Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how employee perceptions of change and leadership might impact work engagement following major organizational change.

Social media invited US workers recently experiencing major organizational change to anonymously complete a web-based survey requesting qualitative and quantitative responses. Values-based coding and thematic analysis were used to explore qualitative data. Hierarchical and linear regression, and bootstrapped mediation were used to analyze quantitative data.

Analysis of qualitative data identified employees’ perceptions of ideal change and ideal leadership were well supported in the change leadership literature. Analysis of quantitative data indicated that employee perceptions of leadership fully mediated the relationship between employee perceptions of change and work engagement.

Study findings imply that how employees perceive change is explained by how they perceive leadership during change, and that these perceptions impact work engagement. Although these findings appear commonsensical, the less than stellar statistics on major organizational change may encourage leaders to become more follower-focused throughout the change process.

The study makes a contribution to an understudied area of organizational research, specifically applied information processing theory. This is the first study that identifies employee perceptions of leadership as a mediator for perceptions of change and work engagement. From a value perspective, leaders as successful change agents recognize significant cost savings in dollars and human welfare by maintaining healthy workplaces with highly engaged workers.

This chapter investigates the mutual relationship between logic and paradox, showing that paradox is indispensable to test logic, as well as logic is necessary to extend our understanding of paradox. Firstly, I consider the lesson that organizational theory can draw from formal logic’s investigation of semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. Subsequently, I survey the plural interpretations of the concept of “logic” in organizational theory (as logic of theory, logic of practice, and institutional logics). I argue that this plurality of meanings is not a source of confusion but offers an opportunity to illustrate different manifestations of, and ways to cope with, organizational paradoxes.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss four main research questions which are as follows: how does a consumer turn into a devoted fan? How does a devoted fan react to the expansion of a human brand? What kind of strategies does a devoted fan take when facing challenges encountered by a human brand? And are devoted fans homogeneous, or can they be further divided into different subgroups?

The basis of grounded theory process is intensive depth interviews with 14 devoted fans of a famous Taiwanese pop singer in a qualitative manner along with content analysis of messages from online fan clubs.

Using the metaphor of kingdom to parallel the phenomenon of fandom, the research also explicates the importance of initial brand position, and the construction and expansion from the core castle – the core positioning of the human brand – to become a kingdom where devoted fans swear to be loyal to the human brand and cross-buy the derivative products of the latter. Five fan’s subgroup and a theoretical framework are obtained.

The theoretical framework derived in this study explicates how consumers’ initial perceptions of the human brand are formed and reinforced and how they become different kinds of fans which in turn influence the strategies they take in the face of the expansion or withdraw of the human brand.

This collection of commentaries on the reprinted 1987 article by Nancy C. Morey and Fred Luthans, “Anthropology: the forgotten behavioral science in management history”, aims to reflect on the treatment of the history of anthropological work in organizational studies presented in the original article.

The essays are invited and peer‐reviewed contributions from scholars in organizational studies and anthropology.

The scholars invited to comment on the original article have seen its value, and their contributions ground its content in contemporary issues and debates.

The original article was deemed “original” for its time (1987), anticipating as it did considerable reclamation of ethnographic methods in organizational studies in the decades that followed it. It was also deemed of value for our times and, in particular, for readers of this journal, as an historical document, but also as one view of the unsung role of anthropology in management and organizational studies.

Existing studies have been conducted to explain the process of digital transformation. This work aims to identify the paradoxes encountered by companies in undertaking digital transformation and the role of digital affordances in overcoming these paradoxes.

This study uses rich empirical data from four traditional Chinese manufacturers that have successfully achieved digital transformation to explain how companies can overcome the digital transformation paradox with the help of digital affordances.

The authors identify the paradoxes that traditional companies encounter when carrying out data transformation based on the experience of four Chinese traditional manufacturing enterprises that have successfully achieved digital transformation – the paradox of flexibility and stability of organization structure, the paradox of cost and profit and the paradox of perception between executives and employees. Based on this, we propose three digital affordances that play an important role in overcoming the digital transformation paradoxes – digital decentralization, digital agility and digital citizenship.

This study identifies three forms of critical digital affordances and introduces citizenship into digital transformation contexts.

This autobiography sums up the life story of one of the contributors to the history of inquiry and instruction in the field of marketing, with special attention to the historical developments that have influenced the study of consumer behavior and the concept of branding.

This paper is an autobiographical essay, a personal history.

The reminiscence illustrates the way life experiences evolve, showing the interaction among personal growth, education, career choices and work experience that led to Professor Levy’s contributions to the field of marketing education and its research literature.

The paper describes a unique life, and an unusual explication of the personal life sources of influential ideas. It is novel in its large perspective and integrative narrative, and the unusual exposure of its various conceptual issues and links. It should be of interest to marketing historians, managers and scholars of marketing education.

The purpose of this paper is to question some of the assumptions about warm proximity which animate the idea of ethnography as a largely naturalistic mode of enquiry.

Watching television and having a think.

That the history of ethnography can be told as a process of bringing “them” closer to “us”, and this account culminates in the idea of watching a TV show as a mode of academic enquiry.

Largely depends on whether anyone is actually convinced by the argument.

Film provides an alternative medium for assessing our interpretations of cultural icons. This selective list looks at the film and video sources for information on and interpretations of the life of Woody Guthrie.

MORE than a decade ago we were assured by the then head of Imperial Chemicals Industries that the man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive. We might venture to add as a footnote that such a man's journey will be easier, his destination more certain, if he first clears away the assorted debris that encumbers his route.