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Is there a relationship between the nature and intensity of the action orientations of the members of a team and group effectiveness? This problem was explored with a sample of 21 educational workshop groups taken from a population of 138 such groups associated with elementary schools in Quebec (Canada), categorized according to their rated effectiveness. Four other Measures, test V (values), N (Norms), R (roles) and F (facilities), were administered to parents, teachers and administrators who formed each educational workshop group. Effective groups differed from less effective groups in the areas of shared values, adherence to norms related to participation, methods of participating in the work and in the area of satisfaction with the human and material resources which affected their group behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse an Australian commercial radio talkback show that deployed prank as a strategy to scoop royal news to entertain an Australian audience, often commodified for popularity ratings and sponsorship dollars.

Using textual analysis, the study empirically examined the crisis that followed the 2Day FM’s prank call to the Duchess of Cambridge at King Edward VII Hospital, London. The paper engages with the media-made disaster from the lens of issue and crisis management interrogating social conversations and news stories across three countries, i.e., Australia, Britain and India.

Findings reflect that the media, in this case, radio, far more than any other public entity, is subject to public scrutiny and has a moral obligation to practice with public interest at heart. Both news and social media played crucial roles in the escalation of the crisis that ignited a range of public issues. While social media narratives were abusive, condemning and life-threatening, news stories focused on legality, ethics and privacy.

The prank broadcast invited news and social media attention and raised public concern over the ethics of Australian radio entertainment. Crises, whilst often damaging, contribute to the rethinking and rejuvenation of organisational and professional values and practices.

This project is significant in that it is the first to use a radio talk show as a case to engage with issue and crisis management literature and interrogate radio practice in Australia. Further, the project identifies this crisis as media-made and develops an innovative crisis lifecycle model.

We propose that institutional logics are resources organizations use to leverage their strategic choices. We argue that firms with an awareness of multiple available logics, expressed by a larger stock of competences and a broader industrial scope are more likely to add an institutional logic to their repertoire and to become purist in this new logic. We also hypothesize that a favorable opportunity set as expressed by status leads high and low status firms to add a logic but not to focus exclusively on this new logic. We examine our hypotheses in the French industrial design industry from 1989 to 2003 in which a managerialist logic emerged and prevailed along with the pre-existing institutional logics of modernism and formalism. Our findings contribute to theory on the relationship between organizations’ strategy and institutional change and partially address the paradox of why high-status actors play a key role in triggering institutional change when such change is likely to undermine the very basis of their social position and advantage.