The information processing view of organizations, first conceived by March and Simon (1958), and introduced to managers by Jay Galbraith (1974), proposed that knowledge workers process information until they encounter “exceptions”— situations in which the information required to execute a non-routine task exceeds the information available to the person performing the task. They then refer excep...

OBJECTIVES In Europe, 25% of workers use video display terminals (VDTs). Occupational health surveillance has been considered a key element in the protection of these workers. Nevertheless, it is unclear if guidelines available for this purpose, based on EU standards and available evidence, meet currently accepted quality criteria. The aim of this study was to appraise three sets of European VD...

Fatigue of workers is a complex phenomenon resulting from various factors in technically innovated modern industries, and it appears as a feeling of exhaustion, lowering of physiological functions, breakdown of autonomic nervous balance, and decrease in work efficiency. On the other hand industrial fatigue is caused by excessive workload, remarkable alteration in working posture and diurnal and...

Using powerful and convenient analysis tools, engineers “adapt their product designs virtually”—i.e., they iteratively build models of potential product configurations virtually, in the computer; they analyze these models to predict their performance; they evaluate the predicted performance of each configuration against required or desired performance objectives; and they propose new configurat...

One hour of near work produced adaptive changes in the resting states of accommodation and binocular vergence, which may be responsible for different aspects of visual fatigue. Two groups of college students read from either hard copy or a video display terminal (VDT). Immediately before and after reading, the subjects' distance acuity, dark vergence, dark focus, and accommodative response accu...

A chasm exists between laboratory and field methods in C2 research. These methods are complementary but used rarely in combination. This expository article describes a research approach that bridges such chasm: computational experimentation. Computational experimentation mitigates the weakness of both laboratory and field research, yet it has its own limitations and appears suited best as a com...