The Consolations of Organization Theory

The call for greater relevance in management research leads us to examine the remedies offered by organization theory to organizational problems. In contrast to Starkey and Madan (2001), we argue that research engagement with other academic disciplines helps produce broadly useful knowledge. Installing practitioners in central places in the research process may focus research on short-run rather than deep-seated processes. We illustrate the relevance of organization theory through two examples of how apparently esoteric knowledge (produced through cross-disciplinary collaboration) can have surprising application. First we show how the social network perspective proved useful in rescuing a manager from the perils of unpopularity. Second, we show how deconstruction can uncover the institutionalized routines that disempower managers and workers. Neither the management training centers nor the web-based learning initiatives admired by Starkey and Madan are likely to deliver insights that address deep-seated processes of change within society. Collaboration with academics across the university can further our goals of research relevant to practitioners.     

Reducing overclaiming in needs assessment studies. An experimental comparison.

A randomized experiment investigated the effect of various instructional sets on reducing agency awareness overclaiming, that is, claiming knowledge of fictitious agencies. As predicted, respondents who were warned that the list contained fake agencies exhibited less agency awareness overclaiming than respondents who were not warned. However, providing respondents a memory retrieval strategy had no effect on agency awareness overclaiming. A multivariate model, which included demographic variables, response style variables, and knowledge variables, explained 40% of the variance of agency awareness overclaiming.     

全球环境管治改革:争论与进展

产生于1972年斯德哥尔摩人类环境会议的主要组织决定就是创建联合国环境规划署,其职能是在环境全球管治中协调联合国相关机构的环境活动并担当新政策创议的发动者。自那时以来,国际社会已经在环境全球政策(以及最近在可持续发展政策)方面付出了巨大努力,并创建了大量的条约、组织和机制。从总体上说,进展是积极性的,并日益指向一种不断扩展着的全球环境管治体系。但同样显而易见的是,尽管全球环境管治体系的规模和资金都在迅速扩大,但它在实现其实质性改善全球环境、走向可持续发展甚或扭转环境恶化趋势等目标方面并不是真正有效的,甚至可以说,恰恰是全球环境管治体系的演进本身带来了难以应付的制度性挑战。正因为如此,近年来一种渐趋一致的共识是,我们必须充分考虑如何改革这一现存体系,而且关于全球环境管治改革的讨论必须超越联合国环境署本身的改革,以便构建一种全新的体系,其中不同行为体能够更加高效和有效地相互作用,从而服务于环境保护与可持续发展的最终目标。     

A configurational approach to transnational families: Who and where is one's family in the case of mobile older adults?

This article introduces a novel transnational family configuration (TNFC) approach to study the diversity of family forms across kinship and geographical boundaries. Integrating theoretical insights from family sociology and transnational family research, it examines contemporary families as personal networks that encompass both subjectively identified and potentially transnationally dispersed kin and non-kin members. Drawing on original survey data and in-depth interviews with adults aged 55+ living in Switzerland, it compares migrants’ and non-migrants’ personal family networks. The results indicate that these networks are both diverse and transnational. Although there is a strong correlation between transnationality and migration background, other life-course factors also contribute to the development of transnational family networks beyond the scope of migrant ‘exceptionalism’. By advocating the adoption of a TNFC approach to the study of contemporary families, in diverse population groups and various cultural contexts, this study paves the way for future research in this area.     

Eastern European immigrants in the United States: A socio-demographic profile

Immigration to the United States has experienced a phenomenal increase in the last decades. Following the dissolution of the “Iron Curtain” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Eastern Europeans have been free to emigrate. Since then, there has been an increase in their numbers in the U.S. This study is an analysis of the socio-demographic profile characterizing the immigration from Eastern Europe. It examines income levels and the poverty status for Eastern European immigrants (at the individual and family levels). The study also examines educational attainment and language proficiency. The findings show that, generally, the educational attainment of people coming form Eastern European (e.g., Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia) countries is high compared to those coming from other region (e.g., Mexico). The results also indicate that while some immigrants from Eastern Europe have relative low levels of poverty (e.g., Slovenia), the majority of them are confronted with high levels of economic strain.     

Distributed algorithms for barrier coverage via sensor rotation in wireless sensor networks

When deploying sensors to monitor boundaries of battlefields or country borders, sensors are usually dispersed from an aircraft following a predetermined path. In such scenarios sensing gaps are usually unavoidable. We consider a wireless sensor network consisting of directional sensors deployed using the line-based sensor deployment model. In this paper we propose distributed algorithms for weak and strong barrier coverage that allow sensors to determine their orientation such that the total number of gaps is minimized. We use simulations to analyze the performance of our algorithms and to compare them with related works.     

The Crafting of Community: Recoupling Discourses of Management and Womanhood

The construction of organizations around images of masculinity makes the position of ‘women managers’ a problematic one which calls for ‘remedial work’ (Gherardi 1995). Women managers have sought to reconcile their dualistic positions by deploying various individual and collective coping strategies typically articulated within the boundaries of their organizations. In contrast, we research a group of senior women from a British city in the Midlands who attempt to renegotiate their conflicting identities as ‘female’ and ‘senior managers’ by creating a collective forum outside their organizations. Through the construction of a ‘learning set’, they created a space where members could explore their terms of participation, as women and as managers, in their respective work organizations and in the local community. This space was articulated implicitly and explicitly around values typically associated with ‘community’ (e.g. sharing, support, trust, loyalty), a controversial concept in feminist politics. The article documents the (fragile and contested) processes by which these women mobilize the imagery of community in order to create a safe space where ‘remedial work’ could be performed. The conclusion stresses the ambivalent effects of the learning set in both reproducing and transgressing gendered positions.     

The Conventions of Management Research and their Relevance to Management Practice

This paper recognizes the failure of management research to communicate with practitioners, and speculates over the reasons why this may be the case. It is possible that the researchers’ interests may not always coincide with management practitioners’; however, even when such interests are congruent, it seems that relatively little management research is published in practitioner journals. We suggest that this is because academic research is written in a style that tends to alienate most practitioners. This paper isolates the stylistic conventions associated with research targeted to academics (typically published in academic journals) and research targeted to practitioners (typically published in practitioner‐oriented journals). Such stylistic differences are illustrated through a study of organizational change whose findings have been published in both academic and practitioner format, namely in the Administrative Science Quarterly and the Harvard Business Review. We suggest that the gap between these two types of research could be narrowed through processes of translation (i.e. academic jargon could be translated in practitioner language). In addition we might consider greater use of Mode 2 research over Mode 1 research (academic). Mode 2 research presupposes that teams of academics and practitioners assemble to define the research problem and methodology in terms appropriate to a particular context and in a way that accounts for all existing interests so that translation processes are seamless. However, Mode 2 creates its own gap in that the knowledge is more contextual and may not reach a wide audience.