One of the primary objectives of the MCEER research program is to contribute toward the development of disaster resilient communities. As a result, there is a general need to model, understand and ultimately direct the behavior of a wide variety of complex multi-scale systems. Within the context of a critical care facility, these not only include the structural and non structural systems that s...

This ethnographic study of "goal displacement" in an adult day care center explains how and why certain goals come to surpass others in the organizational practices of elder day care settings. Adult day care is often oriented towards providing family caregivers with respite rather than attempting to directly improve the lives of the elders themselves. Although the adult day care center studied ...

This paper studies organizational change following a shift in an industry environment, in the context of how a focused factory adapts to a change in its manufacturing objectives. We use the organizational nature of production operations to suggest that the effectiveness of adaptation will depend on how well the manufacturing requirements of the new objectives match manufacturing capabilities at...

Ambient Intelligence promotes a shift in computing which involves fitting-out the environments with devices to support context-aware applications. One of main objectives is the reduction to a minimum of the user’s interactive effort, the diversity and quantity of devices with which people are surrounded with, in existing environments; increase the level of difficulty to achieve this goal. The m...

Abstract: The Didactics of Informatics research group at the University of Paderborn is involved in efforts to design, implement and evaluate a curriculum for Media education for prospective teachers at the secondary school level. One major issue is the question of whether it is necessary for future teachers to learn the basic concepts of informatics, and if so, which topics within informatics ...

Programme evaluators frequently encounter resistance from individuals affected by evaluation. Resistance occurs throughout the evaluation process, from the inception of an evaluation to the utilization of its findings. This article addresses possible psychological explanations for such resistance. The objectives of the article are: to provide a review of the relevant evaluation literature; to o...

BACKGROUND The goal of this study is to extend research on evidence-based practice (EBP) implementation by examining the impact of organizational type (public versus private) and organizational support for EBP on provider attitudes toward EBP and EBP use. Both organization theory and theory of innovation uptake and individual adoption of EBP guide the approach and analyses in this study. We ant...

Research on social networks has grown exponentially in recent years. However, despite its relevance, the field of psychology has been relatively slow to explain the underlying goal pursuit and resistance processes influencing social networks in the first place. In this vein, this article aims to demonstrate how a dynamic network theory perspective explains the way in which social networks influ...

It is widely accepted that sustaining Business and Information Technology (IT) alignment is a complex task, due to the lack of appropriate alignment methodologies, rapid changes in running business processes and insufficient IT techniques to cope with such changes. One way of achieving successful alignment is the development of an IT system which meets business expectations. This is only possib...

A large part of information systems security approaches is technical in nature with less consideration on people and organizational issues. To this end, there is a need to investigate other means of managing information systems security since most information systems security approaches although valuable they focus on technical oriented solutions, e.g. checklists, risk analysis, evaluation meth...