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Explores the shifting values and infrastructures which characterize recent changes in US managerial systems – from a traditional hierarchical approach to an emerging team management concept. Success will come to those companies which place innovation and team spirit back into the work environment. As we approach the twenty‐first century, two major challenges confront US corporate managers in utilizing team management techniques – a new corporate mindset and a multicultural workforce. To accept the commitment needed for effective team management, managers will be required to develop a paradigm shift. This shift is a process which is both complicated and difficult. Multi‐cultural teams must be helped to confront differences in attitudes, value, behavior, experience, background, and expectations, as well as language, with respect.

Presents empirical evidence in the context of grocery shopping to challenge the assumption that routine shopping is considered invariably to be a low‐involvement activity. Argues that certain situational factors may give rise to routine purchases becoming more involving than others and studies the case of stock‐out situations. Finds that there is some evidence to suggest that routine food shopping for many consumers can be highly involving at times.

This chapter asks whether the United States would benefit from establishment of a national independent children’s rights institution (ICRI). This chapter begins with insights into why the United States has not established a national ICRI. Although about half of the 50 US states have set up children’s rights ombudspersons, most of these state-level institutions do not focus on rights of all children and their efforts are not coordinated. This chapter discusses what ICRIs do and what their essential qualities are, then seeks to demonstrate that an ICRI will meet needs of American children and their rights. This chapter suggests that a national US ICRI can participate in international activities around children’s rights, which will advance rights and interests of American children.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

The most obvious symptom of the most obvious trend in the building of new libraries is the fact that, as yet, no spade has entered the ground of the site on Euston Road, London, upon which the new building for the British Library Reference Division has to be erected. Some twenty years of continued negotiation and discussion finally resulted in the choice of this site. The UK and much more of the world awaits with anticipation what could and should be the major building library of the twentieth century. The planning and design of a library building, however large or small, is, relatively speaking, a major operation, and deserves time, care and patience if the best results are to be produced.

This article is not the work of an expert on the period in question (see Robinson, 1971; Rheinwald, 1977); rather it is a commentary on a book whose half‐century has just passed almost unnoticed. In a sense the argument involves a further visit to what J.A. Schumpeter once described as the “lumber room” of historical knowledge, although this particular visit is prompted neither by nostalgia nor piety, but rather by the conviction that Chamberlin still has much to teach those interested in the theory of the firm and in the wider area of industrial economics. The article is also prompted by the conviction that the conventional textbook accounts of Chamberlin's work have introduced misleading simplifications in pursuing the qualities of coherence and precision in the presentation of ideas.

At a time when governmental corruption seems rife and administrations grow ever more secretive, the whistleblower is a crucial resource in journalism’s attempts to make accountable those who wield power. Yet despite legislation that is meant to protect employees and officials who expose wrongdoing, a governmental “war on whistleblowers” has made the hazards faced by many whistleblowers increasingly grim. This chapter explores the role of the journalist/whistleblower collaboration in disclosing important, but sensitive, information involving national security. In discussing case studies of those who have braved the government’s anger, we examine not only the circumstances of these breaches, but also their political and legal repercussions.

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.