•Initial household engagement with energy information appeared effective.•Longer term interest of households towards energy information was low.•Personalised information increases user ...engagement.•Tailoring of information is essential in sector reorganisation.
The second decade of the 21st century is distinctive by the rapid deployment of sensors, meters and other measurement technology that by their ability to detect and report data on events or changes in the environment are considered central in the reorganization of many sectors. The collected information is expected to improve efficiency and coordination, already enhancing the delivery of services in sectors such as health care, environment or entertainment. While infrastructural elements, such as roads, street lighting or waste containers, have traditionally been non-informational, now these kinds of elements are being furnished with sensors as part of an effort to change how their respective sectors operate. Energy sector, with its shift to the ‘smart grid’ infrastructure, provides a case study of how efforts at reorganising the sector are impacted by the relationship households develop to large quantities of energy information. Based on findings from studying ‘smart grid’ development in Japan, I argue that, to enable a reorganisation of the energy sector, extensive tailoring of information is required in order to engage users to develop an active relationship with infrastructure.
In this paper, we contribute to understanding of how video films were used by change management as a communication strategy to portray and promote the organisational reform of the Swedish police in ...2015. Based on a multimodal analysis of 44 video films, we theorise how the Swedish police change management “gave sense” to the transformation and future state of the police service. The findings show how change was motivated through descriptions of contexts, the problematisation of the present situation, prescriptions of the change process, and forecasts of an ideal future status for the Swedish police. These messages were reinforced visually using stereotypical images and by layering multiple modes of communication. The paper contributes to the literature on organisational change and police reform by describing how change can be motivated and legitimised through persuasive portrayals of the present and the future. We conclude that multimodal communication through video is a powerful technique for sensegiving, with the potential to construct credible, but not necessarily accurate, accounts of organisational change.
Following arm amputation the region that represented the missing hand in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) becomes deprived of its primary input, resulting in changed boundaries of the S1 body map. ...This remapping process has been termed ‘reorganisation’ and has been attributed to multiple mechanisms, including increased expression of previously masked inputs. In a maladaptive plasticity model, such reorganisation has been associated with phantom limb pain (PLP). Brain activity associated with phantom hand movements is also correlated with PLP, suggesting that preserved limb functional representation may serve as a complementary process. Here we review some of the most recent evidence for the potential drivers and consequences of brain (re)organisation following amputation, based on human neuroimaging. We emphasise other perceptual and behavioural factors consequential to arm amputation, such as non-painful phantom sensations, perceived limb ownership, intact hand compensatory behaviour or prosthesis use, which have also been related to both cortical changes and PLP. We also discuss new findings based on interventions designed to alter the brain representation of the phantom limb, including augmented/virtual reality applications and brain computer interfaces. These studies point to a close interaction of sensory changes and alterations in brain regions involved in body representation, pain processing and motor control. Finally, we review recent evidence based on methodological advances such as high field neuroimaging and multivariate techniques that provide new opportunities to interrogate somatosensory representations in the missing hand cortical territory. Collectively, this research highlights the need to consider potential contributions of additional brain mechanisms, beyond S1 remapping, and the dynamic interplay of contextual factors with brain changes for understanding and alleviating PLP.
•Technological advancements provide new insight into the neural basis of phantom pain.•Traditional mechanistic accounts of remapping in somatosensory cortex are incomplete.•Related contextual factors such as adaptive behaviour will contribute to brain plasticity.•A broader mechanistic focus beyond primary sensorimotor cortex is needed.•Plasticity and stability of the sensorimotor body maps may vary across time scales.
To explore complex patterns of causal interrelationships between antecedents of organizational innovation, this study applies fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to a large sample of ...German firms drawn from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The results show several equifinal configurations of contextual factors leading to organizational innovation. Evidence also suggests complex substitutive and complementary relationships between factors and reveals their causal asymmetric influence on firm's innovation behavior. These findings help explain some inconsistent results in prior studies on organizational innovation.
We draw on an in-depth longitudinal analysis of conflict over harvesting practices and decision authority in the British Columbia coastal forest industry to understand the role of institutional work ...in the transformation of organizational fields. We examine the work of actors to create, maintain, and disrupt the practices that are considered legitimate within a field (practice work) and the boundaries between sets of individuals and groups (boundary work), and the interplay of these two forms of institutional work in effecting change. We find that actors' boundary work and practice work operate in recursive configurations that underpin cycles of institutional innovation, conflict, stability, and restabilization. We also find that transitions between these cycles are triggered by combinations of three conditions: (1) the state of the boundaries, (2) the state of practices, and (3) the existence of actors with the capacity to undertake the boundary and practice work of a different institutional process. These findings contribute to untangling the paradox of embedded agency—how those subject to the institutions in a field can effect changes in them. We also contribute to an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that drive changes in the institutional lifecycle.
This paper empirically examines how business unit reorganization affects innovation, and explores how the learning process may mediate this relationship. Unit reorganization is the creation, ...deletion, or recombination of business units within a firm. Innovation is radical and involves product market entry by a firm into markets in which it was not previously active. I test competing hypotheses that predict either a U-shape or inverted U-shape relationship between reorganization and innovation to determine whether and how learning occurs in the presence of unit-level structural change. Theoretical support is drawn from literature on dynamic capabilities and organizational learning. The sample studied is 250 medical firms belonging to the pharmaceutical, healthcare-service, and medical-device industries, studied over a 20-year period. The findings are twofold. First, reorganization is found to exhibit a U-shape relationship with innovation, supporting learning arguments that stress the importance of experiencing a cohort of multiple events. Second, only reorganization experiences within a current period affect future innovation; past experiences do not impact future innovation, implying that firms may face constraints in organizational memory. The study concludes by exploring the structural origin (i.e., from internal, acquired, or recombined units) of innovative activity within firms.
Gender mainstreaming (GM) has been on the agenda of organisations at various levels in Sweden and worldwide since the 1990s. Research has shown that GM is difficult to apply and has yet to be clearly ...defined, and additionally that organisations are uncertain about how to implement it. Research also suggests that the dominance of the new public management (NPM) approach within organisations has made GM work more challenging. In this article, we examine GM in a medium-sized Swedish municipality that is reorganising itself to become gender mainstreamed while introducing trust-based governance (TBG). This municipality provides a unique opportunity to study how GM is constructed in a municipality at the intersection of NPM and TBG. Applying a critical perspective, this article analyses documents from reorganisation based on Bacchi’s (2009) policy analysis. The results demonstrate that GM is mainly translated into TBG-inspired practices and that efficiency becomes an overarching concept that entangles GM, TBG and NPM. GM becomes part of cultural change together with TBG, while NPM maintains its dominance in the structural change of the organisation.
In this paper, we contribute to understanding of how video films were used by change management as a communication strategy to portray and promote the organisational reform of the Swedish police in ...2015. Based on a multimodal analysis of 44 video films, we theorise how the Swedish police change management “gave sense” to the transformation and future state of the police service. The findings show how change was motivated through descriptions of contexts, the problematisation of the present situation, prescriptions of the change process, and forecasts of an ideal future status for the Swedish police. These messages were reinforced visually using stereotypical images and by layering multiple modes of communication. The paper contributes to the literature on organisational change and police reform by describing how change can be motivated and legitimised through persuasive portrayals of the present and the future. We conclude that multimodal communication through video is a powerful technique for sensegiving, with the potential to construct credible, but not necessarily accurate, accounts of organisational change.
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