Emerging Disciplines in Analyzing The University Workplace Research Paper

Emerging Disciplines in Analyzing The University Workplace - Research Paper Example The researcher states that industrial engineering and economics play to the nitty-gritty, the practical, the numbers, the devils in the details. They help to quantify how organizations work, what transactions are at play, and what hierarchies are formalized and how that operates. Yet there are emerging disciplines that have begun to change the analysis of organizations irrevocably. Women's studies reminds researchers and analysts of the role of kinship, gender and sexual relations in determining how institutions work: They submit that, without understanding gender roles and inequalities, it is impossible to understand everything from the glass ceiling in corporate America to the mommy track to the second shift. Communications as a discipline informs researchers and analysts that the way that organizations communicate internally and externally, with individuals and with organizations, formally and informally, all are vital to determine how the organization behaves and fares in terms o f survival and managing change. It is impossible, for example, to understand a media institution without knowing how information is communicated up the ladder to the top then disseminated to other institutions like households and businesses. Information systems try to analyze both the usage of computers within institutions and institutions themselves as computational arrangements. And marketing looks at how institutions market their culture internally and externally. Understanding all these disciplines is essential to understanding the operation of the University of Pittsburgh. Psychology of organizations focus on factors like threat rigidity. Threat-rigidity is the tendency of institutions and people like to respond to threats or changes by falling back on established habits that worked in the past. The problem is, like the famous Chinese joke of the farmer who saw a rabbit break its neck on a stump and thereafter waited for another rabbit to do so in order to get a meal again, tha t patterns change and past practice is not always applicable. Sometimes, weathering the storm by sticking to one's guns and using prior effective practices is the right strategy. But other times, rigidity is a problem, and dynamic and creative responses are necessary. Staw et al analyzed, using both sociological and psychological mechanisms, the tendency of institutions to behave like people and freeze up in the face of danger, sticking to the most rigid and subconscious patterns until disaster struck. â€Å"The Penn Central Railroad, for example, continued paying dividends until cash flow dried up completely ...Chrysler Corporation, when faced with the oil crisis and rising gasoline prices, continued large (but efficient) production runs on its largest and most fuel-inefficient cars until inventories overflowed†. Universities like my workplace, the University of Pittsburgh, seem to be particularly vulnerable to this, and the reasons why are helpful to the rigidity hypothesis in general. The university is faced with a major change, say the increasing obsolescence of a particular academic department. It is hard to tell prima facie if this will be a temporary or a permanent phenomenon. Tenure prevents the department from being easily cut or repurposed. In any respect, it makes no sense to remove a vital discipline from the field.

REDEFINING HAPPINESS THROUGH THE PRISM OF LIFE Essay

REDEFINING HAPPINESS THROUGH THE PRISM OF LIFE - Essay Example Does only living on and on means happiness untouched by what goes around us or even a brief stint of life, if its filled with satisfaction can be termed as a good life. Similarly, humans must also act in someway to fulfill their desires or needs as long as he or she may be alive. For years psychologists have tried to decipher the most generic code of conduct to guide humans through good and torrid times which means studying data on scale that even the most super of computer cannot negotiate with. Humans vary in nature and therefore there cannot exist a generic code of conduct however, if every one makes an effort to work out a way for himself and understand what s the best option while making any decision life could make some sense. When we know that this journey of life has to end someday then why almost all humans live life entirely differently from one another .The fact that ever since the evolution of man and despite its conquest of knowledge and power and freedom on his will, he has not been able to understand what really makes him happy after all this conquest has been made in search of satisfaction and happiness. Therefore if ever we wonder why in most humans life religion means a great deal lot. Religion although has no physical reality as such but for so long been able to provide answer to evading questions pertaining to our happiness. Thats why even after achieving so much materialistically humans turn to religion for soul searching to achieve satisfaction. Death: Unwanted Necessity We in our search for satisfaction since the beginning of time been able to change the world to our liking when those of who did that eventually had to leave this world one day. Still we are unable to comprehend that there are certain rules of thumb in place ever since man learned to sense things around him regarding what to prefer and what not to prefer in good and bad times. For instance we are likely to prefer pains that are short term rather than pains that are relatively long term. Fear and the Hope Factor: The truth of fact is that we are not sometimes intelligent enough for our own sake. We can be very chameleon like in different states of mind. At a given point in time we might commit our self to act differently where as we might do something different in reality. 1Psychologists call it the 'Hot' and 'Cold' states of mind and the difference in thinking and doing the 'empathy gap'. We treat life through the prism of happiness and satisfaction living always with a fear of death. This makes us sometimes to lean towards decision which could be far from making us happy and contented. A person due to lack of money might not be able to afford 500,000 $ sedan which would leave him feeling worthless for some time but after sometime he will be able to get back to his routine and live life normally. What we do not realize that we have defined happiness in our own way. Now, this short sightedness of scope lead the people to belief that inability to achieve something in the short run will make the discomfort to persist for longer period of time then would really happen. In between all this decision making the death factor holds an important place in peoples