Bridging the Relevance Gap: Aligning Stakeholders in the Future of Management Research

This report examines the relevance gap in management research. Its focus is the nature of knowledge created by research at the interface between business and academia in the context of major changes likely to affect the nature of demand for such knowledge. Management research has been accused of a lack of relevance to managerial practice and of too narrow a discipline base. The report examines the conditions giving rise to this criticism, in the UK and elsewhere, and identifies an important strategic need to increase the stakeholding of users in various aspects of the research and knowledge creation and dissemination process. The report concludes with recommendations concerning new forms of research partnership and research training that will address the relevance gap. However, bridging this gap does not only require changes in the academic mind-set. Managers and firms too need to rethink their involvement in the research process.     

Words Are Her Legacy: Remembering Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

Muriel Dimen is remembered as a writer who spoke first-person in a third-person world. She was not content with traditional scholarly narrative and turned instead to auto-theory experiments that blended theory, clinical case material, fiction, and memoir.     

Shame and guilt in men exposed to childhood sexual abuse: a qualitative investigation

This study examined the experiences of shame and guilt in adult males sexually abused as children. Seven participants attending a service for male sexual abuse completed measures of shame, guilt, dissociation, and childhood trauma history and subsequently participated in a focus group. All participants experienced childhood sexual abuse in the "severe" range and showed elevated scores for shame, guilt, and dissociation. Four superordinate themes with associated subordinate themes emerged: (a) self-as-shame (foundations of self-as-shame, fear of exposure, temporary antidote: connection), (b) pervasiveness and power of doubt and denial (from others, from self, consequences of incredulity), (c) uncontrollability (of problems after disclosure, of rage, of intrusions and emotional pain), and (d) dissociation. Results are discussed with reference to the existing literature and the emerging "self-as-shame" construct, which appeared to encapsulate participants' view of themselves.     

Drivers of land use change and household determinants of sustainability in smallholder farming systems of Eastern Uganda

Smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa have undergone changes in land use, productivity and sustainability. Understanding of the drivers that have led to changes in land use in these systems and factors that influence the systems’ sustainability is useful to guide appropriate targeting of intervention strategies for improvement. We studied low input Teso farming systems in eastern Uganda from 1960 to 2001 in a place-based analysis combined with a comparative analysis of similar low input systems in southern Mali. This study showed that policy-institutional factors next to population growth have driven land use changes in the Teso systems, and that nutrient balances of farm households are useful indicators to identify their sustainability. During the period of analysis, the fraction of land under cultivation increased from 46 to 78%, and communal grazing lands nearly completely disappeared. Cropping diversified over time; cassava overtook cotton and millet in importance, and rice emerged as an alternative cash crop. Impacts of political instability, such as the collapse of cotton marketing and land management institutions, of communal labour arrangements and aggravation of cattle rustling were linked to the changes. Crop productivity in the farming systems is poor and nutrient balances differed between farm types. Balances of N, P and K were all positive for larger farms (LF) that had more cattle and derived a larger proportion of their income from off-farm activities, whereas on the medium farms (MF), small farms with cattle (SF1) and without cattle (SF2) balances were mostly negative. Sustainability of the farming system is driven by livestock, crop production, labour and access to off-farm income. Building private public partnerships around market-oriented crops can be an entry point for encouraging investment in use of external nutrient inputs to boost productivity in such African farming systems. However, intervention strategies should recognise the diversity and heterogeneity between farms to ensure efficient use of these external inputs.     

The spillover effects of population aging, international capital flows, and welfare

This paper considers how a rise in old-age survival probability in a country with a higher old-age dependency ratio (the home country) influences the welfare of a country with a lower old-age dependency ratio (the foreign country). In a dynamically efficient steady-state equilibrium, we show that the old-age survival probability in the home country, when relatively low (high), has a positive (negative) effect on the welfare of the foreign country. We also show that the reform of a social security program in the home country may improve not only domestic welfare but also the welfare of the foreign country.     

Population aging, health care, and growth

This paper constructs a small open two-sector (health care and non-health care) overlapping generations model and investigates how changes in the demand for health care induced by population aging influence the economy’s employment structure and per capita income growth rate. We show that population aging induces a shift in labor from the non-health care sector to the health care sector and lowers the per capita income growth rate. This paper also investigates public policy for child care and demonstrates the existence of an intergenerational conflict between current and future generations concerning public policy on child care.     

Organizational Improvisation: What, When, How and Why

In this article, the authors review the growing body of literature on organizational improvisation in order to present an encompassing and systematic perspective on this concept. An integrative definition of its construct is presented together with a new way of measuring this phenomenon in organizational settings. The article further explores this construct by presenting its triggers, necessary conditions, influencing factors and major outcomes. The issues of improvisation's growing legitimization in the organizational arena for practitioners and researchers alike are addressed in order to argue for the need for and interest in a fuller development research on this concept.     

A Quiet Catharsis of Comprehension: A Poetic for Paul

Paul Rock is a leading UK interactionist, author of The Making of Symbolic Interactionism and a number of ethnographies on the UK criminal justice system. He was professor of sociology at the London School of Economics until his retirement in July 2008. At his retirement, Ken Plummer presented the following poem to him. The words are largely those of Paul himself, along with a few of his older intellectual companions (meaning mainly Dewey, James, and Mead). Thus this poetic is Paul's words reconstructed and reflected back to him.     

A mixture-based approach to robust analysis of generalised linear models

A method for robustness in linear models is to assume that there is a mixture of standard and outlier observations with a different error variance for each class. For generalised linear models (GLMs) the mixture model approach is more difficult as the error variance for many distributions has a fixed relationship to the mean. This model is extended to GLMs by changing the classes to one where the standard class is a standard GLM and the outlier class which is an overdispersed GLM achieved by including a random effect term in the linear predictor. The advantages of this method are it can be extended to any model with a linear predictor, and outlier observations can be easily identified. Using simulation the model is compared to an M-estimator, and found to have improved bias and coverage. The method is demonstrated on three examples.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Interstate Migration and Employer-to-Employer Transitions in the United States: New Evidence From Administrative Records Data</Emphasis>

Declines in migration across labor markets have prompted concerns that the U.S. economy is becoming less dynamic. In this study, we examine the relationship between residential migration and employer-to-employer transitions in the United States, using both survey and administrative records data. We first note strong disagreement between the Current Population Survey (CPS) and other migration statistics on the timing and severity of any decline in U.S. interstate migration. Despite these divergent patterns for overall residential migration, we find consistent evidence of a substantial decline in economic migration between 2000 and 2010. We find that composition and the returns to migration have limited ability to explain recent changes in interstate migration.