Organizational learning among senior public‐service executives: An empirical investigation of culture,decisional latitude and supportive communication

Abstract: For several years, organizational learning has been a concept of interest in the search for efficiency, innovation, and knowledge management in both the private and public sectors. In general, three determinants of organizational learning are identified in the literature: the organizational learning culture as a major determinant, the control or decisional latitude that individual employees have over their work, and the impact of supportive supervisor communication. However, little empirical research has been offered to substantiate the relationship between these variables. As part of the national Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (apex) study on work and health, a representative sample of 1,822 public‐service executives were surveyed. Results showed that organizational learning culture and decisional latitude played an important role in the acquisition of organizational learner attitudes and behaviour. Supportive supervisor communication was not significantly related to individual organizational learning. This article offers unique empirical evidence concerning the relationship between organizational learning culture, decisional latitude and individual learning attitudes and behaviour. The discussion emphasizes the contribution of theoretical models of organizational learning and suggests future avenues of research. Sommaire: Depuis plusieurs années, l'apprentissage organisationnel est un concept interessant pour la recherche de l'efficience, de l'innovation et pour la gestion des connaissances, a la fois ans dans les secteurs privé et public. On retrouve generalement trois determinants de l'apprentissage organisationnel dans la documentation: la culture de I'apprentissage organisationnel comme determinant principal, le con‐trôle ou la latitude de décision que les employés individuels ont sur leur travail, et l'impact de la communication des superviseurs attentionnés. Cependant, peu de recherche empirique a été entreprise pour corroborer les relations entre ces variables. Dans le cadre de I'étude nationale de Aapex (Association professionnelle des cadres de la fonction publique du Canada) sur le travail et la santé, un échantillon représentatif de 1 822 cadres supérieurs de la fonction publique ont participéà un sondage.* Les résultats ont indiqué que la culture d'apprentissage organisationnel et la latitude de décision jouaient un rôle important dans l'acquisition d'attitudes et de comportements de l'apprenant organisationnel. La communication des superviseurs attentionnés n'était pas liée de manière significative à l'apprentissage organisationnel individuel. Le présent article offre une évidence empirique unique en ce qui concerne les relations entre la culture d'apprentissage organisationnel, la latitude de décision et l'attitude et les comportements lies à l'apprentissage individuel. Le débat met l'accent sur la contribution des modèles théoriques de l'apprentissage organisationnel et offre des pistes de recherche pour l'avenir.     

Acute Fatal Coronary Artery Dissection Following Exercise‐related Blunt Chest Trauma

Coronary artery injury such as acute coronary dissection is an uncommon and potentially life‐threatening complication after blunt chest trauma. The authors report an unusual autopsy case of a 43‐year‐old healthy man who suddenly collapsed after receiving a punch to the chest during the practice of kung fu. The occurrence of the punch was supported by the presence of one recent contusion on the left lateral chest area at the external examination and by areas of hemorrhage next to the left lateral intercostal spaces at the internal examination. The histological examination revealed the presence of an acute dissection of the proximal segment of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Only few cases of coronary artery dissection have been reported due to trauma during sports activities such as rugby and soccer games, but never during the practice of martial arts, sports usually considered as safe and responsible for only minor trauma.     

Police Officers’ Theories of Crime

What factors do police officers point to in explaining offending and victimization? A limited amount of prior research has addressed this question, despite the possibility that such theories impact police practice. Moreover, the findings that do exist are based solely on municipal police; yet a different socio-environmental context could lead officers to adopt different explanations. In the present paper, we draw on qualitative data obtained in interviews with campus police officers to explore how they explain common crimes on campus. They theorized petty larceny, underage drinking, and drug possession to result from a variety of factors, including opportunity, social learning, supervision, culture, peer pressure, the psychopharmacological effect of alcohol on crime, and deterrence; as a collective, these ideas form officers’ rational choice theories. After presenting our findings, we suggest how officers’ explanations of crime may be shaped by working in particular contexts and also affect how they police; implications for future research and police practice are discussed.     

There is nothing simple about simple commodity production

This essay offers a theoretical rethinking of simple commodity production that avoids two extreme notions of capitalism: one which readily embraces all relations of production found in the pervasive world system, and another which produces a rigidly eroded model to which everything else is externally articulated. It is argued that some specific forms of SCP can be treated as variations of capitalism integral to its polymorphous logic, and therefore as subjected, under determinate conditions, to a flexibly defined process of labour's subordination (formal and real) to capital. Self‐employed labour is also re‐examined in the light of (a) the basic exigencies of capital accumulation, (b) the contradictions inherent to capitalism, especially those pertaining to the confrontation between intraverted and extroverted economies, and (c) the active struggle of all working classes against their total dispossession from commodified wealth.     

Covid-19 and contracts in China and Europe

China-EU Law Journal - The purpose of this succinct contribution is to present to the readers the Chinese law of contract on “force majeure” and “hardship,” in a comparative...     

Jaccard's heel: Radex models of criminal behaviour are rarely falsifiable when derived using Jaccard coefficient

Purpose. This article considers whether the modular facet of popular ‘radex’ models of offender behaviour is falsifiable or a statistical inevitability when using Jaccard coefficient, as evidence from other domains suggests. Method. Data equivalent to that examined in previous papers, and artificial data varying on four parameters, were examined using the conventional procedure of deriving Jaccard coefficients and submitting these to a smallest space analyses (SSA‐I). The parameters were number of variables, number of cases, highest frequency of variable occurrence, and distribution of occurrences. Evidence of a modular pattern in each SSA‐I solution was assessed using one qualitative and two quantitative measures. Results. When variables were free to occur in more than 50% of cases, none of the Jaccard‐based SSA‐I solutions supported the null hypothesis of no modular facet. This contrasts equivalent analyses using Yules Q, where 95.7% of the solutions supported the null hypothesis. When variables were restricted to occur in less than 50% of cases, the number of solutions supporting the null hypothesis changes to .003 and 78%, respectively. Analyses of the artificial data found that reducing the number of variables in a Jaccard‐based solution increased the likelihood of supporting the null hypothesis, which suggests that these solutions are structured by variable occurrence (i.e., frequency) rather than variable co‐occurrence. Implications. Research using Jaccard coefficient to measure co‐occurrences among behaviours should not claim that the modular facet of their radex model is an empirical finding. Unfortunately, this is many of the existing publications.     

Re-examining the saving-investment nexus: threshold cointegration and causality evidence from the ECOWAS

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between saving and investment in the case of ECOWAS countries. We then employ the Gregory and Hansen (J Econometr 70:99?C126, 1996a; Oxford Bull Econ Stat 58:555?C560, 1996b) threshold cointegration tests and the Toda and Yamamoto (J Econometr 66:225?C250, 1995) causality procedure. Threshold cointegration approach allows estimating changes in the saving-retention coefficients over time. Using yearly data for the period from 1960 to 2007, we show out two groups of countries regarding the cointegration test results. In the first group (The Gambia and Togo), capital is perfectly mobile since there is no long-run relationship between savings and investment. The second group comprised of the ten other ECOWAS countries studied, is characterized by an incomplete capital mobility. Moreover, in the second group the saving-retention coefficient is time-varying in most of the ECOWAS countries (except for Benin and Niger) and is different from a country to another one. The changes in the saving-retention coefficients indicate how international capital mobility has changed. Moreover, the inclusion of trade openness and country size in the saving-investment equation reduces the saving retention coefficients implying improvement of capital mobility over time. Furthermore, investment rates cause saving rates in Benin, Guinea-Bissau and Niger while saving rates cause investment rates in Cote d??Ivoire, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.