Evidence‐based Management in Practice: Opening up the Decision Process,Decision‐maker and Context

Evidence‐based management (EBM) has been subject to a number of persuasive critiques in recent years. Concerns have been raised that: EBM over‐privileges rationality as a basis for decision‐making; ‘scientific’ evidence is insufficient and incomplete as a basis for management practice; understanding of how EBM actually plays out in practice is limited; and, although ideas were originally taken from evidence‐based medicine, individual‐situated expertise has been forgotten in the transfer. To address these concerns, the authors adopted an approach of ‘opening up’ the decision process, the decision‐maker and the context (Langley et al. ( 1995 ). ‘Opening up decision making: the view from the black stool’, Organization Science, 6, pp. 260–279). The empirical investigation focuses on an EBM decision process involving an operations management problem in a hospital emergency department in Australia. Based on interview and archival research, it describes how an EBM decision process was enacted by a physician manager. It identifies the role of ‘fit’ between the decision‐maker and the organizational context in enabling an evidence‐based process and develops insights for EBM theory and practice.     

Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the Advanced Institute of Management Research and its Elite

In 2002, the UK government launched the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a major initiative intended to raise the quality of research in business schools. Rather than offering research grants in open competition, AIM deliberately funded a select few leading lights in management. Insufficient allowance was made for the Research Assessment Exercise, which measured research excellence in terms of papers published in top journals. The AIM's elite exploited its existing publishing advantage, and AIM provided further resources to aid their efforts. The AIM recruited willing acolytes to work with its elite in fashioning the sort of papers required by the top journals of management – positive papers, consensual and endlessly citable. Analysis of the publishing patterns of AIM senior fellows reveals research cliques and publication silos rather than a network organization. Much as the elite saw its AIM funding as recognition of its own excellence, so AIM itself came to be seen as acknowledgement of the excellence of management research as a whole. That AIM existed to raise management research from intellectual poverty was forgotten. The AIM was wound up in 2012, having spent £30 million, most of it on the subject's elite. The problems that beset management research remain.     

Creating a Consensus: Psychologists, the Supreme Court, and School Desegregation, 1952–1955

SPSSI psychologists' involvement in the early civil rights movement in the postwar United States was epitomized by their involvement in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. This article examines how social scientists sought to maintain the persona of objective, scientific expert when asked to prepare briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court for the Brown case. The social scientists believed that only by collapsing what they saw as an artificial distinction between objectivity and advocacy could the social scientist become a social activist. This article is based on extensive research in numerous archives, including the papers of Gordon W. Allport, Kenneth B. Clark, Stuart W. Cook, David Krech, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Theodore M. Newcomb, Robert Redfield, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.     

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY IN THE SHADOW OF CONFLICT

Appropriation possibilities significantly alter economic fundamentals in a production and exchange economy. This is the primary lesson of our model, which combines Ricardian trade and the potential for predator/prey behavior. The model shows how conflict can be subdued by mutual gains from trade, but at a resource cost that modifies the exchange itself. On the other hand, it identifies conditions wherein appropriation incentives are so strong that specialized production and trade are precluded altogether. The model also reveals a new way to think about and measure the gains from trade. ( JEL C72, D51, D74, F10)     

UNIFORM TWO-PART TARIFFS AND BELOW MARGINAL COST PRICES: DISNEYLAND REVISITED

This paper completely characterizes the demand and cost parameters which induce a constant cost monopolist charging a uniform two-part tariff to choose a marginal price less than marginal cost when selling to two types of consumers with different linear demands. It also provides a quantitative assessment of the potential significance of such pricing. Pricing below marginal cost maximizes profits in large regions of the model parameter space, contrary to widely held beliefs. If fixed costs are zero, pricing below marginal cost can increase profits by a factor of √2, although for most parameters the profit increase is much smaller. ( JEL D42, L11)     

Competence and Competitive Advantage: Towards a Dynamic Model

Over the last ten years the concept of ‘competence’ has emerged as a central concept for competitive strategy. Several rich theoretical streams have contributed an extensive array of frameworks, definitions and papers using the concept. There is now a need to integrate these many contributions. Indeed, some of the frustration expressed recently by academics may be due to the large volume of conversation and the low level of integration. A concept that is considered so useful that many writers have incorporated it in their work will be of little value if it takes on different meanings for every use. If competence is to be used to explain relationships among variables and to build richer understandings of the roots of competitive advantage, then the field needs to engage in a serious conversation that attempts to focus this concept. Competence needs to be understood in a way that is faithful to its theoretical roots, allows the multiple dimensions that underpin competitive advantage to be meaningfully integrated and is specific enough that meaningful differences can emerge when used as a variable in empirical research. This paper seeks to begin a conversation toward that end by presenting a conceptualization that meets all of these requirements. The paper builds its conceptualization around satisfying the elements of a dynamic model of the relationship between competence and competitive advantage.     

Linear Aggregation of SSB Utility Functionals

A necessary and sufficient condition for linear aggregation of SSB utility functionals is presented. Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem for von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions is shown to be a corollary to this result. Two generalizations of Fishburn and Gehrlein's conditional linear aggregation theorem for SSB utility functionals are also established.     

Postmodernism, philosophy and management: concepts and controversies

The paper offers a (partial) review of the philosophy of postmodernism as it applies to social science in general and management and organization theory in particular. Initially, some of the main analytical perspectives of postmodernism and post-structuralism are explored, notably those relating to epistemology and ethno-industrial change. Subsequently, we review concepts which lie at the heart of the 'postmodern mood' in social philosophy and sociology; for example, representation, reflexivity, deconstruction and decentring. In so doing, we take reference to the works of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard amongst others Finally, this philosophical assessment review forms the basis for an analysis of postmodernism as an emerging paradigm of management and organization theory. The works of key postmodernist writers in management and organization studies are reviewed and case examples of postmodern research presented.     

THE BOYS IN BLUE AND THE BAD BLUE BOYS: A CASE STUDY OF INTERACTIVE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE POLICE AND ETHNIC YOUTH IN WESTERN SYDNEY

The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with a group of young men known collectively as the Bad Blue Boys (BBB)¹. These young men use the supporting of a soccer team (Sydney United in the national league) as a means of parading nationalistic allegiance to their parent's homeland, Croatia. Given the history of crowd conflict at Australian soccer matches and the current trends within soccer officialdom to move the sport away from its traditional affiliation with ethnic communities, it is inevitable that the BBB have come into confrontation with agents of social authority, such as the police, during an afternoon at the football. The participant observation aspect of the research is used to discuss the interaction between the police and the BBB at soccer matches, while interviews with members of the BBB are recounted to reveal group attitudes held about the police. The paper is written to articulate with other academic contributions which have investigated the relationship between youth from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) and the police in contemporary Australian urban contexts. A leading contributor to such studies, Janet Chan, has commented, ‘Australian research specifically on police-ethnic youth relations [paints] a negative portrait’ (Chan 1994, p. 176). The portrait painted by the present study is intended for comparison with such research. At the outset it must be stressed that the findings are peculiar to the study and that no great claim is made for extrapolation. However, this is not to say that the study does not reflect trends in relations between NESB youth and police in Australian cities. On the contrary, a conclusion will be drawn which argues that ethnographic studies of particular ethnic youth groupings and subcultures facilitate a social mapping of police youth relations.