•We analyze the insights underlying the design of the disruption index.•Conceptual work is more likely to disrupt science than technical work.•Disruption reflects how paradigms shift in the ...development of science.•“New direction” identified by disruption also includes using new framing for an existing phenomenon that facilitates scientific dissemination.•Citing highly cited papers may decrease the disruption of paper.
The disruption (D) index is a network-based indicator to quantify the extent to which a focal paper disrupts its predecessors. This study focuses on what disruption means by examining example articles related to “sleeping beauties in science” and frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). We investigated the structure of the citation network and subsequent papers’ motivations for citing the focal papers. Based on the observation that conceptual work is more likely to disrupt science than technical work, we hypothesize that disruption reflects the mechanism of how paradigms shift in the development of science. We also assume that the disruption identified by the D index indicates more than generating a new direction. Disruptive contributions include revolutionary studies such as Nobel-prize-winning papers, as suggested in previous work. However, disruptive contributions also include scientific dissemination of new terminology created by popular proposals, such as “sleeping beauties in science.” Such contributions redefine and popularize phenomena in science.
Rapidly growing populations of older adults rely heavily on formal long-term care services such as those provided in nursing homes. Nursing home staff are confronted with complex challenges. We ...explored how staff (
= 88), particularly care aides, interpreted challenges and responded to them by taking adaptive leadership roles, and engaging in technical and adaptive work in nursing homes. We conducted analysis of the ethnographic case studies. In long-term care settings, staff face complex challenges in improving resident care due to contextual barriers. These include demanding work conditions and inadequate resources. Additionally, top-down communications, despite being well-intentioned, often lead to misinterpretation and a lack of staff motivation. Nonetheless, we found that certain staff managed to overcome these contextual barriers and effectively execute change initiatives by assuming adaptive leadership roles. Formal leaders have a vital role in empowering staff, including care aides, and facilitating their adaptive leadership behaviors.
Project forms of organizing are theorized to rely upon horizontal as opposed to vertical lines of authority, but few have examined how this shift affects progression-how people advance in an ...organization. We argue that progression without hierarchy unfolds when people assume lateral authority over project tasks without managing people. With a longitudinal study of a mature, collectively managed open source software project, we predict the individual behaviors that enable progression to lateral authority roles at two different stages. Although technical contributions are initially important, coordination work is more critical at a subsequent stage. We then explore how lateral authority roles affect subsequent behavior-after gaining authority, individuals spend significantly more time coordinating project work. Our research shows how people progress to the center as opposed to up a hierarchy, and how progression differs by stage and specifies the theoretical relationship between lateral authority roles and the coordination of project work.
•We introduce a novel dataset on MIT Biology labs from 1966 to 2000.•We document trends in laboratory composition over more than three decades.•We document that postdocs (vs. grad students or ...technicians) account for the majority of laboratory publication output.•Relative to postdocs, grad students and technicians are equally important for breakthrough publications.•We propose a methodology to reconstruct laboratories from bibliometric data.
We study the link between a laboratory's personnel composition, its number and types of graduate students and postdocs, and the laboratory's productive output. Building upon a fine-grained dataset with full personnel lists from the MIT Department of Biology from 1966–2000, we find that while postdocs account for the large majority of publication outputs, graduate students and postdocs with external funding contribute equally to breakthrough publications. Moreover, technicians are key contributors to breakthrough publications, but not to overall productivity. Taken together, this study contributes to our understanding of knowledge work, as well as reinforcing the importance of a laboratory's personnel composition.
Urban infrastructures are often particularly visible in India, both due to their recurrent failures and to the rhythm of their construction. In this article, we look at the wastewater treatment ...system of Varanasi, which has become since the 1980s, a symbol of the difficulties of urban planning in contemporary India, as millions of litters of wastewater flow untreated into the river Ganges despite large investments (Alley, 2014). By focusing on the technical workers who operate and maintain these infrastructures, we try to decipher their vision and analysis of the situation and the role of social, professional and institutional dynamics in the perpetuation of failure.
Sweden has the reputation of being one of the most progressive countries in the world concerning work-life development and industrial democracy. In this article, an analytical overview of the ...development in these areas is provided, which includes the antecedents, major events, actor positioning and also the broad-term outcomes. Two major reform movements are described: one aiming to create a radically different work-life where workers control their own work with a power balance between labour and capital, and one a reformist movement aiming to create a degree of co-determination and a more engaging work-life without any major changes in power relations. The case shows that the radical movement was not able to generate radical change and that the reformistic movement achieved only partial success. The outcome over time has been a decreased interest in work-life development where co-determination practices are heavily institutionalized but perhaps do not provide better conditions for workers than in many other advanced industrial countries with a lesser degree of formal co-determination.
In light of the overwhelming consumption of resources by the manufacturing sector, this paper examined three key subsystems that are critical in greening the sector. Whereas the extant literature has ...focused on technological development to reduce environmental damage, it has not analyzed profoundly how manufacturing processes can be greened effectively. Hence, using carefully gathered data of 299 respondents and structural equation modeling, this paper sought to investigate the mediating effect of social, environmental, and technical subsystems on the relationship between management support and sustainable manufacturing performance. The results show that management support has a positive relationship with sustainable manufacturing performance (p < 0.005), while social, environmental, and technical subsystems partially mediate this relationship. Hence, efforts must be taken to encourage management of manufacturing firms to support sustainable management performance, while at the same time supporting them to introduce innovative social, environmental, and technical practices.
In this paper we explore the question of why firms offshore particular services to specific geographic locations. We draw on research related to the unique characteristics of services in trade and ...commerce, and more recent analyses of the transnational unbundling and spatial dispersion of business processes. We move beyond a simple assessment of the cost sensitivity or relative sophistication of offshoring services and develop a typology emphasizing the degree to which offshoring services activities are interactive, repetitive, or innovative. We suggest that the location of offshoring projects will depend on the particular mix of these attributes, and test this assertion using a data set of 595 export-oriented offshore services projects initiated from 2002 to 2005 by US and UK company parents in 45 developed and developing countries. We find that offshore location choices greatly depend on these services characteristics, and in sometimes surprising ways, and draw implications from our findings for international business theory, policy, and practice.
This article studies the work performed by technicians in a large demonstration project, EcoGrid 2.0, in the Danish island Bornholm. Based on observations of household visits conducted by ...technicians, we demonstrate how these act as ‘middlemen’, mediating and linking together the smart technology of the demonstration and the involved users. Formally, technicians’ work is to keep users online; however, they also perform a number of invisible tasks to keep users engaged and active. Our ethnographic study shows two broad categories of invisible work: first, technicians continually facilitate the willingness of users, recurrently affirming the social contract between users and demonstration project. Second, technicians facilitate the abilities of users by improvising informal training sessions of how to operate the system. These findings are used to discuss the importance of invisible articulation work of technical service workers in large scale real‐world experiments.
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