The multifaceted nature of social practices: A review of the perspectives on practice-based theory building about organizations

A vibrant body of literature on social practices has developed rapidly in recent years. However, a systematic analysis of the underlying perspectives that shape the way practice-based scholars contribute to theory building about organizational phenomena has escaped scholarly attention. It is of pivotal importance to examine the multifaceted nature of social practices and understand the process by which new practice-based knowledge is developed. Our study addresses this gap by disentangling how researchers have adopted the knowledge, materiality, ethics, and politics perspectives that – as past influential work has informed us – are particularly relevant to practice-based theory building. In so doing, we categorize the body of literature into themes that correspond to the organizational phenomena examined by social practice scholars: practice boundaries and coordination of work, technology at work, strategy formation, local particulars structuring everyday work, and transformation of work practices. By uncovering how scholars adopt the four perspectives within each theme, our review shows that scholars (i) predominantly adopt the knowledge perspective, (ii) neglect the politics perspective when looking ‘inside’ a social practice, (iii) strikingly de-emphasize the ethics perspective, and (iv) isolate each of the four perspectives used in theory building. We then examine in detail the implications of our work for future research on social practices and conclude with a number of theoretical and methodological suggestions.     

Relational Leadership Theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing

Relational leadership is a relatively new term in the leadership literature, and because of this, its meaning is open to interpretation. In the present article I describe two perspectives of relational leadership: an entity perspective that focuses on identifying attributes of individuals as they engage in interpersonal relationships, and a relational perspective that views leadership as a process of social construction through which certain understandings of leadership come about and are given privileged ontology. These approaches can be complementary, but their implications for study and practice are quite different. After reviewing leadership research relative to these two perspectives I offer Relational Leadership Theory (RLT) as an overarching framework for the study of leadership as a social influence process through which emergent coordination (e.g., evolving social order) and change (e.g., new approaches, values, attitudes, behaviors, ideologies) are constructed and produced. This framework addresses relationships both as an outcome of investigation (e.g., How are leadership relationships produced?) and a context for action (e.g., How do relational dynamics contribute to structuring?). RLT draws from both entity and relational ontologies and methodologies to more fully explore the relational dynamics of leadership and organizing.     

Governance of sustainable supply chains in the fast fashion industry

This paper examines the impact of corporate social responsibility behavior on the sustainability performance of focal companies and their partners in fast fashion supply chains. The attributes of sustainability and the mechanism of sustainability governance of the fast fashion supply chain are also discussed. From the perspective of strategic corporate social responsibility, we first analyze the motives for adopting sustainability governance in fast fashion supply chains, and identify seven competitive sustainable attributes of the fast fashion product based on sustainable development theory. Then, by establishing a sustainability governance framework, we identify seven factors that affect the sustainability governance decision-making and evaluate the efficiency and legitimacy mechanism of sustainability governance from internal and external perspectives. Finally, we explore the application of the governance mechanisms via a case study based on H&M’s seven sustainability commitments. The findings suggest that the core influence and centrality of a corporation should be strengthened from the perspective of internal governance, and stakeholders should collaborate to achieve sustainability governance throughout the entire fast fashion supply chain from the perspective of external governance.     

Conceptualizing reflection in experience-based workplace learning

This paper seeks to understand key dimensions of reflection in experience-based workplace learning for research being collaboratively undertaken by scholars in Dutch and US research institutions. We systematically explore and compare Tara Fenwick’s analysis of five perspectives on cognition to distinguish among constructivist, psychoanalytic, situative, critical-cultural, and enactivist perspectives on reflection. Our aim is to examine how to conceptualize reflection so that one or more perspectives can complement our understanding of learning through experience at work. We position reflection not only from a practical but also from a theoretical perspective that moves beyond the individual focus of the constructivist perspective. Fenwick’s five perspectives are described in terms of whether and how reflection is utilized, key activities in the process of reflection, relative focus on the individual and/or the context, triggers for reflection, role of power and positionality, role of emotions, and reflection outcomes. We conclude that adding other lenses to the dominant constructivist perspective helps expand our understanding of reflection as well as identify and attend to other tools, people, and factors in the work situation that influence reflection processes and learning outcomes. The paper closes with a discussion of promising new approaches that have emerged since Fenwick’s analysis.     

An evaluation of social learning and learner outcomes in a massive open online course (MOOC): a healthcare sector case study

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to calls for new inquiries into the use of technology in HRD. We examine how, and to what extent, social media tools contribute to learner experiences and learner outcomes in an HRD intervention in a workplace context. We analyse qualitative and quantitative data relating to a massive open online course (MOOC) in a healthcare sector case study setting. We examine the interaction between the MOOC programme, social learning through social media tools and learner outcomes. The results of our evaluation show that usage of social media tools does not significantly affect knowledge outcomes but social media usage enhances affective outcomes. We conclude that social media tools can foster productive social learning processes. We also find evidence of some reluctance to engage with the technologies and declining patterns of interactivity using social media over the duration of the MOOC programme. We conclude that a more nuanced theorization to take account of personal and professional workplace context is necessary to explain how learners regulate their engagement with social media tools and the effect of social technologies for sustained social learning in HRD interventions.     

Explaining information technology usage: A test of competing models

While much of the prior information technology (IT) research has attempted to explain users’ acceptance of new IT, recent research has focused on IT continuance or continued usage. The technology acceptance model (TAM) and the expectation–disconfirmation theory (EDT) are currently the dominant referent theoretical frameworks explaining user acceptance and continuance of IT, respectively. However, no study to date has yet empirically compared the relative ability of the two competing theories in explaining IT continuance intention. This paper fills this gap in the literature by comparing the explanatory ability of the two models via a longitudinal study of computer-based tutorial usage. Our findings confirm that both models have good explanatory power with the TAM providing a better prediction of intention. An integrated model, combining TAM and EDT, provided a marginally better explanatory power.     

Cooperation governance mode: an extended transaction cost approach

This paper analyses the cooperation governance mode and possible factors affecting the choice between an equity joint venture and a contractual agreement. Although transaction cost economics (TCE) provides a workable and well-used framework within which to analyse this choice, it only captures the static transaction costs related to the two modes. This has lead to a discussion about dynamic governance costs and possible benefits related to the governance mode. The objective of this paper is to show how this extended framework differs from TCE when determining the appropriate governance mode. We use four factors related to nature of cooperation to contrast these two approaches. We collected empirical data about cooperation in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in order to find support for these arguments. Estimates based on logistic regression analysis suggest that our dynamic governance cost and benefit perspective really provides valuable complementary insights into the traditional static transaction-cost framework when it is a question of the choice of alliance form.     

Framing the Long-Term Impact of Mega-Event Strategies on the Development of Olympic Host Cities

Mega-event strategies and their impact on the development of host cities have drawn increasing interest as they have become part of wider city development strategies. Studies of mega-event strategies have tended to focus on a single perspective such as economic rationale and impact. As greater attention is paid to their long-term impact, there is a need for more comprehensive evaluation combining economic, social and environmental perspectives, and assessing the management of competing objectives. This paper proposes a comprehensive analytical framework for examining the multiple long-term impacts of mega-events on host cities. It illustrates the use of the framework through two examples of the Summer Olympics as the archetypal mega-event.     

Internationalization of Digital Innovations: A Rapidly Evolving Research Stream

This perspective paper synthesizes the burgeoning literature on internationalization of digital innovations to identify promising areas for future research. We first integrate multiple perspectives on digital innovations to offer a coherent and unified definition of digital innovations. Next, we synthesize digital innovation research into a theoretical framework that discusses the interrelationship between digital innovations and international business environment and its implications for international penetration of digital innovations. Our synthesis of literature highlights the increased research focus on demand-side perspective as an appropriate theoretical framework to explain the unique dynamics of digital internationalization. Finally, we take account of recent trends in digital economy as well as important gaps in current literature to propose promising avenues for future research. We particularly emphasize the need to integrate current institutional transitions of a digital era as well as emerging theoretical perspectives such as demand-side perspective and opportunity logic in digital internationalization research. We hope our perspective paper will contribute toward a more systematic and theoretically grounded advancement of digital internationalization research.     

An Integrated Text Analytic Framework for Product Defect Discovery

The recent surge in the usage of social media has created an enormous amount of user‐generated content (UGC). While there are streams of research that seek to mine UGC, these research studies seldom tackle analysis of this textual content from a quality management perspective. In this study, we synthesize existing research studies on text mining and propose an integrated text analytic framework for product defect discovery. The framework effectively leverages rich social media content and quantifies the text using various automatically extracted signal cues. These extracted signal cues can then be used as modeling inputs for product defect discovery. We showcase the usefulness of the framework by performing product defect discovery using UGC in both the automotive and the consumer electronics domains. We use principal component analysis and logistic regression to produce a multivariate explanatory analysis relating defects to quantitative measures derived from text. For our samples, we find that a selection of distinctive terms, product features, and semantic factors are strong indicators of defects, whereas stylistic, social, and sentiment features are not. For high sales volume products, we demonstrate that significant corporate value is derivable from a reduction in defect discovery time and consequently defective product units in circulation.     

基于效率视角的上市公司股权激励工具选择研究

本文运用2011-2016年发布股权激励计划的我国A股上市公司数据，从激励效率的角度，探讨公司规模、成长性及产权性质等异质性要素如何影响公司股权激励工具的选择。研究发现，公司规模能够显著影响股权激励工具的效率，大型上市公司更适合使用股票期权，而小型上市公司更适合使用限制性股票；且公司成长性越高，上述匹配关系对股权激励效率的影响越显著。对于国有上市公司，选择股票期权作为股权激励工具比限制性股票更具有激励效率。     

Perceptions of demotion decisions: A social capital perspective

This article examines how demotees and co-workers understand involuntary demotion decisions, using a social capital lens. Drawing on data based on semi-structured in-depth interviews from 23 demotees and 46 co-workers (two co-workers of each demoted worker), we find that the likelihood of being demoted is determined by several factors. The personal characteristics of the demotee influence three aspects of social capital: 1) the quality of the employee-management relationship, 2) the ability to socialise with other organizational members and 3) visibility in the organization. Our findings contribute to the relational embeddedness perspective of social capital as well the growing body of literature on the dark side of social capital in organizations by showing how a lack of social capital impacts on demotion decisions. Relevant implications for organizations and HR practitioners for utilizing demotion as a HR tool are discussed.     

基于制度逻辑的不同上下级关系对员工创新行为的差异化影响机制研究

作为组织中影响员工创新的重要人际关系，层级性上下级关系目前存在着基于西方文化的LMX （领导-成员交换）与基于中国文化的SSG （上司-下属关系）两种界定。为探求不同上下级关系对员工创新行为的影响机制是否有所不同，本研究从制度逻辑视角出发，基于社会交换理论和制度逻辑二维分析框架，构建了上下级关系透过心理授权作用于员工创新行为的路径，剖析了SSG和LMX对创新行为的差异化影响机制。来自72个团队的252名成员为样本的实证分析表明，SSG和LMX均能正向影响员工创新行为，心理授权在这种影响中均发挥着中介作用；尤为重要的是，相较于基于工作逻辑的LMX，基于家族逻辑的SSG对中国情境下的员工创新行为有更强的解释力度，这种差异是通过两者的不同交换逻辑对心理授权的不同影响而产生的。本研究为解构中国情境下的创新行为和上下级互动及其关系提供了全新的理论视角，丰富了本土化的创新管理研究。     

Good Night,and Good Luck: Perspectives on Luck in Management Scholarship

It is not insignificant that seminal contributions to management scholarship have highlighted luck as an alternative explanation for performance differences between individuals and organizations. Yet it has rarely taken center-stage in scholarship. The principal purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the application of luck in the management literature and in such foundation disciplines as economics, sociology, and psychology. Our analysis finds five common perspectives on luck: (a) luck as Attribution; (b) luck as Randomness; (c) luck as Counterfactual; (d) luck as Undeserved; and (e) luck as Serendipity. We outline various ways in which research on luck may be advanced along each of these perspectives, and develop an underexplored, sixth, perspective on (f) luck as Leveler to provide a possible solution to such issues as social inequality and (unwarranted) executive compensation.     

A self‐motives perspective on feedback‐seeking behavior: Linking organizational behavior and social psychology research

Both the feedback‐seeking literature in management and the self‐motives domain in social psychology have focused on how motives affect the way in which people acquire information for self‐evaluation purposes. Despite apparent conceptual similarities, the implications of research in these domains have not been fully integrated. This paper aims to link research on feedback‐seeking behavior to recent theoretical developments in social psychology. First, the current perspective in management on feedback‐seeking motives is depicted. Second, a well‐established framework of self‐motives in social psychology is introduced. Third, similarities and differences between these two motivational perspectives are discussed and a first step towards integration is proposed. Fourth, it is demonstrated how a self‐motives perspective might guide future research on six key issues. Self‐motives might be useful in identifying new antecedents of feedback‐seeking behavior, resolving inconsistencies in the feedback‐seeking literature, understanding the interplay among feedback‐seeking motives, integrating feedback‐seeking and feedback reactions research, examining attitudinal outcomes of feedback‐seeking motives, and enhancing the feedback–performance relationship.     

Knowledge retention in ERP implementations: the context of UK SMEs

Abstract

Knowledge retention (k-retention) is vital for various enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), though it is a highly demanding and challenging task. The aim of this paper is to investigate different types of approaches to k-retention and factors influencing k-retention in SMEs. Our study adopts a grounded theory approach with cases based on 12 ERP implementations in UK SMEs. We analyze our data using thematic analysis. The findings reveal specific elements that support the k-retention of ERP package knowledge and business process knowledge. These elements are: k-retention tools, documentation, human capital and the understanding of k-retention challenges. In addition to insights from these aspects, our study reveals two additional factors (project management and organizational culture) that influence ERP package k-retention and business process k-retention. Based on these findings, we develop an ERP k-retention (EKR) framework that can be utilized by SMEs which are considering implementing ERP systems, to facilitate knowledge retention during implementation.     

Why and when does inclusive leadership evoke employee negative feedback-seeking behavior?

Why and when do employees respond to inclusive leadership by actively seeking negative feedback from their leaders? Beyond the perspectives proposed in previous studies, we offer a new angle based on a social identity perspective and propose that inclusive leadership increases employees' negative feedback-seeking behavior (NFSB) by facilitating employees' organizational identification. We also theorize that employees' supervisor organizational embodiment (SOE) influences the extent to which employees identify with the organization, which in turn triggers their NFSB. The results from a three-wave survey study conducted in China showed that inclusive leadership fostered employees' organizational identification, thereby facilitating employees' NFSB, and that the effect of inclusive leadership was stronger when employees’ SOE was higher. Our findings provide implications in theory and practice.     

主导企业适应突破性技术变革的整合研究

突破性技术变革的频率正在不断加快,而主导企业在技术范式的转换过程中却经常遭遇绩效下滑甚至被新进入企业所替代.本研究认为,主导企业能否适应技术变革取决于三个因素的平衡和交互作用:技术投资、技术能力以及互补性资产,在考察技术变革所带来的竞争含义时强调综合考虑多个视角的重要性.此外,作者根据这些因素提供了三种应对机制:利用实物期权方法进行技术投资、利用自主事业单位开发新技术,以及利用互补性资产与突破性技术发起企业建立战略联盟.     

Leader political support: Reconsidering leader political behavior

Historically, organizational politics and political leader behavior have been framed and characterized negatively, as self-serving and counter-productive. However, scholars have noted that political acts can achieve positive ends, and have called for further discussions of positive forms of political leadership. Continuing in this recent stream of research on positive perspectives on organizational politics, a framework of leader political support is proposed, suggesting that the positive features of leader political behavior, and testable propositions are developed. The leader political support construct is defined and its antecedents are explicated utilizing a social capital perspective. Additionally, social exchange theory is used to explain the consequences of leader political support. Contributions to both leadership and organizational politics literatures and directions for future research are discussed.     

Measuring user attitudes in MIS research: a review

Management information system (MIS) user attitude measurement and research has been motivated by two distinct perspectives, termed the implementation perspective and the information perspective. A survey of the most significant work based on these perspectives is presented. The consensus of this work is that MIS attitudes are related to MIS use, broadly speaking. However, the usage-relevant components of user attitudes are as yet not well understood. More refined attitude concepts and measures are needed. One such concept, that of a user's channel disposition, is advanced as part of a suggested research direction.