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Firms engaged in new product development (NPD) have to achieve a balanced portfolio of NPD projects. Despite the large number of models purporting to support portfolio optimization, most of them do not take into account political bias in project selection decisions. This paper aims to analyze approaches of organizational politics to NPD project selection and their implications for NPD portfolio management and future research.

A review is made of the current literature at the intersection between organizational politics and NPD project selection. With regard to the underlying assumptions of organizational politics, similarities, differences, practical implications, and research perspectives are identified.

From the paper, insights could be gained into explaining the effects of organizational politics on NPD project selection. However, the differences in assumptions that can be generally observed in organizational politics are also reflected in the studies analyzed. Future research could benefit from integrating different political and methodological perspectives.

In order to reach a balanced NPD portfolio, the potentially dysfunctional biases which characterize political processes from idea generation to project selection should be addressed. A concept of NPD portfolio management is proposed which considers the management of power and politics.

This paper contributes to a more comprehensive overview of political approaches of NPD project selection and serves as a sound basis for future research. The relevance and implications of politics for NPD portfolio management are demonstrated.

The purpose of this study is to propose a model of knowledge legitimation in organizational learning focusing on the relationship between power politics and legitimacy.

This study adopts the approach of a conceptual discussion.

This study developed an organizational learning model that explains how actors exercise their power and how knowledge is legitimated through politics. The author identified various factors that shape the politics; these factors trigger, enhance, facilitate and inhibit power exercise. This study also identified which type of power (influence, force, domination and discipline) leads to which type of legitimacy (pragmatic, moral and cognitive). Furthermore, this study found that power politics and organizational learning are interrelated; actors’ powers bestow legitimacy on knowledge, and knowledge enhances the power of related actors.

This study identified the set of factors that shape actors’ power exercise in organizational learning as well as their associated mechanism and illustrated how they lead to knowledge legitimation. The author also revealed the relationships between actors’ power and legitimacy of knowledge. Finally, this study elaborated on the findings of prior studies concerning politics of organizational learning.

Despite the ongoing increase of women in the top positions, they are still underrepresented in politics. The studies that primarily focus on women’s underrepresentation in politics neglect the role of gender as a category that structures and makes sense of social practices. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms that regulate the contemporary gender order in politics through discourse analysis and the contribution of the critical feminist perspective.

The study is based on 30 biographical interviews with Italian politicians and focuses on the account of their political experiences and on the meanings attributed to these.

The results of this paper underline the tendency to either absolve or blame women for gender inequality in politics through different interpretative repertoires: “Women’s disinterest toward politics,” “Politics as masculine context” and “Politics–family unbalance.” The analysis allowed to unravel the way in which the discursive practices create and reproduce the hegemonic gender order in politics.

The research is limited to 30 qualitative interviews, and so results cannot be generalized.

The findings of this paper highlight the importance of exploring issues relating to the gender gap in politics and stress the need to implement actions to promote gender equality in politics.

The paper contributes to an understanding of women’s underrepresentation in politics and offers causes for reflection on a phenomenon that has profound implications for our society.

This paper analyzes the connection between black political protest and mobilization, and the rise and fall of a black urban regime. The case of Oakland is instructive because by the mid-1960s the ideology of “black power” was important in mobilizing two significant elements of the historically disparaged black community: (1) supporters of the Black Panthers and, (2) neighborhood organizations concentrated in West Oakland. Additionally, Oakland like the city of Atlanta also developed a substantial black middle class that was able to mobilize along the lines of its own “racialized” class interests. Collectively, these factors were important elements in molding class-stratified “black power” and coalitional activism into the institutional politics of a black urban regime in Oakland. Ultimately, reversal factors would undermine the black urban regime in Oakland. These included changes in the race and class composition of the local population: black out-migration, the “new immigration,” increasing (predominantly white) gentrification, and the continued lack of opportunity for poor and working-class blacks, who served as the unrequited base of the black urban regime. These factors would change the fortunes of black political life in Oakland during the turbulent neoliberal era.

Presents the results of research conducted with five groups of nurse executives from the Johnson & Johnson/Wharton Fellows Program in Nurse Management. Groups at the 1994 and 1995 sessions conducted collaborative story enquiries into their own development as organizational politicians. In interviews months later, participants reported three kinds of outcome: change in themselves which can be characterized as development in political maturity; the collaborative story enquiries having worked in both expressive and explanatory ways to foster their learning and response; and understanding stories to be a powerful tool for learning and development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between leader’s behavioral integrity and employees’ organizational identification as well as to test the moderating roles of power distance and organizational politics on that relationship.

Data encompass 969 employees from 19 five-star hotels in Turkey. The relationship between behavioral integrity and organizational identification and the moderating roles of power distance and organizational politics on that relationship were tested using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and moderated hierarchical regression analyses.

The PLS-SEM and moderated hierarchical regression analyses results reveal that there was a significant positive relationship between leader’s behavioral integrity and employees’ organizational identification. In addition, the positive relationship between behavioral integrity and organizational identification was weaker when both power distance and organizational politics were higher compared to that when they were lower.

This study showed that leader’s behavioral integrity enhanced employees’ organizational identification. Leaders need to show the perceived alignment between their words and deeds and strive to form high quality leader–follower exchanges to create a trust-based culture that satisfies the necessary affective and cognitive components required for trust formation. Moreover, the results of this study indicated that perceived organizational politics weakened employees’ identification with their organizations. Organizational practices and policies, especially human resource practices, should be carefully designed and implemented as to prevent organizational politics, an important source of employee dissatisfaction and distrust.

The study provides new insights into the influence that leader’s behavioral integrity may have on employees’ organizational identification and the moderating roles of power distance and organizational politics in the link between behavioral integrity and employees’ identification with their organizations. This paper also offers a practical assistance to employees in the hospitality industry and their leaders interested in fostering organizational identification and lowering perceived organizational politics.

Whether an organization’s political behaviour is positively related to its performance has been a long-standing question. Most studies elaborating on this issue, although rich in detail, primarily have been limited to case studies, apart from a niche set of studies in international business. This study aims to explore this question through a survey study of managers and executives from around the world, across a range of industries.

The study explores the link between politics, the ability of a firm to speedily reach the market and its growth rate through a study of 382 executives from across the world. It also investigates alternative explanations of slow speed to market due to power centralization, decision-making layers and conflict.

The results show that politics – the observable but often covert actions through which executives influence internal decisions – has a direct negative effect on a firm’s ability to reach the market first and on its growth rate. That is, not only is politics time-consuming but it may also have a detrimental impact on the selection of the best growth opportunities.

Politics does have a negative impact on growth; it slows down a firm’s growth and its ability to reach the market. This study eliminates possible alternative explanations of a slow pace to market: slower companies are not so because they have too many decision-making layers but because they use consultative processes in resource-allocation decisions, or because of conflict.

Investigates urban bias in state policy making in Mexico. Refers to literature claiming that rural poverty in developing nations is a major problem because capitalism reflects an urban bias. Examines social security coverage for the rural poor in Mexico and notes that there are great variations depending on area, suggesting that social security coverage is politically negotiable. Outlines briefly the historical development of Mexico’s welfare state and uses a power resource model to demonstrate how groups with competing interests go about securing benefits from the state. Cites literature on dependency theory, indicating that rural groups have failed to mobilize politically and have therefore not secured the same state resources (such as social security benefits and housing) as urban groups, yet argues that this does not always apply in Mexico, partially due to party politics and bureaucratic paternalism. Explains how data was collected to examine regional variations in social security coverage among the rural poor and how the data was analysed. Reveal that workers in important international export markets (such as cotton and sugar) have greater political leverage in obtaining better social security benefits. Notes also that areas supporting the political party in power obtain better benefits. Concludes, therefore, that rural workers are not powerless in the face of urban capitalism and that urban bias and dependency theories do not reflect the situation in Mexico – rather social security benefits are politically negotiable.

This study explores the politics of ideology in the process of sensegiving and sensemaking at a Japanese retailer in Hong Kong. Studies on power and politics are scarce despite key role of power and politics in understanding the factors behind the conflict between the management's policy legitimization (sensegiving) and employees' policy interpretation (sensemaking). By using the three dimensions proposed in the critical sensemaking approach (discourse, rules and contexts), this paper explores the complex mechanism of power and politics in sensemaking and sensegiving.

Using 15 months of participant observation as a salesperson, this paper discusses how the Japan-centric customer service philosophy (dominant discourse), customer service policies and practices (organizational rules) and asymmetric power structure between the Japanese global headquarters and Hong Kong subsidiaries (formative contexts) are presented and perpetuated through the sensegiving–sensemaking process.

Dominant discourse was observed in the management's sensegiving, which placed the Japanese style of customer service over others. This ethnocentric dominant discourse informed the creation of customer service policies, although the realization of the discourse was determined by the employees' conflicting interpretations of the organizational rules. As a formative context, an asymmetric power structure was present that positioned the Hong Kong subsidiary as subservient to the global headquarters in Japan. This shows that the political process of sensegiving and sensemaking deeply implicates the dominant discourse, organizational rules and power structure as central forces that determine the level of perpetuating ideology.

This research illustrates the wider implications of power and politics in sensegiving–sensemaking studies and provides a complex picture of ethnocentric management.

Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.