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Enduring scholarly interest in the process of strategy-making stems from an abiding assumption that some ways of strategizing are more efficacious than others, and thus lead to higher firm performance in the long run; higher than luck alone would bring. Expressions of interest in and endorsements of the strategy process are abundant in the academic literature. As Pettigrew (1992) points out, Hofer and Schendel's pioneering definition of strategic management is processual in character emphasizing the development and utilization of strategy. Rumelt, Schendel, and Teece (1994) list the policy process question – how does policy process matter? – as a fundamental question of the strategic management field. Porter (1996) expresses preoccupation with the leadership and organizational challenges of managing the process. And, Hamel (1988) exhorts the field to devote as much attention to the conduct of strategy, i.e., the task of strategy making, as they have to its content. For senior managers and leaders, the question of how to make effective strategies stands usually at the top of their agenda. Not surprisingly then, the quest to uncover stable principles of good strategy making has attracted much support and interest over the years.

We conduct an experiment to examine the occurrence of the bystander effect on willingness to report a fraudulent act. Specifically, we investigate the impact of evidence strength on managers’ decisions to blow the whistle in the presence and absence of other employees who have knowledge of the wrongdoing. Results indicate that when there is strong evidence indicating a fraudulent act, individuals with sole knowledge are more likely to report than when others are aware of the fraudulent act (the bystander effect). However, the bystander effect is not found when evidence of fraud is weak. Further, a mediated moderation analysis indicates that perceived personal responsibility to report mediates the relation between others’ awareness of the questionable act and reporting likelihood, suggesting that the bystander effect is driven by diffusion of responsibility. Our results have implications for all types of organizations that wish to mitigate the detrimental effect of fraud. Specifically, training or incentives may be necessary to overcome the bystander effect in an organization.

The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal was one of the largest examples of organizational wrongdoing in corporate history, costing the firm immense damage to its reputation and over $33 billion in fines, penalties, financial settlements, and buyback costs. In this paper, we draw on the concept of boundary work to provide insight into the causes of wrongdoing at VW. Supplementing other work on the scandal, we show how the ways in which boundaries became established in the organization resulted in an internal context that defined “in” and “out” groups, normalized certain behaviors, and limited communication across intraorganizational boundaries. This allowed wrongdoing to not only become established but also to go unchallenged. We provide contributions to broader understandings of organizational wrongdoing and to the temporal unfolding of boundary work by theorizing how a combination of cognitive, horizontal, and vertical boundaries can create an infrastructure of organizational design that permits organizational wrongdoing, prevents it being challenged, and ultimately normalizes it in everyday activities.

In the early 2010s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) became increasingly concerned about incidents of academic workplace “bullying” on the campus, and in 2014–2016 created policies designed to address such behavior at the University. The new policies and accompanying initiatives were implemented in 2017, defining a new term to describe these behaviors as “hostile and intimidating behavior” (HIB). We use data from three sources to explore the outcomes of the new HIB policies and initiatives to date. Evaluation data from training sessions show the importance of educating the campus community about HIB, providing evidence that the training sessions increase HIB knowledge. Data from two campus-wide surveys measure incidence of HIB for different groups on campus (e.g., analysis by gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, rank, job duty, and/or the intersection of these characteristics), as well as changes in the knowledge about HIB as reported by faculty and staff. These data show that UW-Madison faculty and staff are increasing their knowledge of HIB as a problem and also increasing their knowledge about what to do about it. Underrepresented groups who more commonly experience HIB agree that this culture is improving. At the same time, we are seeing slow and uneven progress in reduction of actual incidence of HIB at UW-Madison. We close with some “lessons learned” about instituting such a sweeping, campus-wide effort to reduce HIB, in the hopes that other campuses can learn from our experience.

Aristotle's Politics provides an example of what a biopolitical science might look like. Three key elements stand out: (1) an account of political structure as a multilevel society including kin and non-kin relationships; (2) an account of the human species that includes comparison with other social species that are capable of coordinated action; and (3) an emphasis on the human capacity to understand and communicate moral rules. Over the last 50 years, a number of research programs in evolutionary anthropology have provided the basis for a biopolitical science that maps onto the elements above. Schultz, Opie, and Atkinson describe the trajectory of human evolution from solitary to a pair bonded, familial species. Michael Tomasello's two-step account of the evolution of human cooperation shows how the ancestral humans went from merely gregarious to genuinely political animals. Christopher Boehm shows how the human capacity for moral emotions and decision making by consensus developed. Richard Wrangham provides evidence that the suppression of reactive aggression by ancestral human societies resulted in a self-domesticated species, a process that enhanced the human capacity for cooperation and communication. Bernard Chapais argued that the emergence of pair bonding among ancestral humans laid the foundation for both consanguineal and affinal kinship structures. That these bodies of research hold together can best be seen when they are viewed in light of Aristotle's biopolitical science.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.

Organizations are confronted with problems and political risks to which they have to respond, presenting a need to develop tools and frames of understanding requisite to do so. In this article, we argue for the necessity of cultivating “political judgment” with a “sense of reality,” especially in the upper echelons of organizations. This article has two objectives: First to highlight how a number of recent interlinked developments within organizational analysis and practice have contributed to weakening judgment and its accompanying “sense of reality.” Second, to (re)introduce some canonical works that, although less in vogue recently, provide both a source of wisdom and frames of understanding that are key to tackling today’s problems. We begin by mapping the context in which the need for the cultivation of political judgment within organizations has arisen: (i) increasing proliferation of political risks and “wicked problems” to which it is expected that organizations adapt and respond; (ii) a wider historical and contemporary context in which the exercise of judgment has been undermined – a result of a combination of economics-inspired styles of theorizing and an associated obsession with metrics. We also explore the nature of “political judgment” and its accompanying “sense of reality” through the work of authors such as Philip Selznick, Max Weber, Chester Barnard, and Isaiah Berlin. We suggest that these authors have a weighty “sense of reality”; are antithetical to “high,” “abstract,” or “axiomatic” theorizing; and have a profound sense of the burden from exercising political judgment in difficult organizational circumstances.

Researchers recommend a reorganization of the medical profession into larger groups with a multispecialty mix. We analyze whether there is evidence for the superiority of these models and if this organizational transformation is underway.

We summarize the evidence on scale and scope economies in physician group practice, and then review the trends in physician group size and specialty mix to conduct survivorship tests of the most efficient models.

The distribution of physician groups exhibits two interesting tails. In the lower tail, a large percentage of physicians continue to practice in small, physician-owned practices. In the upper tail, there is a small but rapidly growing percentage of large groups that have been organized primarily by non-physician owners.

While our analysis includes no original data, it does collate all known surveys of physician practice characteristics and group practice formation to provide a consistent picture of physician organization.

Our review suggests that scale and scope economies in physician practice are limited. This may explain why most physicians have retained their small practices.

Larger, multispecialty groups have been primarily organized by non-physician owners in vertically integrated arrangements. There is little evidence supporting the efficiencies of such models and some concern they may pose anticompetitive threats.

This is the first comprehensive review of the scale and scope economies of physician practice in nearly two decades. The research results do not appear to have changed much; nor has much changed in physician practice organization.