Search results

Entrepreneurship and leadership may flow from the same genealogical source and the appearance of separation of the two constructs may be due to differences in the contexts through which the root phenomenon flows. Entrepreneurship and leadership are figuratively different manifestations of the need to create. To better understand the origin of entrepreneurship and leadership, research must first focus on the combinations or hierarchy of traits that are necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, to stimulate the two constructs. Factors that trigger a drive to create or take initiative within the individual in the context of a particular circumstance should be identified, and the situational factors that move the individual toward more traditional leader or classic entrepreneurial-type behaviors need to be understood.

This article examines how a profit-centered restructuring of labor relations in an academic medical center undermined team-based care practices in its intensive care unit. The Institute of Medicine has promoted team-based care to improve patient outcomes, and the staff in the intensive care unit researched for this paper had established a set of practices they defined as teamwork. After hospital executives rolled out a public relations campaign to promote its culture of teamwork, they restructured its workforce to enhance numerical and functional flexibility in three key ways: implementing a “service line” managerial structure; cutting a range of staff positions while combining others; and doubling the capacity of its profitable and highly regarded intensive care unit. Hospital executives said the restructuring was necessitated by changes to payment models brought forth by the Affordable Care Act. Based on 300 hours of participant-observation and 35 interviews with hospital staff, findings show that the restructuring lowered staff resources and intensified work, which limited their ability to practice care they defined as teamwork and undermined the unit’s collective identity as a team. Findings also show how staff members used teamwork as a sensitizing concept to make sense of what they did at work. The meanings attached to teamwork were anchored to positions in the hospitals’ organizational hierarchy. This paper advances our understanding of he flexible work arrangements in the health care industry and their effects on workers.

Despite a large and growing literature on the subject, little is understood about the phenomenon of small business growth. Specifically, the small business growth literature has often emphasized “why” opposed to “how” firms grow. This chapter sheds light on this black box of growth by investigating the phases of planning and implementation processes separately to explore the choice of strategic expansion modes. It examines a much under-researched firm category: declining small firms. Employing a three-year longitudinal study using a multi-case study method, we find that while growth approaches are typically contextually (industry) derived, formalized planning greatly affects implementation. Further, resources are the key mediating variable between formal planning and implementation – firms with slack resources will typically implement their contextually influenced planned growth course, and firms with inadequate resources will typically implement through interactive learning, which causes them to downscale the growth plans or exit the market (merger or sale).

Black death on a loop online through the click economy brings to bear the mimetic violence associated with Blackness. The idea of consuming Black death as a repeat event highlights the visceral economy of online consumption practices in which Black death is shared and passed on as viral content. The foreshadowing of the Black body and Black death is both banalized and commodified as content for instant gratification spread via algorithms, tagging, likes and newsfeeds. The distributive popular economy online and the offering of Black death through a click economy redrafts Blackness through its historic fungibility of slavery and White oppression, and equally ‘virtuality’ in which both its hyper-visibility and invisibility assemble it through new modalities of violence whilst invoking new spaces to commune, grieve and experience collective grief for these demised bodies. Blackness is made perceptible through its liminality and denial of its corporeality such that both social death and mortal death are ascribed to it. This chapter agitates against the futility of Black death by its quest to read Black humanism online as a moment of empowerment and emancipation to reclaim Blackness and to defy its formlessness in the digital economy as the new graveyard of its spiritual resurrection.

The reliance on teams in today’s work environment underscores the importance of understanding how teams function. To better understand teams, one must be able to measure team dynamics or interaction. The purpose of this chapter is to outline an unobtrusive approach to measuring team dynamics from verbal communications.

The basic premise of this approach is that the words we use provide insight into how we feel and think at any given time. The methodology described in this chapter employs a lexical analytic approach to examining team dynamics. To best accomplish this, we first identify the principal features or dimensions of teamwork and then we propose lexical measures that may map to these processes.

This approach can be employed to track team functioning over time “at a distance” without interrupting task performance.

This chapter describes an approach to measuring relevant teamwork dimensions through verbal content. This approach has the potential to give us direct, unobtrusive insight into the emotional and cognitive states of teams. It is original in its examination of how team dynamics can be indexed in speech.

Use of the Internet continues to grow at an explosive rate. While entertainment, education and communication serve as important applications of the Internet, e‐commerce continues to emerge as an increasingly significant business phenomenon. However, little empirical research exists to identify factors that influence the extent to which individuals use the Internet and e‐commerce. With the aid of survey research and a neural network, this study analyzes a wide range of variables in an attempt to identify accurate predictors of this usage. The results of the analysis identify gender, overall computer usage, job‐related use, and home access as important characteristics that should influence use of the Internet and e‐commerce.