Methodological fit, an implicitly valued attribute of high-quality field research in organizations, has received little attention in the management literature. Fit refers to internal consistency ...among elements of a research project--research question, prior work, research design, and theoretical contribution. We introduce a contingency framework that relates prior work to the design of a research project, paying particular attention to the question of when to mix qualitative and quantitative data in a single research paper. We discuss implications of the framework for educating new field researchers.
Although playing a crucial role for the prevention of long‐term health impairment, interventions aiming at the improvement of employees' recovery processes are still scarce. In this study, we ...therefore investigated the effectiveness of a low‐dose mindfulness intervention for recovery from work. In addition, differential responding to the treatment in terms of treatment‐by‐baseline interactions was studied. A sample of 140 employees participated in a randomized field experiment with a self‐training and a wait‐list control group. Three central recovery processes (psychological detachment, sleep quality, and sleep duration) were assessed with event‐sampling methodology involving daily measurements over 10 workdays. Growth curve analyses revealed intervention effects on sleep quality and sleep duration. No effects were found for psychological detachment after work and for the proposed treatment‐by‐baseline interactions. Our findings are discussed in the context of occupational health promotion in general and mindfulness‐based interventions in specific.
Practitioner points
Although daily recovery from the demands of work has been shown to be vital for employee well‐being and performance, research on how workplace interventions can help improve recovery is still scarce.
This study investigated the effectiveness of a brief, economic mindfulness intervention on processes that are vital for recovery – psychological detachment, sleep quality, and sleep duration.
Findings revealed positive effects of the intervention on sleep quality and duration, but not on psychological detachment.
Descriptions of runoff generation processes continue to grow, helping to reveal complexities and hydrologic behavior across a wide range of environments and scales. But to date, there has been little ...grouping of these process facts. Here, we discuss how the “fill‐and‐spill” concept can provide a framework to group event‐based runoff generation processes. The fill‐and‐spill concept describes where vertical and lateral additions of water to a landscape unit are placed into storage (the fill)—and only when this storage reaches a critical level (the spill), and other storages are filled and become connected, does a previously infeasible (but subsequently important) outflow pathway become activated. We show that fill‐and‐spill can be observed at a range of scales and propose that future fieldwork should first define the scale of interest and then evaluate what is filling‐and‐spilling at that scale. Such an approach may be helpful for those instrumenting and modeling new hillslopes or catchments because it provides a structured way to develop perceptual models for runoff generation and to group behaviors at different sites and scales.
Key Points
Runoff is at the scale of the beholder. We need to move from a notion of uniqueness of place to uniqueness of scale
Fill‐and‐spill, together with its components is common to all event runoff systems
Fill‐and‐spill as a framework is perhaps a guide for field hydrologists on what to measure, in what order and why
Implementation of Field Work Practice (FWP) for Vocational High School (VHS) students is one of the programs planned as a means for students to improve competence in both soft skills and hard skills, ...besides that by carrying out FWP students get learning and training bythe world of work. Every student supervisor or teacher has difficulty evaluating the results of street vendors, due to the lack of references obtained by student supervisors in implementing the street vendors program at VHS. This study aims to identify and analyze various approaches and evaluation models that have been used in the implementation of street vendors in VHS students. This research method uses a systematic literature review (SLR) with a descriptive explanatory type of research to gain a comprehensive understanding of the evaluation of the street vendors program implementation. This study found 50 articles on the topic of street vendors from various disciplines, but 15 research articles that were appropriate to the topic of Technology and Engineering came from various literary sources or based on the database found on Google Scholar. This study produced three evaluation models, namely the Context, Input, Process, and Product (CIPP) model with 15 articles, the discrepancy model with 3 articles, and the goal-oriented model with 2 articles. The contribution of this research is expected to increase understanding of the evaluation of the implementation of the street vendors program for VHS students and to lay a strong basis for the development of better evaluations in the future.
By providing feedback to customers on home electricity and natural gas usage with a focus on peer comparisons, utilities can reduce energy consumption at a low cost. We analyze data from two ...large-scale, random-assignment field experiments conducted by utility companies providing electricity (the Sacramento Municipal Utility District SMUD) and electricity and natural gas (Puget Sound Energy PSE), in partnership with a private company, Opower, which provides monthly or quarterly mailed peer feedback reports to customers. We find reduction in energy consumption of 1.2% (PSE) to 2.1% percent (SMUD), with the decrease sustained over time (7 months PSE and 12 months SMUD).
•We conduct the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship between the “meaningfulness” of a task and worker effort.•We found that increasing the meaningfulness of a task increased ...the quantity of output with no change in quality.•We found that decreasing the meaningfulness of a task decreased the quality of output with no change in quantity.•Our study introduces MTurk as an exciting platform for running natural field experiments in economics.
We conduct the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship between the “meaningfulness” of a task and worker effort. We employed about 2500 workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market, to label medical images. Although given an identical task, we experimentally manipulated how the task was framed. Subjects in the meaningful treatment were told that they were labeling tumor cells in order to assist medical researchers, subjects in the zero-context condition (the control group) were not told the purpose of the task, and, in stark contrast, subjects in the shredded treatment were not given context and were additionally told that their work would be discarded. We found that when a task was framed more meaningfully, workers were more likely to participate. We also found that the meaningful treatment increased the quantity of output (with an insignificant change in quality) while the shredded treatment decreased the quality of output (with no change in quantity). We believe these results will generalize to other short-term labor markets. Our study also discusses MTurk as an exciting platform for running natural field experiments in economics.
We examine organizational field change instigated by activists. Contrary to existing views emphasizing incumbent resistance, we suggest that collaboration between incumbents and challenger movements ...may emerge when a movement's cultural and relational fabric becomes moderately structured, creating threats and market opportunities but remaining permeable to external influence. We also elucidate how lead incumbents' attempts at movement cooptation may be deflected through distributed brokerage. The resulting confluence of cultural and relational "structuration" between movement and field accelerates the pace but dilutes the radicalness of institutional innovation, ensuring ongoing, incremental field change. Overall, this article contributes to the emergent literature on field dynamics by uncovering the evolution and outcomes of collaborative work at the intersection of social movements and incumbent fields.
This qualitative case study explored a community–university partnership for teacher preparation with an urban Indigenous community organization. The study examined the roles of Indigenous community ...partners as co-teacher educators working to better prepare teachers for the needs of urban Indigenous children and communities. The author collected data through focus groups with Indigenous participants before and after engagement with the partnership, direct observations of partnership activities where Indigenous participants interacted with teacher candidates and university faculty, and offered individual interviews for all participants. Indigenous Postcolonial Theory (IPT) guided this research and offered a lens to examine the perspectives of urban Indigenous community members engaged as co-teacher educators in field-based teacher preparation. This study held implications for continued development of Indigenous community–university partnerships and furthering the role of community leaders in teacher preparation to advance efforts of Indigenous postcolonialism through self-education.
Slippery Law, John; Lien, Marianne Elisabeth
Social studies of science,
06/2013, Volume:
43, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper explores empirical ontology by arguing that realities are enacted in practices. Using the case of Atlantic salmon, it describes a series of scientific and fish-farming practices. Since ...these practices differ, the paper also argues that different salmon are being enacted within those different practices. The paper explores the precarious choreographies of those practices, considers the ways in which they enact agency and also work to generate Otherness. Finally it emphasises the productivity of practices and notes that they generate not simply particular realities (for instance particular salmon), but also enact a penumbra of not quite realised realities: animals that were almost but not quite created.
Scholars have recently begun to investigate job design as one of the contingencies that moderates1 the performance effects of transformational leadership in public sector organizations. Drawing on ...this stream of research, we used a completely randomized true experimental research design to explore the potential of two extra-task job characteristics–beneficiary contact and self-persuasion interventions–to enhance the effects of transformational leadership on public employee performance. The participants in our field experiment were 138 nurses at a public hospital in Italy. Whereas participants who were exposed to transformational leadership manipulation alone marginally outperformed a control group, the performance effects of transformational leadership were much greater among nurses who were also exposed to either beneficiary contact or self-persuasion interventions. Follower perceptions of pro-social impact partially mediated2 the positive interaction of transformational leadership and each of the two job design features on job performance. Moreover, the performance effects of transformational leadership and the interaction effects of transformational leadership and each of the two job design features were greater among participants who self-reported higher levels of public service motivation. The implications of the experimental findings for public administration research and theory are discussed.
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