The current state and future directions of research and practice in organizational learning and learning organizations in China

This article aims to analyze systematically academic papers concerning organizational learning and learning organizations in the China Academic Journals Full-text Database (CAJ) published after 2000. A detailed review was conducted of their main findings, publication time, research methods, subjects (themes), and source of funding to depict the current state of research on organizational learning and learning organizations in China on three different levels, namely organizational, team and individual levels of learning. Based on the comprehensive review of literature, this article proposes future directions for organizational learning research and practice in China. Suggestions are offered to advance further research and practice in China.     

Controls as a Sharable Knowledge Commodity: An Architecture for Open Exchange

The world seems to be getting more dangerous: terrorists; fraudulent corporations; money laundering; hurricanes; pandemics. Governments and organizations respond with a flurry of new controls. In some cases these are centrally mandated (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley). In others, organizations struggle to find their own control solutions. Seldom, however, do organizations work together as a community of common interests to share solutions to their control threats. In this paper we consider how an open exchange of control solutions might be supported electronically. We assume a community of similar organizations that wish to exchange detailed knowledge about organizational control techniques. These might be non-competing institutions, such as libraries, customs agencies, and even universities; or, they may in fact be competing organizations, wishing to exchange control solutions in dimensions where they do not compete – e.g. the airlines exchanging best practice about safety and security. The main point is to propose an information technology architecture that permits a view of organizational controls as shareable, exchangeable knowledge commodities.     

Making sense of corporate social responsibility in international business: experiences from Shell

International business organizations are regularly addressed on their corporate social responsibility (CSR). As illustrated in this paper, it is not yet clear exactly what CSR means to organizations and how to deal with it. In this paper, the authors explore how a sensemaking approach helps to understand the business challenges of CSR within an organizational context. The theories of Karl Weick are applied to the experiences of CSR in Royal Dutch Shell. The authors argue that the key to CSR in international business organizations is to engage stakeholders and start a process of joint sensemaking. Three main competencies are crucial in this: the competency to engage stakeholders through listening and understanding; the creation of an organizational language so that CSR makes sense to members of the organization; and recognizing the momentum of taking action.     

Strategic alignment and performance: Brazilian companies in the medical diagnostics sector

A gap has been identified in the literature on the diagnosis and monitoring of the degree of strategic alignment. The main objective of this article is to diagnose and analyze the strategic alignment profile using the alignment diagnostic profile (ADP) tool, which enables organizations to show visually their degree of strategic alignment. The methodological approach adopted is multiple-case studies, which were conducted at five organizations in the medical diagnostics sector. The results indicate that the ADP enables organizations to understand the steps required to improve their level of alignment and to identify and locate gaps and conflicts.     

加强营销创新构建和谐社会

本文认为从社会学的角度来理解、构建和谐社会的重要内容之一就是要实现政治领域、经济领域和社会领域三大社会部门的良性运行和协调发展,而市场营销有助于政府部门完成行政目标,实现地区和谐发展;有助于营利组织创造更多社会财富,获得可持续的和谐发展;有助于非营利组织提升服务水平,取得壮大与和谐发展。文章提出,面对构建和谐社会的发展环境,我们需要创新营销理念,丰富构建和谐社会的文化,创新营销组织,完善构建和谐社会的主体,创新营销技术,提升构建和谐社会的手段。通过与时俱进地推进这些方面的创新,充分发挥营销在构建和谐社会中的积极作用。     

Perceived Purposes of Budgets in Organizations in a Developing Country

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this paper is to explore the perceptions which Ghanaian managers have of the purposes which budgets serve in organizations. The paper draws upon previous research concerning the link between budgets and decision-making in the developing world. The findings of these studies suggest that budgets are minimally used and inadequately understood. The data employed in this paper is of a qualitative nature drawn from four large-scale organizations by way of discussions, semi-structured interviews plus documentary evidence. The paradox of the findings is that whilst most managers perceived the major roles of budgets to be planning and control, in fact, budgets are largely ignored. Among the reasons stated for this include the high inflation in the country, lack of money in the organizations, managers' lack of adequate accounting knowledge, and untimely and inappropriate presentation of budget variance reports. The paper concludes with some consideration of the ways in which

the budget can be a more effective management tool.     

The impact of Enterprise 2.0 in organizations

Many organizations have embarked on Enterprise 2.0. However, not many have successfully implemented it. Availability of inexpensive tools does not guarantee their usage by organizations and their employees. To have Enterprise 2.0 implemented widely and effectively by organizations, it is important that both managers and employees benefit from using it. It is expected that the level of congruence of management–employees perceived benefits would affect the level of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in organizations. Testing this is the purpose of this research. Using the case study of two large global organizations, this study analyzed the use of Enterprise 2.0 by both employees and managers. The results showed that even though both employees and managers believe that Enterprise 2.0 usage does have a positive impact on communication, collaboration, community building, and employee engagement, the level of belief is different: managers’ perception of Enterprise 2.0 benefits is less than that of employees. There was a greater degree of congruence though between both the groups on the perceived benefits of Enterprise 2.0 on knowledge management and organizational outcomes. The size and the type (not-for-profit) of organization was a disadvantage in adopting such tools. The not-for-profit organization was more at loss when applying Enterprise 2.0 as its employees are less aware of the type of tools and of their benefits, and there is less managerial support.     

Evaluation of Collaborative Strategies Used in the Management of Natural Parks in Rio de Janeiro

This paper presents the main conclusions of exploratory research aimed at analyzing the management of eight natural parks in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In view of the participative management guidelines proposed by Law 9985 (“NSCU”), the findings revealed that governmental agencies have, indeed, been making an effort to establish more participative management by means of advisory councils. Despite this, the initiatives have still been partially ineffective. The multiple case studies show that different forms of partnership are sustained with varied organizations; however, factors such as bureaucracy, lack of management autonomy, and the inadequate use of managing tools have hampered the expansion of such collaborative strategies.     

The role of NGOs in development cooperation

There has been an impressive proliferation of non-governmental organizations in development cooperation in the last two decades. The main reason for this has been the belief—among both experts and the public at large—that NGOs have a number of advantages over the state sector when it comes to aid efficiency. The following article examines these apparent advantages and concludes that NGOs are often not nearly as effective in practice as the theory purports.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in Colombia: Making Sense of Social Strategies

As corporate social responsibility (CSR) grows increasingly well known and accepted worldwide, organizations attempt to make sense of their social strategies bridge the gap between their current situation and what their stakeholders expect of them. If social strategies represent a potential stepping stone to more sophisticated forms of CSR, then research must investigate the strategies that organizations have adopted. After defining a framework for classifying and analyzing organizations’ social strategies, this article considers empirical evidence from 10 case studies in Colombia to reveal how organizations might build on their social involvement to engage in more sophisticated CSR practices. The framework also suggests some different trajectories that organizations might follow.     

Towards a theory of Sustainable Communication in Risk Society: Relating issues of sustainability to marketing communications

There has recently been much discussion about a preferred ecological outcome for late capitalism to work toward, that is sustainable consumption. Related to this is a fundamental question, can business in Western industrial society (some now use the label risk society) be transformed into ecologically sustainable organizations? If we optimistically assume the answer to this question to be 'yes' how would these organizations communicate with the world in which they operate? This paper reports the author's application of a social constructionist approach to 'green' communicative acts and those responsible for them in an attempt to start answering such questions. In a qualitative empirical study of an environmental and social justice communications consultancy the social world of the people involved is explored as they interact with and communicative the issues with which they are concerned in risk society. A main research theme attempted to relate three issues of ecocentrism to what is known as marketing communications. In this respect the author has concentrated on a leading edge agency and four of its clients in the fields of animal, personal health and planet preservation. In the analysis the author lays the foundations for a new theory, Sustainable Communication, which can account for communicative acts, in any eco-discourse (Harris, 1996), that have issues of sustainability as their focal point. This process is then problematized for the reader in relation to capitalist organizations and the final discussion proposes that others, interested in this theoretical area, play with this notion of Sustainable Communication to help in its future development. In this respect the author proposes a fruitful allegiance between Critical Macromarketing and Sustainable Communication. Throughout the paper, especially in the section on 'building blocks', the author chooses to illustrate key points for the reader by drawing on data from the study.     

Editorial Essay: Mapping the Ethical in Neuroscientific Research

The unmanaged organization (Gabriel in Organ Stud 16:477–501, 1995) is moving from coffee corners to social networks. This means not only a change of media, but also a transformation in how organizations exert control over workers and how workers resist the commodification of emotions (Fineman, in: Fineman, Emotion in organizations, Sage, London, 2000; Lindebaum in J Manag Inq 21:262–277, 2012). After analyzing instances of the online publication of images and texts that escape organizational control, we identified three main ambiguities helpful in framing future studies about organizational control and resistance: ambiguity between private and public spheres, ambiguity between spontaneous and performed manifestations, and ambiguity between the distribution and control of power. Our main contribution is to understanding the Internet, particularly social networks, as a medium for employee resistance through distance (Collinson, in: Jermier et al., Resistance and power in organizations, Routledge, London, 1994), and in using the three aforementioned ambiguities to help analyze this phenomenon.     

Selbstorganisation von Verbrauchern-theoretische Überlegungen und empirische Befunde

Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag referiert die Ergebnisse zweier in den Jahren 1977/78 durchgeführten Befragungen von Vorständen und Mitgliedern von Verbrauchervereinen in der BRD und bringt sie in Zusammenhang mit weiterführenden Argumentationen, die im Rahmen laufender Forschungsvorhaben der AGVP erarbeitet wurden.Ausgehend von einer Analyse der Handlungen von fremd- und selbstorganisierten Verbrauchervereinen wird der Frage nachgegangen, ob die derzeit bestehenden selbstorganisierten Verbrauchervereine eine formale und inhaltliche Alternative zu bestehenden Verbraucherfremdorganisationen bilden.

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The paper reports on a study of local consumer organizations in the Federal Republic of Germany with and without individual membership. The study is part of a theoretical and empirical evaluation of present consumer policy aiming at the discovery of ways to activate consumer organizations. Above all, the project explores whether organizations with individual membership would be an organizationally feasible and qualitatively preferable alternative.To do this, it was necessary, as a first research step, to evaluate the existing local consumer organizations by considering various aspects of organizational and individual behaviour within them. Questionnaires were constructed for both officials and members of the organizations. The study shows that local consumer organizations with and without individual membership do not differ much in their activities. Distributing information about prices and qualities of goods becomes the main task. The direct membership of consumers in consumer organizations does not automatically lead to a qualitatively different situation.Member consumer organizations—that receive their legitimization because of a connection to the rank-and-file — need active consumers. Therefore, in the second step in this research phase, an attempt was made to explain the extent of individual activity in consumer organizations. It was shown that preference for collective strategies and participative organizational structure were relatively strong predictors. The study shows further that organizations without individual membership tend to resemble member organizations; as the organizational structure becomes rigid, individual activity ceases.

     

Rhetorical profiling: Modes of meaning generation in organizational topoi

Accounting for homogenous action in seemingly apparent heterogeneous organizations is a research question that persists across prominent organizational studies literatures, and which have become more persistent and pertinent as organizations have become more global and diverse. To address how differing forms of relatively homogeneous solutions to practical problems arise from otherwise heterogeneous organizations, we develop a rhetorical framework that depicts the role of topoi, often understood as a theme or motif or literary convention, in an organization's rhetorical activity and facilitates the profiling of organizations according to how members use topoi as modes of meaning creation. We assert 10 propositions reflecting how members invent and legitimize functional meaning and demonstrate how such meaning can direct the organization toward different discursive paths. Copyright © 2013 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Downsizing and Ethics of Personnel Dismissals — The Case of Finnish Managers

The purpose of our article is to present a qualitative empirical study from the ethical viewpoint. It aims at the theoretical conceptualization concerning the managers' decision-making of personnel dismissals in downsizing organizations. First we present and seek to motivate our research task. The importance of real business ethical issues as a starting point of business ethics research is emphasized. Second the main normative ethical theories and ethical decision-making models are presented. These form the loose framework for describing and interpreting research interviews. After this the empirical findings are set forth. This part suggests that the managers explain the dismissals from different decision-making roles emphasizing different ethical orientation. The roles are called a rational and an independent manager, a marionette and an emotional individual. Our study suggests that the role of empathy in morality reveals an interesting and a necessary research topic for business ethics research.     

The practices of effective managerial coaches

Coaching is a frequently cited, but less often effectively implemented, developmental tool for enhancing managerial performance at all levels. The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the practices junior managers consider to be most critical for senior managers to employ when implementing coaching as a performance improvement practice. In this research, we engaged 45 focus groups consisting of 225 middle managers from over twenty different US organizations to explore the issue of managerial coaching and its implications for organizations and individual managers.     

The founding rate of venture capital firms in three European countries (1970–1990)

In this article, the sectorial and environmental forces that facilitate or inhibit the creation of venture capital companies are studied in the three European countries where the industry is most developed: the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands. The focus is on the start-up phase of the industry, the period from 1970–1990. The founding of firms can be studied on four different levels: entrepreneurial, organizational, population, and macroeconomic. In this study, a population approach is taken; this implies that we do not attempt to explain any single founding, but rather the aggregate number of foundings that occur in an industry in a certain period in a certain country.According to the organizational ecology theory, the population density (i.e., the total number of organizations in a population) is the major environmental factor that affects the founding rate through two processes. Initially, when the density is low, each founding eases new foundings, because the simple prevalence of a form tends to give it legitimacy (thereby spurring imitations), the training ground for qualified personnel grows and the supporting networks are widened and strengthened. The legitimation process does not grow forever: once enough organizations of a certain kind exist, legitimation attains a ceiling. As the number of organizations increases, the second process becomes dominant: the competition for resources (raw material, personnel, customers, capital) grows, leading to a negative relationship between the density and the founding rate, everything else being equal. Thus, the founding rate declines as the number of organizations increases, once a threshold is reached. The major hypothesis that is tested here is that the population density has an inverted U-shaped effect on the founding rate of venture capital organizations.In addition, the effect that the venture capital firms of the three countries have on each other is studied. Two populations are said to interact when the populations affect each other's growth rate, but the interaction need not be symmetrical. The second hypothesis, tested in this study, is that populations in different countries have a positive effect on each other and not a competitive effect because the legitimating effect does not halt at geographical borders. Yet, the competition for resources (capital, people, deals) among geographically different populations is limited in this industry.This study is valuable because until now, the existing ecological studies focus on long-established industries. Testing, the theory in a young industry that emerged only in the seventies (in Europe) has merits in its own right, because the technological progress after the Second World War has altered the organizational environment tremendously. The communication and transportation revolutions may have especially influenced the way in which organizations interact with each other and with the environment. The venture capital firms are furthermore special in the way they are organized with the dual structure of management company and investment fund(s). If the theory holds in this young industry, important additional evidence will be given that the theory is truly applicable to “populations of all types, in any time period, and in any society” (Carroll 1988, p. 18). Finally, this study extends the theory by giving evidence on how industries in different countries may interact upon each other.We show empirically that the major factor that influences the overall founding rate in each of the three countries is the density of the industry, i.e., the number of organizations that already exist in the industry; this confirms the population ecology theory. When the density is low, adding a new organization to the industry raises the probability of a subsequent founding; when the density is high, the contrary is true. The institutional changes considered here, such as the establishment of tax transparent legal entities or state guarantees against losses (in the Netherlands) and the establishment of secondary stock markets, do not significantly influence the founding rate in any of the three countries. Moreover, the Dutch foundings are positively influenced by the British density and the French foundings by the Dutch density; the British foundings are, on the contrary, negatively influenced by the Dutch density. The competitive effects between the Netherlands and the U.K. are thus more important than initially thought.The relationship between the density and the founding rate is the strongest, most consistent, and most significant relationship found in this study. Thus, the number of organizations that already exist in an industry is very important in explaining the founding of organizations, apart from, for example, the personality of the entrepreneur or from the networks in which he or she is involved. This indicates that, when trying to explain the founding of organizations, the industry structure, and more specifically the number of organizations that exist at the moment of the founding, cannot be ignored.     

论企业社会责任报告基本理论框架

企业社会责任报告基本理论框架由报告的模式、主要内容和指标、形式和质量标准构成。文章比较了国际上企业社会责任报告不同模式、报告的主要内容和指标、报告的形式,指出中国企业社会责任报告是政府与非营利组织的双重主导模式,以经济、环境、社会三重底线为视角,构建中国企业社会责任报告的重点内容和关键指标,以及报告的形式。文章根据信息产品的特性论述了企业社会责任报告的基本质量标准。     

Best value supply chains: A key competitive weapon for the 21st century

All executives would like their organizations to perform better, and most seek ways to make that happen. This paper focuses on how supply chains — the series of activities through which products and services are created and then distributed to customers — can enhance firm performance. For the last couple of decades, most firms have emphasized maximizing speed or minimizing costs within their supply chains. In the current business landscape, however, a broader approach is needed. We describe the main advantages of developing best value supply chains as a tool for enhancing performance. These chains differ from traditional chains in important ways. Best value supply chains are used by organizations as a central element of strategy, not simply as a means to move materials. Rather than focusing primarily on speed or cost, best value supply chains are designed to deliver superior total value to the customer in terms of speed, cost, quality, and flexibility. Our contention is that organizations that develop best value supply chains will enhance their performance. We support this contention with examples from leading firms that reflect a best value approach.     

Causes and consequences of managerial failure in rapidly changing organizations

To survive in today's ultra-competitive business environment, organizations must better understand the factors that cause managers to fail to achieve desired results. To that end, focus group data was collected from 1040 managers from over 100 different U.S. manufacturing and service organizations experiencing large scale organizational change in order to help identify the primary causes of managerial failure. This article discusses the 15 primary causes of managerial failure identified in the study, along with their perceived consequences to managerial and organizational performance. Ultimately, it is hoped that this will provide a guide for improving the effectiveness of both individual managers and the organizations they serve.