpose learning framework called Syntactic Nonparametric Analysis of Complex Systems (SYNACX), which uses tools from Bayesian nonparametric inference to learn the statistical and syntactic properties of biological phenomena from sequence data. We show that the models learned by SYNACX offer performance comparable to that of standard neural network architectures. For complex biological systems or processes consisting of several heterogeneous components with spatio-temporal interdependencies across multiple scales, learning frameworks like SYNACX can become unwieldy due to the the resultant combinatorial complexity. Thus we also investigate ways to robustly reduce data dimensionality by introducing a new data abstraction. In particular, we extend traditional string and graph grammars in a new modeling formalism which we call Simplicial Grammar. This formalism integrates the topological properties of the simplicial complex with the expressive power of stochastic grammars in a computation abstraction with which we can decompose complex system behavior, into a finite set of modular grammar rules which parsimoniously describe the spatial/temporal structure and dynamics of patterns inferred from sequence data.

Organizational adaptability is critical to organizational survival, and executive leadership's inability to adapt to extreme disruptive complex events threatens survival. Scenario planning is one means of adapting to extreme disruptive complex events. In this qualitative interpretive phenomenological study, 20 executives who had lived experience with extreme disruptive complex events and applied scenario planning to help adapt participated in phenomenological interviews to share their experiences related to the application of scenario planning as a means adaptation to extreme disruptive complex events. Participants were from a single large organization with executives distributed throughout the United States and executives from 10 state agencies located within a single state. Using the thematic analysis process, 14 themes emerged. The themes included knowing the difference between adaptation and response, not being afraid to tackle difficult questions, scenario planning is never over because the environment constantly changes, the true measures of scenario planning value are the benefits achieved via the planning exercise versus the business application, and participation should be individuals who can or could have a direct influence on adaptation and do not get bogged down in structured and/or rigid processes, methods, or tools because while useful, they are not required to be successful. The implications for positive social change include the ability for organizations to reduce economic injury and the compound effects of disruption including the social impacts of business injury, disruption, recovery, job loss, and reduced revenue on communities and local economies.

This study is the exploration of the emergence of DataONE, a multidisciplinary, multinational, and multi-institutional virtual scientific collaboration to develop a cyberinfrastructure for earth sciences data, from the complex adaptive systems perspective. Data is generated through conducting 15 semi-structured interviews, observing three 3-day meetings, and 51 online surveys. The main contribution of this study is the development of a complexity framework and its application to a project such as DataONE. The findings reveal that DataONE behaves like a complex adaptive system: various individuals and institutions interacting, adapting, and coevolving to achieve their own and common goals; during the process new structures, relationships, and products emerge that harmonize with DataONE’s goals. DataONE is quite resilient to threats and adaptive to its environment, which are important strengths. The strength comes from its diversified structure and balanced management style that allows for frequent interaction among members. The study also offers insights to PI(s), managers, and funding institutions on how to treat complex systems. Additional results regarding multidisiplinarity, library and information sciences, and communication studies are presented as well.