Search results

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesize the attributes of loose and tight coupling in educational organizations. In addition, it is aimed to determine whether this phenomenon has value and strategies to offer for the current educational administration and research.

Integrative literature review and content analysis, assisted by Atlas.ti software, were used as the methods of this paper. Review data included 32 articles from peer reviewed journals.

Conceptual framework of continuum of organizational couplings in educational organizations was generated. Elements of the framework include the features of coupling concepts within the continuum, components of couplings, contributory types of organizational couplings and the elements of leadership and change process with emerging strategies, as well as the element of cultural context. In this paper, elements of continuum of couplings and leadership will be emphasized.

Findings have practical implications for the management and leadership in educational organizations, and for the researchers in the field for future research purposes.

Findings have social implications for both teaching staff and administration in educational organizations, by highlighting the attributes of loose and tight coupling, and their connections with leadership, change process and cultural context.

The paper presents a distinctive synopsis of the educational administration literature, in the context of loose and tight coupling, with the time span of four decades.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce project business as a research field. The project business view in this paper puts focus on the management of firms and their businesses, and this way the paper complements the existing project‐centric view of the role of projects and their management in various business contexts.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework for project business and identify relevant research areas and themes. These research areas and themes are derived by using the knowledge and experience obtained from scientific project business research conducted in Finland since the early 1990s.

This paper describes project business as a research field by introducing a project business framework and the four major research areas inherent in the framework: management of a project, management of a project‐based firm, management of a project network, and management of a business network. It also suggests specific research areas and themes within the framework that are relevant and contribute to new knowledge in the project business field.

The project business framework described in this paper, including the suggested research areas and themes, is important in focusing research and for development of practical application of project‐based business activities in firms and in public organizations.

The paper reveals avenues that lead towards the development of a new body of knowledge for project business that focuses on managing both firms and projects effectively in their networked business environments.

This article attempts to understand the dynamics of institutional management processes. This concept is defined here as managerial action vis‐a‐vis emerging political and infra‐structural conditions for business in the nation‐state arena. For this purpose the emerging patterns of relationships between business and politics in the Finnish forest sector are described and analysed. Our focus is on the impact of the four most societally loaded changes in political and infra‐structural conditions of the forest sector: its position in the core of the Finnish economy, the ownership of the key resources, the use of timber as the basic source of welfare, and the logging and transportation infrastructure. These changes become the key issues for the level of institutional management in the forest sector. They have remained significant over the studied long‐term period, but the efforts of their moulding have changed over time. These dynamics of institutional management are found to follow a cycle, divided in seven phases, coined as: (1) offensive confrontation, (2) operational co‐operation, (3) differentiation of institutional management, (4) exploitation of a core position, (5) justification of expansion and growth, (6) legitimation of decline, and (7) defensive confrontation. The authors provide examples and evidence of these changing patterns of institutional management, and offer a proposition about the underlying dynamics of the cycle.