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Large firms have traditionally commanded a competitive advantage in the marketplace over small firms by being able to use their financial strength to perform large‐scale market research studies, to design and implement wide reaching advertising campaigns, and to establish computer and information systems to communicate with their staff and suppliers. This empirical study of 192 large and small companies indicates that small firms are using new media technologies to level the competitive playing field. Cost‐effective new media technologies are making it easier for small firms to enjoy some of the benefits that previously were only available to large companies. Contributes to the scholarship because little relevant research currently exists on the marketing uses of new media technologies for small firms and their potential for altering the competitive advantages long enjoyed by larger firms.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a supported and validated reference point for Machiavellianism as an antecedent to the contemporary management philosophy of business process reengineering (BPR).

This paper analyzes BPR and Machiavellianism by using the seminal work of Hammer and Champy (1993) on BPR and the original writings of Machiavelli coupled with the personal correspondence of Machiavelli with his contemporaries.

The findings of this research indicate that the constructs of Machiavellian thought transcend the five centuries since the publication of The Prince, and can be found in the contemporary managerial framework of BPR. This comparison of historical leadership frameworks demonstrates how recent management decisions in companies show the rise of Machiavellian as BPR. In an analysis of these theories, the authors show similarities in five significant tenets of business leadership and argue how these repackaged ideas and prescriptions undermine employee-centric advances.

This comparison reviews the managerial frameworks presented in Machiavelli’s The Prince and Hammer and Champy’s book Reengineering the Corporation through the theoretical tenets of leadership.

Employment of Machiavellianism and BPR results in an expendable utilization of followers and employees. Implications abound for modern managers, as the authors emphasize the elements and outcomes which lead to deleterious organizational outcomes.

In an analysis of these theories, the authors argue how these strategies undermine employee-centric advances within human relations by embracing these repackaged ideas and concepts.

This research leverages historical perspective to provide a qualitative understanding of the follies of recycled versions of Machiavelli’s ideas. The overall study and inquiry of BPR from a leadership perspective is not robust and leaves antecedents and influences critically unevaluated.

Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.

This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).

We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.

We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

Michael Hammer sees process as “the Clark Kent of business Ideas”—a concept that has the power to change a company's organizational design.

The literature on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), cultural differences between organizations have frequently been identified as one of the main challenges in the process of post-merger integration (PMI). Existing research has explored a broad variety of cultural differences in perceptions, such as those relating to expectations, norms, values and beliefs within the respective organizations, and how these affect the process and success of PMI. However, less attention has been paid to the relevance of the macro-societal context to PMI. The ambition of this article is, therefore, to advance our understanding of how macro-level societal factors define organizational cultures and affect the success of PMI.

We draw on social systems theory as devised by Niklas Luhmann, assuming that organizations are always embedded in the macro-level societal context of distinctive realms of social reality—such as the economy, politics, religion and the arts—that make up the so-called “function systems”. Looking at the case of the integration of a Brazilian technology start-up into a market-leading corporation, we analyze the dominant orientations towards these function systems, and the changes in these orientations over time.

The results suggest that differences in organizational culture in PMI can be partly explained by differences in orientations to the function systems. Moreover, forcing dramatic changes of orientations towards the function systems within a merged entity can severely damage its raison d'etre in the first place, potentially leading to, in some sense, an account of “culture murder”.

This article is unique in demonstrating that organizations are multifunctional systems whose culture is defined by the highly specific and potentially varying degrees of importance they place on individual function systems and that knowledge or neglect of these functional profiles may seriously affect the success of post-merger integration. Against this backdrop, the article presents a multifunctional profiling method that may easily translate into PMI management tools.

The purpose of this paper is to celebrate the manifold contributions made by Michael Thomas, marketing professor extraordinary.

This paper is an exercise in autobiographical memory, coupled with the subjective personal introspective procedures advocated by many leading marketing scholars, most notably, Steven Gould and Morris Holbrook.

The paper shows that ornithology is an apt metaphor – analogy, rather – for Professor Thomas's many and varied contributions to marketing thought.

The paper comes closer than most to defining the quintessential Michael Thomas.

Organizations that adopt new practices employ managers to make decisions about how to materialize these practices. I examine how these managers move between the meanings and resources found in extra-local and local realms. I find that managers’ practices shift over time from adapting BPR practices to inhabiting BPR as an idea. Managers’ approaches are shaped by each organization’s history of efforts to introduce extra-local ideas. Rather than adapting BPR practices, managers draw on change tools, techniques, and methods that have worked in the organization and integrate BPR work into ongoing interactions, activities, and language in the local context.

BPR can be deconstructed into four different identities. In the first place it is a product of the management fad industry. In the second place it is part of a neo‐Taylorist movement because of the following characteristics: a top‐down streamlining of operations, unproblematic acceptance of typical Taylorist solutions and the prevalence of assertions that the outcome for workers is an upgraded work content. In the third place BPR is a euphemism for downsizing. Downsizing is much more at the core of BPR than some of its proponents would have it. Finally, BPR functions as a non‐normative, descriptive label for process oriented change. The paper seeks to show how the different identities of BPR interact and get into one another’s way.