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The Seventies have experienced a proliferation of citizen, city, state, national and international groups aiming at designing alternative futures for a better society. With few exceptions these groups have neglected to incorporate into their designs the private corporation as an important determinant of these futures. In this paper we provide a conceptual framework which identifies the role of the private corporation as an indispensable agent in future developments. The framework discards the contemporary form of a corporation and proposes a new organic firm.

This paper attempts to present a general theory to explain evaluation and development of management practices in various social systems, organizations, cultures and countries. This theory proposes that there are five stages and levels of sophistication in management. It is also possible to link management‐level in an organization and the type of leadership that goes with it. At higher management levels, more systemic and strategic management is required, also as evidenced in recent international studies by Jaques. Management in developing countries can be enhanced by understanding these stages and levels advanced in international management and administration references.

It has become fashionable nowadays for economists, planners, forecasters and corporate executives to warn their organizations that they must place their decisions within the context of the total environment. Many managers ask, “What is the external business environment?”, “How does one go about analyzing it?” This article addresses both of these questions.

The process by which organisations respond to changes in their environment is a particularly complex one, involving considerations of resource availability, strategy formulation, organisational structure and culture, power and information availability. In considering the interdependencies between these variables, it is suggested that interactions between environment, strategy and structure affect the distribution of power within the organisation, and that power is used to affect the distribution of resources. The advent of a market intelligence report which forecasts market adversity provides an occasion when the organisation can select from among a number of possible responses. A model of the selection process by which responses to market adversity are chosen is developed, in which it is suggested that the distribution of resources within the organisation plays a critical role. The model is a dynamic one, since the response selected is likely to re‐distribute resources within the organisation. If executives are viewed as competing against each other for access to resources, the possibility arises that an executive may deliberately bias the market signal to promote a response more favourable to his/her own relative position. Other sources of bias may also exist, all of which complicate the process of response selection. It is however argued that in the longer term a learning process may be expected to take place which effectively de‐biases the market signal. It is therefore suggested that it is the distribution of resources within the organisation which dominates the choice of response to forecast market adversity.

As has been pointed out throughout this edition the whole concept of financial control in the literature has been treated in rather a narrow, confused way. The purpose of this present article is not to repeat these arguments but rather to highlight a major omission in the literature and this edition — the whole idea of what could be called “external” financial control.

This paper aims to respond to the strong calls for interdisciplinary solutions to address the many and varied challenges that major disasters create in urban (tourism) spaces, and provide a holistic conceptualisation of organisational responses to disruptions in the external business environment. It argues that organisations need to actively (re)formulate a sustainable business proposition to passively adapt to environmental conditions and modify the selective environment.

This study uses a qualitative approach to introducing and examining the concepts and theoretical constructs underpinning the proposed conceptual schemata. The content-driven inductive approach used here is based on an extensive review of the disaster recovery, crisis management, entrepreneurial strategy and urban tourism literature with a focus on organisational perspectives. It systematically brings together the theories and research findings from these separate strands of literature.

While the extant literature focuses on the importance of effective adaptability to survive and thrive in environmental uncertainties, some aspects of the relevant evolutionary processes are not addressed in the context of urban tourism. Indeed, a systematic approach that questions how urban tourism and hospitality businesses react to crises has been long overdue. This paper, therefore, introduces niche construction theory (NCT) as an alternative and proposes an integrated framework to understand the environmental conditions of urban tourism and organisational evolution during post-disaster turbulence.

The proposed model emerging from a multidisciplinary literature review acknowledges boundary conditions in the tourism industry-specific interpretation of a crisis situation. The tenets of NCT need to be adopted flexibly rather than as part of a strictly prescriptive process to allow for all aspects of the related business responses to play out and become exposed to the emerging selection pressures.

The argument underpinned by the theoretical constructs of niche construction encourages and offers a framework for practitioners to actively (re)formulate business proposition and (re)construct organisational niche to survive post-disaster turbulence in the business environment and exert influence over their own evolution.

This paper offers different angles, filters and lenses for constructing and interpreting knowledge of organisational evolution in the context of crisis management. The conceptual schema (Figure 2) emerged as a novel contribution itself providing a necessary lens to interpret the empirical data and understand the complexities of the organisational responses to the disruptive post-disaster turbulence in an urban tourism business environment.

Global outsourcing is a management strategy by which an organization delegates major, non‐core functions to specialized and efficient service providers. Global outsourcing represents a significant shift in the way organizations manage and staff their business support activities. While global outsourcing has received considerable attention from practitioners and consultants, there has been little empirical research published on global outsourcing. This study explores why and how organizations are using global outsourcing and identifies problems that effect global outsourcing success. The results showed that organizations generally considered themselves successful at global outsourcing. However, while they achieved significant improvement in organizational effectiveness, they were not achieving the order of magnitude improvements ascribed to global outsourcing.

As organizations globalize their operations, there is a heightened need to identify and select qualified managers for overseas assignments. The increased complexity of these foreign assignments necessitates a recalibration of the traditional selection procedures and processes used in the past. In particular, there is some evidence that expatriation becomes strategic as organizations increasingly grow and compete globally. Therefore, the critical issues, which arise as expatriates’ assignments evolve into a global assignment scope, must be viewed in a systematic manner. This paper develops a unique theory‐based expatriation selection process based upon a systemic assessment of potential expatriate candidates’ multiple IQs, learning styles, thinking styles, and the nature of the expatriate assignment. In addition, a practical step‐by‐step managerial process is developed that can be used in the selection of expatriate managers for global assignments.

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the requirements of leading in a global environment as perceived by the leaders participating in this study as well as the way these leaders learn and develop their global mindset.

The research methodology informed by social constructivism included in‐depth interviews with 24 global leaders that were analyzed using constant comparative and content analysis. The findings presented in this paper are part of a larger study on the meaning of global leadership and mindset. The framework for this research was guided by the Global Leadership Mindset (GLM) model developed by the authors and their colleagues.

Transcendence, plasticity of the mind (flexibility, thinking differently, rebalancing, openness, having multiple frames of reference), mindfulness, curiosity, and humility emerged as requirements of leading in the global environment. The global leaders' learning journeys were characterized by informal learning during everyday work and life experiences including learning from mistakes, and from and with others. Self‐reflection leading to the “self‐awareness of otherness” as well as reflection with others were at the core of learning and developing the global mindset of these leaders.

The findings of this study highlight the role of human resource development (HRD) professionals in facilitating self‐reflection and reflection with others – core processes for the learning and development of global mindset. HRD professionals are called to address both the “you don't know what you don't know” phenomenon by offering cross‐cultural training programs and experiential learning opportunities and the “you know what you don't know” daily challenges of global leaders and their team members. Initiatives that will incorporate self‐reflective and reflective processes will allow the participants to make meaning of their learning.

This is an initial attempt to explore the development of a global leadership mindset as informed by the GLM model with a focus on its learning component. The findings of this study could inform leaders preparing to work in global environments and HRD professionals called to develop learning environments and a learning culture in global workplaces.

The paper initially engages in a discussion of the different concepts of trust promulgated over the years via a review of the literature. Trust is then discussed in the context of three management accounting situations, viz. the typical transfer pricing situation; the (equally) typical budget setting process; and, finally, the rather more specific situation of the accounting information system (here utilising the concept of action at a distance) employed within a particular construction company. So whilst two of the management accounting applications examined are from a theoretical perspective, the third is empirically based (if only because of the dearth of theoretical literature available in the relevant domain)