Dr. Laura M. Arpan is the Theodore Clevenger Professor of Communication and Director of Doctoral Studies in the School of Communication at Florida State University. Dr. Arpan’s research examines risk perceptions, human motivation and responses to pro-environmental messages, interventions, and related technologies. Her projects focus on the effectiveness of promotional messages and outreach efforts designed to encourage sustainable behaviors such as energy conservation and efficiency. Recent work has examined Americans’ attitudes toward energy conservation and sustainability, factors enhancing the effectiveness of information campaign messages promoting energy-use-reduction and sustainability
Dr. Laura M. Arpan is the Theodore Clevenger Professor of Communication and Director of Doctoral Studies in the School of Communication at Florida State University. Dr. Arpan’s research examines risk perceptions, human motivation and responses to pro-environmental messages, interventions, and related technologies. Her projects focus on the effectiveness of promotional messages and outreach efforts designed to encourage sustainable behaviors such as energy conservation and efficiency. Recent work has examined Americans’ attitudes toward energy conservation and sustainability, factors enhancing the effectiveness of information campaign messages promoting energy-use-reduction and sustainability
Sez Atamturktur Russcher from Clemson University came to CURENT on April 27th to present the topic of Institutional and Cultural Changes in Engineering Disciplines
April 27, 2018
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The presentation by Drs. Russ Marion and Sez Atamturktur addresses current theories of organizational change leadership, focusing in particular on complexity theory and complexity leadership theories; we also describe methodological strategies for analyzing complexity and complexity leadership theory. The presentation will overview two NSF-funded projects led by Drs. Marion and Atamturktur: National Research Traineeship (NRT) project on Resilient Infrastructure Systems, a transformative approach to graduate education and Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project, a responsive, replicable, theoretically informed approach for creating a curricular scaffold by weaving the coursework. Both projects are informed by the complexity leadership theory as applied to management and education to establish an academic culture that promotes innovation through a collective impetus for change, thus enabling rapid adaptation to meet societal needs.
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Complexity theory is a theory of dynamic, ever-changing systems. The theory emerged largely from the field of biology as a way to augment explanation of evolutionary dynamics among species. In adaptations to social systems, it explains how informal leadership dynamics foster emergent phenomenon such as creativity, adaptability, productivity, and learning. Complexity leadership theory explores how humans can best lead complex social systems to enhance their production of positive emergent outcomes.
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Methodologies for complex systems must capture intensively interactive processes among social participants. Statistical procedures that evaluate only variables don’t serve complexity theorists well for at least two reasons: first, variables are not the proximal unit of analysis in complex systems, and second, interaction violates statistical assumptions about serial autocorrelation. For these reasons, complexity theorists turn to social network analysis (SNA), agent based modeling (ABM), qualitative procedures, and mathematical modeling. We describe SNA and ABM, and address their use in scholarly research and in organizational evaluations.