Chasing a Fault across Ship and Shore

Knowledge management (KM) in the U.S. Navy is championed as a strategic initiative to improve shipboard maintenance and troubleshooting at a distance. The approach requires capturing, coordinating, and distributing domain expertise in electronics and computer engineering via advanced information and communication technologies. Coordination must be achieved to ensure ship readiness. A potential challenge for human performance technologists is to develop robust theoretical frameworks to analyze and explain existing practice within this context. To illustrate, we present the case of U.S. naval sailors and civilian subject‐matter experts (SMEs) collaboratively troubleshooting complex shipboard radar systems across ship and shore. Adapting perspectives from organizational theory, information science, and educational psychology, we conduct a multi‐level analysis of the context of distributed knowledge and work. Findings suggest that regulative and normative restrictions, boundary spanners and objects, and disruption of coordination across system components influence practice substantively. Implications for research and practice, including a readdressing of the existing cannon of analytical frameworks are offered.     

Making sense of modernity's maladies: health and disease in the Industrial Revolution

The industrialization and urbanization of Britain during the 19th century gave the medical profession something to think about. In particular, were the radical changes taking place in society responsible for the sudden rise in endemic and epidemic disease? This article (part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series) examines the reactions of two key figures in the history of British public health, James Philips Kay and Thomas Southwood Smith, to this question. Their outlooks typify the tendency of Victorian medical practitioners to construct economies of health that saw disease as a consequence of the violation of natural laws and cycles rather than as a product of industrial modernity.     

Peer Acceptance and Social Adjustment in Preschool and Kindergarten

Research on the relation between social behavior and peer acceptance in preschool children and the long-term consequences of peer acceptance or rejection is reviewed. Preschool children who exhibit aggressive behavior tend to be rejected by peers at an early age and these first impressions have a lasting effect on peer acceptance, in spite of subsequent changes in the child's behavior. Social behaviors that are related to peer popularity vary by age and sex. Children who experience high levels of peer acceptance in preschool and who have friends entering kindergarten with them make a better adjustment to school. Recommendations for fostering social development in preschoolers are discussed.