11 The Effects of Governments on Management and Organization

Abstract

We review and integrate existing research from organization theory, strategy, organizational behavior, economics, sociology and political science on the effects of governments on organization and management, with a focus on how governing ideology and government capability influence independent organizations’ forms, strategies, and their participants’ behavior. When brought together these works suggest significant research opportunities in the fields of management and organization, as well as new perspectives on public policy challenges. Several avenues of potentially profitable empirical research include more attention to the influence of government on corporate strategies, more research on the strategies of pursuing corruption and government capture for competitive advantage, the role of government in fostering innovation and the growth of entrepreneurial organizations, and extra‐organizational contextual effects on managerial and employee organizational behavior. Possible public policy implications are illustrated with an application to the role of organizations in national wealth generation and dispersion.     

Accounting elite and accounting policy making — The Swedish case

Based on the assumption that the accounting policy formation process increasingly recognizes the legitimacy of several interest groups, this paper describes standard setting in Sweden. The accounting elite is identified and the development of new norms is described in three cases. It is concluded that the more institutionalized the process the greater the responsibility for influential people to initiate and maintain a public debate. A producer attitude towards the annual report is the dominating one in Sweden with academics and business journalists showing a consumer orientation.     

Temperament and Destiny——The Contrast between Mr.Winterbourne and Mr.Darcy

Mr.Winterbourne in Henry James ’ novel Daisy Miller and Mr.Darcy in Jane Austen ’ s novel Pride and Prejudice are two heroes with great acknowledgements.Mr.Winterbourne is in admiration of Miss Daisy , while Mr.Darcy is in pursuit of Miss Elizabeth.One story ends up with sorrows and regrets while the other ends with joys and satisfaction.I would like to provide evidences to analyze how the male characters ’ action and thoughts affect the consequences.     

The Social Policy Response to COVID-19 – The Failure to Help Vulnerable Children and Elderly People

Public Organization Review - Norway’s handling of COVID-19 has been seen as a success. Vulnerable groups among young and elderly people, have however, not been part of this success. Their...     

The future of the bicycle —Its problems and its potentialities

In this article the author argues that the bicycle will undoubtedly be improved upon, but it is not likely to be supplanted. It will continue to provide the most energy-efficient short-distance form of individual ground transportation.Whether or not its share of the number of person-trips made in urban areas will increase dramatically depends partly on the improvements which are made to the vehicle, partly on the increasing costs and restraints on motor-vehicle use, but to a greater extent on the success with which planners solve the highway-intersection problem.     

The bandpass problem: combinatorial optimization and library of problems

A combinatorial optimization problem, called the Bandpass Problem, is introduced. Given a rectangular matrix A of binary elements {0,1} and a positive integer B called the Bandpass Number, a set of B consecutive non-zero elements in any column is called a Bandpass. No two bandpasses in the same column can have common rows. The Bandpass problem consists of finding an optimal permutation of rows of the matrix, which produces the maximum total number of bandpasses having the same given bandpass number in all columns. This combinatorial problem arises in considering the optimal packing of information flows on different wavelengths into groups to obtain the highest available cost reduction in design and operating the optical communication networks using wavelength division multiplexing technology. Integer programming models of two versions of the bandpass problems are developed. For a matrix A with three or more columns the Bandpass problem is proved to be NP-hard. For matrices with two or one column a polynomial algorithm solving the problem to optimality is presented. For the general case fast performing heuristic polynomial algorithms are presented, which provide near optimal solutions, acceptable for applications. High quality of the generated heuristic solutions has been confirmed in the extensive computational experiments. As an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with important applications the Bandpass problem offers a challenge for researchers to develop efficient computational solution methods. To encourage the further research a Library of Bandpass Problems has been developed. The Library is open to public and consists of 90 problems of different sizes (numbers of rows, columns and density of non-zero elements of matrix A and bandpass number B), half of them with known optimal solutions and the second half, without.     

Transformations and Legitimacy in Nonprofit Organizations—The Case of Amnesty International and the Brutalization Thesis

This paper looks at organizational change in voluntary nonprofit organizations. Their 'purposive' nature makes voluntary organizations difficult to change while their tendency to oligarchic control results in this change often being imposed from the top. Amnesty International's death penalty work demonstrates the complexity of organizational change, as well as the accountability for and the legitimacy of change in nonprofits. Legitimacy should not be equated with organizational strength, and will remain subject to shifting, contested social norms concerning standards of behavior.     

The Active Audience? Gurus,Management Ideas and Consumer Variability

This study draws on an active audience perspective to develop a better understanding of mass audiences' attraction towards popular management ideas. It focuses on audience members' own experiences and, in particular, what audience activities actually play a role in shaping mass attraction, and how the deployment of these activities may vary. Analysing 65 in‐depth interviews with management practitioners in their role as audience members of guru seminars, the authors identify different key consumption activities, and explain how individual management practitioners may shift in consumption orientation throughout the communication process. This paper argues that such a broader and more dynamic understanding of consumption activity is essential in understanding the success and impact of management ideas, and opens several fruitful research directions.     

The Politics of ‘Social Accountability’ in England and Germany: Democratic Control and Moral Imperatives

This article investigates how politicians in England and Germany approach social accountability during the introduction of markets in the national health care systems. It analyses the discourse among members of parliament during the law making process of the 2012 NHS Health Care Act in England and the 2011 Act for Financing of Statutory Health Insurance in Germany. Generally, the new social accountability reform agenda is attractive to policy makers as it foregrounds public engagement and bottom-up participation (Peters 2001). Social accountability refers to institutional practices that favour participatory and horizontal mechanisms that depart from traditional hierarchical Principal-Agent forms.     

The Wages of Sin? Illegal Drug Use and the Labour Market

We use data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) to analyse the relationship between illicit drug use and labour market outcomes for a sample of men and women aged 16–25. In using these data we highlight a serious design flaw in the BCS questionnaire structure that presents a serious barrier to statistical modelling of drug use at the individual level. We propose a simple way of overcoming this problem and proceed to estimate a model of occupational attainment jointly determined with unemployment and current drug use, conditional on past drug use. Separating the commonly abused drugs into a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ category, we find that past hard drug use has a significant positive association with current unemployment, but find no significant association between past hard or soft drug use and occupational attainment. We also find no significant association between current drug use and attainment, although we observe that current drug use is associated with current unemployment.     

Does self-efficacy matter for burnout and sickness absenteeism? The mediating role of demands and resources at the individual and team levels

In team-based organizations, team members may share similar experiences, feelings and, consequently, susceptibility to burnout. This study explores the burnout process beyond the individual level of analysis and integrates Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) with the Job Demands-Resources Model (JD-R), emphasizing the role of self-efficacy in shaping the meaning that people ascribe to situations. A multilevel structural equation model was tested in which it was predicted that work self-efficacy beliefs would be associated with burnout both directly and indirectly via job demands and job resources, and at both the individual and the team level. Moreover, it was posited that, at the team level, registered sickness absences are predicted by burnout. A sample of 5406 call centre operators, clustered in 186 teams working in the same large Italian company, filled out a questionnaire, whereas team absence rates were provided by the company's HR department. The findings largely supported the hypothesized model: at both levels, job demands and job resources partially mediated the relationship between self-efficacy and burnout. Moreover, at the team level, burnout predicted subsequent sickness absenteeism. In addition, individual-level burnout was primarily associated with job demands, whereas team-level burnout was primarily associated with a lack of team-level resources.     

What Do We Mean by Performativity in Organizational and Management Theory? The Uses and Abuses of Performativity

John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory‐building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors’ analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under‐uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors’ aim is to provoke a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.     

Japan's new industrial era—II. The new information and service industries

This is a second of a series of three articles on the Japanese economy and its future development. The mainstream of the new development will be the microelectronics technology and the progress of information and service-oriented industries. Although this new trend is unlikely to set up a momentum as powerful as that which led to the rapid growth in the two decades prior to 1973, it is a revolutionary force at all levels of economic and social activity.     

The interaction between stock prices and corporate investment: is Europe different?

I find limited evidence of firm learning from stock prices in Europe and uncover multifaceted complementarities between firm informational and operating environments in determining investment sensitivity to stock prices. Specifically, European firms seemingly do not shift away from their own (peer) stock prices even in instances in which their peers’ (own) stock prices become relatively more informative about firms’ fundamentals. This is consistent with European managers adopting more conservative strategies relative to their U.S.-based peers, and stock prices being less revealing in Europe than in the U.S. Furthermore, while a firm may attach equal weight to both its own stock prices and peer price innovations when peer firms are relatively smaller, investment responds more positively to peers’ price shocks than to that firm’s own stock prices when peers are relatively larger. Interestingly, investment sensitivity to peers’ stock prices decreases in peers’ market share, operating performance, and capital intensity. The decrease is accentuated when peer firms have more informative stock prices and are industry leaders or more capital intensive, thereby signaling perceived reduced growth opportunities. Broadly, these results imply that the specifics of the interaction between stock prices and firm behavior in the U.S. do not necessarily generalize to Europe. More important, these different learning patterns are partly attributable to differences in the amount of internal information, which in turn depends on country-level institutional infrastructures.     

Does valuing androgyny and femininity lead to a female advantage? The relationship between gender-role,transformational leadership and identification

The notion of ‘think manager–think male’ has been demonstrated in many studies. The current study examines whether leaders are perceived as more effective when they have ‘feminine’, ‘masculine’ or ‘androgynous’ characteristics, and how this relates to the leader's and followers' sex. Using carefully matched samples of 930 employees of 76 bank managers, we studied the relationship between managers' gender-role identity (perceived ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘androgyny’) and how this relates to leadership effectiveness in terms of transformational leadership and personal identification with the leader. Our findings show that among both male and female leaders, ‘androgyny’ was more strongly related to transformational leadership and followers' identification than ‘non-androgyny’, and that leaders' ‘femininity’ was more strongly related to leadership effectiveness than ‘masculinity’. Furthermore, the results show that women paid a higher penalty for not being perceived as ‘androgynous’ (mixing ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’), in comparison to men with regard to personal identification. When examining same- versus cross-sex relationships, we found that ‘non-androgynous’ male managers were rated higher by their male employees than by their female employees. Our findings suggest that women and men who are interested in being perceived as effective leaders may be well advised to blend ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ behaviors, and even more so when they are in situations of non-congruency (i.e., women in leadership roles and leading in cross-sex relationships). We discuss the implications of these findings for both theory and practice.