The phenomenon of organizational growth has traditionally been assumed to be indeterminate largely due to chance or accidents found in organizational worlds. This research takes up the causal processes underlying the growth (and decline) of virtually all world-class manufacturers in the international automobile industry from 1946 to 1989. Two models are developed as alternative explanations for the long-term trends observed in growth rates and their differences across firms. The models are estimated with a nonlinear method and tested through various empirical implications. The model that seems most consistent with the data shows unambiguously that they were not generated by a random or chance process but by underlying processes of collective learning, innovation, and outnovation in technologies and organizational routines. Firms that had generated different rates in these processes differed as hypothesized in their long-term growth performance. The dynamics of collective learning processes, as measured by the parameters of the model, largely explain the dynamics of organizational growth in the world automobile industry, hence, the dynamics of interorganizational competition. The results from tests of ecological hypotheses suggest that organizational ecology might benefit from the application of matrices of collective learning rates generated from interorganizational learning curves, particularly where ecology seeks to explain patterns of competition by organizational size. As shown, this research strategy is general and gauges directly interactions among organizations over long periods. It is also flexible in dealing with various levels of analysis in longitudinal and cross-sectional dimensions. As also shown, the collective learning theory, its model, and the ecology of interorganizational learning curves derived from them can help in evaluating empirically the competitive potential of firms by indicators of innovation and outnovation relative to other firms, patterns of competition (gauged by relative learning rates) among firms, and any changes of those patterns over time. Thus, the research strategy used here provides potentially useful causal analyses as well as meaningful measures on which different organizations can be compared, with each other and with themselves. These measures may also provide important benchmarks and diagnostics for strategic management.

<p>This study focused on understanding inter-organizational relationships (IOR) of a dynamic nature. A dynamic process that has repetitive sequences of negotiation, commitment, and execution stages is central to inter-organizational relationships. The dynamic process is a tool that is used by management through collaboration, co-operation, and coordination to engender formation, governance, and performance of inter-organizational relationships. This report looked into how the resource-dependency theory gives insight into the formation of an inter-organizational relationships and how the transaction-cost theory contributes to the understanding ofinter-organizational relationships governance.</p>

Within research regarding superior-subordinate conflict there is noticeable variation. Scientists have found different answers to the question: what causes superior-subordinate conflicts in the workplace. A literature-study was conducted to examine the different scientific studies in the area and try to find a conclusion to what causes the variation and how it affects how one views the social phenomena that is superior-subordinate conflicts. The results indicate that (1) depending on theoretical standpoint the responsibility for the conflict is shifted. (2) Depending on methodical preference the conflict is more or less likely to be viewed as collectively created. In addition to this a Marxian perspective was added in an analytical discussion. Showing that using this theoretical standpoint conflicts can be portrayed as something positive.

This dissertation evaluates the veracity of Richard Scott’s three pillars of institutionalization: regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive. The test of his theory is whether the processes and practices within the environments of the three pillars can account for differences between academic performance and athletic performance in Miami-Dade County, Florida public schools. Scott’s model of institutionalization works better in predicting academic success than it does athletic success in the context of this study as evidenced by the majority of the findings coming from the scholastic realm. The primary methodological approach was to obtain publicly available measures of academic performance and resources for 31 high schools in Miami-Dade County, FL, and then evaluate relationships between these academic indicators and measures of 􀀃 􀀃school athletic performance. Pearson (parametric) and Spearman (non-parametric) correlation coefficients were calculated to estimate the strength of association between school characteristics and measures of academic and athletic performance. These analyses further informed the construction of stepwise multiple linear regression models that regressed the dependent variable (a measure of academic or athletic performance) with a range of possible independent variables all related to individual school characteristics. Improvement in the academic categories included in this dissertation (math, science, reading, and writing) has been the goal of a great deal of legislation that deals with education at the federal, state, and local level. The top indicator of a school’s academic performance was the number of highly qualified teachers within a school. Cultural-cognitive pillar indicators of socioeconomic status, including minority rate and percentage of students in a school who are eligible for free lunch, were negatively associated with academic performance. Thus, normative and cultural-cognitive processes can have a significant impact on whether laws and legislation have their intended effect. In the end, it is reasonable to conclude that all three pillars complement each other in interdependent ways within Scott’s institutional framework with different pillars taking prominence as time and circumstances change. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This thesis studies the formation of a novel expert role—the data scientist—in order to ask how arcane knowledge becomes publicly salient. This question responds to the two-sided public debate, wherein data science is associated with problems such as discriminatory consequences and privacy infringements, but has also become linked with opportunities related to new forms of work. A puzzle arises also, as institutional boundaries have obscured earlier instances of quantitative expertise. Even a broader perspective reveals few expert groups that have gained lay salience on the basis of arcane knowledge, other than lawyers and doctors. This empirical puzzle recovers a gap in the literature between two main lines of argument. An institutionalist view has developed ways for understanding expert work with respect to formal features such as licensing, associations and training. A constructivist view identifies limitations in those arguments, highlighting their failure to explain many instances in which arcane knowledge emerges through informal processes, including the integration of lay knowledge through direct collaboration. Consistent with this critique, data nerds largely define their work on an informal basis. Yet, they also draw heavily on a formalized stock of knowledge. In order to reconcile the two sides, this thesis proposes viewing data science as an emerging “thought community.” Such a perspective leads to an analytical strategy that scrutinizes contours that emerge as data nerds define arcane expertise as theirs. The analysis unfolds across three empirical settings that complement each other. The first setting considers data nerds as they define their expertise in the context of public events in New York City’s technology scene. This part draws on observations beginning in 2012, shortly after data science’s first lay recognition, and covers three years of its early emergence. Two further studies comparatively test whether and in what ways contours of data science’s abstract knowledge are associated with its lay salience. They respectively consider economic and academic settings, which are most relevant to data nerds in part one. Both studies leverage specifically designed quantitative datasets consisting of traces of lay knowledge recognition and arcane knowledge construction. Together the three studies reveal distinctive contours of data science. The main argument that follows suggests that data science gains lay salience because it relies on informal practices for recombining formal principles of knowledge construction and application, in a collective effort. Data nerds define their thought community on the basis of illustrative and persuasive tactics that combine formal ideas with informal interpretations. This form of improvisation leads data nerds to connect diverse substantive problems through an array of formal representations. They thereby undermine bureaucratic control that otherwise defines tasks in the context where data scientists mostly apply their arcane knowledge. Despite its name and arcane content, moreover, data science differs from scientific principles of knowledge construction. The main contribution of this thesis is a first detailed and multifaceted analysis of data science. Results of this study address the main public problems. This thesis demonstrates that data science creates new opportunities for work provided that data nerds are willing to embrace the uncertainty associated with a formally undefined area of problems. The first perspective, focusing on community identification principles, furthermore allows identifying new forms of work in the ongoing technological transformation data science is part of. At the same time, the main argument supports reason for concerns as well precisely because data nerds often operate on an individually anonymous basis, despite their association with formal organizations. It has remained unclear how to address the social consequences of their work because data nerds undermine those conventional forms of control and oversight. The findings of this thesis suggest that although data nerds depart from scientific principles for identifying relevant problems, they coordinate those deviant activities through forms of discipline that qualitatively resemble those common in academic fields. Data nerds define their knowledge as a community. It follows that embedding public concerns in data science’s disciplinary forms of coordination, and enhancing those forms, offers the most effective mechanisms for preserving the utility of data science applications while limiting their potentially harmful consequences. Finally, conceptual and methodological contributions follow as well. The focus on thought communities reveals new leverage for understanding social processes that unfold as a combination of informal activities in local settings and institutional dynamics that are largely removed from individual actors. This problem is common for many instances of skilled work. This additional leverage is the result of an integrated methodological design that relies as much on qualitative observations as on formal analyses. As part of this integration this thesis has directly encoded phenomenologically salient contours into a quantitative design, effectively leading to an analysis of data science through data science.

The embattled profession of teaching is like a sad song on repeat (Goldstein, 2015). For beyond a decade, research has proliferated a deficit narrative of teaching as a “revolving door” (Ingersoll, 2001, p. 514) or “leaky bucket” (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, & Carver-Thomas, 2016, p. 2), in which at least 50% of teachers quit within the first 5 years (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014). In fact, as teacher attrition increases, the teacher-shortage crisis ravages our hardest-to-serve schools (Sutcher et al., 2016). Today, the number of aspiring teachers has dropped to the lowest it has been in 45 years (Flannery, 2016). The curiosity driving my research was and is whether it is possible to disrupt this deficit narrative of teaching as America’s most embattled profession (Goldstein, 2015). To do so, my goals have been to learn how eight teacher-leaders describe and understand their own flourishing in their careers, if they do at all, and what are the encouragers of and obstacles to their flourishing. In other words, rather than turn up the volume on the narrative of teachers who fail, flee, and quit the profession, I wondered how, if at all, stories exist of teachers who live, teach, and lead well. For this study, I derived the term flourishing from Aristotle’s eudemonia or the art of living well and doing well for self and others (Aristotle, 2011, line 1095b). I then crafted the beginnings of a flourishing framework for what it might mean for teacher-leaders to live the good life. Through a cross-disciplinary and integrative literature review (Torraco, 2016), I learned that flourishing most frequently includes experiencing passion, purpose, and practical wisdom in work and life. In response, I sought to examine how, if at all, eight teachers who are also leaders—both formally and informally in their schools and beyond—experience their own flourishing. To clarify, I defined teacher-leaders as teachers who I believe grew into leaders (Drago-Severson, 2016) and are “galvanized by the desire to improve and thus ensure learning for all students” and “driven to experiment, take risks, collaborate, seek feedback, and question their own and others’ practices” (Fairman & Mackenzie, 2015, p. 64). Therefore, the eight teacher-leaders for this study fit Fairman and Mackenzie’s definition. They participated in two programs that I believe are strong holding environments (Drago-Severson, 2013): North Carolina Teaching Fellows, a preservice university program for aspiring teachers, and National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, an in-service development opportunity for experienced teachers with more than 4 years of experience. To be clear, “holding environments” can be relationships and contexts that create developmentally spaces for adults to grow and feel “honored for who they are” (Drago-Severson, 2012, p. 48; Kegan, 1982, p. 115; Winnicott, 1990). The Pillar Practices of teaming, mentorship, collegial inquiry, and inviting teachers to assume leadership are four holding environment (i.e., structures) in which adults can feel well held (supported) and adequately challenged—in order to increase internal capacities (Drago-Severson, 2004, p. 88). I chose to invite teachers who participated in two teacher-development programs (i.e., North Carolina Teaching Fellows and National Board Certification) specifically because these programs seem to provide holding environments. Researchers have shown teachers who participated in these two programs are among the best and brightest or irreplaceable teacher-leaders whom schools want to keep, or retain, in our classrooms (Henry, Bastian, & Smith, 2012; Jacob, Vidyarthi, & Carroll, 2012; Petty, Good, & Handler, 2016). In fact, all eight teacher-leaders who participated in this study stayed in the profession at least ten years despite the last decade of sociopolitical flux and rising complexity of public schools (Drago-Severson, 2016). To facilitate this dissertation study, I conducted three in-depth semi-structured interviews and document analysis with each of the eight teacher-leaders who work in Wake County Public School System of North Carolina (32 hours), the 15th largest district in the nation (Hui, 2016). I asked them how they describe and understand flourishing, if they do, throughout their career, with close attention to three distinct points in the trajectory of their career, that is, in the beginning years (1-3 years), during the National Board Certification Process (during or after 4 years of teaching), and within the last academic year, which was also an election year (2016-2017). I also asked how they describe and understand the encouragers of and obstacles to their own flourishing. For data analysis, I coded verbatim transcripts from these in-depth interviews with Dedoose in two analytic cycles (Maxwell, 2013; Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014; Seidman, 2013). In the first cycle, I completed open/descriptive and theoretical coding, and, in the second, I looked for categories and broader themes to display the data in narrative summaries and profiles for each participant (n = 8). Throughout, I attended to research bias, reactivity, and validity threats through analytic memos, member checks, discrepant data, and inter-coder reliability with my sponsor. Findings from this qualitative in-depth interview study and document analysis contributed to a framework of understanding flourishing for teacher-leaders. Overall, I learned that to flourish, or to teach, lead, and live well, for the eight teacher-leader participants in my study, the good life meant that they needed to prioritize the purpose of relating with students (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter V; cultivate connections with colleagues who share common passions (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter VI; and reflect with their practical wisdom on their priority to teach well in the midst of the push and pull of leadership entangled in flourishing (n = 8), as I claimed in Chapter VII. The implications and recommendations for policy, research, and practice from these claims and findings based on these eight teacher-leader participants are as follows: 1. to re-story excellence in teaching by creating teacher pipelines, development programs, and measurement tools (policy and research) that consider holistic frames of teacher excellence to include flourishing (i.e., do the teachers believe they are committed to teaching, leading, and living well?); 2. to re-center relationships in schools, especially for teachers, by intentionally crafting spaces such as holding environments where teachers, principals, and all educational leaders can grow their internal capacities to deepen relationships with students and colleagues; and 3. to re-frame the tides of teacher-leadership and consider the practical wisdom and time it takes for teachers to discern their own priories, their own balance, and their own flow (i.e., push and pull) of leadership based on their own understanding of their ability to teach and live well. In conclusion, I offer a beginning model and framework for teacher-leader flourishing in order for future research to explore how, if at all, teachers in different districts and states or of different demographics and levels might describe and understand their own good life.

This study examines the role of collective identity in nonprofit coalition-building, using critical discourse analysis of a case study of an Asian American nonprofit organizational coalition focused on advocating for community health access and equity. The study finds that the pan-ethnic collective identity is a resource for the organizational coalition studied. The study extends existing literature on inter-organizational studies and nonprofit organizational coalition-building through the introduction of a conceptualization or model of identity work as involving both the activation and strategic deconstruction of the pan-ethnic Asian American collective identity. This study finds that identity work, as conceptualized, can be critical not only to sustaining a pan-ethnic coalition, but also to ensuring that a pan-ethnic coalition of nonprofit organizations embodies social work value of social justice and ethical responsibility of cultural competence and social diversity.

塗爾幹的機械團結理論和有機團結理論假設了同步一致性/互補配合性的儀式表演可以提升群體內的團結感。已有的心理學研究通過實驗發現同步一致性的群體表演促進了群體內的合作行為。本研究在上述實驗的基礎上，進一步檢驗了互補配合性促進群體內團結感的假說，并對二者的結果進行了比較。在實驗中，100名參加者以4人為一組被隨機分配到“同步一致擊鼓“、“互補配合擊鼓“和“非協調擊鼓“(控制組)三個實驗條件下；進而報告其信任感、同組歸屬感和愉悦感水平；最後參加一個標準化的、包含五輪決策任務的公共物品博弈。實驗結果表明，互補配合性的擊鼓表演與同步一致性的擊鼓表演都能促進人們在公共物品博弈中的合作行為。 / The Durkheimian theory of mechanical solidarity and organic solidarity hypothesized that synchrony/complementarity promotes social solidarity. Previous psychological experiments suggested that synchronous ritual performance improves the level of cooperation among group members. This study replicated their experimental design while further testing the complementaritysolidarity hypothesis to make a comparative analysis. In this experiment, 100 participants in groups of four were first randomly allocated to one of three conditions: synchronous drumming, complementary drumming, and asynchronous drumming (control); then they self-reported on questions about in-group trust, same-group feeling, and happiness; and finally, they played a five-round standardised public good game. The experimental result revealed that both the complementary and the synchronous drumming promoted cooperative behaviour in a social dilemma situation. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Liu, Yue. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 38-39). / Abstracts also in Chinese; appendixes in Chinese. / Introduction --- p.1 / Literature review --- p.3 / Social solidarity as a solution to the problem of social order --- p.3 / Ritual performance and social solidarity --- p.4 / Synchronous ritual and mechanical solidarity --- p.6 / Complementary ritual and organic solidarity --- p.10 / Method and hypotheses --- p.12 / Participants --- p.12 / Materials --- p.13 / Design --- p.14 / Procedure --- p.17 / Result and analysis --- p.19 / Discussion --- p.23 / Appendix --- p.25 / Chapter Appendix 1. --- Recruitment message and application sheet --- p.25 / Chapter Appendix 2. --- Consent form --- p.26 / Chapter Appendix 3. --- Instruction for subjects --- p.27 / Chapter Appendix 4. --- Evaluation questionnaire for the drumbeat task --- p.31 / Chapter Appendix 5. --- End questionnaire --- p.33 / Chapter Table 1. --- T-test result for synchronous vs. asynchronous condition (one-tailed) --- p.35 / Chapter Table 2. --- T-test result for complementary vs. asynchronous condition (one-tailed) --- p.36 / Chapter Table 3. --- T-test result for experimental vs. control condition (one-tailed) --- p.37 / References --- p.38

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