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The purpose of this paper is to measure technical efficiency of Indian thermal power sector employing the recent by-production approach.

The by-production approach is used in conjunction with data from the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) of India to compute the output-based Färe, Grosskopf, Lovell (FGL) efficiency index and its decomposition into productive and environmental efficiency indexes for the ITPPs

The authors show that given the aggregated nature of data on coal reported by CEA, CEA’s computation of CO₂ emissions through a deterministic linear formula that does not distinguish between different coal types and the tiny share of oil in coal-based power plants, the computed output-based environmental efficiency indexes are no longer informative. Meaningful measurement of environmental efficiency using CEA data is possible only along the dimension of the coal input. Productive efficiency is positively associated with the engineering concept of thermodynamic/energy efficiency and is also high for power plants with high operating availabilities reflecting better management and O&M practices. Both these factors are high for private and centrally owned as opposed to state-owned power-generating companies. The example of Sipat demonstrates the importance of (ultra)supercritical technologies in increasing productive and thermodynamic efficiencies of the ITPPs, while also reducing CO₂ emitted per unit of the net electricity generated.

This paper uses the by-production approach for the first time to measure technical efficiency of ITPPs and highlights how the nature of the Indian data impacts on efficiency measurement.

The purpose of this study is to develop a multi-level and politically informed perspective on organizational learning and change based on the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to contribute to a less managerialist and more multi-voiced understanding of change. The authors aim for a better understanding of the links between expansive learning, contradictions in and of activity systems and episodic and systemic power.

The authors develop a framework on expansive learning, integrating the concept of faces of power. The framework is applied to a case study.

The authors show productive and restrictive effects of episodic and systemic power for dealing with contradictions in expansive learning and organizational change. The productive role of change critics and non-managerial actors is shown.

The case study is illustrative and findings need to be validated and expanded through more detailed empirical investigations. Future studies should particularly investigate how patterns of power could itself become the object of expansive learning.

The framework fosters an understanding of organizational change as multi-voiced, decentralized and driven by contradictions. Emancipation of actors and protected social spaces are essential for unfolding the productive potential of multi-voicedness against the backdrop of asymmetric power relations in organizations.

The authors step back from a managerialist perspective on organizational change by developing a politically informed, activity theoretic perspective on learning systems. The paper contributes to a better understanding of contradictions, related multi-voicedness and effects of episodic/systemic power in expansive learning and change.

The passionate debate, among policy makers and theorists, over the appropriateness of protecting infant industries in developing countries was one of greatest interest in the economic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On one side of the argument are the British advocates of free trade, concocting subtle arguments to neutralize the boisterous aspirations of insubordinate colonies (and former colonies) yearning for independence; on the other, the standard‐bearers of Economic Nationalism, responding fiercely to the incessant firing of classical contentions. Such reaction to laissez‐faire economics gave birth to a corpus of ideas which was to form the core intellectual bulwark of commercial protectionism and cultural freedom. Discusses and comments on the conflicting views which animated the confrontation through examination of the major works of the most illustrious exponents of both factions.

Adopting the critical sensemaking (CSM) lens to the micro-level interaction between leader and employees, the article offers a theoretically informed example of leading with soft power and positive emotions that blurs boundaries in democratic organisations.

The research methodology involves videography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions that combines focused ethnography with video analysis. The analysis focuses on face-to-face meeting interactions between a leader and employees in a small service firm.

The findings illustrate how restoring the sense of the democratic organisation is an accumulating and complex phenomenon where explicit and implicit organisational rules and changing identity positions are enacted by constructing affective loyalties, moral and reflex emotions that serve as soft power capacities helping the leader and employees to enact meanings attached to a democratic rather than hierarchical organisation.

The article provides new insight for human resources practitioners and leaders who want to build resilient organisations and pay attention to shared, distributed and relational leadership practices, co-creative work and collective decision-making processes.

The power explored in previous sensemaking studies has been power over, which is most often associated with the negative aspects of power, such as domination and suppression, in the pursuit of specific performance. The applications of videography method linking ethnography and interpretive analysis of video-recorded interactions are still rare in organisation studies.

The purpose of this paper is to engage knowledge management (KM) researchers and practitioners with Foucault’s power/knowledge lens as a way of thinking about and recognising the central role of power in organisational knowledge cultures.

The empirical illustrations in this paper are drawn from two qualitative studies in different professional and institutional contexts (insurance and theatre work). Both studies used in-depth interviews and discourse analysis as their principal methods of data collection and analysis.

The empirical examples illustrate how practitioners operate within complex power/knowledge relations that shape their practices of knowledge sharing, generation and use. The findings show how an application of the power/knowledge lens renders visible both the constraining and productive force of power in KM.

Researchers may apply the conceptual tools presented here in a wider variety of institutional and professional contexts to examine the complex and multifaceted role of power in a more in-depth way.

KM professionals will benefit from an understanding of organisational power/knowledge relations when seeking to promote transformational changes in their organisations and build acceptance for KM initiatives.

This paper addresses a gap in the literature around theoretical and empirical discussions of power as well as offering an alternative to prevailing resource-based views of power in KM.

Marx's formulation of the alienation problematic is grounded in a strategic set of underlying assumptions concerning the human condition. On the one hand, people are seen as the creators of their material and mental world through their labour activity. They are endowed with natural human qualities, creative powers and historically existing potentialities that are essential to human growth. People are, in essence, free, creative, productive beings of praxis in conscious control of their activities and the world they have created. But the material and mental products of human labour (e.g. commodities, ideas, social institutions) assume an autonomous life of their own. They come to rule over people as dehumanizing objects and powers, as alien and hostile forces operating independently above and against the common will of their own creators. People no longer experience themselves as active human agents in conscious control of their life circumstances. Their own productive activities, human creations, social relationships and nature at large remain alien and beyond their grasp. The realization of natural human capacities and potentialities for a genuinely human life in an alienating world of domination and oppression is consequently thwarted, repressed or denied. Alienation is construed as a universal social phenomenon that pervades all spheres of human life in the existing world.

Many bureaucracies still exist, and not just in the public sector. Increasingly, however, we would argue that they are more likely to evolve towards polyarchic forms because of the growing centrality of stakeholder resistance, especially that which is premised on empowerment of key employees. We suggest that managerial responses to this resistance are transforming bureaucracies through process of accommodation: upper echelon managers invent responses to contentious acts and voices so as to reintegrate ‘resisters’ while rewarding them for contesting decisions in a cooperative way. Understanding these processes help us understand why traditional bureaucracy is currently transforming itself as a result of the emergence of new forms of resistance in the workplace.