Relationship between Organizational Change and Failure in the Wine Industry: An Event History Analysis

Whether organizational change is adaptive or disruptive has been an issue among organization researchers. This paper examines the effect of organizational change on organizational failure and compares the result to previous findings. To increase comparability, we replicated Delacroix and Swaminathan’s (1991) format of the California wine industry study using Missouri wine industry data. Event history analysis is used to cover time-varying variables and censoring problems. Following an organizational ecology perspective, our result supports the finding that organizational change is not related to organizational failure     

Controlling R & D projects by networks

Abstract . This paper discusses the use of network analysis in the management of a large scale engineering project carried out within the R & D department of an engineering company. It describes the use of precedence diagrams and concludes that these are simpler to use than the more commonly encountered PERT nomenclature. This method has now been extended to cover other projects in the R & D department and it is concluded that their successful introduction has been encouraged by the interest and support of top management.     

Corporate social accountability through action: Contemporary insights from British industrial pioneers

Corporate social and environmental responsibility has become a major contemporary focus of business, government and community attention globally. With this increased attention and activity have come debates ranging across corporate authenticity, legislative necessity, and the scope of appropriate strategies. Through an historical analysis of four leading British industrialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this paper addresses the question of how corporate social accountability can be shaped and implemented by industrial leaders. It finds that while they may be motivated by a mix of business case agendas and their personal philosophical and religious beliefs, their accountability orientation reflects the latter. Social accountability in these cases, emerges as accountability rendered through action, reflecting organisational leaders’ moral responsibility and their connecting their personal beliefs with action for the common good. In the light of parallels between historical and contemporary global industrial environments, the study identifies resonances between historical and contemporary corporate leader social responsibility values, initiatives and accountabilities through action. This opens up the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of motivations for and manifestations of corporate social responsibility and accountability.     

New development: Reconnecting public service ethos and multi-agency collaboration. What are the possibilities and prospects for new local collaborative environments?

The public service ethos (PSE) is typically portrayed as the responsibility of public officers working for the public good, or described negatively as requiring intervention from the private sector. This article explores the relationship between the ethos and collaboration informed by findings from an empirical case study of public officers. It ends by identifying future avenues for research on the PSE by setting out possibilities and prospects for new local collaborative environments.     

A Study of Management Attitudes in Chinese State-Owned Enterprises,Collectives and Joint Ventures

Since 1978 China has introduced a series of reforms that has gradually moved its economy away from planning and towards more market-based resource allocation. State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) have been permitted to set market prices, retain profits after tax and employ factors of production much more freely than before. Private-sector firms have been allowed, and joint ventures with foreign firms encouraged. At the same time, continued political intervention in the management of enterprises may be dulling incentives for management to operate commercially. This study reports the results of research based on structured interviews with senior managers in 16 corporatized and non-corporatized SOEs, collective enterprises and joint ventures in Shanghai and Nanjing. The fieldwork was undertaken between October and December 1995, to shed light on the extent to which management attitudes had changed in recent years following the reforms, and to confirm whether there were noticeable differences in attitudes between managements in the various types of enterprises. The research also considers the current relationship between plant management and government bureaus, and management attitudes towards privatization.     

Motivations for corporate social responsibility reporting by MNC subsidiaries in an emerging country: The case of Bangladesh

While many studies of the motivations behind the corporate social responsibility reporting (CSRR) practices of large corporations have been reported internationally, few have focussed on multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiaries. Most importantly, we still do not know how host country institutional norms, or parent corporation policies, influence MNC subsidiaries embarking upon CSRR. By integrating legitimacy theory (LT) and neo-institutional theory (NIT) explanations, this paper offers a theoretical framework for investigating the CSRR practices of MNC subsidiaries in general, and provides empirical evidence on the nature and motivations of subsidiaries’ CSRR practices in Bangladesh, a developing country. Employing a case study method and using qualitative data, the study finds that CSRR practice in Bangladeshi MNC subsidiaries is limited, consisting mainly of employee information. This observation mirrors the overall CSRR trend in Bangladesh. A desire for internal legitimacy emerges as the primary motivation for CSRR practice in MNC subsidiaries. In particular, the external host country environment of the Bangladeshi subsidiaries seems to be a major limitation in the development of CSRR.     

Small business and entrepreneurship in the knowledge economy: A comparison of Australia and Sweden

Dominant explanations within the existing development literature for the differences in poverty levels around the world have tended to ignore the influence of international inequality on poverty, instead focusing solely on domestic factors. In this paper, I conduct a regression analysis of the effect of inequality between countries on world poverty between 1980 and 2007, employing a new structural measure of international inequality which is created using social network analysis to calculate countries' positions in international trade networks. Countries' infant mortality rates are used to measure poverty. The results of the empirical analysis provide cross-country evidence to demonstrate that structural inequalities in the international system have a significant impact on poverty around the world. As such, the analysis demonstrates the need to move beyond focusing exclusively on domestic attributes of developing countries towards considering the broader international political economy in analysing contemporary poverty.