Entrepreneurial versus cooperative social capital: The impact on operational performance

Research has extensively focused on how firms can become more competitive, by discovering new knowledge domains while exploiting current ones. Prior research has shown the positive impact of social capital on performance; however, there have been no empirical studies that distinguished between the architectures of social capital and how they impact the operational performance dimensions. Building upon the knowledge-based theory, we propose a model to examine the effects of the two architectures of social capital (entrepreneurial and cooperative) on individual dimensions of operational performance (quality, delivery, flexibility and cost). The hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling and data collected from 182 companies in Ireland. The results show that the cooperative social capital archetype supports the operational performance dimensions, while the entrepreneurial social capital archetype only impacts the cost dimension. The findings extend the current understanding about the complex relationships among the architectures of social capital and provide guidance for managers on how to leverage their investments in social capital to enhance specific operational performance dimensions.     

The Economic Consequences of Professional Sports Strikes and Lockouts

The National Basketball Association (NBA) lockout of 1998-1999 resulted in the cancellation of a significant number of games. According to the claims made by proponents of sports-driven economic growth, cities with NBA franchises should experience significant negative economic losses from this work stoppage because of the lost spending in and around basketball arenas during this event. Although it will be several years before adequate data exist for a careful ex post evaluation of the effects of the lockout, an examination of the impact of past work stoppages in professional football and basketball can shed some light on the potential impact of the NBA lockout as well as the viability of professional sports as engines of economic growth in cities. The parameter estimates from a reduced-form empirical model of the determination of real per capita income in 37 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) over the period 1969-1996 suggest that prior work stoppages in professional football and baseball had no impact on the economies of cities with franchises. Further, the departure of professional basketball from cities had no impact on their economies in the following years. These results refute the idea that attracting professional sports franchises represents a viable economic development strategy.     

Organizational Identity and Place: A Discursive Exploration of Hegemony and Resistance

abstract    This paper analyses how three distinct cohorts of workers in a recently merged UK-based College of Further Education understood their group and their organization's identities. We focus in particular, but not exclusively on how the groups' shared understandings of 'place' informed their identity accounts. Identities are theorized as being constituted within discursive regimes, and place treated as a discursive resource on which individuals and groups may draw in their attempts to author versions of their selves. In our case, understandings of place were also a resource on which some people drew in nostalgic reminiscence, and others used to fantasize about their preferred futures for the college. Framed by our intention to identify plurivocal native interpretations of place and identity in ways that promote the reading of polysemy back into case research, the contribution this paper makes is threefold. First, it adds to efforts to theorize organizations and identities as unstable social constructions constituted through acts of languaging. Second, it illustrates how different groups of local actors with distinct histories and value preferences may draw on their place of work in order to author contrasting versions of their organization's identity. Finally, our paper analyses the attempts made by senior managers and groups of other staff to define their organization in particular ways, as hegemonic 'moves' in an ongoing struggle for control over the organization as a discursive space.     

Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants' clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.