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1 – 10 of 323This chapter outlines how Pearson, the world’s largest education company, and its CEO John Fallon are acting as trailblazers of Jugaad Innovation …
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter outlines how Pearson, the world’s largest education company, and its CEO John Fallon are acting as trailblazers of Jugaad Innovation (https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-frugal-innovators-do) in education by embedding a focus on learner outcomes – “efficacy” – at the heart of the company. The purpose of the chapter is to highlight practical examples of how this innovation has affected business strategy and decision-making, enabling the company to be able to have a greater impact on learning with the aim of simultaneously helping the business to grow financially. Many of these examples are from products and units that are continuing to embrace and adopt efficacy; they represent live examples of best practice.
Findings
This chapter provides an overview of how the drive toward efficacy represents a new, innovative way of doing business. The approach is not new to education, but putting a focus on learner outcomes at the center of traditional business operations represents a step-change from how other companies in the sector operate. The chapter will also look at the Office of the Chief Education Advisor, a central intrapreneurial unit that continues to lead the global efficacy agenda, with the aim that efficacy becomes so embedded in the company fabric that it becomes irreversible. In addition, the chapter provides some other examples of specific frameworks, tools and units that operate with an innovative and intrapreneurial mindset.
Originality/value
This study presents a case study in a major private company and the way the applied approach affected the company. The content of the chapter is taken from a live case and represents a unique insight into the ongoing application of innovation and intrapreneurship in the field.
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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how two media firms, Sky Plc and Pearson Plc, adapted, reconfigured, and transformed their businesses to meet the demands of an…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how two media firms, Sky Plc and Pearson Plc, adapted, reconfigured, and transformed their businesses to meet the demands of an operating environment characterized by inexorable changes in digital technologies.
Design/methodology/approach
The over-arching vision, corporate strategies, and financial performance for both firms are examined over two business cycles.
Findings
These findings illustrate why firms need to create a portfolio business that takes advantage of the market opportunities created by innovative digital technologies, while off-setting the risks associated with digital disruption.
Practical implications
Business leaders should not dispense with the basic principles of good strategic business unit portfolio management in their attempts to take advantage of the market opportunities provided by a disruptive digital environment.
Originality/value
This paper provides a highly original insight into how two firms placed ambitious levels of growth at the heart of their corporate strategies to seize the market opportunities provided by an increasingly digital operating environment.
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To show how e‐learning has contributed to organizational learning.
Abstract
Purpose
To show how e‐learning has contributed to organizational learning.
Design/methodology/approach
The article explores how BAE Systems has used a virtual university to develop learning opportunities for its staff.
Findings
Cost savings have flowed from using e‐learning as well e‐learning extending the reach of learning activity.
Practical implications
The article shows how e‐learning can be put into practice and the value of an organization‐wide approach.
Originality/value
The article will be of value to company trainers and developers who are looking at the use of e‐learning.
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This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a…
Abstract
Purpose
This research paper aims to examine how organized criminals rescript their identities to engage with entrepreneurship discourse when authoring their biographies. From a sociological perspective, stereotypes and social constructs of the entrepreneur and the criminal are subjects of recurring interest. Yet, despite the prevalence of the stereotype of the entrepreneur as a hero-figure in the entrepreneurship literature and the conflation of the entrepreneur with the stereotype of the businessman, notions of entrepreneurial identity are not fixed with constructions of the entrepreneur as a rascal, rogue or villain being accepted as alternative social constructs.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative approaches of “biographical analysis” and “close reading” adopted help us draw out discursive strategies.
Findings
The main finding is that a particular genre of criminal biographies can be re-read as entrepreneur stories. The theme of nuanced entrepreneurial identities and in particular gangster discourse is under researched. In this study, by conducting a close reading of contemporary biographies of British criminals, the paper encounters self-representations of criminals who seek to author an alternative and more appealing social identity as entrepreneurs. That this re-scripting of personal biographies to make gangster stories conform to the genre of entrepreneur stories is of particular interest.
Research limitations/implications
This study points to similarities and differences between criminal and entrepreneurial biographies. It also presents sociological insights into an alternative version of entrepreneurial identity and sociological constructions of the criminal as entrepreneur.
Practical implications
This research provides an insight into how criminals seek to legitimise their life-stories.
Originality/value
This research paper is of value in that it is the first to consider contemporary biographies of British criminals as entrepreneurship discourse. Understanding how criminal biographies and entrepreneur stories share similar socially constructed themes, storylines and epistemologies contribute to the development of entrepreneurship and sociological research by examining entrepreneurship in an unusual social setting.
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The purpose of the study is to propose a conceptual model of frugal innovation and examine how it is linked to value creation.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the study is to propose a conceptual model of frugal innovation and examine how it is linked to value creation.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is exploratory in nature, whereby previous studies were explored to identify the dimensions of frugal innovation. The previous studies were explored from selected databases including Google Scholar and ProQuest using the key word search, “frugal innovation”, “Jugaad innovation”, “value creation” and “environmental munificence”. The review process included the studies from 1991 to 2017.
Findings
This study suggests that frugal innovation is a multidimensional construct with affordability, simplicity, quality, sustainability, resilience, management support and defeaturing as its dimensions. The study found that frugal innovation is an important predictor of value creation. The study also proposes the moderating effect of environmental munificence on the relationship between frugal innovation and value creation.
Practical implications
This study invokes entrepreneurs, academicians and managers to be more inclined toward the bottom of the pyramid by using fewer resources. The study contributes to the strategic entrepreneurship literature by developing a conceptual framework of frugal innovation and linking it to the value creation.
Originality/value
The conceptual framework proposed is based on selected dimensions which seem to be lacking owing to various conceptualizations and meanings in the literature. The study is the first of its kind which has proposed the dimensions of frugal innovation.
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Throughout their histories the Evangelical and Catholic communitieshave been traditional opponents. Seldom have they agreed, and never havethey joined to work as one within the US…
Abstract
Throughout their histories the Evangelical and Catholic communities have been traditional opponents. Seldom have they agreed, and never have they joined to work as one within the US society and polity. However, beginning in the early 1990s some small, self‐identifying élites from each religious community sought out in the other visible persons of similar ideological and moral commitment. Advances the context of that dialogue between these micro‐élites, proposes the application of classical élite theory to explain the dialogue better. Generates a seven‐postulate hypothesis to answer the question posed by the context and the application of élite theory: can self‐selected micro‐élites maintain their alliance and accommodation for a significant period of time? Given that these are integrative and pattern maintenance élites (not the more usual ruling and adaptive ones) the application of élite theory offers an unconventional understanding of alliance building, as well as an uncommon insight into religious co‐operation and political accommodation by micro‐élites in contemporary US politics.
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THE IRISH, it would appear, are not a romantic race ! They do not appreciate their works of art, neither do they revere their great writers. As James Joyce so aptly put it—
Not all pressured, greedy, and opportunistic individuals actually commit white-collar crime. So what exactly is the common denominator for individuals to commit white-collar…
Abstract
Not all pressured, greedy, and opportunistic individuals actually commit white-collar crime. So what exactly is the common denominator for individuals to commit white-collar crime? This study investigates the propensity of an individual to commit white-collar crime and advances personality as an explanatory factor. Questionnaire survey data is collected from 357 undergraduate accounting students in a later year accounting course at a large university in Australia. Personality is measured using the Big Five Inventory. Support is provided for the view that individuals scoring lower in agreeableness and lower in conscientiousness have a higher propensity to commit white-collar crime. While no significant main effect associations emerged for extraversion, neuroticism, or openness to experience, inspection of individual parameter estimates revealed a significant negative association between neuroticism and propensity to commit white-collar crime but only in certain circumstances.
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Corporate financial communications concern public and private disclosure (Holland, 2005). This paper aims to explain how banks developed financial communications and how problems…
Abstract
Purpose
Corporate financial communications concern public and private disclosure (Holland, 2005). This paper aims to explain how banks developed financial communications and how problems emerged in the global financial crisis. It explores policy responses.
Design/methodology/approach
Bank cases reveal construction and destruction of the social, knowledge and economic world of financial communications over two periods.
Findings
In the 1990s, learning about financial communications by a “dominant coalition” (Cyert, March, 1963) in bank top management was stimulated by gradual change. The management learnt how to accumulate social and cultural capital and developed “habitus” for disclosure (Bourdieu, 1986). From 2000, rapid change and secrecy factors accelerated bank internalisation of shareholder wealth maximising values, turning “habitus” in “market for information” (MFI) (Barker, 1998) into a “psychic prison” (Morgan,1986), creating riskier bank cultures (Schein, 2004) and constraining learning.
Research limitations/implications
The paper introduces sociological concepts to banking research and financial disclosures to increase the understanding about financial information and bank culture and about how regulation can avoid crises. Limitations reflect the small number of banks and range of qualitative data.
Practical implications
Regulators will have to make visible the change processes, new contexts and knowledge and connections to bank risk and performance through improved regulator action and bank public disclosure.
Social Implications
“Masking” and rituals (Andon and Free, 2012) restricted bank disclosure and weakened governance and market pressures on banks. These factors mediated bank failure and survival in 2008, as “psychic prisons” “fell apart”. Bank and MFI agents experienced a “cosmology episode” (Weick, 1988). Financial communications structures failed but were reconstructed by regulators.
Originality/value
The paper shows how citizens require transparency and contested accountability to democratise finance capitalism. Otherwise, problems will recur.
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Shahriar M. Saadullah and Charles D. Bailey
From an online survey of 114 participating accountants at staff, senior staff, and supervisor levels from a top-100 U.S. accounting firm, we investigate the effects of the Big…
Abstract
From an online survey of 114 participating accountants at staff, senior staff, and supervisor levels from a top-100 U.S. accounting firm, we investigate the effects of the Big Five personality traits (Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness) on the ethical decision-making process of accountants. Within the framework of Rest’s (1986) Four-Component Model of Ethical Behavior, we focus on Component III, the formation of an intention to act upon one’s best ethical judgment. Based on the limited extant literature on the connection between personality and ethical behavior, we expect that accountants high in Conscientiousness and Openness will tend to form an intention to act ethically despite pressure in an ethical dilemma. We develop more tentative hypotheses about the remaining three factors. Controlling for age, gender, education, sole earning status, and experience, we find clear positive statistical effects of only Conscientiousness and Openness. These findings have implications for the human resource departments of accounting firms, as well as contributing to a basic understanding of the relationships between Big Five personality factors and ethical intention.
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