Search results

Relationship learning is a topic of considerable importance for industrial networks, yet a lack of empirical research on the impact of relationship governance structures on relationship learning remains. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of relationship governance structures on learning in partnerships.

This paper contributes to the closure of the research gap by examining sample data drawn from 42 interviews on the subject of 199 customer‐supplier relationships within the Finnish metal and electronics industries. As a method, the paper applies cluster analysis and analysis of variance mean‐comparison.

The results of this paper show that balanced hybrid governance structures explain learning in partnerships, which suggests that certain combinations of relationship governance mechanisms (price, hierarchical, and social mechanism) produce the best learning outcomes in partnerships. Results suggest that managers should use hybrid relationship governance structures when governing their supplier partnerships.

The paper has some limitations such as limited sample size, cross‐sectional data, and difficulties due to measuring social phenomenon such as learning. Owing to the interview method being applied, research is bound to apply a sample data drawn from companies that operate in the west coast in Finland. These limitations need to be considered when applying the results.

The results encourage managers to use different governance mechanisms simultaneously when managing their company's supply chain partnerships. The result emphasizes the role of active relationship management.

The paper is one of the first to empirically show that relationship learning is best facilitated by using various relationship governance mechanisms simultaneously. Trust needs to be complemented by hierarchical and possibly by price mechanism.

This paper explores the experiences of women in Saudi Arabia who have been managed by other women, and examines how junior women perceive senior women's role in advancing their career.

The paper is based on qualitative data gathered using in-depth semi-structured interviews undertaken with 30 women working in Saudi public organisations.

This study's findings shows that the hierarchical relationships between women and their woman manager are complex due to a multifaceted web of contextual factors including sociocultural values, family values, religious beliefs and organisational cultures and structures. These factors shape the quality of relationships between senior women and their women subordinates. Also, this study reveals that there is solidarity and ‘sisterly’ relationship between women in the workplace that plays a role in facilitating women's career development and advancement. In addition, this study shows that despite senior women's having supported other women's career advancement, this support tended to be conditional and limited. This can have an influence on women-to-women work relationships, where such relationships can be described as being disconnected and fragile. Furthermore, the study depict that there is evidence of the existence of ‘Queen Bee’-like senior women who distance themselves from other women and block their career advancement. The Queen Bee phenomena can actually become a form of hierarchy that mimics the patriarchal structure and excludes women from serving at top management levels.

This paper provides an in-depth understanding of the hierarchical relationships between women in the workplace and how these relationships have an influence on women's career advancement. Therefore, the paper makes a valuable contribution to the scarce knowledge that currently exists within the field of management research in relation to women's career development – and the advancement of such research within the Arab Middle Eastern context. Also, the findings of this study could potentially inform practitioners and HR department personnel within organisations about the connections between women's hierarchical workplace relationships and women's career development and advancement.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a Resource Description Framework (RDF)-based approach to transform metadata crosswalking from equivalent lexical element mapping into semantic mapping with various contextual relationships. RDF is used as a crosswalk model to represent the contextual relationships implicitly embedded between described objects and their elements, including semantic, hierarchical, granular, syntactic and multiple object relationships to achieve semantic metadata interoperability at the data element level.

This paper uses RDF to translate metadata elements and their relationships into semantic expressions, and also as a data model to define the syntax for element mapping. The feasibility of the proposed approach for semantic metadata crosswalking is examined based on two use cases – the Archives of Navy Ships Project and the Digital Artifacts Project of National Palace Museum in Taipei – both from the Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program.

As the model developed is based on RDF-based expressions, unsolved issues related to crosswalking, such as sets of shared terms, and contextual relationships embedded between described objects and their metadata elements could be manifested into a semantic representation. Corresponding element mapping and mapping rules can be specified without ambiguity to achieve semantic metadata interoperability.

Five steps were developed to clarify the details of the RDF-based crosswalk. The RDF-based expressions can also serve as a basis from which to develop linked data and Semantic Web applications. More use cases including biodiversity artifacts of natural history museums and literary works of libraries, and conditions, constraints and cardinality of metadata data elements will be required to make revisions to fine tune the proposed RDF-based metadata crosswalk.

In addition to reviving contextual relationships embedded between described objects and their metadata elements, nine types of mapping rules were developed to achieve a semantic metadata crosswalk which will facilitate the design of related mapping software. Furthermore, the proposed approach complements existing crosswalking documents provided by authoritative organizations, and enriches mapping language developed by the CIDOC community.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new similarity method to gauge the differences between two subject hierarchical structures.

In the proposed similarity measure, nodes on two hierarchical structures are projected onto a two-dimensional space, respectively, and both structural similarity and subject similarity of nodes are considered in the similarity between the two hierarchical structures. The extent to which the structural similarity impacts on the similarity can be controlled by adjusting a parameter. An experiment was conducted to evaluate soundness of the measure. Eight experts whose research interests were information retrieval and information organization participated in the study. Results from the new measure were compared with results from the experts.

The evaluation shows strong correlations between the results from the new method and the results from the experts. It suggests that the similarity method achieved satisfactory results.

Hierarchical structures that are found in subject directories, taxonomies, classification systems, and other classificatory structures play an extremely important role in information organization and information representation. Measuring the similarity between two subject hierarchical structures allows an accurate overarching understanding of the degree to which the two hierarchical structures are similar.

Both structural similarity and subject similarity of nodes were considered in the proposed similarity method, and the extent to which the structural similarity impacts on the similarity can be adjusted. In addition, a new evaluation method for a hierarchical structure similarity was presented.

Although studies have demonstrated the importance of supply chain integration (SCI) strategies in improving firm performance, very little is understood about how the organizational structure (OS) of focal firms affects the successful implementation of SCI initiatives across supply chains (SCs). Taking into consideration the importance of the oil and gas (O&G) industry, as well as the impact of uncertainties on OS and strategy choices, it is important to understand how OS and SCI affect the operational performance of O&G SCs. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Taking a contingency approach and using a global sample of 181 O&G firms, this study examines the mediating role of internal, customer, and supplier integration on the relationship between three main dimensions of OS – the degree of centralization, formalization, and hierarchical relationships and operational performance, using structural equation modeling.

Findings reveal that OS dimensions negatively impact operational performance. Further testing for the mediation found that by increasing SCI, O&G SCs can mitigate the negative effect of high centralization, formalization, and hierarchical relationship on operational performance.

Classifying OS into “structuring” and “structural,” this research provides evidence on which of the two has a stronger negative impact on operational performance. This is significant since it may be difficult for O&G companies to restructure and reform their OS.

This study examines the impact of OS and SCI on improving the operational performance of the O&G SCs. Theoretical and practical contributions to the field of operations management and organizational studies are also discussed.

Positivist deductive research on transformational leadership brings along with it 25 years of researcher presuppositions. Such research not only suggests that a transformational leader’s influence is unidirectional but also that transformational leadership theory is a universal theory. In this chapter, I inductively seek to examine board-executive director interactions, free from the shackles of existing theory.

The current chapter uses an inductive research approach to the collection and analysis of the empirical material. By being open to surprises in the empirical material, I am able to explore behaviors and relationships, while analyzing a specific context – the nonprofit board-executive director relationship.

The current study finds evidence that individualized consideration in a governance model frequently occurs in the opposite direction. Despite organizational documents promoting a hierarchical structure, evidence of top-down, collegiality, and bottom-up individualized consideration suggests hierarchical boundaries are commonly crossed in the decision making process.

Results of this exploratory study suggest that in a governance context, hierarchical actors do not fit neatly into the boxes defined by 30 years of research on transformational leadership theory, suggesting that the leadership process is more complex than portrayed by current dichotomizations. The findings provide support for recent criticisms of transformational leadership theory.

The findings of this chapter provide evidence of the benefits of eliciting input from organizational actors at multiple hierarchical levels. The empirical evidence provides practitioners with a fresh perspective on board roles and relationship, diverging from the traditional structural prescriptions.

This paper seeks to argue against the conventional wisdom in the current TQM literature that hierarchy is not conducive for TQM. It aims to identify the cultural dynamics that can aid TQM implementation in a hierarchical country like India.

The paper reflects on the existing literature on culture and TQM and develops a mechanism that explains why hierarchy hinders TQM implementation in Western culture and how it can support TQM implementation in Indian culture.

In a people oriented culture like those of Japan and India, nurturance is the juice that sustains hierarchy that finally morphs into collectivism. In these social systems, there need not be conflicting impact of hierarchy and collectivism on TQM implementation if the nurturance aspect of hierarchy is understood. Thus, in the Indian context, hierarchy, operationalised through the guru‐shishya (teacher‐student) relationship between the boss and the subordinate can develop a learning orientation among the organisational members and facilitate TQM implementation. Similarly, by superimposing the element of “equity” on the “personalised relationship” dimension of hierarchy, in a collectivistic society like India, it is possible to elevate the aspect of “personalised relationship” between superior and subordinate to the status of “individualised consideration” dimension of transformational leadership provided it is bestowed only upon the satisfactory completion of “task” by the subordinate.

This paper shows how the cultural aspect of TQM implementation should be handled in a high power distance country like India.

The paper identifies the two Indian cultural aspects that can facilitate TQM implementation in India notwithstanding the hierarchical Indian values.

This paper aims to improve the semantic-disambiguation capability of an information-retrieval system by taking advantages of a well-crafted classification tree. The unstructured nature and sheer volume of information accessible over networks have made it drastically difficult for users to seek relevant information. Many information-retrieval methods have been developed to address this problem, and keyword-based approach is amongst the most common approach. Such an approach is often inadequate to cope with the conceptualization associated with user needs and contents. This brings about the problem of semantic ambiguation that refers to the disagreement in meaning of terms between involving parties of a communication due to polysemy, leading to increased complexity and lesser accuracy in information integration, migration, retrieval and other related activities.

A novel ontology-based search approach, named GeTFIRST (short for Graph-embedded Tree Fostering Information Retrieval SysTem), is proposed to disambiguate keywords semantically. The contribution is twofold. First, a search strategy is proposed to prune irrelevant concepts for accuracy improvement using our Graph-embedded Tree (GeT)-based ontology. Second, a path-based ranking algorithm is proposed to incorporate and reward the content specificity.

An empirical evaluation was performed on United States Patent And Trademark Office (USPTO) patent datasets to compare our approach with full-text patent search approaches. The results showed that GeTFIRST handled the ambiguous keywords with higher keyword-disambiguation accuracy than traditional search approaches.

The search approach of this paper copes with the semantic ambiguation by using our proposed GeT-based ontology and a path-based ranking algorithm.

Hierarchy and bureaucracy have been more or less welcomed companions of human civilisation from the very beginning. In almost every culture and epoch, ruling elites and followers, superiors and subordinates can be identified. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are quite flexible, adaptable and they are fairly persistent – but why could, or even should we see this as a problem?

This introduction will first provide a brief history of no change, followed by the second section where the advantages and disadvantages and the contested terrain of hierarchy are elaborated in some length. The discussion focuses on three areas: the functional, social and ethical qualities of hierarchy. In the final section, the chapters of this volume will be briefly introduced. The chapters are grouped into three sections: (I) Fundamentals and historical accounts of bureaucracy, (II) Organisational, cultural and socio-psychological aspects of hierarchy and (III) Alternative views on, and alternatives to hierarchy.

Despite the importance of bibliographic information systems for discovering and exploring library resources, some of the core functionality that should be provided to support users in their information seeking process is still missing. Investigating these issues, the purpose of this paper is to design a solution that would fulfil the missing objectives.

Building on the concepts of a work family, functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) and information visualization, the paper proposes a model and user interface design that could support a more efficient and user-friendly presentation and navigation in bibliographic information systems.

The proposed design brings together all versions of a work, related works, and other works by and about the author and shows how the model was implemented into a FrbrVis prototype system using hierarchical visualization layout.

Although issues related to discovery and exploration apply to various material types, the research first focused on works of fiction and was also limited by the selected sample of records.

The model for presenting and interacting with FRBR-based data can serve as a good starting point for future developments and implementations.

With FRBR concepts being gradually integrated into cataloguing rules, formats, and various bibliographic services, one of the important questions that has not really been investigated and studied is how the new type of data would be presented to users in a way that would exploit the true potential of the changes.