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This paper aims to show how organisation theory can be used to understand the controversy between the shareholder and the stakeholder perspectives. Rationalistic and open system theories may enhance research on corporate governance by offering well-defined concepts and by specifying core relationships.

This paper applies descriptions of the two perspectives in organisation theory as a “method” for illustrating how they are linked to and support the shareholder versus the stakeholder perspectives.

The controversy stems from the fact that the shareholder and the stakeholder perspectives address different relationships. The shareholder perspective captures two relationships that accord with rationalistic organisation theory: shareholders are managing the managers and the organisation, and managers are managing the corporation on behalf of the owners. The stakeholder perspective focuses on three relationships that are not concordant with system theory: managers are managing the shareholders (i.e. the symbolic management of stockholders), managers are managing the corporation (i.e. general management theory) and managers are managing the stakeholders.

Organisation theory provides suggestions for more fruitful definitions of the often-used concepts of direction, control, administration and influence. These terms may be substituted with the well-defined concepts of management, power and control.

Proponents of organisation theory find it theoretically difficult to deal with the topic of corporate governance, if they do at all. When they do, they do it only perfunctorily.

Organisation theory may strengthen research on corporate governance if we insist on both theoretical clarifications of major relationships and on the use of more strictly defined concepts.

This conceptual paper aims to develop a multi-level mental health management framework for project management practitioners (PMPs) in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) project organizations through organizational design theories to extend current knowledge on mental health by revealing organizational, project and external environmental factors contributing to mental health management in AEC project organizations.

A systematic literature review was adopted to propose a theoretical model that integrated five organizational design theories: institutional theory, agency theory, resources-based theory (RBT), contingency theory and complexity theory.

The model reveals permanent organization, project organization and external environment factors for mental health management in AEC project organizations. It further proposed hypothetical interrelationships between elements of permanent organization, project organization, external environment and mental health management indicators to unravel the resultant effects of the interactions on mental health of PMPs.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge by developing a multi-level mental health management framework that identify and shows how combination permanent organization, project organization and external environment elements impact mental health of PMPs in AEC project organizations. It offers a model that offers guidance to practitioners on permanent organization and project organization management practices that can be implemented to improve mental health.

In recent years, organization scholars have engaged in several conversations about the process of theory development, and offered many proposals for building new theories of organization. The purpose of this paper is to highlight a fundamental, fruitful and often neglected method for developing new theories of organization.

This paper draws on Peirce's typology of reasoning: deduction, induction and abduction. This typology helps in analyzing and categorizing the extant proposals for developing new theories of organization, and also makes it visible what approach has been most often missing.

This paper shows that the offered proposals can be categorized into the following two models: (1) armchair theorizing; (2) present capturing. This categorization also highlights a third model – change sensitizing – that is based on shifting organization theories by sensitizing ourselves to macro shifts of organizational reality.

Although the change sensitizing model is an unusual, marginal practice in today's organization research, it has historically been used to develop many of the renowned theories in social sciences. If taken as a serious agenda, it has the potential to generate a host of new, valuable theories of organization.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, how organization theoretically diverse research on OCR is actually grounded, since insights into the organization theoretical foundations of OCR are completely lacking.

A selection of 85 articles on organizational change was made, published in top tier journals in 2010. The authors conducted a reference analysis based on 18 prominent organization theories and their main contributing authors.

The findings show firstly a very strong theoretical selectivity, focusing on cognitive, learning, and neo-institutional theories. Other theories are almost fully neglected. Secondly, this analysis suggests that current OCR struggles hard with transforming the cognitive frames of topical OT into fruitful accesses to the own object. The resulting theory application appears as a dissatisfying escape strategy, performed to cover theoretical antagonisms and to avoid a deeper confrontation with the underlying assumptions of OCR.

The authors are fully aware that the depth of their analysis is worth broadening. A more comparable scope in the amount of the theories, journals, articles, and of the covered time span would help to substantiate their results.

Pragmatic change approaches rely strongly on organizational change research. If OCR itself is not topical in terms of using available theoretical knowledge, pragmatic approaches fail to stand on solid ground. The paper therefore provides a background for the link between failing empirical change projects and the usage of available scientific knowledge.

An analysis of the organization theoretical topicality of organizational change research is completely missing. The paper therefore not only contributes to the discovery of a blind spot in organizational studies, it possibly helps to explore the reasons for the high percentage of failing change projects.

The impact of the e-globalization combined with staggering costs for R & D across industries has resulted in the call for new approach to innovation where openness and interconnectivity is the role. This new approach is designated as “open innovation”. The new paradigm calls for the sharing of knowledge and resources in conducting innovation activities within and among organizations. As such, one needs to re-orient the structure of the organization to meet these new requirements. On the conceptual level, it becomes a significant undertake to try to grasp how our traditional understanding of the organization can be fitted within the requirements of the open innovation when the environment of the e-globalization is taken in consideration. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the question of how organization structure theories can be coupled to the open innovation paradigm. Out of that analysis the authors propose a new theoretical framework of organizational analysis that takes both the classical knowledge and the new economic context of e-globalization.

The contemporary period is recognized by the term “new economy”, as a replacement for the “old economy”. Another term of importance is “globalization”, which is coupled to the issue of economy categorization. Humanity launched the modern age of globalization some decades ago, but we are going through a new type of globalization, e-globalization. In the e-globalization, processes are induced basically by the impact of the new tools of communication and information technologies. These dynamic processes have forced a re-thinking of the traditional innovation practices. In the paper, the authors reflect on the changes in relation to the traditional knowledge about organization structure, using a deductive approach and textual analysis and relate that to the requirements of an open innovation paradigm. In the process, the authors introduce the basics of the “theory of internetisation dynamics” as a new potential organizational theoretical framework.

From the analysis, it was found that some traditional concepts about organization structure and organizing mechanism theories are responsive to the needs of the open paradigm settings while other theories are not. However, each of these is able to contribute to one of the five components of the theory of internetisation dynamics.

The authors argue that by using the correct framework for the analysis of the organizational structure, one can propose a set of strategic steps which would help the companies to re-structure. That would save time and effort for policy-makers and managers of firms, as well as researchers active in this field of organization and organizing processes, who are focused on the open innovation transformation requirements of the firms. Running this analysis would add some input into organizational re-orientation in troubled sectors such as in pharmaceutical industries.

While mainstream organization theory has contributed to making organizations a productive part of society, they have simultaneously contributed to the creation of a “dark side” of organizational existence that stifles the individual, frustrates the attainment of desired social ends and distorts many core values of democratic societies. Mainstream theory recognizes this “dark side,” but has been unsuccessful at suggesting how it might be ameliorated or avoided. The writings of Foucault, however, reveal not only how the “dark side” arises but also how it might be avoided so that organizations may develop and pursue interests in common with both society and the individual.

Institutional theory is becoming one of the dominant theoretical perspectives in organization theory and is increasingly being applied in accounting research to study the practice of accounting in organizations. However, most institutional theory research has adequately theorized neither the institutionalization process through which change takes place nor the socio‐political context of the institutional formations. We propose a social theory based framework for grounding and expanding institutional theory to more fully articulate institutionalization processes. Specifically, we incorporate institutional theory and structuration theory and draw on the work of Max Weber in developing a framework of the context and the processes associated with creating, adopting and discarding institutional practices. We propose that the expanded framework depicts the socio‐economic and political context better and more directly addresses the dynamics of enacting, embedding and changing organizational features and processes. Expanding the focus of the institutional theory based accounting research can facilitate a more comprehensive representation of accounting as the object of institutional practices as well as provide a better articulation of the role of accounting in the institutionalization process.

This paper aims to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework for interpreting voluntary IC disclosure practices by organizations.

Four most‐commonly used theories in the area, namely agency theory, stakeholder theory, signalling theory, and legitimacy theory, were integrated in terms of the interrelated concepts relating to voluntary IC disclosure.

The constructed theoretical framework includes three concepts: to reduce information asymmetry; to discharge accountability to various stakeholders; and to signal organizational legitimacy and excellence (or superior quality) to society, which are seen as motivations for organizations to disclose their IC on a voluntary basis.

The framework ignores some other theoretical perspectives which are also relevant to voluntary IC disclosure; the framework is not justified by any empirical evidence.

This research is the first attempt to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework for the voluntary disclosure of IC; the constructed framework can be employed as a theoretical foundation for future empirical studies in relation to voluntary IC disclosure.

This paper aims to examine the role of James March and his actor-network in the development of a functionalist paradigm of organization theory (OT). Recognizing the important contribution of March to the development of the field of OT, the authors set out to understand the role that he played in establishing the oft-quoted development of founding a behavioral facet of the functionalist paradigm of management theory.

The authors draw on ANTi-History to study some of the key factors that contributed to the challenges associated with the creation of a functionalist paradigm of OT. ANTi-History is an amodernist method drawing attention to how history is produced, differing from a modernist method for identifying the single-most truth of a series of past events and from a postmodernist method for revealing the relativity of accounts of the past. To that end, the method of ANTi-History is to explore the intersections of a series of human (e.g. scholars), non-human (e.g. a textbook) and non-corporeal (e.g. paradigms) actors to assess their role in producing a version of the past (e.g. a unified field of OT).

The authors reveal how the history, producing the paradigmatic idea of OT as a supposed field of inquiry, is not an account of an actual field of inquiry as much as it is the outcome of the shared and conflicted worldviews of multiple actors.

The unique and original contribution is in the tracking over time of the relationship between a known and important actor James March and the formation of a specific paradigm of OT. In particular, the authors focus on the factors and activities that formed or failed to form OT at points in time and James March’s role in this. In the process, the authors set out to learn not simply what James March achieved but how he achieved it.