Psychological fusion and personal conflict in organizations

An employee's failure to differentiate himself or herself from the perceived attitudes of another is at the heart of much stress in organizations. The world of family systems psychology identifies a dysfunctional process, called psychological fusion, which stems from insufficient self-definition by an individual and results in a dependency upon others to meet an innate need to feel accepted. People suffering from psychological fusion perceive any criticism as a threat, making it impossible for them to receive the critical feedback that is necessary for growth. To experience intrinsic motivation, people require a sense of relative self-determination and competence. This paper argues that much as employers take an interest in such emotional health issues as substance abuse and stress, they should also address psychological fusion; the paper offers methods for dealing with this interpersonal communications issue     

Describing collaborative forms: a profile of the team-writingprocess

The paper examines collaborative writing practices students in the Air Force Institute of Technology's Graduate School of Logistics and Acquisition Management use to produce team-authored theses. In analyzing how student writing teams plan, execute, and assess writing activities, the researchers identify and describe some of the forms that collaboration takes, thereby successfully connecting their work within a broader research continuum concerning collaborative writing, particularly when applied in academic settings     

Call control and traffic transport for connection-oriented highspeed wireless personal communications over metropolitan area networks

A distributed circuit-switched approach for supporting the deployment of high speed wireless personal communication services in urban areas through the interconnection of base stations via metropolitan area networks (MANs) is proposed. Broadband MANs minimize traffic congestion by dynamic sharing of link capacity and by serving as distributed switches for partitioning call control functions. While the DQDB protocol readily supports distributed packet-switching over the IEEE 802.6 MAN, isochronous traffic such as voice and video is best supported by circuit-switched connections. The authors present an enhanced bi-state pre-arbitrated (PA) transport mechanism, and associated call control and handoff management techniques, which enable distributed circuit-switching over the MAN. These capabilities are not currently addressed in the 802.6 standards. The bi-state PA transport mechanism facilitates statistical multiplexing of variable rate isochronous traffic sources. The network capacity is constrained by the call setup delay performance, and is analyzed by simulations. Alternative signaling architectures, involving different placements of call control network elements, are evaluated. The effects of erasure nodes, and close bus versus open bus architectures, are considered. The overlap inter-MAN call setup procedure is proposed to reduce delays. Different call handoff procedures are formulated according to the type of handoff and the resulting change in call connectivity. Most handoffs are intra-MAN, requiring simple procedures with short delays     

ISDN and new services in Poland: opportunities and obstacles

Presents an overview of problems involved in introducing ISDN and new services in the public network of Poland. The technical aspects of the assumed network and services development strategy are considered. The focus is on development alternatives and the process of establishing national requirements for the development     

Advanced service provisioning in a partly digitalized networkenvironment

Considering the given situation in the Hungarian telecommunications infrastructure and the prompt demands for advanced services, this paper describes an individual solution to provide intelligent services in the mixed analog and partly digitalized Hungarian public telephone network. The preIN system is based on co-located stand-alone units equipped with SSP/SCP functionality