Trading off learning and performance: Exploration and exploitation at work

Employees are increasingly given control over how they learn, and their choices for training are diverse and varied, yet employees must balance competing demands. On one hand, they are expected to be increasingly efficient in their current job duties – on the other hand, they are expected to develop new skills and competencies that enable them to adapt and respond to changing job demands. Drawing from the organizational learning literature, we propose a model of worker and work characteristics that inform choices between two mindsets related to learning at work. The first mindset is exploration, or the pursuit of learning outside one’s current knowledge domain; the second mindset is exploitation, the refinement/deepening of one’s existing knowledge stock focusing on the task at hand. We further propose that these strategic choices, or trade-offs, influence employee learning and performance in unique ways, with different implications for both routine and adaptive performance. Finally, we incorporate the notions of feedback loops and risk assessments that influence ongoing decisions between exploration and exploitation mindsets. Recommendations for future research and extensions of the theoretical model are also proposed.     

HRM in dynamic environments: Exploitative,exploratory, and ambidextrous HR architectures

Abstract

The current economic crisis has brought to the fore the need for firms to deal with ambiguity and complexity. Hence, firms need a specific balance between exploration and exploitation in order to keep pace with varying and changing environmental conditions. Hitherto, there is limited research that has examined the nexus of HR architectures, ambidexterity, and environmental dynamics. In this conceptual paper we ask: How do HR architectures serve as a means of balancing exploitative and exploratory learning in different dynamic environments? We explain how exploratory, exploitative, and ambidextrous HR architectures with their embedded HRM systems on the business unit level enable organizations to meet different environmental requirements. Thus, firms in which heterogeneous demands for flexibility and for innovation co-exist need to develop internally differentiated HR architectures. In particular, we elucidate how critical the organization’s ability is to connect different HRM systems to create an ambidextrous HR architecture to find an appropriate balance between exploration and exploitation.     

Managing digital business platforms: A continued exercise in balancing renewal and refinement

Central to the evolution of a digital business platform is the organization’s ability to balance exploration (renewal) and exploitation (refinement) simultaneously. Drawing on prior research—including digital platforms, contradictory tensions, and organizational ambidexterity—and our own experience investigating digital business platforms in organizations, this article provides insights into how executives can manage this evolution successfully. More specifically, we present a framework recognizing three pairs of organizational capabilities (i.e., identifying-nourishing, expanding-legitimating, and augmenting-embedding) that enable balancing renewal and refinement of the platform over time. We close by providing critical managerial practices that executives can use in anticipating, adjusting, and evaluating the evolution of a digital business platform over time, including its initiation, development, and growth.     

Microfoundations of network exploration and exploitation capabilities in international opportunity recognition

While international entrepreneurship (IE) recognizes opportunity recognition (OR) as a central activity and the prominent role of network capabilities in OR, it is not informative as to how different network capabilities influence OR in international markets. We utilize dual network capability through the lens of exploration-exploitation to better understand how these two different capabilities influence the identification of international opportunities. Given that microfoundations perspective and prior experience in IE are under-developed and under-theorized, we explore founder’s prior experience as an essential microfoundation for the dual network capability. By employing structural equation modeling on a sample of 647 early internationalizing firms from a developing country, the study demonstrates that founders’ prior experience is a significant microfoundation of dual network capability in international OR. However, both exploration and exploitation capabilities fail to bring new opportunities in a changing market environment. A post-hoc analysis reveals that at a higher level of market change, younger firms benefit more from network exploration, whereas older firms achieve greater success when leveraging benefits from network exploitation. The study concludes with implications and future research avenues.     

Dynamic ambidexterity: How innovators manage exploration and exploitation

Firms must excel at both exploration and exploitation to ensure long-term survival and prosperity. However, firms often have difficulties in doing so because they have to accommodate the contradictory logics of exploration and exploitation. This article examines the logics of exploration and exploitation, evaluates the difficulties of accommodating both logics, and identifies dynamic ambidexterity as a new way to overcome these difficulties. To achieve dynamic ambidexterity, firms need to support structural ambidexterity at the corporate level, contextual ambidexterity at the business-unit level, and sequential ambidexterity at the project level. I believe that the notion of dynamic ambidexterity and its managerial practices can help firms manage exploration and exploitation and ensure long-term survival and prosperity.     

The effect of external supply knowledge acquisition,development activities and organizational status on the supply performance of SMEs

Given the increasingly strategic role of external resources, acquiring knowledge about current suppliers and the broader supply market is an important and demanding task for the purchasing and supply management (PSM) function of a firm. Performance-improvement-oriented application of external supply knowledge present further challenges for the function. To examine this, we draw on the knowledge-based view and develop a hypothesized model in which supply knowledge acquisition drives PSM exploration and exploitation orientations which in turn mediate the organizational status of PSM function in terms of supply performance. We test the model on an SME-focused and survey-based dataset, using structural equation modelling. Our results indicate that an exploitative orientation is associated with knowledge gained from the supply base, whereas an explorative orientation is predominantly associated with supply market knowledge and less with supply base knowledge, suggesting natural pairings. The findings also show how an exploitative development orientation mediates the positive association of the PSM function's organizational status with supply performance. Driven by supply base knowledge, a status-empowered exploitative PSM orientation may suppress supply market based explorative orientation in resource-scarce SMEs, thus appearing to serve as the sole path to supply performance. Our research contributes by pointing out the significance of the knowledge-resource, and the knowledge-based view, in understanding performance in PSM.     

Co-ordination of land exploitation,exploitable farmland reserves and national planning in China

Land exploitation, as an important strategy to mitigate farmland loss and stabilize grain production, has been adopted to compensate farmland loss due to rapid urbanization in China. Bounded by the limited capacity and obvious spatial variations of national farmland reserves, it is essential to arrange land exploitation activities timely and reasonably. In this study, we propose an indicator for the status of regional land exploitation, the Exploitation Degree, to facilitate an overview of land exploitation programs in China at both provincial and prefectural levels based on project data from 2006 to 2012. To further our understanding of the regional features of land exploitation activities, we employ the Lasso model to identify and quantitatively assess influencing factors on land exploitation. Our study shows that: (1) contemporary land exploitation practices in China are significantly inconsistent across exploitable farmland reserves. Some areas are greatly over-exploited and such irrational land exploitation has been persistent; (2) related national land plans designed to guide land exploitation efforts centered on resource-rich regions and critical areas do not function as intended. Therefore, we suggest that China⿿s land exploitation policy shall be improved by reconsidering the orientation of land exploitation policy, coordinating land exploitation activities with productivity improvements and eco-system protection, and enhancing the power and scope of the plans in controlling and guiding land resource management.     

A Micro-Approach for Testing Marx's LTRPF: Evidence from Greece, 2000 and 2009

This article develops a novel micro-approach for the empirical evaluation of Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Contrary to the traditional method which uses national macroeconomic data, this approach utilises data taken directly from company reports and accounts. The principal advantage of this approach is that it provides an accurate measurement of the value composition of capital, devoid of the measurement limitations of the traditional method regarding variable capital which stem from the inability to distinguish productive from unproductive labour. A disadvantage, however, is that this approach does not cover the entire national economy. The application of the proposed micro-approach to the ongoing Greek crisis yields results which are congruent with the traditional method and reinforce other recent studies linking the current crisis with low profitability.     

Safeguarding Children: Ofsted and Regulatory Failure

This article analyses two aspects of the regulatory conduct of Ofsted in protecting children from abuse by strangers. The first concerns the problems associated with child protection and safeguarding in the context of facilitating multicultural norms whereby certain social behaviours which would be unacceptable in one culture can be tolerated or condoned in another. The second aspect arises because, following Ofsted's failure to protect thousands of children from child abuse in many UK cities, children's social services' departments may have adopted strategic behaviour which may protect them rather than the children.     

Marx,Sraffa, and Surplus: Observations Prompted by Garegnani (2018)

ABSTRACT

In a posthumously published article, Pierangelo Garegnani (2018. ‘On the Labour Theory of Value in Marx and in the Marxist Tradition.’) depicts Marx’s project in Capital as that of ‘developing systematically the theory of Ricardo and [the] implications of social conflict’ implied by Ricardo’s ‘surplus approach to value and distribution’. This paper argues to the contrary that Marx’s theory of surplus value and exploitation differs from (neo-)Ricardian surplus theory in fundamental ways, and modifies Garegnani’s simple Sraffian model to illustrate the distinctive implications of Marx’s theory.