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The purpose of this paper is to consider the nature of the business continuity management (BCM) process and to frame it within wider literature on the performance of socio-technical systems. Despite the growth in BCM activities in organisations, some questions remain as to whether academic research has helped to drive this process. The paper seeks to stimulate discussion within this journal of the interplay between organisational performance and BCM and to frame it within the context of the potential tensions between effectiveness and efficiency.

The paper considers how BCM is defined within the professional and academic communities that work in the area. It deconstructs these definitions in order to and set out the key elements of BCM that emerge from the definitions and considers how the various elements of BCM can interact with each other in the context of organisational performance.

The relationships between academic research in the area of crisis management and the practice-based approaches to business continuity remain somewhat disjointed. In addition, recent work in the safety management literature on the relationships between success and failure can be seen to offer some interesting challenges for the practice of business continuity.

The paper integrates work in safety, crisis and risk management with BCM in order to identify the main areas of overlap and synergy between these areas of academic research. By definition, the need for business continuity represents the risks and cost of failure in organisational performance in the absence of continuity. This calls into question the effectiveness of organisational processes around decision making, control, and strategic management. The paper sets out a series of issues that are in need of further research.

The paper draws on some of the practice-based definitions of BCM and highlights the limitations and challenges associated with the construct. The paper sets out challenges for BCM based upon theoretical challenges arising in cognate areas of research. The aim is to ensure that BCM is integrated with emerging concepts in other aspects of the management of uncertainty and to do so in a strategic context.

Academic research on performance reflects both the variety and the multi-disciplinary nature of the issues around measuring and managing performance. Failures in organisational performance have also invariably attracted considerable attention due to the nature of a range of disruptive events. The paper reveals some of the inherent paradoxes that sit at the core of the BCM process and its relationships with organisational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of effectiveness in the context of organisational crisis. It considers the “darker” side of organisational effectiveness by exploring the processes by which effectiveness can be eroded as an organisation moves from an ordered state, through a complex one, and into a state of chaos, or crisis. It brings together complementary literatures on risk, crisis management, and complexity, and uses those lenses to frame some of the key processes that allow organisations to transition to a state that shapes their inabilities to remain effective.

The paper sets out a theoretical framework for the analysis of a crisis event and does so in a way that emphasises the role of the human element in the various stages of a crisis: the incubation phase, the operational crisis, and the post-event legitimation phase. The paper uses the emerging crisis around the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 to illustrate some of the task demands associated with a crisis and the manner in which crisis events challenge the efficiencies and capabilities of organisations to deal with complex, multi-layered issues in which uncertainty is high. Given the emergent nature of that particular crisis, the use of the case is purely illustrative rather than analytically grounded in a normal case study approach.

The paper highlights a number of underlying elements that contribute to the generation of crises and offers recommendations for managers on how to deal with those demands. The paper shows how an organisation can move from an ordered state into a complex or chaotic one and highlights some of the problems that arise when an organisation does not have the capabilities to respond to the task demands generated by such a shift in the environment.

The paper challenges some of the normal practices of management in a “steady state” environment and highlights the need to consider the organisational capabilities that are necessary to deal with the transition from a stable to an unstable system state and ensure organisational effectiveness in the process. A core message within the paper is that the “normal” processes of management can contribute to the generation of crises as organisations prioritise short-term efficiencies over the strategies for longer-term effectiveness. The implications for crisis management practices are discussed.

The paper considers an issue that has wider applicability within society namely the relationships between organisational effectiveness and risk. The issues raised in the paper have applicability in a range of other societal settings.

The key output from the paper is the development of a theoretical framework that allows for an analysis of the relationships between crises and organisational effectiveness. The paper argues that effectiveness and crisis management are intrinsically linked and that crises occur when organisational effectiveness is impaired. The paper highlights the role that template-based approaches to dealing with complex problems can have in terms of the generation of crisis events.

Adam Smith’s theory of economic growth, as presented in the Wealth of Nations, is based upon the potential for increasing returns in manufacturing generated by increased specialization and division of labour and upon the accumulation of real capital, which is necessary to support the greater division of labour. The increasing returns part of Smith’s theory leaves open the possibility that bank credit, issued judiciously, might be used to extend the market and so increase an economy’s growth rate. However, Smith’s theory of bank credit and note extension is quite conservative. Henry Dunning Macleod, a century after Smith, made much of the potential of credit to extend the market. Notes Smith’s apparent inconsistency and considers reasons why he might have chosen not to promote the use of credit to enhance economic growth.

This paper considers the dark side of organisational effectiveness and the processes by which and organisation can move into a state of crisis. The paper sets out a series of arguments around the relationships between people and processes and the manner in which they contribute to the incubation of crises within organisations. The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to many of the issues that are raised in this issue of the journal and calls for more research that explores the relationships between effectiveness and failure.

The paper draws upon a range of literatures to set out the case for considering the negative aspects that surround organisational attempts at achieving effectiveness. In particular, it considers the role of both people and processes in a symbiotic relationship within the incubation of crisis. The paper highlights the importance of innovative practices in bypassing organisational controls.

The paper outlines issues around management practices that serve to focus the attention of practitioners on the ways in which they can contribute inadvertently to the failure of the organisation. In particular, it highlights some of the potential vulnerabilities that can exist within the organisation and which, if unchecked, will result in failure.

The paper highlights the need for further research within the field of organisational effectiveness around the ways in which crises can be incubated as part of the normal processes around effective working.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the fusion of psy-correctional discourse with the dominant risk logic to consider the implication this nexus can have on how self-injurious behaviour committed by women in prison is interpreted and responded to by the Correctional Service Canada (CSC).

The central focus of the study is an in-depth case analysis of the carceral death of Ashley Smith, a 19-year-old woman who committed suicide in her segregation cell in 2007 after enduring four years of excessively punitive treatment aimed at controlling her self-injurious behaviour.

Findings illustrate how the fusion of these logics creates a kind of “therapeutic-risk cloak” that reframes the behaviour as “abnormal” and “risky”, which masks the punitivity of strip search and segregation interventions in the name of safety, security and treatment.

Given that correctional officials knowingly failed to intervene when Smith tied the fatal ligature around her neck, a federal inquiry judged her death to be a homicide. By attempting to unveil the “therapeutic-risk cloak” the authors hope to challenge the underlying logic of CSC’s governance and management framework, which not only denies the oppressive gendered carceral reality that is linked to self-injurious behaviour amongst women prisoners, but is also used to justify intervention responses that exacerbate the very behaviour this framework aims to control. Until systemic transformation is achieved that eradicates CSC’s contradictory governance framework, there is no doubt that the authors will continue to see similar preventable deaths take place in prison.

Adam Smith recognized that slavery, despite its economic disadvantages, was the rule rather than the exception in the eighteenth-century commercial society. How did he explain the massive employment of enslaved Africans in the American and Caribbean colonies? Several scholars have been highlighting that Smith attributed the persistence of slavery to an almost natural inclination of humanity toward tyranny and dominion. However, the mere reference to the love of domination is not enough to fully answer the question above. This paper addresses another feature of Adam Smith’s account of Atlantic slavery: the relation between the love of domination and the mercantile policies regulating colonial trade. We conclude that Smith saw the extraordinary profitability arising from such policies as an enabling condition to the massive employment of slave labor in the sugar and tobacco colonies.

This volume, sponsored by the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, was shaped at the University of Bologna where earlier drafts of the 16 essays it contains were presented at a Conference on institutions, markets and the division of labor. Like any collection of essays, especially if they come after a conference, the quality of the contributions varies, but it must be said that the average exceeds the usual standard. Moreover, although the title “Knowledge, Social Institutions and the Division of Labour” is broad enough to accommodate a diversity of subjects, there is a degree of congruity among the different contributions. The book is divided in three parts, “Rationality, Communication and Connecting Principles” (comprising four essays), “Social Interaction and Moral Sentiments” (comprising five essays) and “Division of Labour, Patterns of Interdependence and Social Institutions” (comprising seven essays).

President Bill Clinton has had many opponents and enemies, most of whom come from the political right wing. Clinton supporters contend that these opponents, throughout the Clinton presidency, systematically have sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office, including Travelgate, the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the Filegate controversy, and the Monica Lewinsky matter. This bibliography identifies these and other means by presenting citations about these individuals and organizations that have opposed Clinton. The bibliography is divided into five sections: General; “The conspiracy stream of conspiracy commerce”, a White House‐produced “report” presenting its view of a right‐wing conspiracy against the Clinton presidency; Funding; Conservative organizations; and Publishing/media. Many of the annotations note the links among these key players.

The memorial is an account of Smith's personality and work by a former and favored student. It is a sustained personal reminiscence backed by the reminiscences of others who admired Smith together with an account of Smith's working practices and of his main texts. It is in this sense subjective as well as objective. It is not a full-scale biography, rather a biographical sketch and it is necessarily limited by its very proximity to the subject. The principal and other informants knew Smith and liked him. However, given Stewart's own profession, the work is more than this. It was written in the context of the consequences for Smith's reputation in the light of the French Revolution. Stewart is anxious, given the sensitivities concerning the destructive radicalism in France and in the context of the conservative reaction in Britain, to distance Smith's ideas on liberty and on policy from those ideas as they were being expressed in revolutionary France. In this way, Stewart's biographical work is both an account of Smith's life and works and a politicized interpretation of his principle economic ideas.