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This paper aims to propose the need to be bolder about recognizing when an employee needs to be let go.

This paper is based upon a review of literature and extensive fieldwork.

Three situations are presented for when releasing an employee may be the appropriate tactic, along with five general principles for shifting the organization–employee relationship from unhealthy enmeshment to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

This paper proposes a practical view of the organization–employee relationship that strives to enhance organizational performance while honoring the humanity of the employee.

In retrospect, one of the most extraordinary features of the support from faculty was that they encouraged me to follow my interests rather than being concerned about making sure that I would contribute to enlarging their research agenda. I say, in retrospect, because it has only been in seeing how often graduate students are given limited options by faculty that I have understood the model that I was taught at Stanford. Each faculty member I interacted with knew that I was developing a different agenda either because of my interest in ethnography or because of my interest in different disciplines than theirs. Seymour Martin Lipset, similarly, could clearly see that I was not following in his footsteps, yet hired me as a research assistant and provided important input for my dissertation work. When I returned from doing fieldwork in Washington, DC, Joanne Martin's expertise in studying culture and narratives helped me to make sense of my data and helped provide a different perspective to the ambiguity and choice scholarship. My work was more closely related to that of my dissertation advisor, Jim March, though he was also in a position to see how my ethnographic leanings would uncover issues that required me to move in directions other than his work. Yet, he defended and supported my choice even to the point of walking me through the conundrums that arose while I was working as a policy analyst and doing fieldwork.

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Scott). In the school of education, Jim March was intriguing a new generation of students with his puzzles and wisdom. In addition to Mike Hannan's joint appointment, the Graduate School of Business featured such luminaries as Jeff Pfeffer, Joanne Martin, Jim Baron, Joel Podolny, and Bill Barnett. Slightly further afield, Ray Leavitt and Michael Fehling had begun to train engineers to think about organizational issues, as they developed computer simulations with nuanced attention to cognitive and decision-making processes. Steve Barley would join (what was then) the department of industrial engineering in 1994 and Mark Granovetter would join the department of sociology in 1995, adding fresh insights from the sociology of work and economic sociology, respectively, to what was already a firm foundation for organization studies. The umbrella organization that linked many of these efforts was the Stanford Consortium on Organizational Research (SCOR), which had been guided by Dick Scott's able leadership since 1988 and hosted an annual organizations conference at the beautiful Asilomar retreat in Monterey, California.

This chapter attempts to explain why the community of scholars at Stanford University generated an unparalleled amount of highly influential theory and research on organizations in the last three decades of the 20th century.¹

The sheer volume of decisions taken within the public sector procurement process prevents perfect and complete information being obtained and applied to every best value tender analysis that is carried out. As such, uncertainty must be accepted as a feature of the best value decision‐making process. This paper reports research which is developing a methodology for utilising the uncertainty component in best value tender analysis in order to create a more transparent decision making process. The main output of the research is the production of a robust support tool which aids the multi objective decision making process within the public sector of the UK construction industry by provoking rational discussion with respect to; the industry’s key performance indicators (KPIs), the client’s attitude to risk and provides a transparent audit trail of the decisions taken. The underlying rationale for the support tool is based on a combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi‐Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and Whole Life Costing (WLC). The paper demonstrates the practical utility of the methodology of the tool through a tender decision process.

Resilience is the ability to snap back after experiencing trauma, and is increasingly important for leaders in today’s complex, global world. Resilience can be learned, which is a great news for leaders wanting to sustain through tough times. When adversity arises, resilience becomes the tool to help us grow stronger. Unfortunately, most organizations do not purposefully design themselves to foster a resilient workplace, leaving leaders to do this work on their own. By not investing in building resilience in employees, organizations are missing an important way to differentiate themselves from the competition. Workplaces that build resilience into their practices, culture, and development benefit from employees who sustain, even thrive, through complex change and market shifts.

This chapter explores how the habit of “stealing time” can build stronger, more resilient leaders, in adverse times. We will also discuss how reshaping our own mindset makes us stronger and ready to tackle daily challenges. Then we focus on spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental components of resilience. By increasing our resilience, we also gain a sense of cognitive freedom – a sense of empowered problem-solving and creativity – that can be a positive and contagious force throughout our teams and organizations. Finally, we focus on the organizational “streams” of resilience, which allow organizations to build greater resilience capacities at all levels. By using classic organizational design principles, we begin to see how we can help everyone live and work more fully and with more vigor.

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.

Discusses case examples from organizations which reveal a customer focus. Examples cover retail, airlines, manufacturing and service firms. Places service and quality of service firmly in the forefront of competitive advantage. Considers factors such as the importance of existing customers; the need for a clear view of the customers on whom the company wishes to focus; and methods for building customer relationships.

A number of studies have highlighted the problems and challenges that have been encountered with the analysis of best value and partnering tenders carried out in the UK public sector. One of the principal issues is that client organisations and decision makers have to assess numerous diverse quality attributes as part of the contractor selection process. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of research, which aimed to identify the core factors, which could be used to differentiate bids in the context of social housing.

A questionnaire was sent to a cross‐section of stakeholders within the social housing sector asking the respondents to rank the importance of 35 attributes with respect to selecting a successful contractor. The responses were subjected to principal component analysis to detect a structure in the relationship between the attributes and classify the attributes into a set of factors.

The results indicate that the 35 attributes could be grouped together and reduced to ten core factors.

Application of the results could enable the stakeholders to streamline the tender analysis procedure allowing the high volume of tenders to be dealt with more effectively and efficiently.

It is not expected that client organisations would limit their tender analysis to the ten core factors only. They are not intended to be prescriptive and the paper only provides a starting point in using them in the choice of contractor selection quality attributes.

The 1980s and 1990s at Stanford University were a uniquely productive era for research on organizations and labor markets. I describe three important, interconnected themes that characterize the research on organizations and labor markets that emerged from Stanford during this era: the central role of the firm in a multi-level system that determines labor market outcomes, the role of institutions in both creating and constraining labor market outcomes, and the dynamic, often unexpected, consequences of labor market outcomes. I describe the genesis and development of each theme and conclude by discussing what lessons can be learned from this era about creating an innovative and productive research culture.