Breaking the glass ceiling

The glass ceiling is a form of organizational bias and discrimination that prevents qualified professionals from achieving positions of top governance and leadership. This article examines glass ceiling barriers that keep physicians from the upper reaches of management. While these factors apply mainly to women and minority physicians in academia, and are attributable to sexual harassment and discrimination, physicians as a class are frequently denied executive management positions. Such denial results from inadequate preparation for a career in health care administration. Important issues in the professional development of physician executives include mentoring, training and education, administrative experience, and cultural and personality factors. All of those must be considered when making the transition from medicine to management.     

薛伟成:低迷突围!

打出"品牌矩阵、渠道挖潜、电商探索"组合拳2012年,众多家纺企业和其他零售行业一样,正直面消费者信心不足的困境。根据全国商业信息中心截至2月份的统计,全国50家重点大型零售企业零售额同比下降2.78%,自2011年1月以来首次出现同比负增长。"这轮危机带来的压力,超过2008年。"罗莱家纺股份有限公司董事长薛伟成并没有掩饰自己的忧虑。不过,他认为这也是行业竞跑或者洗牌的最好时机。根据2011年财报,罗莱家纺以23.8亿元的营业收入和24.18%的净资产收益率,继续保持其2005年以来的行业老大地位。为此,薛伟成提出,要带领罗莱在2016年进入百亿俱乐部。     

Breaking the trance

The father of hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson, insisted that trance was a fairly common state for individuals, one that we drop into many times a day without any help at all--not at all the sensational image we think of with the magician hypnotizing the audience volunteer, or the psychiatrist the patient. Trances have a number of things in common--they: (1) are an altered state of consciousness; (2) feel autonomous; (3) come packaged with any of a number of "Deep Trance Phenomena"; (4) tend to repeat; (5) are universal. Organizations have trances, too. They have autonomous states of mind, ways of thinking that seem to come from nowhere, that seem impossible to change. They have automatic behaviors--ways of meeting, building of bureaucratic structures, interactions between departments. If organizations had knees, we might call them "knee-jerk reactions." Or communal habits. Or organizational trances. If the trance is a harmful one, how can you loosen its grip? By building up parallel realities.     

Breaking away

While life as hospital employees was comfortable, the lure of independence won out for these two emergency department physicians. Breaking away to develop a new company was not easy, but it's paid off for the entrepreneurs of the Capital Region Emergency Medicine, P.C. Developing an emergency medicine business meant learning all aspects of business: billing services, evaluating legal services, raising capital, and becoming employers. The advantage has been an ability to use profits to improve the moral of staff, an increase in salary, and an overall sense of satisfaction.     

Breaking the cycle of fear

Two approaches to eradicating pervasive and chronic fear include viewing mistakes and errors as informative rather than cause for personal evaluation, and improving people's skills for confronting and resolving these crucial conversations.     

冲破干部工作中的关系网

干部提拔靠什么?你如果回答说靠自身优良的素质、靠出色的政绩、靠组织上严格而科学的考核、靠群众公认,那么相信相当多的提问者都会报之以善意而又不乏嘲讽的一笑.因为在他们看来,你回答得固然不错,但答出的只是显规则,却没答出潜规则--关系,而对是否能够提拔,起关键甚至决定作用的却正是这种潜规则,所以你就显得太嫩.随后,也许有人还会半是卖弄、半是无奈地告诉你一些升官秘诀:年龄是个宝,文凭不可少,政绩巧装点,关系最重要.     

周海江：破“刘易斯拐点”

从金融危机脱逃出来的服装企业，未必能躲过这轮通货膨胀。红豆集团总裁周海江看到了严峻的形势。     

Breaking the outsourcing path: Backsourcing process and outsourcing lock-in

The objective of this paper is to develop research on backsourcing, which consists in recalling outsourced activities back in-house. We focus on the processes that firms follow to backsource these activities, particularly when they are locked into outsourcing. We refer to path dependence and path creation concepts to conduct this research. Using a case study methodology, we analyze the process related to the backsourcing of information technology activities in a telecommunications company. This paper highlights the negative effects of the need to control outsourced activities as it maintains outsourcing lock-in. Organizational crises and the perception of backsourcing as a success are two elements that enable significant mindful deviations from outsourcing practices and the development of a backsourcing path. The decision to backsource and its implementation can be facilitated by past successful integration experiences, internal productive capabilities, and capabilities to control activities. Changes in power relations within the firm can sustain the development of a backsourcing path. Our research contributes to research on organizational path breaking by studying the backsourcing process as an outsourcing path breaker. This paper complements studies on organizational practices such as outsourcing and backsourcing and their interplay.     

Breaking the boardroom gender barrier: the human capital of female corporate directors

Although there is a paucity of female corporate directors in Canada, women are slowly managing to break the gender barrier of all-male boards of directors. Using resource dependency theory a model is developed that identifies the human capital characteristics that contribute to a woman being appointed to an all-male board. The model is tested on a sample of 193 Canadian firms that appointed women to their boards of directors between 1996 and 2004. The results show that women who are appointed to all-male boards have specialized knowledge skills; either they have firm-specific knowledge as insiders, or they are support specialists with a specific financial or legal expertise.     

正确处理资格要求与破格使用的关系

在选拔任用领导干部时,我们往往会要求领导干部有一定的资格、资历,要经过一定台阶的锻炼,因为只有这样,领导干部对基层和全局工作才可能有一定的掌控并具备相应的领导能力.《干部任用条例》对干部的提拔任职资格作了七项原则规定,同时又指出,特别优秀的年轻干部或者工作特殊需要的,可以破格提拔.那么,在选拔任用干部时,如何正确处理资格要求和破格使用的关系呢?     

Breaking the Ties That Bind: From Corporate Sustainability to Socially Sustainable Systems

Although the recent push toward sustainability is certainly generally a positive development in business and society, we can see many problems in the execution of the theory of sustainability. Where the triple bottom line calls on companies to weigh effects on stakeholders and the environment alongside profit, in practice in many cases, sustainability has been perverted to represent sustainable profits. In these cases, environmental impact and effects on people are only important insofar as they positively contribute to a firm‘s future profits. It is not only practitioners who have often espoused this misappropriated view of sustainability but also academics have lent credibility to this view. In this work, we start by criticizing the often espoused current view of sustainability and remind academics of their responsibility to adapt a more critical view of this narrow focus. We provide examples that show how the current system of capitalism has resulted in outcomes for people and the environment that are patently unacceptable. Reasons are given as to why there is much hesitation to change the status quo. We then call on academics to reexamine what the role of businesses should be within society, what obligations business and corporations should have in society, and how we can encourage meaningful change that results in a better world for future generations.     

Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Public Involvement in the Immigration Plan for the Nanji Islands, China

A centralized political context such as China provides a harsh environment for public involvement program that intends to share decision-making power with the public, however, there are still learning opportunities that can survive and prepare the public for a meaningful participation in the future. This article illustrates this point by designing a public involvement program that is implementable and educational in Nanji Islands, China. The public involvement program is designed to solve conflicts and tension regarding to an immigration plan between the public and local government and organized by a third party. It includes information sharing, public representatives election, and negotiation meeting between public representatives and governmental officials. The six-dimension framework from Alterman’s classic work is employed to test its feasibility within the local context.

Breaking the routines: Entrepreneurial orientation,strategic learning,firm size,and age

Drawing upon prior research suggesting inertia prevents organizations from learning, we suggest that the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and strategic learning (SL) is not as straightforward and linear as has been suggested. The size and age of an organization, considered indicators of inertia, are important factors affecting how EO contributes to the components of SL. Data from 182 software companies confirm the non-linear relationships between EO and the dissemination, interpretation, and implementation components of SL. The results also indicate that the U-shaped association between EO and specific components of SL is more pronounced for larger and established companies than for younger and smaller ones. These findings depart from previous work based on strategic learning from mistakes, and offer a specific understanding of the relationship between EO and the four distinct components of SL. These results suggest that companies should opt to facilitate the individual components of SL as they are affected differently depending on the level of EO, and the age and size of the organization.     

Breaking Carbon Lock-In: Path Dependencies in Large-Scale Transportation Infrastructure Projects

The central focus of this paper is to highlight the ways in which path dependencies and increasing returns (network effects) serve to reinforce carbon lock-in in large-scale road transportation infrastructure projects. Breaking carbon lock-in requires drastic changes in the way we plan future transportation infrastructure projects, and documentary evidence presented here from the metropolitan regions of Copenhagen, Denmark and Portland, USA, indicate that there may be a discontinuity in the system of automobility (Urry, 2004), thereby increasing the likelihood that such drastic measures may in fact be successfully realized.     

Code Breaking: How Entrepreneurs Exploit Cultural Logics to Generate Institutional Change

If institutions are durable, how do they change from within and from without? We build on the emerging synthesis of social movement theory and institutional theory and articulate how institutional entrepreneurs from within and without deploy pre-existing cultural logics to push forward their institutional projects. We develop propositions, which show how the success of these framing activities is contingent on political opportunity, and illustrate them with a wide range of extreme cases.     

Financial Market Globalization,Symmetry‐Breaking,and Endogenous Inequality of Nations

This paper investigates the effects of financial market globalization on the inequality of nations. The world economy consists of inherently identical countries, which differ only in their levels of capital stock. Each country is represented by the standard overlapping generations model, modified only to incorporate credit market imperfection. An integration of financial markets affects the set of stable steady states, as it changes the balance between the equalizing force of the diminishing returns technology and the unequalizing force of the wealth‐dependent borrowing constraint. The model is tractable enough to allow for a complete characterization of the stable steady states. In the absence of the international financial market, the world economy has a unique steady state, which is symmetric and stable. In the presence of the international financial market, symmetry‐breaking occurs under some conditions. That is, the symmetric steady state loses its stability and stable asymmetric steady states come to exist. In the stable asymmetric steady states, the world economy is endogenously divided into the rich and poor countries; the borrowing constraints are binding in the poor but not in the rich; the world output is smaller, the rich are richer and the poor are poorer in any of the stable asymmetric steady states than in the (unstable) symmetric steady state.