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This article investigates the possibility of studying modern organizations with the feudal model. We introduce feudalism as an ideal type and explain why it is necessary for understanding organizations. The model synthesizes several perspectives on intra-organizational conflict. After defining the feudal model and tracing its theoretical roots, we review several empirical studies to identify the conditions under which feudal conflicts arise. These factors include decentralization, structural interdependence, uncertainty and informal power. The feudal model highlights several overlooked aspects of organizations, including personal relations, the manipulation of formal rules, bribery, corruption and sabotage. However, given the model's limitations, we propose a “segmented approach” to social analysis, which emphasizes the need for multiple models to explain any organization, past or present.

Supplements the (A) case.

After the company's first aviation fatality, Southwest Airlines's CEO is faced with new and difficult decisions. The alacrity and compassion that characterized the company's response serves as a paradigm for any organization facing a future crisis situation.

To teach students how to manage a crisis situation.

Supplements the (A) case.

The purpose of this essay is to highlight how the digital age makes visible community expression and organization on an international scale.

This project provides a rhetorical analysis of the sub-cultural twitter hashtag “#Palestine2Ferguson”. By focusing on #Palestine2Ferguson, this piece interrogates the ways groups that have been displaced by oppression can build bridges in the new digital age. Through the adaptation of Deluca and Peeples “public screen”, this project reveals how increased sophistication of discernment adds a new “touch” to the screen.

An analysis of #Palestine2Ferguson through the lens of “the public touchscreen” emboldens rhetorical studies understanding of how ethnic/racial minority individuals are capable of self-selecting their method and modes of self-expression when building community.

The transformation of life within the digital age has created an exigence for a reconsideration and expansion of Deluca and Peeples concept of “public screens”.

The use of celebrities, and particularly athletes, to influence consumers and sell products is not a new practice, but one that is gaining considerable steam in the sports marketplace. However, many academics and practitioners have long questioned the means by which celebrity endorsement is measured and evaluated. Through the use of validated surveys among US students and the inauguration of the Celebrity-Hero Matrix (CHM), some of their questions are answered. Being labelled a 'heroic' athlete does, it seems, have tremendous power for marketers, and provides endorsement clout for the athlete.

This paper aims to examine the online communications, symbolism and imagery of 35 community crime prevention and crime watch groups across Canada to explore how these groups organize themselves and assess the resulting community actions.

Contributing to digital criminology, gathering data from open access platforms such as Facebook and online platforms such as websites, the authors analyse communications from community crime prevention and crime watch groups in 12 Canadian cities. The authors used qualitative content analysis to explore the types of posts to assess trends and patterns in types of ideas communicated and symbolized.

Whilst such groups bring the community together to help promote community safety, the groups may also encourage stereotyping, shaming and even vigilantism through misrepresenting the amount of crime occurring in the community and focusing on fear. The authors demonstrate how crime prevention becomes sidelined amongst most of the groups, and how intense crime reporting and the focus on fear derail actual community development.

The current study is limited to two years of posts from each group under examination. Interviews with members of online community crime prevention and crime watch groups would provide insights into the lived experience of regular users and their reasons for interacting with the group.

Given some of the vigilante-style the actions of such groups, the authors would suggest these groups pose a governance problem for local governments.

Community crime prevention and crime watch groups are not a new phenomenon, but their activities are moving online in ways that deserve criminological research. The authors contribute to the field of digital criminology by researching how online communications shape community crime prevention organizations and how ideas about regulation of crime and social control circulate online. The authors also explain how this community crime prevention trend may contribute to issues of vigilantism and increased transgression.

Failure to rescue events, or events involving preventable deaths from complications, are a significant contributor to inpatient mortality. While many interventions have been designed and implemented over several decades, this patient safety issue remains at the forefront of concern for most hospitals. In the first part of this study, the development and implementation of one type of highly studied and widely adopted rescue intervention, algorithm-based patient assessment tools, is examined. The analysis summarizes how a lack of systems-oriented approaches in the design and implementation of these tools has resulted in suboptimal understanding of patient risk of mortality and complications and the early recognition of patient deterioration. The gaps identified impact several critical aspects of excellent patient care, including information-sharing across care settings, support for the development of shared mental models within care teams, and access to timely and accurate patient information.

This chapter describes the use of several system-oriented design and implementation activities to establish design objectives, model clinical processes and workflows, and create an extensible information system model to maximize the benefits of patient state and risk assessment tools in the inpatient setting. A prototype based on the product of the design activities is discussed along with system-level considerations for implementation. This study also demonstrates the effectiveness and impact of applying systems design principles and practices to real-world clinical applications.

This study investigates how a hospital can increase the flow of patients through its emergency department by using benchmarking and process improvement techniques borrowed from the manufacturing sector.

An in-depth case study of an Australasian public hospital utilises rigorous, multi-method data collection procedures with systems thinking to benchmark an emergency department (ED) value stream and identify the performance inhibitors.

High levels of value stream uncertainty result from inefficient processes and weak controls. Reduced patient flow arises from senior management’s commitment to simplistic government targets, clinical staff that lack basic operations management skills, and fragmented information systems. High junior/senior staff ratios aggravate the lack of inter-functional integration and poor use of time and material resources, increasing the risk of a critical patient incident.

This research is limited to a single case; hence, further research should assess value stream maturity and associated performance enablers and inhibitors in other emergency departments experiencing patient flow delays.

This study illustrates how hospital managers can use systems thinking and a context-free performance benchmarking measure to identify needed interventions and transferable best practices for achieving seamless patient flow.

This study is the first to operationalise the theoretical concept of the seamless healthcare system to acute care as defined by Parnaby and Towill (2008). It is also the first to use the uncertainty circle model in an Australasian public healthcare setting to objectively benchmark an emergency department's value stream maturity.

Public libraries are incubators for collective action in the knowledge economy. As three case studies from the United States and Singapore demonstrate, public libraries can serve as influential champions that garner financial resources, communicate an urgent need for change, and respond to the unmet information and economic needs of marginalized individuals and communities. In the Raise Up Radio (RUR) case, public librarians engaged schools, museums, youth, and families in rural communities to develop and deliver STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) content over local radio stations. In collaboration with organizational partners, RUR librarians created a model for library-community-radio projects for the rural United States. In the What Health Looks Like (WHLL) case, public librarians engaged senior citizens in discussions of health and the creation of health comics. In partnership with an interdisciplinary health research team, WHLL librarians developed a pilot for library-community-public health projects aimed at information dissemination and health narrative generation. In the Singapore shopping mall libraries case, the National Library Board (NLB) created public libraries in commercial spaces serving working families, senior citizens, and the Chinese community. The NLB developed an exportable model for locating information centers in convenient, popular, and useful business spaces. These case studies demonstrate how libraries are nodes in the knowledge economy, providing vital services such as preservation of cultural heritage, technology education, community outreach, information access, and services to working families, small- and medium-size businesses, and other patrons. In the years to come, public libraries will be called upon to respond to shifting social norms, inequitable opportunities, emergencies and disasters, and information asymmetries. As the cases of RUR, WHLL, and the shopping mall libraries show, public librarians have the vision and capacities to serve as influential champions for collective action to solve complex problems and foster sustainable development and equitable participation in the knowledge economy.