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The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how research teams serve as building blocks for collaboration at a field level, and how these building blocks are assembled by a network of interacting organizations. The field setting is a medical sciences consortium in Australia established to encourage collaborative and entrepreneurial research among government, industry, research centers and university units. This consortium is examined as a case study. The analysis demonstrates how collaboration evolved at three interacting levels: research team, organization and interorganizational field.

The main findings are: (1) Intellectual property (IP) acts as the key orienting agent in this field to align the behavior of various stakeholders and leverage collaborative and entrepreneurial activity. (2) Tensions between the different ways that the commercial and public sector actors value IP serve to structure the interfaces among the consortium, the member organizations and the research teams. (3) The consortium is a key infrastructural element in the creation of collaborative capital in the Australian biotechnology field studied. The main contribution of the study is to highlight the nature of collaborative capital at a field level and begin to explore its implications.

Recent research develops theory and evidence to understand how organizations come to be seen as “actors” with specified features and properties, a core concern for phenomenological institutionalism. The authors use evidence from changes in research designs in the organizational study of institutional logics as an empirical strategy to add fresh evidence to the debates about the institutional construction of organizations as actors. The case is the research literature on the institutional logics perspective, a literature in which organizational and institutional theorists grapple with long-time social theory questions about nature and context of action and more contemporary debates about the dynamics of social orders. With rapid growth since the early 1990s, this research program has elaborated and proliferated in ways meant to advance the study of societal orders, frames, and practices in diverse inter- and intra-organizational contexts. The study identifies two substantive trends over the observation period: A shift in research design from field-level studies to organization-specific contexts, where conflicts are prominent in the organization, and a shift in the conception of logic transitions, originally from one dominant logic to another, then more attention to co-existence or blending of logics. Based on this evidence, the authors identify a typology of four available research genres that mark a changed conception of organizations as actors. The case of institutional logics makes visible the link between research designs and research outcomes, and it provides new evidence for the institutional processes that construct organizational actorhood.

The goal of this study is to examine the influence of resources provided to nonprofit organisations by corporate partners on the achievement of nonprofits' social and organisational objectives, accounting for mediation effects of dependence and relationship. This goal is investigated from the perspective of nonprofit organisations.

Following 20 preliminary in-depth interviews, an online survey was administered to people working in nonprofit industry who had experience working with their organisation's corporate partnership. With 273 completed questionnaires, the authors tested the model with mediation analyses, using bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals method.

Although reputation, non-financial resources and cash investments have strong and positive effects on achieving social and organisational objectives, these relations are fully mediated by dependence and relationship between partners. Further analysis shows that relationship is a significantly stronger mediator than dependence on the effect of reputation in regards to the achievement of both sets of objectives.

This article builds on marketing knowledge, using resource dependence theory to focus on the effects of corporate-provided resources on nonprofit organisations; a topic largely unexplored in extant literature. It is the first study to operationalise and empirically examine the specific effects of different types of resources on specific nonprofit performance objectives.

The purpose of this study is to understand turbulence in the field of payments in Europe and which future challenges this bring. The objective is to enable actors – industrial as well as policy-making agencies – to avoid becoming passive and reluctant to take needed steps that may realize a new playing field for payments.

The article uses scenario analysis methodology to propose a way forward if the field of payments is to move away from turbulence and instead embrace renewal. It is based on a literature study, interviews and workshops.

This article discusses and shows how the payment system is in a state of turbulence, which in itself, may become a self-reinforcing negative process. The seemingly rational competitive actions that firms take in this situation may make the situation worse. The article also outlines critical action that must be taken to avoid this negative process.

There is a need for research that integrates studies on innovation and renewal in the critical industries – banking, telecom and the system driving industries – to improve our understanding of possible synergies and/or obstacles to integrated, cross-industry innovation efforts. Such insights may also lay the foundation for the creation of a way to overcome turbulence.

The article advocates the need that critical actors collaborate to develop a new understanding – or common ground – of a future payment system. This will serve as a tool to identify obstacles and challenges, develop action and formulate agendas for different actors in and around the system. Based on the new common ground, actors are then free to formulate their own strategic agendas in a new competitive landscape in the field of payments.

If the turbulence is to be avoided, national governments in the euro area and the European Union Commission must work hard to avoid national exemptions and adaptations (often caused by strong lobbying by companies from each country in question). Innovation agencies must work so as to stimulate renewal. Another task could be to educate consumers on the social and economic benefits of moving away from a cash-based payment system.

The originality of this paper is to test the idea that turbulence and the consequential inertia in the payment system is a result of the institutional set-up of the industry. In addition, the article uses causal texture theory and scenario analysis to understand turbulence and inertia in the payment system. This has, to my knowledge, not been done before.