Search results

Most readers of this chapter are very familiar with OSSP. The book's basic proposition is that successful companies need to develop consistency among their strategy, the business model they adopt, including the choice of technology, and their organizational capability including human resource practices. The basic framing of the problem in OSSP is not a static analysis of fit but rather the dynamic problem of adaptation. How do organizations adapt to changing environments? Why do adaptive failures occur? These were the starting questions for M&S.

This paper examines the effectiveness of the reliance on a leader’s reputation as an informal control tool to mitigate subordinates’ budgetary slack. In addition, it seeks to explain whether this relationship is mediated by subordinates’ truthfulness in revealing their private information.

A laboratory experiment was conducted involving 60 undergraduate business students who participated in the experiment. A 1 × 2 between-subjects design was employed for the experimental study. Each subject assumed the role of a production manager responsible for setting a budget target. The experimental task employed involved a simple decoding task adapted from Chow (1983).

The results of this study indicate that budgetary slack is lower when a leader’s reputation is favourable than when it is unfavourable. In addition, it is found that subordinates’ truthfulness in revealing private information fully mediates the relationship between a leader’s reputation and budgetary slack.

This paper extends the limited literature on the reliance of informal controls in mitigating budgetary slack by examining a leader’s reputation as an informal control. The findings of this study provide important implications for the design of effective management control systems.

Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective’s implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

Innovation is a key driver of growth in the twenty-first century economy. Organisations of all types are increasingly relying on innovators to create and deliver this key driver in a constantly changing, globally competitive business environment. We need to understand innovation – what it is, how to harness it, why it is important and what frameworks and tools are useful for product, service, experience design and beyond.

The purpose of this chapter to introduce the principles of design thinking and its role in creativity and marketing as well as some of the organisations that are using it in order to spur innovation and how they are using it effectively. The chapter examines some of the results and best practices for how organisations, and their creative leaders, can use design thinking effectively. Last, the chapter provides some insight into the future trends of design thinking.

Research on same-sex marriage has suggested that the transition to marriage is a symbolically meaningful experience that significantly changes sexual minority lives. This chapter draws upon semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 28 married gay men and lesbians to examine how the life course trajectories they took en route to marriage shaped their experiences transitioning to marriage. A description of the short and direct and long and winding trajectories to marriage is provided. Subsequently, it is demonstrated that, although those who took the former report experiences much like those documented by research thus far, those who took the latter had smaller wedding ceremonies to which they attach relatively little meaning, and they report that getting married has done little to change their family relationships. These findings paint a more nuanced picture of the transition to same-sex marriage than has been documented to-date, and point to important directions for future research.

Organizations today operate in highly dynamic environments and are becoming more complex. Helping their organizations master this complexity is a major leadership challenge. To better understand how managers’ behaviors aggravate or reduce complexity, we reviewed 1,400 responses to a proprietary organizational complexity survey. Analysis identified specific managers’ behaviors that contribute to perceived complexity. We draw from these findings, literature on complex adaptive systems, and our consulting experiences to identify specific strategies managers can use to make it simpler for people to get things done, and even to “master” complexity by turning it into a source of strategic advantage.

In this chapter, we suggest a neighborhood perspective as a possible way to ‘react’ to some suburban trends that characterize the city today. We mention some of these trends and focus on their social and environmental impact. Our aim is to ecologically pose the centrality of sociospatial organization in the city; such organization, indeed, is fundamental to think to more sustainable forms as a countertrend to urban sprawl. On one side, we consider the works of Barry Wellman in order to show that community is more and more disconnected to a particular space or place. On the other side, we consider the contribution of Robert Sampson to stress the centrality of the concept of neighborhood, which has been made free from the ‘community rhetoric’ of strong ties in urban studies. Sampson gives a particular importance to collective efficacy, which he suggests as the tool through which a high quality of life can be pursued in urban neighborhoods. So, these studies stress the organizational and ecological aspects instead of the ones connected to strong local ties. In the final part, we suggest that our perspective is also very useful in order to give substance to the idea of a dense city as a mosaic/network of neighborhoods, a city where social mixitè is a binding element.

This article is the third in a trilogy of articles that discuss the professionalism (or deprofessionalism) of the accounting profession. The first examines the slow uphill climb of accounting and auditing practice to the level of being recognized as a highly trusted profession. The second examines the stagnation in professionalism leading to deprofessionalization of the accounting profession. This third article looks at the resulting directionless efforts of accounting and auditing firms in the wake of major deprofessionalization events. The interest in this study is the time period immediately following the passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 which is described in this paper as the “Post-SOX” history of public accountancy in the United States. During this time period, nearly equally mixed activities of professionalism and deprofessionalism have resulted in a status quo with directionless efforts doing little if anything to reverse decline in professionalism. Public accountants continued to experience conflict with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over independence rules. The large Certified Public Accountant firms generated controversies and squabbles concerning “auditing and consulting,” while at the same time they faced questions regarding the marketing and selling of aggressive tax shelters. In addition, most of the self-regulating aspects of the profession declined dramatically following passage of SOX. While initially both tax fees and audit fees of CPA firms increased during this time period, concerns are again arising as the large CPA firms more recently have renewed the emphasis on advisory services. While revenues have both increased and changed in composition during the post-SOX era, public opinion has maintained a status quo. The post-SOX era has also seen a weakening in the Code of Conduct, providing more liberties for CPAs to maximize self-interest. Meanwhile, the PCAOB faced constitutional challenges, while at the same time the AICPA experienced strong divisions in its membership. To provide some sense to these directionless efforts, this study, similar to the prior two articles in this trilogy, concludes with a summary analysis based on the nine SOCRECELIST criteria, and the question whether public accountants have learned their history lesson.