Sticks and Stones may Break Your Bones, but Words can Break Your Spirit: Bullying in the Workplace

Workplace bullying has a well-established body of research internationally, but the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in the identification and investigation of this phenomenon. This paper presents a managerial perspective on bullying in organizations. The lack of attention to the concept of workplace dignity in American organizational structures has supported and even encouraged both casual and more severe forms of harassment that our workplace laws do not currently cover. The demoralization victims suffer can create toxic working environments and impair organizational productivity. Some methods of protecting your organization from this blight of bullying are proposed. Bullying has always been part of the human condition; history is rife with references to abuse of power and unnecessary or excessive force. The classic bully story is of Joseph and his brothers, a tale of envy and hostility. The refinement of bullying to include various forms of legally defined social harassment is a relatively late phenomenon, however, dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the United States, bullying is not illegal, whereas it is illegal in many other countries. Bullying is not about benign teasing, nor does it include the off-color jokes, racial slurs, or unwelcome advances that are the hallmarks of legally defined harassment. Workplace bullying is the pattern of destructive and generally deliberate demeaning of co-workers or subordinates that reminds us of the activities of the schoolyard bully. Unlike the schoolyard bully, however, the workplace bully is an adult, usually (but not always) aware of the impact of his or her behavior on others. Bullying in the workplace, often tacitly accepted by the organizational leadership, can create an environment of psychological threat that diminishes corporate productivity and inhibits individual and group commitment. The two examples that follow will help to clarify the difference between harassment and bullying.     

The Role of Traders and Small Businesses in Urban Social Movements: The Case of London's Workspace Struggles

This article focuses on the role of traders and small businesses in urban social movements by exploring three examples of opposition to commercial displacement in London. While the work of Castells, Lefebvre and the wider field of urban social movement research has radically expanded the terrain of struggle beyond the workplace to take in a wide range of community and grassroots groups and concerns, little attention has been paid to the potential role of traders and small businesses, particularly in the global North. The article focuses specifically on the mobilization of traders and small businesses in response to the threat of commercial displacement which, as one of the ways in which surplus value is extracted from cities, is a potentially significant site of urban contestation. Drawing on the author's research and involvement with one metropolitan and two local ‘workspace struggles’ in London, the article demonstrates that commercial displacement may mobilize threatened traders and small businesses to play a role in broader urban social movements with wide-ranging goals and concerns. Further research on workspace struggles has the potential to offer much-needed insights for radical urban politics and possibilities for developing alternatives by challenging and working across divides between economy and society.     

移动机器人模块化机械臂运动学分析

机械手臂的运动学分析是移动机器人机械臂实现抓取作业的一个关键问题。为成功完成抓取作业,将移动机器人模块化手臂优选为4自由度构型。运用D-H法建立了机器人的运动学方程,基于装备在移动机器人的模块化手臂的运动学研究,建立了机械手臂自主抓取的数学模型,分析手臂的工作空间,并用Matlab仿真验证运动学算法的正确性。建立了视觉与手臂基础坐标系的位姿矩阵,并用实验验证了该构型的运动学结论和位姿转换矩阵的正确性。     

Agile office work as embodied spatial practice: A spatial perspective on ‘open’ New Work environments

An increasing number of companies transform their traditional office spaces into open work environments, often as part of an effort for working relations to evolve away from rigid and hierarchical structures. Contrary to intentions, recent studies show how open office projects tend to re-produce social hierarchy and norms but say only little about how these socio-spatial structures come into being. In this study, we demonstrate how a workspace designed as ‘open’ is being (re-)produced and negotiated in everyday spatial practices. We investigate this question in an ethnographic research design using the example of office redesign at a German financial service company and from the perspective of social theories of space. First, we develop a critical perspective on the ‘new office’ by demonstrating that office work redesign is a political process. Through a focus on spatial practices of office work, we disclose movement and sound as crucial dimensions in the socio-political construction of ‘agile’ office work and of a social hierarchy in the open office. Second, based on our findings we propose that openness in organizational space, rather than being a design feature of a specific work environment, needs to be understood as a generative social process.     

一种新型3-PRP并联机器人的运动学分析与仿真

针对传统三自由度并联机器人结构分析困难的问题,通过对传统并联机器人结构与性能的分析,提出一种新型3-PRP并联机器人。为有效地降低机器人结构分析的难度,采用直线模组构成2个对称移动副,配合1个转动副,代替传统三自由度并联机器人的3个转动副,并根据该新型机器人的结构特点,建立了运动学模型;应用空间解析几何和向量代数法,推导出机器人的运动学正解与逆解方程;应用MATLAB仿真软件编程验证运动学正解与逆解的正确性,确立机器人的工作空间。仿真结果表明,该机器人具有工作空间大、运动学模型精度高、制造成本低等特点,具有广泛的工业应用前景。