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In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of…
Abstract
In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.
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The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the relative importance to individuals of particular work values during the deterioration of external economic conditions.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the relative importance to individuals of particular work values during the deterioration of external economic conditions.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employed longitudinal field survey techniques, comparing the change relative work value priorities at an initial and two subsequent points in time during dramatic economic swings in Hong Kong. The paper also evaluate needs hierarchies such as Maslow's and Elizur's, minimally adjusted for a Chinese cultural context for a theoretical framework for assessing the shifting importance of work values resulting from changing local economic conditions.
Findings
The major contribution is the finding of statistically significant changes in the differing importance to individuals of particular work values during the deterioration of external economic conditions. The paper demonstrates that the needs hierarchy theories provide an appropriate framework for the shifting importance of work values resulting from local economic conditions.
Research limitations/implications
The paper is in a single location, limiting generality of the results. All longitudinal studies are affected by panel attrition. Replication with larger samples and tracking of panel drop‐outs are needed for theoretical development.
Practical implications
These results have crucial implications for the effective management of business firms and their human resources in changing economic conditions, finding that work values of managers are not invariant but change with conditions.
Originality/value
The majority of studies on work values of employees have been performed, analyzed, and interpreted in a vacuum, in isolation from consideration of critically import variables, the current, historical, and expected future economic environment of the employee. The paper finds work values change due to environmental circumstances; this effect has rarely been studied.
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Gábor Nagy, Carol M. Megehee and Arch G. Woodside
The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why…
Abstract
The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.
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Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely…
Abstract
Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.
For sociological perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex…
Abstract
For sociological perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – and possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”
For perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and…
Abstract
For perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic, and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – find possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”
Anne Bang, Christine Mølgaard Cleemann and Pia Bramming
The main purpose of this paper is to explore and revitalise key contributions of Peter Drucker for the understanding of how changing conditions in the economy radically alter the…
Abstract
Purpose
The main purpose of this paper is to explore and revitalise key contributions of Peter Drucker for the understanding of how changing conditions in the economy radically alter the ways business value is created. Second, the authors wish to demonstrate how the changes in key economic resources pose altogether different challenges and opportunities for management research and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
Taking Peter F. Drucker as a point of departure, the paper presents a conceptual reflection of the conditions and new challenges for the creation of business. Drucker's insights are discussed and accelerated with a philosophical and sociologically inspired position on management.
Findings
The paper demonstrates that the creation of business value in the knowledge economy is highly immaterial and socially embedded. This demands a broadening of perspective to (ontologically) encompass both the technical and the social. Production and the value of consumption cannot be measured independently of the affects produced in the consuming, social subject.
Practical implications
The paper helps to conceptualise the productivity of knowledge work in the new economy in order to direct managerial practice towards the basics of value driving production.
Social implications
Both the production of business value as well as the working conditions of this production must be readdressed in respect of both the creative and the repressive forces of how social subjects are formed.
Originality/value
The paper illustrates that the economy is faced with new challenges following the changing relationship between the creation of business value from the optimisation and exploitation of knowledge as the new key economic resource.
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Indicators of economic and social phenomena can be useful descriptive and analytical inputs for public policy. The “social indicators movement” has emerged in the last decade and…
Abstract
Indicators of economic and social phenomena can be useful descriptive and analytical inputs for public policy. The “social indicators movement” has emerged in the last decade and is devoted to the measurement of widely‐ranging dimensions of human welfare. For the most part, questions of systematic measurement for public policy are explored here. Drawing initially on some traditions of measurement in economics, the principal aim is to provide a broad theoretical frame of reference for policy indicator design. Questions of indicator development necessarily involve ideas of suitability or validity of indicators designed for a purpose. Approaches to indicator design for the purpose of enhancing collective decision‐making—including formal model building approaches—are subsumed as special cases once a more general theory is espoused in sections II and III.
Steven J. Haider, Jacob Alex Klerman and Elizabeth Roth
Nationally, the welfare caseload declined by more than 50% between 1994 and 2000. Considerable research has been devoted to understanding what caused this decline. Much of the…
Abstract
Nationally, the welfare caseload declined by more than 50% between 1994 and 2000. Considerable research has been devoted to understanding what caused this decline. Much of the literature examining these changes has modeled the total caseload (the stock) directly. Klerman and Haider (forthcoming) model the underlying flows and show analytically and empirically that previous methods are likely to be biased because they ignore important dynamics. However, due to their focus on the bias of the stock models, they present only limited results concerning the robustness of their findings and utilize only a single measure of economic conditions, the unemployment rate. This paper examines the robustness of the basic stock-flow model developed in Klerman and Haider (forthcoming), considering both richer dynamic specifications and richer measures of economic condition. We find that more complex dynamic specifications do not change the substantive conclusions, but richer measures of the economy do. While a model that only includes the unemployment rate attributes about half of the California caseload decline between 1995 and 1998 to the economy, models that incorporate richer measures of the economy attribute more than 90% of the decline to the economy.
Ilan Alon, Melih Madanoglu and Amir Shoham
This paper aims to demonstrate how franchising firms can manage system expansion by weathering the economic effects of a location (i.e. country-level economic cycles) by shifting…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to demonstrate how franchising firms can manage system expansion by weathering the economic effects of a location (i.e. country-level economic cycles) by shifting their resources.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a comprehensive database of 151 US hybrid franchising organizations, including observations for the years between 2001 and 2008. Data analysis is conducted with count model panel data with a Poisson distribution.
Findings
The model reveals a curvilinear U-shaped relationship between location (i.e. economic cycles) and franchising expansion.
Originality/value
This study contributes to competitiveness literature by showing how franchising firms respond to changing local conditions.
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