centralization
Business
Management
(noun)
The act or process of combining or reducing several parts into a whole.
Examples of centralization in the following topics:
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Centrality of experience
- Centrality of experience is the starting point.
- The instructor in the scenario used the questionnaires to check the learners' frame of mind (centrality of experience) that is constructed from their experiences.
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Centralization
- Centralization is the concentration of span of control, decision making, and communication within an organization.
- The military and manufacturing firms are examples of centrally managed organizations.
- In political science, centralization refers to the concentration of a government's power, both geographically and politically, into a centralized government.
- In neuroscience, centralization refers to the evolutionary trend of the nervous system to be partitioned into a central nervous system and peripheral nervous system.
- Centralized organizations typically require that communications flow through a central person or location.
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Study questions
- Why is an actor who has higher degree a more "central" actor?
- How does Bonacich's influence measure extend the idea of degree centrality?
- How does the "flow" approach extend the idea of "closeness" as an approach to centrality?
- Most approaches suggest that centrality confers power and influence.
- Who might be central, but not powerful?
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Student Learning Outcomes
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The Central Dogma: DNA Encodes RNA; RNA Encodes Protein
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Intro to the Central Nervous System
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Introduction to closeness centrality
- Degree centrality measures might be criticized because they only take into account the immediate ties that an actor has, or the ties of the actor's neighbors, rather than indirect ties to all others.
- In a case like this, the actor could be quite central, but only in a local neighborhood.
- Closeness centrality approaches emphasize the distance of an actor to all others in the network by focusing on the distance from each actor to all others.
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Introduction to degree centrality
- So, a very simple, but often very effective measure of an actor's centrality and power potential is their degree.
- With directed data, however, it can be important to distinguish centrality based on in-degree from centrality based on out-degree.
- Actors who display high out-degree centrality are often said to be influential actors.
- It also appears that this network as a whole may have a group of central actors, rather than a single "star."
- We can see "centrality" as an attribute of individual actors as a consequence of their position; we can also see how "centralized" the graph as a whole is -- how unequal is the distribution of centrality.
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Control of the Money Supply
- A nation's money supply is determined by the monetary policy actions of its central bank.
- A nation's money supply is determined by the monetary policy actions of its central bank.
- Commercial banks, as required by the central bank, must keep a fraction of all accepted deposits on reserve either in bank vaults or in central bank deposits.
- Under fractional reserve banking, a nation's central bank is responsible for holding a certain fraction of all deposits as cash or on account with the central bank.
- Clockwise from top-left: Federal Reserve, Bank of England, European Central Bank, Bank of Canada.
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Characteristics of Organizational Structures
- Network - independent departments providing functions for a central core breaker
- Centralization occurs when decision-making authority is located in the upper organizational levels.
- Centralization increases consistency in the processes and procedures that employees use in performing tasks.
- Centralization is usually helpful when an organization is in crisis and/or faces the risk of failure.
- This diagram compares visual representations of a centralized vs. decentralized organizational structure.