Search results

Annotation is a practice that is familiar to many of us, and yet it is a practice so natural that it is hard to pin down its characteristics, to find where its edges are, and identify what it does for us. In this piece, we use reflections on the practices of annotation in four fields of work: academia, software engineering, medical sonography and visual art as a point of departure to theorise annotation as a set of practices that bridge reading, writing and thinking. We think about annotation being performative and consider what and how it brings into being. Revealing hidden practices in our working lives, such as annotation, helps us to understand how knowledge comes to be created, disseminated, legitimated and popularised. To this end, we make the practices of annotation involved in writing the present piece visible in an effort to write differently in management and organisation studies, unpicking and exposing it as ever dialogical and unfinished.

This paper explores the spatial and material context of a creative production project. Taking the music recording project as an empirical setting, it explores the creation of a pop song and reveals the highly situated character of its management and organization. Making a creative product such as a pop song is a complex endeavor, requiring a large number of decisions involving highly subjective and often contested and contestable judgments. The purpose of this paper is to understand how this is achieved.

The study is based on observation of musicians and a music producer during the creation of a pop song in a mid-sized recording studio. Interviews were also conducted with the participant musicians and 24 music producers based in the UK. The resulting qualitative data were analyzed using a socio-material perspective to trace the spatial relationships and explore the material organization of the project.

Producing musical product is achieved through establishing spatial and material relations in order to regulate tasks and roles and manage the challenge of making decisions within temporarily assembled teams engaged in tasks characterized by high levels of uncertainty.

This paper tackles a neglected aspect of creative management, the physical context in which it is carried out. Other sites within the creative industries such as design and film studios, theatre and other performance spaces can usefully be analyzed using the approach and perspective of this research.

Digital business models are often designed for rapid growth, and some relatively young companies have indeed achieved global scale. However, despite the visibility and importance of this phenomenon, analysis of scale and scalability remains underdeveloped in management literature. When it is addressed, analysis of this phenomenon is often over-influenced by arguments about economies of scale in production and distribution. To redress this omission, this paper draws on economic, organization, and technology management literature to provide a detailed examination of the sources of scaling in digital businesses. We propose three mechanisms by which digital business models attempt to gain scale: engaging both non-paying users and paying customers; organizing customer engagement to allow self-customization; and orchestrating networked value chains, such as platforms or multi-sided business models. Scaling conditions are discussed, and propositions developed and illustrated with examples of big data entrepreneurial firms.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the idiosyncratic features of the adoption and institutionalization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

This is a conceptual paper in which current theory on the institutionalization of practices within organizational fields is extended. This is achieved through considering how well established models of the institutionalization process accommodate the idiosyncrasies of CSR practices.

Established models of the institutionalization process do not properly account for the patterns of CSR adoption that are identified. This is because CSR has some features that differentiates it from other organizational initiatives, including idealism, delayed discovery of instrumental benefits, public attention, and the tension between public and private logics.

This is a conceptual paper which now needs to be explored empirically, either at the level of the CSR practice or at the organizational field. It is believed that a detailed examination is warranted of the effects of the truncated adoption process (a coercive bandwagon) on organizations' adoption of CSR practices. Neither has it been considered whether all categories of CSR practices are subject to the same dynamics or development path.

It is argued that prizes and regulations that are introduced before the organizational case has been worked through properly can have a negative effect on the adoption of beneficial practices throughout the wider field. Similarly, accusations of greenwashing of firms who implement CSR prematurely, and the negative publicity that results, can result in the valuable ideals of CSR being operationalised in a sub‐optimal form.

The paper offers a new conceptualisation of the path of the institutionalization of CSR practices.

Some students with documented learning needs (e.g., learning disabilities, physical challenges) receive strong support through the legislation, funding, and accountability systems associated with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2004) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973). However, in the absence of supportive federal policy, other students with documented learning needs (e.g., high cognitive ability) experience varying levels of support due to differences in state and local policies, funding, and accountability requirements. These differences are due in large part to misconceptions about students with advanced learning needs (e.g., that they can meet grade-level standards without intervention) and equity concerns (e.g., students with the greatest perceived needs should be served first). Special education has a long history of alleviating educational mismatches by preparing students for challenging learning opportunities, providing classroom support structures, and monitoring educational placements through a system of regular evaluation and adjustment. Students served in gifted and talented education can benefit from these same asset-based, sociocultural approaches. However, efforts to support students with advanced learning needs are more likely to be consistently and successfully applied if they are backed by changes to existing policies, funding, and accountability systems.

The religious tradition of male circumcision has come increasingly under attack across a number of European states. While critics of the practice argue that the problem is about children’s rights and the proper relationship between secular and religious traditions, Jews tend to see these attacks within the longer history of attempts to assimilate and remake them according to the norms of the majority. Using the 2012 German legal controversy concerning the issue as my vantage point, I explore how contemporary criticism of male circumcision remains entangled with ambivalence toward Judaism and the Jews as the “other.” Through a close reading of the arguments, I show how opponents use the seemingly neutral language of universal human rights to (re)make Jewish difference according to the norms of the majority. I conclude by arguing that such an approach to this issue runs the risk of turning Jews once again into strangers at a time when cultural anxieties are troubling European societies.