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The concept of ba was introduced in 1996 by Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno. Since then, it has played a major role in the Japanese way of knowledge creation. It now belongs to the specialized jargon of KM out of the archipelago whose approach of KM is different from the IT oriented one in the USA. The print of Japanese culture in this concept makes it not so easy to understand through Western languages using a unique word, clear, distinct and without any shadow. Therefore this paper proposes an equivalent through the formulation of strategic knowledge community. This contribution is organized in three parts. First, it strives to define the ba concept from a Japanese cultural point of view. Then, it considers some philosophical implications of the concept, and last, it presents some case studies from the Human Health Care’s program from the Eisai Company. This paper was made possible because of an investigation program about the Japanese way of knowledge creation that is supported by the French Embassy in Japan. The global results of this investigation will be available in a book this year.

There's been a flurry of CEO dismissals in recent times. What can top managers do to predict and prevent the failures that lead to such ousters? Greater emphasis on strategic decision making may be the answer.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of James G. March’s key ideas and extend and integrate them with the works and ideas of John Boyd, whose work is highly relevant to, yet neglected by, behavioral and evolutionary perspectives on decision-making, organizations and strategy.

This paper integrates and synthesizes ideas in behavioral organization studies with those of John Boyd.

The authors suggest that when integrated, Boydian and Marchian ideas can enrich the understanding of particular ideas and mechanisms identified in behavioral organization studies and help broaden the intellectual and interdisciplinary range of the field in consonance with March’s vision for it.

The authors combine and integrate ideas central to the field of organization studies with those of an “outsider.”

This study examines Texas FFA officers’ perceptions regarding the traits and characteristics that good followers possess. A content analysis of officer responses to an open-ended question found that these young leaders have a limited level of understanding of what constitutes a good follower. Furthermore, female respondents placed a greater emphasis on supporting the leader and being respectful, whereas male respondents emphasized being a team player. Males also emphasized being involved in the chapter as a desirable trait more often than females. This suggests that females are more focused on ideas that are leader-supportive and males are more action driven. Males focused more on being a team and achievement. The study demonstrates a need to emphasize followership in leader development and education curricula. Youth organizations with similar leadership development programs can better equip their future leaders with the knowledge needed to be a follower-focused leader by teaching them how to identify good followership. As youth organizations become more follower-focused, failure to introduce followership instruction into the leadership classroom is a disservice to students.

Engineering Union leader, John Boyd, talks exclusively to Industrial Management about the renewed con‐troversy over strike action decided on a show of hands'

A memorandum on the Nutritive Value of Milk by the Advisory Committee on Nutrition appointed by the Minister of Health and the Secretary of State for Scotland has now been published with a prefatory note by Sir Kingsley Wood and Sir Godfrey Collins. The Chairman of the Advisory Committee is Lord Luke, and the members include Professor Cathcart, Sir F. Gowland Hopkins, Professor Mellanby and Sir John Boyd Orr. Its terms of reference are “To inquire into the facts, quantitative and qualitative, in relation to the diet of the people and to report as to any changes herein which appear desirable in the light of modern advances in the knowledge of nutrition.” The memorandum explains the high value of milk as an article of food. Analysis of its composition shows that milk contains protein of high nutritive value, energy‐giving nutrients, the known essential vitamins and many mineral elements and apart from its chemical composition it derived value from other properties such as easy digestibility. Many investigations have been made which justify the belief that the general health of the community, and especially of children, would be improved, and the incidence of disease, including rickets, diminished, if the present consumption of liquid milk, averaging about 0.4 pint per head per day, could be increased to about a pint. Milk has few disadvantages as an article of diet. For infants, after breast‐feeding has ceased, it should form the bulk of the diet, with any necessary supplements to furnish iron and vitamins C and D. After infancy milk is not a complete food but a very important item in diet, particularly for children, who should be given one to two pints a day, and for expectant and nursing mothers, for whom about two pints a day are desirable. Other adults, who need milk especially for the sake of its calcium and animal protein, should have at least half a pint a day. Milk is unfortunately liable to contamination by disease‐producing bacteria and its heating by suitable methods such as pasteurisation has important advantages in making it safe for human consumption from this point of view. Moreover, when milk is treated by heat, little significant change is known to occur in its nutritive properties, and such deficiencies as may be caused can readily be made good. It is therefore reasonable to assume that raw milk incorporated in other cooked articles of diet, such as bread and puddings, retains most of its nutritional properties. The report also calls attention to the degrees of nutritive value possessed by various milk products, especially separated milk. The memorandum is entitled “The Nutritive Value of Milk” and can be obtained (price 3d.) direct from H.M. Stationery Office or through any bookseller.

This paper reflects on the evolution of implicit and explicit behavioral ideas in the field of strategic management using Herbert Simon’s scholarship as a starting point, that is, his emphasis on empirically driven; interdisciplinary theorizing allowing and enabling two-way street learning. We argue that historically, there were plenty of behavioral ideas embedded in the field and, together with the recent movement towards explicit “behavioral strategy,” these provide several possible paths for future developments in strategic management research. In the spirit of broadening the tent for behavioral strategy in the future (Hambrick & Crossland, 2018), we suggest some topics and approaches for behavioral strategy in empirically driven, interdisciplinary directions which allows also for two-way street learning between concepts and real-world strategic phenomena.

To develop a biological approach to the analysis of learning organisations based on complexity theory, autopoiesis, and evolutionary epistemology.

This paper synthesises ideas from disciplines ranging from physics, epistemology and philosophy of science to military affairs, to sketch a scientific framework in which the autopoietic status of any kind of complex system can be evaluated. The autopoietic framework also presents generic concepts of memory, learning and knowledge. The autopoietic status of human organisations is tested in relation to this framework, and some of the direct implications regarding organisational learning and adaptation are highlighted.

A new definition of autopoiesis adding sustainability to key requirements is developed. Theoretical ideas of Maturana and Varela, Popper, Pattee, Boyd, and Gould are synthesised and applied to large‐scale organisations to reveal their emergent, autopoietic, evolutionary (i.e. biological), and learning nature.

Many current studies and practices in knowledge management are based on only limited views of what constitutes knowledge in the organisation and have not been conducted within any visible framework for understanding the organisation's survival imperatives, or how the knowledge and processes being studied relate to the organisation's overall strategic aims. The framework presented here will lead towards the development of a sounder theoretical basis for studying knowledge and learning in organisations.

The aim of this paper is to describe the use of sequence analysis to model trajectories of life‐course economic activity status, within a broader research agenda aimed at improving understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic position and health.

The analysis used data on 288 participants of the Boyd Orr Stratified Sub‐Sample, comprising a combination of prospective and retrospective information on economic activity status, as well as health in early old age. Economic activity was coded as a time‐based sequence of states for each participant based on six‐month periods throughout their lives. Economic activity was classified as: pre‐labour market; full‐time employment; part‐time employment; housewife; made redundant; stopped work due to illness; retired; other unemployed; or not applicable. Optimal matching analysis was carried out to produce a matrix of distances between each sequence, which was then used as the basis for cluster analysis.

The optimal matching analysis resulted in the classification of individuals into five economic activity status trajectories: full‐time workers (transitional exit), part‐time housewives, career breakers, full‐time workers (late entry, early exit), and full‐time housewives.

The paper presents the case for using sequence analysis as a methodological tool to facilitate a more interdisciplinary approach to the measurement of the life‐course socioeconomic position, in particular attempting to integrate the empirical emphasis of epidemiological research with the more theoretical contributions of sociology. This may in turn help generate a framework within which to examine the relationships between life‐course socioeconomic position and outcomes such as health in later life.

The first in a series on goal‐based information modelling, this paper presents a literature review of two goal‐based measurement methods. The second article in the series will build on this background to present an overview of some recent case‐based research that shows the applicability of the goal‐based methods for information modelling (as opposed to measurement). The third and concluding article in the series will present a new goal‐based information model – the goal‐based information framework (GbIF) – that is well suited to the task of documenting and evaluating organisational information flow.

Following a literature review of the goal‐question‐metric (GQM) and goal‐question‐indicator‐measure (GQIM) methods, the paper presents the strengths and weaknesses of goal‐based approaches.

The literature indicates that the goal‐based methods are both rigorous and adaptable. With over 20 years of use, goal‐based methods have achieved demonstrable and quantifiable results in both practitioner and academic studies. The down side of the methods are the potential expense and the “expansiveness” of goal‐based models. The overheads of managing the goal‐based process, from early negotiations on objectives and goals to maintaining the model (adding new goals, questions and indicators), could make the method unwieldy and expensive for organisations with limited resources. An additional challenge identified in the literature is the narrow focus of “top‐down” (i.e. goal‐based) methods. Since the methods limit the focus to a pre‐defined set of goals and questions, the opportunity for discovery of new information is limited.

Much of the previous work on goal‐based methodologies has been confined to software measurement contexts in larger organisations with well‐established information gathering processes. Although the next part of the series presents goal‐based methods outside of this native context, and within low maturity organisations, further work needs to be done to understand the applicability of these methods in the information science discipline.

This paper presents an overview of goal‐based methods. The next article in the series will present the method outside the native context of software measurement. With the universality of the method established, information scientists will have a new tool to evaluate and document organisational information flow.