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The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual understanding of organizational consciousness that expands the discussion of organizational analysis, and use a case study to apply it in the analysis of a merger between an academic health center and a regional medical center.

The paper draws on the experiences and insights of scholars who have been exploring complex organizational issues in relationship with consciousness.

Organizational consciousness is the organization's capacity for reflection; a centering point for the organization to “think” and find the degree of unity across systems; and a link to the organization's identity and self‐referencing attributes. It operates at three stages: reflective, social, and collective consciousness.

Translating abstract concepts such as consciousness to an organizational model is complex and interpretive. For now, the idea of organizational consciousness remains mostly a theoretical concept. Empirical evidence is needed to support the theory.

Faced with complicated and compelling issues for patient care, health care organizations must look beyond the analysis of structure and function, and be vigilant in their decisions on where important issues sit on the ladder of competing priorities. Organizational consciousness keeps the organization's attention focused on purpose and unifies the collective will to succeed.

If the paper can come to understand how consciousness operates in organizations, and learn how to apply it in organizational decisions, the pay‐off could be big in terms of leading initiatives for change. The final goal is to use what is learned to improve organizational outcomes.

Discusses how changes in institutional objectives for international food assistance have influenced the organization of supply chains for innovative therapeutic foods designed to address problems of malnutrition and undernutrition.

Draws upon insights from donor and international organization reports, policy documents, and academic publications to reveal the structure, goals, and objectives of international organizations involved in food assistance strategies. Explores how innovations in Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Foods and Ready-to-Use Supplementary Foods fit into food assistance strategies and broader humanitarian goals.

Informed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, international food assistance strategies have broadened beyond acute malnutrition to include chronic undernutrition. Food assistance strategies have shifted toward a focus on local and regional procurement (LRP) over transoceanic aid, with Public Private Partnerships (P3s) playing a facilitating role.

This chapter raises important considerations to factor into the design and execution of international food assistance strategies using LRP/P3 modes of organization. It contributes to an understanding of the challenges of organizing international food assistance strategies that include socioeconomic goals of sustainability and nutrition objectives.

This study aims to investigate the influence of advertising value and privacy concerns on consumers’ intention to use location-based advertising. It also explores if brand trust toward location-based advertising providers and consumers’ privacy self-efficacy reduce privacy concerns.

Based on the privacy calculus and expectancy theory, a conceptual model is developed and empirically tested through structural equation modeling using cross-sectional data of 1,121 actual smartphone users from Germany.

Advertising value positively and privacy concerns negatively affect consumers’ intention to use location-based advertising. As expected, brand trust and consumers’ privacy self-efficacy can reduce consumers’ privacy concerns.

Further research should test and validate the proposed framework in other cultures to gain insights into the culturally specific relevance of privacy concerns and their antecedents. The current study includes sociodemographics as potential moderators; additional studies could investigate other potential moderators (e.g. personality, values).

To reduce consumers’ privacy concerns, location-based advertising providers should make their offers transparent and give consumers control, to increase their privacy self-efficacy. They also should work to strengthen their brand, monitor brand trust trends and avoid any trust-damaging behavior.

This study introduces brand trust toward location-based advertising providers and privacy self-efficacy as factors to reduce consumers’ privacy concerns. It also encompasses a broader, general sample of consumers, which increases the generalizability and practical relevance of the results and supports an initial investigation of sociodemographic factors as potential moderators in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Asian consumer culture by exploring how hungry ghost death ritual in the Buddhist world reconciles spiritual asceticism and materialism.

This is an interpretive study that incorporates elements of visual semiotics, ethnography and qualitative data analysis. The native-speaking first author interviewed local ritual leaders of the Pee Ta Khon festival in Dansai, Thailand, while both authors witnessed examples of other Buddhist death rituals in Thailand and visited temples and markets selling death ritual paraphernalia. Data include translated semi-structured interview transcripts, field notes, photographs and videos, the personal introspection of the first author and also news articles and website information.

The paper reveals how hungry ghost death ritual resolves cultural contradictions by connecting materialism and spirituality through consumption practices of carnival celebration with feasting, music, drinking, costumes and spirit offerings of symbols of material wealth, such as paper money and branded goods.

Further research in the form of full ethnographic studies of the same and other rituals would add additional detail and depth to the understanding of the ritual in Asian consumer culture.

The paper extends existing qualitative consumer research into death ritual into a new area and sheds light on the way managers must locate Asian marketing initiatives within distinctively local contexts.

This study examines how contributors with different achievement goals participate under the influence of two common motivators/demotivators on crowdsourcing platforms, namely system design features and task nature.

A free simulation experiment was conducted among undergraduate students with the use of a crowdsourcing platform for two weeks.

The results indicate that contributors with a strong performance-approach goal get better scores and participate in more crowdsourcing tasks. Contributors with a strong mastery-avoidance goal participate in fewer heterogeneous tasks.

Contributors with different achievement goals participate in crowdsourcing tasks to different extents under the influence of the two motivators/demotivators. The inclusion of the approach-avoidance dimension in the performance-mastery dichotomy enables demonstrating the influence of motivators/demotivators more specifically. This article highlights differentiation between the quality and the quantity of heterogeneous crowdsourcing tasks.

Management is advised to approach performance-approach people if a leaderboard and a point system are incorporated into their crowdsourcing platforms. Also, management should avoid offering heterogeneous tasks to mastery-avoidance contributors. System developers should take users' motivational goals into consideration when designing the motivators in their systems.

The study sheds light on habitual achievement goals, which are relatively stable in comparison to contributors' motives and states. The relationships between achievement goals and motivators/demotivators are more persistent across time. This study informs system designers' decisions to include appropriate motivators for sustained contributor participation.

This chapter draws on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork collected in gay bars from three American cities to explore the strategies LGBTQ subcultures deploy to recreate meaningful places within the vestiges of local queer nightlife. As gentrification and social acceptance accelerate the closures of LGBTQ-specific bars and nightclubs worldwide, venues that once served a specific LGBTQ subculture (i.e., leather bars) expand their offerings to incorporate displaced LGBTQ subcultures. Attending to how LGBTQ subcultures might appropriate designated spaces within a gay venue to support community (nightlife complexes), how management and LGBT subcultures temporally circumscribe subcultural practices and traditions to create fleeting, but recurring places (episodic places), and how patrons might disrupt an existing production of place by imposing practices associated with a discrepant LGBTQ subculture(place ruptures), this chapter challenges the notion of “the gay bar” as a singular place catering to a specific subculture. Instead, gay bars increasingly constitute a collection of places within the same space, which may shift depending on its use by patrons occupying the space at any given moment. Beyond the investigation of gay bars, this chapter contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, unstable, and ephemeral nature of place and place-making in the postmodern city.

Crowdsourcing communities enable companies to post challenges that are completed by solvers (workers); their success depends on engagement, requiring both creativity and effort. This study explores solver engagement in online crowdsourcing communities, advancing the theory of trait engagement by investigating the mediating roles of: (a) task-related self-efficacy in linking conscientiousness, neuroticism and extraversion, with solver engagement, and (b) task complexity in influencing the mediation.

215 valid responses were obtained from solvers engaged in the popular Chinese crowdsourcing community, Epwk.com, using an online questionnaire. PLS was then used to analyze the data.

Results show that self-efficacy mediates the relationships for conscientiousness, neuroticism and extraversion, with solver engagement. Moderated mediation analysis revealed that self-efficacy mediates the relationships for: (a) conscientiousness and extraversion, for only solvers with high task complexity; and (b) neuroticism, for only solvers with low task complexity.

The authors’ findings underscore the importance of accounting for solvers' situational contexts when examining the relationships between personality, self-efficacy and solver engagement in online crowdsourcing communities.

The third term has been expressed as but in wind tunnel work it is often more convenient to measure were the omission of the dash signifies that the moment is now measured about a wind axis. The two quantities are very closely related and the measurement of one tells us almost as much as if the two were known. The latter, however, tells us either directly or indirectly what effect the addition of fin and rudder will have on the autorotation properties of the wings alone. The damping of fin and rudder being due essentially to the air flow meeting them at an angle on account of the rotation it should theoretically be possible to deduce this dynamic quantity from a simple static test of moment due to yaw angle. An experiment to test this was carried out several years ago but the static test did not give any approximation to the truth. This was ascribed at the time to the shielding of fin and rudder by the tail plane in the rotative experiment and subsequent work has amply confirmed this view. It is now known that shielding by the tail plane is by far the most important factor in determining the efficiency of the vertical surfaces at high angles of attack.

Firms invest much money in information technology (IT) since IT support has been recognized as a critical enabler of employee outcomes. However, the value obtained by organizations and their employees is not always as much as they anticipated because of, at least partly, a poor relationship between IT staff and users. The purpose of this paper is to apply the social capital theory to examine relationship management between IT and business and explores mechanisms through which social capital between IT staff and users affect users’ employee outcomes, including job satisfaction and job performance.

Based on social capital theory and past literature, the researchers propose a research model and explore the effect of social capital on knowledge sharing, IT users’ perceived service quality, job satisfaction and ultimately job performance. Based on a survey of 289 respondents, this study applies the partial least square technique to test the research model.

Mediation test was performed to explore the effect mechanisms of social capital on employee outcomes, and the results indicate that three dimensions of social capital affect IT users’ job satisfaction and job performance in different approaches.

This study uses social capital theory to direct how to improve the poor relationship between IT staff and users and provides a useful insight into the mechanisms through which three dimensions of social capital improve users’ job satisfaction and job performance.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the process of participating in a long-term collective memory work group of older men, focusing on the making/unmaking of older men and masculinities, and the potential of memory work with older men.

Participant review and reflection on collective memory work with a group of older men.

Collective memory work provides a novel way to explore ageing, gendering, men, and masculinities. Its potential for working with older men is examined critically in relation to gender politics, power and (in)equalities, interconnections and contradictions of men’s ageing and gendering, the personal and the political, as well as working with older men more generally, including those in transition and crisis.

There is little previous writing on this approach to ageing, men, and masculinities. The paper aims to stimulate wider applications of this approach.