The development of business–government strategies by diversified firms

This paper uses grounded theory to explore internal (intrafirm) conflicts in the formulation of business–government strategies by corporations with diversified business units. We find that three types of conflict exist within firms: conflict over proactive policy positions advocated by the firm (prepolicy issues), conflict over reactive internal distribution of compliance costs/benefits (postpolicy issues), and representational conflict (e.g., individual business units vs. corporate representation in the external public policy arena). We also develop a grounded framework for organizational structures for conflict resolution in the strategic management of government relations, based upon our case studies, and find a relationship between particular structures and the degree of diversification. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improvisers,Incrementalists and Strategists: How and Why Organizations Adopt ADR Innovations

This article identifies three ways in which alternative dispute resolution (ADR) innovations are adopted by organizations in Ireland: improvisation, incrementalism and strategy, and examines how external and internal influences shape different patterns of ADR innovation. The article contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it highlights the limitations of typologies of innovation based on simple dichotomies, such as reactive/proactive and of prevailing understandings of how ADR may interact with strategy. Second, the article develops an integrated framework for the analysis of influences on patterns of innovation that distinguishes between the features of markets and commercial strategies, organizations, stakeholders and champions and institutions, laws and public policies. Third, the article questions the central premise underlying the literature that a strategic approach to ADR equates with the adoption of conflict management systems.     

Is this workplace bullying? How ideas about conflict shape conflict management strategies

The adoption of specific conflict management strategies has usually been linked to various factors, such as litigation avoidance, union substitution and the pursuit of strategic benefits. This study advances the hypothesis that actors’ different frames of reference impact how workplace conflicts are interpreted and managed by unions and employers. Drawing on original data from the Brazilian banking sector, this article shows that companies and unions have different interpretations of workplace bullying. Unions understand workplace bullying as an organizational or sectoral problem inherent to labour relations in the banking sector. In contrast, employers see workplace bullying as a problem caused by individual managers. These different understandings of the same type of conflict are shaped by each actor's frame of reference and influence their responses to workplace bullying. With a pluralist or critical frame of reference, unions favour conflict management tools that try to promote structural changes in the sector. With a unitarist frame of reference, employers try to transform individual behaviour or simply remove individual managers from the workplace. Therefore, organizations with a unitarist frame interpret and respond to conflicts in notably different ways from organizations holding a pluralist or critical frame of reference.     

Managing in conflict: How actors distribute conflict in an industrial network

IMP researchers have examined conflict as a threat to established business relationships and commercial exchanges, drawing on theories and concepts developed in organization studies. We examine cases of conflict in relationships from the oil and gas industry's service sector, focusing on conflicts of interest and resources, and conflict as experienced by actors. Through a comparative case study design, we propose an explanation of how actors manage conflict and manage in conflict given that they tend to value and maintain relationships beyond episodes of exchange. We consider conflicts in relationships from a network perspective, showing that actors experienced these while adapting to changes in their business setting, modifying their roles in that network. By identifying conflict with the organizing forms of relationship and network, we show how actors formulate conflict through pursuing and combining a number of strategies, distributing the conflict across an enlarged network.     

The geopolitics of digital rights activism: Evaluating civil society's role in the promises of multistakeholder internet governance

Multistakeholderism is thought to play an important role in democratizing internet governance institutions and processes by including civil society. Therefore, scholars have studied the participation of civil society organizations, from the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society through to the most recent Internet Governance Forum, to understand how they engage in and shape internet governance. However, this category is not well defined; therefore, it is not always clear whose interests are being advanced by civil society organizations. This study evaluates representation in civil society by examining the annual RightsCon conference as an ideal site of civil society engagement in internet governance in order to evaluate the potential of multistakeholderism to achieve the goals of democratization, representation, and inclusion. Through a meso-level analysis of discursive production at RightsCon that operationalizes a critical geopolitical rubric, this study finds that organizations that represent interests from the Global North and West are highly over-represented in three ways: in leading overall discourse, in claiming authority over global issues, and in driving specific topics such as misinformation, privacy, and internet shutdowns. These findings offer an empirical evaluation of global representation in internet governance, raising the stakes for further study about why and how the category of civil society meets expectations. Finally, conceptual implications are discussed, including evaluating earlier critiques of multistakeholderism as less democratizing in reality than in theory, affirming the analytic value of civil society discourse to policy research, and opening up questions about how a more precise understanding of civil society can contribute to multistakeholderism in internet governance.     

A multilevel model of affect and organizational commitment

This multilevel study investigates affective antecedents of organizational commitment. 230 individuals from 56 working groups were surveyed in eight mainland Chinese firms. The results showed that frequently experienced feelings of guilt and determination in organizations were positively related to increased organizational commitment. In addition, the increase of intragroup relationship conflict strengthened the negative association between chaotic emotions and organizational commitment. The findings suggest that the overall commitment to an organization is related to certain emotions in an organizational setting. This study, which employed a large sample from mainland China, proved consistent with past theory and empirical evidence from the West. A multilevel model of affective events theory with wide applicability is correspondingly proposed.     

Magic pelagic — An agent-based simulation of 20 years of emergent value accumulation in the North Atlantic herring exchange system

This paper presents an empirically-based simulation of an industrial network modeled as an exchange system. It uses a multi-agent simulation model to test for how variations in uncertainty of the input resource and how the changing demand patterns affect the accumulation and distribution of exchange values in the system as a whole. The empirical material is a case study of an industrial network connecting herring supply with demand. This particular network comprises two separate but related sub-networks, identifiable based on the origin of the herring as coming from either Norwegian or Icelandic catchers. While both target the same potential customers in terms of wholesalers and retailers and ultimately European and Asian consumers, they are distinct in their internal organizing aspects. The results indicate that certain types of internal organizing are more adaptive to changes in conditions and are better suited to absorb these changes. The paper contributes to both a theory and method emphasizing the modeling of emergent nonlinear patterns of networks.     

Promoting smart cities in developing countries: Policy insights from Vietnam

Smart city initiatives have been researched primarily in the developed country context. In developing countries, however, emerging technologies are enabling progress on urban functionality, productivity, and livability. A deeper understanding of facilitative policy conditions unique to developing countries would be useful to both theory and practice. This study presents empirically grounded insights about the policy implications of smart city development in developing countries, based on surveys of experts from the public and private sectors in 10 Vietnam cities. The study makes three contributions. First, it provides new evidence that pursuing smart city development (SCD) is not a mere alternative but a crucial strategic imperative. While facing persistent problems, Vietnam's cities exhibit significant and rapidly improving readiness for SCD. Second, the study provides new insights into related policy issues and challenges, including the positive link between e-government development and control of corruption, the risk of bias toward operational management over institutional reform, and the lack of a clear development strategy. Finally, the study proposes a model for guiding smart city initiatives in developing countries.     

Toward a theory of outside-in marketing: Past,present, and future

Outside-in marketing is a powerful driver of superior firm performance, especially for firms in dynamic, competitive markets. The use and application of outside-in marketing has flourished in the past four decades, but research that synthesizes and extends understanding of this approach is missing, such that extant literature remains fragmented and scarce. This paper aims to deliver a theoretically grounded, managerially relevant framework to guide outside-in marketing research and business practices. Specifically, it offers an integrative conceptualization of outside-in marketing, examines its evolution over the past four decades, and provides business cases that depict how organizations have implemented outside-in marketing. On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of research domains pertinent to outside-in marketing, combined with business examples, this article establishes an evolving theory of outside-in marketing, comprising four key tenets and seven testable propositions.     

The impact of aligned rewards and senior manager attitudes on conflict and collaboration between sales and marketing

This research was carried out using five case studies and a survey to discover how sales and marketing managers are rewarded and if alignment of rewards can improve collaboration between sales and marketing and/or reduce inter-functional conflict. In addition, it examined the role of senior managers' support for coordination on sales/marketing collaboration. The results reveal that organizations which use aligned rewards can increase sales/marketing collaboration through such reward structures, but not reduce inter-functional conflict. In addition, senior managers' support for coordination is vital, as it increases sales/marketing collaboration, and strongly reduces inter-functional conflict. This is important because inter-functional conflict has a strong negative impact on collaboration between sales and marketing in business to business firms.     

信息技术、交易成本与激励:论经济组织形式的中间化

基于交易成本理论的分析框架难以对信息技术作用下的经济组织变革趋势作出很好的解释．本文融合了资源基础观的相关观点，建立了一个新的分析框架，比较全面地分析了企业、中间组织和市场这三种经济组织形式。进一步的，通过考察信息技术应用的相关影响，我们得出了信息时代经济组织形式趋于“中间化”的结论。     

Disability and the Performance Paradox: Can Social Capital Bridge the Divide?

This research captures the physical and social experience of disability by analysing the practical performance problems that arise when an ill or injured employee returns to work, and documenting how those problems are interpreted. The grounded theory approach suggests an alternative to the traditional biomedical or social perspectives on disability. Field research reveals four themes: attendance, disciplinary history, peer interaction and task function. Managerial and co‐worker perceptions were significantly affected by interactions that occurred before any disability was known to exist. Historic patterns of social exchange strongly suggest that social capital theory explains problematic work performance.     

Extending community management to industry-university-government organizations

There has been an emergence of collaborative research networks of industry-university-government relationships, or so-called Triple Helix (TH) organizations. Many TH organizations strive for research and innovation community management. In the innovation and knowledge management literature, community management offers open, participatory, and distributed innovation processes. How community management elements manifest, how they evolve, and what are related contingencies remain poorly understood, especially in the case of TH organizations. Our study examines how two TH organizations in Finland have adopted community management elements, how these elements have evolved, and the contingencies that have affected adoption and evolution. We report on the first 6 years of operations in two different TH organizations. Community-management elements have accommodated divergent interests in TH organizations, but they have also been subject to considerable degrees of conflict and tension. We extend the innovation community management literature by explicating community management elements in a TH context, we illustrate how TH organizations adopt and evolve these elements, and we identify two contingencies for community management elements in a TH context.     

Consensus formation during strategic change

This paper offers a refined conceptualization of consensus formation and demonstrates in three organizations how this conceptualization enables us to uncover new patterns of consensus building. It describes a longitudinal study which investigated consensus formation in three organizations undergoing major strategic change. The study explored whether consensus building occurred during the strategic change and, if so, how. Initial participants of consensus were also investigated as well as changes in the scope of participants in consensus. Consensus building did occur, but contrary to some views less through an increase in the strength of consensus and more through an increase in the scope of consensus. Additionally, initial consensus was not located among members of the top management team, but more within an interest group whose members benefited from the given direction of the change. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Emotional stability: A new construct and its implications for individual behavior in organizations

Despite being generally well studied, emotional stability (ES) has not yet been widely accepted as a satisfactory and solidly valid theoretical construct. Without a clearly defined and validated construct, it is difficult to infer what ES means for the behavior and decisions of individuals as well as the performance of groups and organizations. Based on self-organization theory, this study infers a two dimensional construct for ES (threshold and recovery) under the framework of dynamic change and complexity. Two studies were conducted in China to develop and examine the construct of ES in an organizational context. The psychometric examination indicated that the newly developed construct of ES has discriminant and convergent validity with respect to different though related constructs such as the Big Five personality model and emotional intelligence (EI). It also demonstrates incremental validity in predicting group leadership, job satisfaction, job self-efficacy, and commitment. The findings also demonstrate that ES moderates the relationship between individual commitment and group relationship conflict. The results indicate that self-ratings effectively reflect the theoretical construct, whereas peer ratings and supervisor ratings create different biases. Additional theory, empirical, and methodological contributions are also discussed.     

The politics of success in the fight against malnutrition in Peru

The dramatic reduction in children’s chronic malnutrition in Peru observed in recent years has defied the patterns of stunting reduction worldwide. After nearly a decade of stalled progress, the government reported a reduction in stunting rates of nearly 10 points, from 29.8% in 2005 to 18.1% in 2011. The specialized literature has acknowledged the critical role that immediate (e.g. increasing breastfeeding promotion) and underlying (e.g. investments to improve household food security) interventions have played in reducing stunting (Black et al., 2013), as well as the contributing role of enabling factors related to economic performance. This paper offers an alternative explanation to success by looking at the shift in the government’s nutrition strategy after 2006 with the formation of the Child Malnutrition Initiative (CMI), a civil society working platform, and the adoption of a national poverty reduction strategy prioritizing nutrition interventions (known as CRECER) and conditional cash transfers (JUNTOS). The paper uses veto players theory to explain how these changes effectively contributed to policy change by reducing the effective number of nutrition stakeholders involved and facilitating policy agreements around a common policy platform and established goals. The Peruvian case also highlights the importance of the government’s public commitment to reduce chronic malnutrition in children under five by 5 percent in 5 years (“5 by 5 by 5”) and the accompanying role, advocacy and monitoring from civil society organizations.The paper looks at the success of implementing the nutrition strategy in three dimensions. Horizontally, it looks at the coordination between government and non-government agencies to converge around a common policy discourse;vertically, it looks at the implementation of the nutrition strategy across national, regional and municipal governments;and financially, it looks at the coordinated and conditional allocation of nutrition funding and how this created greater incentives for horizontal and vertical coordination. The paper draws some theoretical and policy implications for improving the effective and accountable delivery of nutrition interventions in Peru and other countries outside Latin America.     

On the effects of authority on peer motivation: Learning from Wikipedia

Research Summary: We investigate the conditions under which authority can be deployed without reducing subordinate motivation. We show that lateral authority, the legitimacy to resolve task‐specific problems, is welcomed by members of an organization in the resolution of coordination conflicts, the more so (a) the fiercer the conflict to be resolved, (b) the higher the competence‐based status of the authority, (c) the lower the tenure of, and (d) the more focused the organizational members are. Analyzing the discussion behavior of members of Wikipedia between 2002 and 2014, we corroborate our allegations empirically by analyzing 642,916 article–discussion pages. Our findings, obtained for a modern collective production community, provide learning opportunities for how traditional organizations may want to govern activities of their idiosyncratically motivated staff. Managerial Summary: When managers use their (legitimate) power to take decisions on behalf of their staff, they risk setting back employees and making them detach from the firm. This danger is particularly salient whenever highly motivated teams of staff autonomously work on corporate problems and are used to governing themselves. Examples range from skunkwork initiatives within traditional firms to entire team‐based organizations, such as Valve or Zappos. When and how managers can add value by resolving conflicts within and across these teams once their self‐organization fails is what we study in this article. Inspired by data from Wikipedia, we suggest that managers should not intervene prematurely, benefit from visible competence, and are respected most for their actions by specialized peers who recently joined the organization.     

Building innovative organizations in China: The “execution+” organization

This paper explores how to build innovative organizations in China. Using grounded inductive theory building with ten case studies of commercial organizations in China’s information and communication technology (ICT) industries, we find that because China is entrenched in the paradigm of execution and its two-tier talent structure lacks a competent pool of middle-level talent, it calls for a new organizational form: “execution+.” The key to building “execution+” organization lies in building a competent middle tier by taking advantage of apprenticeship type of training. Our findings have implications for theories of organization design and organizational learning.     

A Study of the Performativity of the “Ambidextrous Organizations” Theory: Neither Lost in nor Lost before Translation

Ambidextrous organizations succeed both in incremental and discontinuous innovation. However, there is little direct empirical evidence on how managers implement the principles of the “ambidextrous organizations” theory to dynamically align the structure and culture of ambidextrous organizations. Our study does not focus on analyzing the factors that give rise to organizational ambidexterity but focuses on analyzing whether the factors suggested by prior theorizing on “ambidextrous organizations” are implemented by managers in their daily practice as suggested by prior theorizing. Accordingly, this study does not investigate the traditionally conceptualized gap between academic theorizing and managerial practice since “ambidextrous organizations” theory can be characterized as rigorous and relevant. We investigate whether the “ambidextrous organizations” theory is implemented as suggested by prior theorizing and whether successful implementation is subject to managing in the way that scholars' prior theorizing suggests. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from two longitudinal case studies, we find that managers overlooked the process dimension in evaluating the required degree of ambidexterity. Furthermore, the organizational structure and culture for incremental innovation did not differ from the structure and culture for discontinuous innovation alongside the expected dimensions. Finally, the discontinuous innovation business unit had to be reintegrated to ensure sustained growth. During the reintegration processes, organizational capabilities mutated. We linked our findings on the processes and performativity of ambidextrous organizing to extant theories and developed the rationale for the observed novel phenomena of innovation myopia, second‐order competency traps, and capability mutations.     

Maintaining legitimacy in contested mature markets through discursive strategies: The case of corporate environmentalism in the French automotive industry

Market-level studies based on institutional theory have gained prominence in recent marketing research seeking to investigate legitimation dynamics. Although these studies have paid particular attention to how organizations build legitimacy in new markets, they have rarely explored legitimations strategies in mature markets, which mostly remain the prerogative of organizational theory. Such emphasis on new markets is thus limiting our understanding of legitimation dynamics in general and legitimacy maintenance in particular, especially since new and mature markets have different characteristics. When markets are well established, they tend to become the target of a growing number of contestations by actors seeking to introduce new societal issues. Once these issues have been institutionalized, organizations must address them to maintain their legitimacy. In this study, we investigate the discursive strategies used by the French carmakers when environmental considerations gained prominence between 2006 and 2008. In contrast to prior works in organizational theory which assume that organizations respond to institutional pressures in an undifferentiated way, our results show that organizations adopt differentiated legitimation strategies by adapting their discourse to their different stakeholders. Paradoxically, we find evidence of industry-wide isomorphism, where rather than developing idiosyncratic discourses, organizations adopt conventional discursive strategies.