Building cultural intelligence: insights from project management job advertisements

This paper examines how organisations that conduct worldwide recruitment of project management professionals can derive insight from the cultural preferences stated within project management job advertisements. Drawing on project management practitioner job advertisements placed by 2040 organisations across seven countries and seven industries, we employ Hofstede’s national cultural framework to categorise cultural preferences which the organisations persistently replicate in their specifications of desired candidate project management practitioner competency. To map global trends and national variations, data analysis is undertaking and utilising exploratory data analysis, Poisson regression and negative binomial regression are used. The paper finds that specific national cultural dimensions – ‘Collectivism’, ‘Uncertainty Avoidance’ and, to a lesser extent, ‘Power Distance’ – are the most salient cultural denominators for advertised project management positions, while this is not the case with ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Individualism’. The findings raise issues about which organisations should seek to become more culturally intelligent, and which relate to the adaptiveness of the cultural preferences that they articulate through their job advertisements, both to project tasks and to cultural contexts for projects.     

Fuzziness in Action: What Consequences Has the Linguistic Ambiguity of the Core Competence Concept for Organizational Usage?

Linguistic ambiguity is one of the most prominent characteristics of management fashions. Using the example of one of the most popular management concepts in the 1990s, the core competence approach, we analyse the consequences of linguistic ambiguity on the level of organizational usage. We pursue an in‐depth case study of a German corporation which can be seen as a ‘heavy adopter’ of the core competence concept. A central implication of our study is that the term ‘ambiguity’ itself has several meanings depending on the level of analysis. On a general level the managers interpreted the core competence concept relatively homogeneously. They simplified and generalized it to an organizational principle and perceived it as guiding action. At the same time, each manager defined his or her own set of core competences. Thus, underneath a seeming consensus, a large variety of practices may hide. This novel kind of ‘contextual ambiguity’ does not originate from the linguistic ambiguity of the management fashion but from the plurality of local contexts in which the concept is interpreted. The managers' pragmatic attitude to the core competence ‘principle’ contributed to the high contextual ambiguity and the – compared to the media discourse – high longevity of the fashion within the case company. Our findings urge management fashion scholars to pay more attention to the distributed and polyphonic character of organizations and the organizational nature of the ‘consumption’ of ambiguous management knowledge.     

Vulnerability and Agenda: Context and Process in Project Management

This paper explores how the project management role is conditioned by the context in which change is progressed. The argument draws on Pettigrew's (1985, 1987) contextual and processual view of change, a view which does not clarify the management implications of contextual variation. Using data from a two-stage research design combining diary and survey methods, four context dimensions are identified, concerning ‘interlocking’, ‘shifting sands’, ‘ownership’ and ‘senior management view’. For analytical purposes, two extreme contexts are characterized as exposing the project manager to high and low levels of ‘vulnerability’ respectively. Project management literature typically offers a rational-linear account of change, and concentrates on ‘content’ and ‘control’ agendas, concerning technical expertise on the one hand, and planning, budgeting and monitoring techniques on the other. Sociological analyses reveal the limitations of the rational-linear account, and focus on the political and cultural dimensions of the ‘process’ agenda. The data suggest how contextual variation affects the relative priority of these agendas. The management implications of these findings are explored, for project management selection, career progression, and the development of diagnostic skills and ‘agenda management’ strategies.     

Talent management as a management fashion in HRD: towards a research agenda

This paper addresses the effects of corporate change programmes on the emotions and ultimately the performance of the so-called ‘middle managers’ within these organizations. Drawing on empirical data from a recent case study in a large engineering company, the paper addresses the extent to which Hochschild's highly original writing on the commercialization of human feeling (1983) and the concept of emotional labour is applicable to managers in today's organizations. Emotional labour is defined as: ‘the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’ requiring one ‘to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’ (Hochschild 1983: 7). The conclusion reached is that emotional labour appears to be a growing but much ignored phenomenon in organizations today, which is worthy of attention and further research by the HRD community.     

‘Bureaucracy‐lite’ and Continuities in Managerial Work

This paper questions three frequently asserted, interrelated claims about developments in management: that centralized, regulated bureaucratic organizations characterized by hierarchy and rules are inevitably giving way to decentralized and empowered post‐bureaucratic organizations characterized by internal networks and an internal market; that, as a consequence, the traditional managerial role of command and control is being superseded by one of facilitation and coordination; and that, in turn, managerial work as routine administration of work processes is being supplanted by the ‘new managerial work’ of non‐routine leadership and entrepreneurship. It is argued that these claims often rest on caricatures of bureaucracy and network organization and are neither new nor well supported by evidence. Against these claims, the paper adduces case‐study evidence which shows that, despite claims about ‘decentralization’ and ‘empowerment’, organizational change may entail not a radical shift to network organization, but more limited change to a different form of bureaucracy in which hierarchy and rules have been retained but in an attenuated and sharper form –‘bureaucracy‐lite’. Consequently, managerial roles continue to be defined in terms of individual responsibility and vertical accountability for an organizational sub‐unit, and managerial work continues to be preoccupied with monitoring and maintaining work processes, routine direction and control of staff and processing information in order to deal with the ambiguities inherent in the dimensions of managerial ‘responsibility’.     

Materializing Strategy in Mundane Tools: the Key to Coupling Global Strategy and Local Strategy Practice?

While much of the literature on strategy and strategy as practice (SaP) focuses on traditional strategic tools, technologies and discursive practices of managers, this paper extends the understanding of strategic change implementation by proposing that mundane material tools, understood as text, translate global strategic discourse in ways that make sense to workers and orchestrate successful global strategy implementation at the local level. Based on a rich case study within one branch of a national bank, this paper demonstrates how a middle manager's materializing practices developed local strategy practice while simultaneously transforming work and producing strategic figures or indicators that satisfied senior management's global strategic change objectives. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) it advances the understanding of the multimodality of materiality by identifying the influence of three types of mundane tools produced locally by a middle manager as he performed his sense of the senior managers’ strategic discourse; (ii) it reveals how these three types of physical texts materialized the manager's sense of this discourse, facilitating frontline workers’ engagement and coupling materiality and orality in a coherent way that allowed workers to embody the company's global strategy in their ‘sayings and doings’; and (iii) it highlights the importance of managers’ ability to materialize a strategic discourse.     

Corporate planning in developing economies

The critical factor in industrial planning in developing economies is the effective implementation of national or regional plans at the individual industrial enterprise level. This article focuses upon the ‘state of the art’ of corporate planning in developing countries and, having considered the difficulties and opportunities for improvement, suggests guidelines for a constructive assistance programme based on the development of planning in terms of progressive modular steps which may be introduced one at a time depending upon individual needs and other local circumstances.     

The Effects of Organizational Culture, Structure and Market Expectations on Technological Innovation: A Hypothesis

This paper is chiefly concerned with the causes and technological effects of ‘short-term pressures’ on and in large firms in British manufacturing. ‘Short-term pressures’ (STP) are defined as factors acting upon (or within) an organization which tend to cause decision-makers (explicitly or implicitly): (a) to raise their time rate of discount; and/or (b) to foreshorten the time horizon beyond which future revenues are ignored altogether. Such pressures will tend to reduce the rate of investment (defined very broadly as present sacrifice of cash flow for future gain), and/or bias it towards ‘short-term’ projects. In the British context such pressures upon firms arise from the nature of the relationship with shareholders. (High interest rates and low profitability have similar effects but should be analysed separately.) STP can also be generated and/or transmitted within organizations. STP acting within an organization are likely to be associated with pressures on middle and lower management to take a narrow, ‘sectional’ view, avoiding efforts and expenditures whose benefits may go largely to other parts of the firm. The first section sets out a theoretical framework within which to predict the intensity of external STP, and uses this to assess their likely incidence. After defining and discussing the concept of culture in organizations, it is argued that culture dominates structure at higher levels, and the reverse at lower levels. The second section deals with internal STP, and shows how performance pressures on managers at various levels are determined by the interaction of structural and cultural factors. Structural factors considered include organizational configurations and methods of auditing and management accounting. Internal performance pressures may at various levels be quite different from the external pressures. The third section shows how, by contrast with economic rationality, STP may affect technological progress - distinguishing between process change, which under certain circumstances may actually be stimulated, and product change, which is likely to be seriously inhibited. (It is pointed out that the impact of any set of performance pressures must be evaluated by comparison with an alternative set, which may themselves not be ideal.) At each stage the analysis is differentiated to allow for the differing circumstances of the UK electronics, Pharmaceuticals and mechanical engineering industries, building up a hypothesis as to the differing incidence of STP among them. This hypothesis can account for the very different record of these UK industries in innovation.     

THE CONCEPT AND MEASUREMENT OF CENTRALITY–AN INFORMATION APPROACH

The complexity of interdependent structural systems greatly complicates the analysis of any single structure. This is particularly the case when a structure represents some behavioral process. For this reason it is necessary to devise measures which can differentiate qualitatively and quantitatively between structures as well as between subsets (or points) of a particular structure. For example, consider the authority structures of two different organizations. They exhibit similarities and differences which a behavioral analyst tries to identify and explain. Typically, both similarities and differences are compared by structural indices which, on the basis of past data and prior information, tend to reflect certain organizational traits. The purpose of this paper is to investigate one particularly important index—centrality. Centrality conveys the notion that points in a structure are not all ‘equal’. This ‘inequality’ vis-a-vis the structure creates a situation in which certain points will be more ‘central’ than others. In this paper we first identify the characteristics of centrality and observe how they may relate to behavioral research. We then develop a procedure for measuring centrality which is based on information theory.     

额外资源按需分配方法研究

文献Wei Quanling等^[1]的最后一段提出了这样一类额外资源分配问题：假设有一些额外的投入资源将要分配给全部或者部分决策单元,如果我们希望分配结果对于整个系统（该系统由全部决策单元组成）来说是最有益的,那么应当如何分配这些额外的投入资源?他们同时还指出系统中哪些决策单元能够获得额外的投入资源,这不仅取决于决策单元的效率,还需要考虑规模报酬。针对此类问题,本文提出一种额外资源按需分配方法：首先,综合决策单元的技术效率与其投影点的规模弹性构建发展曲线,并由决策单元的发展曲线获知其投入变动与产出变动的对应关系;然后,把额外资源分成若干等份,依次分配每一个等份的额外资源,每次分配使系统的总产出增加实现最大,直至分配完全部的额外资源,或者分配某一份额外资源不再带来任何的产出增加,分配就会停止;最后,把决策单元在每一次分配过程中获得的额外资源进行累加,得到这个决策单元最终的分配结果。全文的最后分别在"一个投入一个产出"和"两个投入一个产出"情况下给出两个具体的分配算例。分配结果表明,这种按需分配方法不会缩减任意一个决策单元当前占有的投入资源数量,并且还可以有效地在辨识出某种额外资源在规模上和结构上存在的冗余,从而有效地避免不必要的分配。     

Use of Redundant Industrial Buildings as Injections into the Cultural Sector in Norway

Prime aim is to examine the way the culture sector reuses industrial buildings to instigate cultural activities in the municipalities. The discussion of various actors’ motivation for engagement is based on results from a case study, supplemented with findings from a coarse-meshed telephone survey. At national level overarching political guidelines can be traced back to white papers concerning cultural policy, urban transformation and cultural heritage, and the municipalities’ cultural policies mirror these guidelines. What tends to decide if such initiatives are considered successful are local abilities to cross sectorial divisions and instigate cooperation between municipal planners, private entrepreneurs and NGOs.     

New organizational structures: skill implications for professionals

Many writers predict that emerging new organizational structures will displace the traditional hierarchical structures. This paper looks at the skill implications for ‘professionals’ as these changes take place. It presents data gathered from a series of structured group discussions conducted with managers and professionals in the UK retail financial services sector (banking, insurance and mortgage lending) to illustrate how changing structures are impacting on ‘professional’ skills and roles. Six key trends, identified in the group discussions, are examined in the light of models which predict the way ‘professionals’ will be managed over the next few years. These trends are illustrated by short case examples or vignettes.     

Can organizational change be planned and controlled? Evidence from Russian companies

This study explores limits of applicability of a planned change approach in Russian companies. The data on change management programmes in 59 Russian companies of various industries, regions and sizes was gathered with the help of questionnaires filled by management consultants. The study found that resulted changes often did not coincide with initial plans of change agents. Two groups of organizational elements were identified: ‘uncontrollable’ (those elements that changed outside of the planned change) and ‘unmanageable’ (those elements that did not change despite forming part of the planned change). The findings also indicate that the efficiency of the change programme was unaffected by whether the change programme plans were executed or not. The results suggest that the applicability of a planned change approach is dependent upon the organizational elements at which change interventions are targeted and that change content has to be incorporated into contingency models of change.     

Change of Thought: Findings on Planning for Shrinkage from a Regional Design Competition

Shrinkage or ‘no growth’ is expected to condition the long-term perspective of many Western cities and regions. Planning for shrinkage differs substantively from planning for growth and therefore calls for a change of thought in spatial planning. In our paper, we analyse how planning professionals responded to a ‘planning for shrinkage’ challenge in a regional design competition. We found that they fully adapted to the shrinking perspective, took a strategic approach, and promoted a leading role for local inhabitants. Collaboration with local inhabitants and entrepreneurs, creating new alliances, and timing emerge as key themes for planning professionals in planning for shrinkage.     

Is it Just Me? Exploring Perceptions of Organizational Culture Change

A review of the literature on organizational culture change suggests that the field might benefit from studies combining both etic (researcher) and emic (employee) perspectives to examine individuals’ views regarding how and why their culture has changed. This paper seeks to deepen researchers’ knowledge of how individuals perceive organizational culture change by undertaking a two‐part study within an organization that has undergone planned cultural change initiatives. More specifically survey (i.e. etic view) data and interview (i.e. emic view) data are used to explore: (1) factors associated with (a) whether an individual will perceive that culture change has occurred, and (b) whether they categorize this change as for the better, for the worse or one that could not be categorized using these two labels; and (2) individuals’ rationales for why the culture has changed. The findings are mixed regarding the extent to which they support or refute existing research on organizational culture change.     

Organizational Transformation and Top-Down Change: The Case of the NHS

This paper analyses the effects of government-sponsored attempts to change the way that the NHS, one of the largest employers in Europe, is managed. The theoretical issues raised relate to the concept of transformational change and attempts at public-sector restructuring, which set the context for the presentation of data. The empirical research, carried out over three years, examines the changes since the most recent reforms (the NHS and Community Care Act 1990).
The research considers the extent of organizational change which can be seen as the outcome of these reforms in relation to: a multiple and inter-related change agenda; the creation of new forms of organization; the creation of new roles; the reconfiguration of power relations; and the creation of a new culture, ideology and organizational meaning. These are presented as the key variables which could indicate whether transformational, rather than incremental, change has occurred. The focus of this analysis is at local board level.
This article concludes that earlier analyses of the limited success of administrative reform are no longer the case. Our analysis of the key variables suggests that what is occurring at least at local board level goes beyond incremental change and may represent the beginnings of an 'organizational transformation'. This contains unintended as well as intended elements as an unanticipated 'hybrid' form of management may be emerging.     

如何应用国家文化原型实现品牌的国际化传播——基于中国品牌海外社交媒体广告的多案例研究

本文基于中国品牌海外社交媒体广告的多案例研究,深入探讨了基于国家文化原型的品牌国际化传播策略,并检验了不同应用策略在不同情景下消费者反应的差异。研究表明:(1)国家文化原型资源可以根据文化层次和文化类属分为4种不同的组合方式,相应地,品牌文化原型应用策略也可分为工具性审美、差异化表现、目标消费者认同、全球共识意义获取四种类型;(2)东道国类型(文化距离近vs.远)、企业国际化发展阶段(初期vs.快速发展期)以及企业的传播诉求(产品vs.品牌)会对不同应用策略的传播效果产生影响。本研究不仅丰富了品牌国际化的研究成果,还可为新兴市场企业如何应用国家文化原型助力品牌的国际化传播提供指导和借鉴。     

Information technology and productivity: Myths and realities

In the absence of empirical research, media and government publicity have created false expectations and unnecessary anxieties about the effects of new technology. It is comparatively easy to show how information technology can produce productivity gains and job losses in specific areas. But it is not realistic to extrapolate ‘local’ effects to an organization as a whole, or to the economy. The argument of this paper is that it is necessary to consider the implications of technical change on three ‘levels of effect’—operating, organizational and strategic—in order to make a comprehensive assessment. Management, however, appear to concentrate on operating criteria, ignore the consequences of organizational decisions, and do not explore the strategic opportunities of the new technology. The potential strategic advantages may thus not be achieved.     

Aristotle's fallacy: A hypergame in the oil shipping business …

In this paper, an attempt is made to illustrate and validate some predictions of the ‘hypergame’ model of decision-making, a generalisation of the conventional game model as first described by von Neumann and Morgenstern. The hypergame concept, which can take players' differing perceptions, misperceptions and information conditions into account, is formally defined and two simple criteria of stability and choice are given. The core of the article consists of a case study involving decision-making under misperceptions. One result of the analysis is to show that decisions which at first sight appear ‘stupid’ and remain ‘irrational’ in a conventional game model, are indeed ‘rational’ if the players' perceptual limitations and their differing information conditions are considered. The conclusion is that the hypergame can be a useful extension of the traditional theory of games, and as such is one step on the way toward conceptually more complex and ‘realistic’ model building.     

Design of a resilient shock absorber for disrupted supply chain networks: a shock-dampening fortification framework for mitigating excursion events

This article interweaves the widely published empirical frameworks with a new paradigm proposing stochastic dynamic decision-making tools that could be employed for capturing the trade-offs among multiple and conflicting-in-nature criteria so as to provide a design of a resilient shock absorber (RSA) for disrupted supply chain network (SCN). Modern SCNs encounter ‘excursion events’ of different kinds mainly due to uncertain and turbulent markets, catastrophes, accidents, industrial disputes/strikes in organisations, terrorism and asymmetric information. An ‘excursion event’ is an unpredictable event that effectively shuts down or has a relatively large negative impact on the performance of at least one member of a system for a relatively long amount of time. In this article, design of an analytical framework has been conceptualised that allows an SCN to avoid propagating the ill effects of the ‘excursion events’ further and maintains the network at a desired equilibrium level. A broad analytical view of econophysics has been conceptualised using the definition of a ‘system’ from physics. An example derived from the 9/11 case has been delineated in order to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed design. The devised RSA facilitates the assessment of resiliency strategies for SCNs prone to excursion events that are characterised by low probability of occurrence and high impact. The shock-dampening fortification framework also enables practitioners to identify and assess quantitatively the islands of the excursion events in SCN.