Organizational Transparency and Sense-Making: The Case of Northern Rock

Organizational transparency is associated with mutual understanding and consensus between the organization and its constituents, but is typically defined as information disclosure. Such definitions pose the risk of simplification and provide incomplete understandings of the transparency phenomenon. Additionally, research rarely focuses on how transparency is translated within crisis situations. This article presents a sense-making and discourse analysis perspective of transparency. We use the case of the British bank Northern Rock to show how this bank and its stakeholders enacted transparency in a critical moment, and to demonstrate how different zones of meaning emerged among the players involved.     

Crawling Predicts Infants’ Understanding of Agents’ Navigation of Obstacles

We investigated whether crawling versus noncrawling infants interpret an agent's movements around an obstacle as goal‐directed. Infants (6–9 months) were habituated to a self‐propelled circle jumping over an obstacle to reach a goal. When the obstacle was removed, infants who crawled (n = 13) showed longer looking time to the familiar but now nonrational jumping path versus a novel but rational straight‐line path. Noncrawlers (n = 17) did not discriminate. Looking preference was independent of age and speed of habituation. These findings support the claim that infants’ processing of agency emerges early and applies to all agents, but stress the role of experience in the development of action interpretation.     

The War of the Woods: Facilitators and Impediments of Organizational Learning Processes

This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi–level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action–based learning processes: ‘attending’ and ‘experimenting’. We introduce the concept of a ‘legitimacy trap’ to describe an organization’s over–reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feedforward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.     

Measuring employment vulnerability in Europe

Two of the most notable trends in labour markets in Europe are the rise in the number of atypical job contracts (e.g. fixed‐term contracts and temporary work) and the increase in job turnover. The concept of “employment vulnerability” can be used to describe these trends, which weaken the employer–employee relationship. In this article, the authors measure this employment vulnerability, for individual European countries, by creating two indices – an “employer‐related vulnerability index” and a “job‐related vulnerability index” – which are then aggregated to form an overall employment vulnerability index.     

EVALUATING A BILINGUAL EDUCATION PROGRAM IN SPAIN: THE IMPACT BEYOND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING

Bilingual education programs, which consist of doing a substantial part of the instruction in a language different from the native language of the students, exist in several countries like the United States, India, and Spain. While the economic benefits of knowing a second language are well established, the potential effects over the learning of other subjects have received much less attention. We evaluate a program that introduced bilingual education (in English and Spanish) in primary education in a group of public schools of the Madrid region in 2004. Under this program, students not only study English as a foreign language but also some other subjects (at least Science, History, and Geography) are taught in English. In order to evaluate the program, a standardized test for all sixth grade students in Madrid on the skills considered “indispensable” at that age is our measure of the outcome of primary education. Our results indicate that there is a clearly negative effect on the exam results for the subject taught in English, for children whose parents have less than upper secondary education. This negative effect is a composite of two phenomena: the effect of the program on the student's knowledge of the subject and a reflection of the student ability to do the test in their native language when English is the medium of instruction. Although we are not able to separate quantitatively these two effects, the composite effect has a relevant interest, because the results for exams taken in Spanish are the measures that determine academic progression in the Spanish system. In contrast with the previous result, there is no significant effect for anyone on mathematical and reading skills, which were taught in Spanish. (JEL H40, I21, I28)     

THE HOME MARKET EFFECT IN INTERNATIONAL ARMS TRADE

I show that military spending contributes to international arms proliferation through a push effect: large demand encourages production growth in the domestic market if transport costs are non‐negligible. Under increasing returns to scale, the country can then supply weapons on the global market at low prices. This is a manifestation of the home market effect (HME), which states that countries with higher demand for a differentiated good will be net exporters of that good. I construct a monopolistic competition model of international trade that accounts for differences in demand across countries, and test its predictions using post‐Cold War data. (JEL F1, H5, R1)     

The role of absorptive capacity and innovation strategy in the design of industry 4.0 business Models - A comparison between SMEs and large enterprises

Technological innovations often lead to redesigns in the business models of established companies, requiring them to incorporate new external knowledge into internal activities. Against this background, this study integrates the concepts of business model design, absorptive capacity, and innovation strategy into a novel research model, which analyzes the redesign of established business models in response to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Industry 4.0, also known as the Industrial Internet of Things, constitutes a contemporary research context that is highly relevant for corporate practice but scarcely regarded in management literature until now. The article contains an analysis of data from 221 German industrial enterprises, conducted through structural equation modeling, with separate data for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises. First, the results indicate that the acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation of knowledge from the environment enable companies to engage in both exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies. Furthermore, the paper includes an evaluation of the role of exploratory and exploitative innovation strategies that reflects in efficiency-centered and novelty-centered business model designs. The distinct characteristics differentiating SMEs from large enterprises are also explained. The implications of absorptive capacity on innovation strategies, which influence the redesign of extant business models, are discussed from a research and managerial perspective.     

Pathways to reintegration in Senegal and Nigeria promoted by Italian Assisted Voluntary Return programmes

This article presents the main findings of a research study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of pathways to reintegration for citizens repatriated from Italy to Senegal and Nigeria through Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programmes. Based on the scientific debate on the subject, the article begins by offering an in-depth exploration of the issue of whether or not AVRR is truly voluntary, as well as the meaning of the term ‘reintegration’. It then illustrates the Italian AVRR system before presenting the methodology and results of the research carried out. In particular, the aim is to identify and analyse the main factors upon which the result of the reintegration of citizens who have used AVRR programmes depends, perhaps most notably the type of reception given to the returnee by friends and relatives who remained in their home country.