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In family business studies, inconsistent findings exist regarding the relationship between family involvement and firm innovation. The purpose of this paper is to understand the heterogeneity of family firm innovation.

The authors draw on governance literature and the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective to examine how the extent of family governance and the type of SEW objectives jointly influence innovation strategies in family firms.

The authors develop a typology of family firm innovation strategies, positing that the family firm’s risk orientation, innovation goal, and knowledge diversity vary depending on the degree of family involvement in governance and the type of SEW objective. The authors propose that four family firm innovation strategies (e.g. Limited Innovators, Intended Innovators, Potential Innovators, and Active Innovators) emerge when family involvement in the dominant coalition (high or low) is contrasted with the SEW objective (restricted or extended) pursued by the family.

Understanding how governance and SEW goals work together to influence the firm’s innovation strategies is potentially valuable for managers of family firms. The authors offer practical suggestions for how to strategically reposition the firm to pursue innovation strategies more in line with those of the Active Innovator.

This study contributes to the family business literature by using a multi-dimensional approach to examine family firm heterogeneity. In addition, by articulating various family firm innovation strategies, the authors offer insight into the previously inconsistent findings concerning firm innovation behavior and outcomes in family business studies.

Crisis planning, which symbolizes an organization's crisis preparedness and often conceptualized at the corporate headquarters, is increasingly decentralized to regional centers of global companies. These centers, in turn, synchronize their crisis master plans with its national units for expeditious management of localized crises. The purpose of this paper is to capture the decision‐making processes that practitioners at a regional center faced as they nurtured their master plan from conception to implementation.

The qualitative method is used. This is a case study of a Fortune 500 company with plants in every continent. The company has four regional centers, and the center under study oversees more than 20 national units or countries.

This study found a deep divide in attitude, expectation, and style between what practitioners and the dominant coalition regarded as necessary and sufficient measures in crisis planning.

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Studies like this, grounded in the practitioner's world, add rich layers of context to understanding how theory and practice can integrate. Given that in this study, corporate communications has been found to be regarded as an auxiliary, rather than ancillary, function in this study, this paper offers practical tips on what practitioners can do to transform organizational perception.

Such studies are rare because of the lack of accessibility to data. Practitioners are hesitant to grant access because of the highly sensitive nature of this topic, for fear of reprisals from their organizations, and an inadvertent revelation of organizational privacy and secrets.

Communication technicians are engaged in electronic public relations activities such as producing e‐mail newsletters, setting up teleconferences, creating Web pages, and generating electronic press releases. This paper explores how and why communication managers should use computer‐based technology and new media. The concept of cyberbridging is introduced, whereby communication managers can use electronic communication technologies (eg, the Internet, WWW and on‐line databases) to conduct environmental scanning and informal and evaluation research. Through cyberbridging activities, communication managers gain power, connect with the dominant coalition, and have input to an organisation's broader decision‐making processes. The linkages with the dominant coalition and improved relationships with key publics result in greater organisational effectiveness.

Organizational buying decisions are characterized by conflict which can be studied through the use of coalition theory. It appears, however, that conceptual and methodological problems with coalition theory based on game theory and social psychology have limited its usefulness in helping us understand how such conflict can be managed. This paper proposes the group influence approach to conflict management in organizational buying. The main contribution of this approach is that by treating individuals as representatives of coalitions, sellers and buyers can focus on coalition leaders rather than focus on individuals who, in any case, have to conform to group expectations. Theoretically, the group influence approach recognizes that power and politics are basic forces that affect most spheres of organizational activity. Within such a framework purchase decisions are shown to be politically negotiated settlements between those coalitions involved in making the buying decision.

Views tropical forests as providing a number of outputs for the host country and the world at large. Activities to curb deforestation yield private goods, local (country‐specific) public goods, and global public goods. Markets can operate with respect to the private goods, while nations are motivated to strike bargains with one another with respect to the country‐specific public goods. Inefficiency or suboptimality stems from the global public goods that preservation activities of one country confer on another. Collective action at the transnational level is needed to address these global public goods. This suboptimality can be attenuated if the developed countries establish property rights to genetic material gathered from the rain forests. Much can be done to promote allocative efficiency and these actions should be accomplished prior to the institution of a supranational linkage. Since the bulk of the global public benefits are derived by the developed countries, they are in a weak bargaining position with respect to the shrinking rain forests. An early agreement is in their interests even if the bargain favours the tropical countries.

Coalitions are informal and interdependent groups of actors operating within organizations, yet their effects in organizations are not widely understood. In this paper, we develop a model of coalition formation and functioning inside organizations. By extrapolating the behavioral intentions (i.e., altruistic or antagonistic) and compositional differences (i.e., supplementary or complementary) among these informal group structures, we classify coalitions into four forms (i.e., lobby, cartel, circle, and alliance), theorizing how each coalition form affects work role innovation, resource allocations, and work performance. Our conceptualization helps clarify previous theoretical inconsistencies and establish an agenda for the study of coalitions at work. Furthermore, this paper provides insights into the ways that coalitions support or impede the organization’s objectives.

Recently, the senior author of this study conducted a series of seminars for top executives on “Strategic Management: A Problem of Implementation”. The series followed the traditional seminar format in that a brief theoretical introduction was followed by lengthy open‐ended discussions. The most critical problem relating to strategic management, as perceived by the participants, was how to create an environment that encourages and rewards middle managers for thinking strategically. One of the executives aptly summarised the reasons for rewarding middle management for strategic thinking:

This paper explores the interface between institutional theory and Austrian theory. We examine mainstream institutionalism as exemplified by D. C. North in his work with Wallis and Weingast on the elite compact theory of social order and of transitions to impersonal rights, and propose instead an Austrian process-oriented perspective. We argue that mainstream institutionalism does not fully account for the efficiency of impersonal rules. Their efficiency can be better explained by a market for rules, which in turn requires a stable plurality of governance providers. Since an equilibrium of plural providers requires stable power polycentricity, the implication goes against consolidating organized means for violence as a doorstep condition to successful transitions. The paper demonstrates how to employ Ostroms’ Bloomington School Institutionalism to shift, convert, and recalibrate mainstream institutionalism's themes into an Austrian process-oriented theory.

This paper offers a quick overview of Cameron's contingency theory of conflict management in public relations. It then applies the theory to three cases that occurred during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games that were taken from the policy position papers, notes, diaries and tape recordings of C. Richard Yarbrough, Managing Director‐Communications of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG). The areas analysed include: the moving of preliminary volleyball matches from one venue to another which was forced by conflict between gay activists and local politicians who passed an anti‐gay resolution — a sustained effort at accommodation that shifted to advocacy; conflict between the ACOG board of directors and the media resulting from the disclosure of ACOG executive salaries — a strong advocacy stance that led to compromise; and conflict threatened between ACOG and a minority minister who was disgruntled about an Olympic sponsor — a case of marginality too insignificant to bother with. The cases not only illustrate and support factors in the contingency theory, but highlight the impracticality and inflexibility of two‐way symmetrical or mixed‐motive public relations as models of choice.