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Dispersed multinational teams include people from multiple nations, some of whom are not collocated. In a knowledge economy, such teams must locate, store, allocate, and retrieve knowledge. Three central questions are: (a) How can dispersed multinational teams manage knowledge resource flows? (b) What factors influence knowledge resource distribution in these teams? and (c) How do dispersed multinational teams evolve over time? This chapter examines knowledge resource sharing in multinational teams through three theoretical lenses: transactive memory theory, collective action theory, and evolutionary theory, and concludes with practical suggestions for managing dispersed multinational teams that are derived from these three theoretical lenses.

The position of professions within society has long been a subject of great interest and controversy among sociologists. Currently, however, the social position of professions appears particularly worthy of study, for two reasons. First, sociologists have recently formulated a variety of frameworks of analysis which attempt to identify the means by which occupations are able to secure and maintain for themselves the privileges and power of “profession” — thereby manipulating their social position. Second, some professions are now facing significant social changes which may provide greater threats to their established positions than they have experienced in the recent past. Sociologists such as Elliott and members of professions themselves have claimed that the professions face a “crisis.” These commentators describe changes which largely concern those issues of autonomy and power that are now coming to be regarded as salient in the study of professions — changes such as a diminution of professions' control over their conditions of practice and over their established market segments. Investigation of these changes should be able to furnish evidence which is relevant to a quesiton of current sociological concern, and also provide an interpretative challenge which may help to refine existing frameworks of analysis. These considerations form the rationale for the present paper, which analyses recent changes affecting the social position of five professions in the United Kingdom and the United States. The five professions are accounting, architecture, civil engineering, law, and medicine (including dentistry).

The fundamental premises of three different models of diffusion of new technologies are described; the similarities and differences in prediction which are derivable from the three perspectives are highlighted. These perspectives include (1) diffusion of innovation; (2) technology transfer; and (3) critical mass theory. The article examines these predictions within the context of the unique social, cultural and political environments of developing countries. To illustrate the results of this approach, these theories are applied retrospectively to three technologies introduced into developing countries. They differentially explain diffusion and the subsequent use of these technologies. Implications for change management and technology policy are presented and future research is suggested.

Bindu Aryais currently a doctoral student in International Business and Strategy at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her dissertation will empirically investigate how collaborative efforts between for-profit, not-for-profit and governmental agencies facilitate outcomes and can function to enhance sustainable development. Her research on how social networks facilitate organizational and group decision-making processes and outcomes has appeared in Journal of Management (forthcoming).

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The study of the diffusion of innovations into libraries has become a cottage industry of sorts, as libraries have always provided a fascinating test-bed of nonprofit institutions attempting improvement through the use of new policies, practices, and assorted apparatus (Malinconico, 1997). For example, Paul Sturges (1996) has focused on the evolution of public library services over the course of 70 years across England, while Verna Pungitore (1995) presented the development of standardization of library planning policies in contemporary America. For the past several decades, however, the study of diffusion in libraries has tended to focus on the implementation of information technologies (e.g., Clayton, 1997; Tran, 2005; White, 2001) and their associated competencies (e.g., Marshall, 1990; Wildemuth, 1992), the improvements in performance associated with their use (e.g., Damanpour, 1985, 1988; Damanpour & Evan, 1984), and ways to manage resistance to technological changes within the library environment (e.g., Weiner, 2003).

The rational organization has long been an important tool in public administration (Weber, 1968; Simon, 1964; Alkadry, 2003). It is often identified with positive characteristics such as objectivity, expertise, efficiency, fairness and formalization. However, these same positive characteristics can contribute to a “darker side” of rational organizations. Hummel (1994) articulates this as a “bureaucratic experience” resulting from the interaction between administrators and bureaucracy, while others articulate it as the “organization man” experience. In this article, a conceptual model of the relationship between organizational rationalization and administrator experiences is developed. This model is tested using a survey of front-line administrators and a structural equation model of the relationships between these two concepts. The article concludes with a discussion of alternatives to technical rationality.

A relatively recent advance in analyzing longitudinal data, structural equation modeling with structured means, for examining the impact of organizational change and development interventions, is presented. Some of the limitations of current approaches to analyzing data collected from “experimental” and “control” groups are discussed, along with why structural modeling is particularly useful for real‐world experiments and quasi‐experiments. An illustration is then given, applying this approach to data collected from a team‐building intervention which involved 2,331 employees in 16 plants of a large garment manufacturer. Implications of the research are briefly considered.