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All things change, nothing is extinguished…. There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement. (Ovid)

The purpose of this case study was to increase the knowledge base of how research librarians experience and cope with the turbulence of change within their library system. A library belonging to the Association of Research Libraries was selected for case study investigation. Seventeen librarians participated in on-site interviews, utilizing a protocol composed of a clustering technique and semi-structured interviewing. Instrumental case studies of each individual were then developed through a collective case method. The findings presented in this chapter include: the competing tensions between the physical and virtual environments, the speed of change, the search for professional meaning, and coping with the experiences of professional change. Analysis of the findings suggest: the emergence of a hypercritical state, the limiting nature of negative feedback, a complex systems framework for professional thinking, and coping in the hypercritical organization.

Stanford contributed significantly to the organizational culture movement that occurred in organization studies from 1970–2000. This chapter traces developments at Stanford and puts the contributions of its researchers and scholars in the context of the many influences that shaped the study of organizational culture during this period. In addition to the historical account, there is speculation about why the culture movement at Stanford more or less ended but might yet be revived, either by those studying institutionalization processes or by those who resist them.

Statistical inference (estimation and testing) for the stochastic volatility (SV) model Taylor (1982, 1986) is challenging, especially likelihood-based methods which are difficult to apply due to the presence of latent variables. The existing methods are either computationally costly and/or inefficient. In this paper, we propose computationally simple estimators for the SV model, which are at the same time highly efficient. The proposed class of estimators uses a small number of moment equations derived from an ARMA representation associated with the SV model, along with the possibility of using “winsorization” to improve stability and efficiency. We call these ARMA-SV estimators. Closed-form expressions for ARMA-SV estimators are obtained, and no numerical optimization procedure or choice of initial parameter values is required. The asymptotic distributional theory of the proposed estimators is studied. Due to their computational simplicity, the ARMA-SV estimators allow one to make reliable – even exact – simulation-based inference, through the application of Monte Carlo (MC) test or bootstrap methods. We compare them in a simulation experiment with a wide array of alternative estimation methods, in terms of bias, root mean square error and computation time. In addition to confirming the enormous computational advantage of the proposed estimators, the results show that ARMA-SV estimators match (or exceed) alternative estimators in terms of precision, including the widely used Bayesian estimator. The proposed methods are applied to daily observations on the returns for three major stock prices (Coca-Cola, Walmart, Ford) and the S&P Composite Price Index (2000–2017). The results confirm the presence of stochastic volatility with strong persistence.

Purpose — This study assesses the effectiveness of initiatives by expatriate employees of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T, popularly referred to as the ‘Bell System’11The use of the term ‘Bell System’ as a synonym for AT&T reflected the firm's initial dependency on the exploitation of the telephone patents of Alexander Graham Bell. The Bell System consisted of AT&T, a holding company, and its affiliates including The Bell Telephone Laboratories (research), Western Electric (manufacturing) and 13 regional telephone operating subsidiaries.) in the revival of the Japan's telecommunications system and allied industries after World War II.

Methodology — Our primary methodology involves historical analysis of archival resources for AT&T and the Civil Communications Section (CCS) of the Supreme Command Allied Powers (SCAP), the American occupation government agency responsible for advising Japanese government and industry during the period 1945–1950.

Findings — Before the war, the Bell System maintained strong direct connections in Japan. AT&T's influence during the occupation, however, was indirect: knowledge dissemination through the activities of the CCS, which had several employees on loan from the Bell System.

Research limitations/implications — While our sample of organisations seems narrow and the duration of time relatively brief, the Bell System's people made a tremendous impact: transforming the Japanese telecommunications system. This suggests that guidance and tutelage by expatriate experts may enable host countries to master best practices rapidly without incurring high costs of evolutionary development.

Social implications — Local social mores and differences in workforce educational attainment may temporarily impede the acceptance of new foreign approaches to management and administration.

Value of the chapter — This chapter demonstrates how firm-specific and proprietary knowledge built up over decades at one firm could, through the agency of expatriates, revolutionise in just a few years the basic approaches followed in another country's telecommunications industry.

Here is a new conceptual framework for organizational learning (OL) that applies to both planned reform and emergent change. It integrates strategic and operational, micro and macro perspectives. It has three parts: (a) a revised definition and typology of OL, (b) seven reform stories that define stages and tasks, (c) a management and assessment guide demarcating four areas of OL: (i) action learning within core operations; (ii) sharing learning and innovations across the organization; (iii) mission/s-beyond ambidexterity; (iv) integration-managing mission conflicts and other paradoxes, which ensure endogenous change. Dynamic capability is therefore intrinsic to this view of OL that is illustrated from two cases: NYPD and public school reforms.

Contemporary organizations with multinational business activities must strive to achieve strategic responsiveness to thrive and survive as they operate across a highly dynamic and complex global business environment. Here we emphasize the importance of combining the slow analytical strategy processes at headquarters with the fast autonomous responses taken by frontline agents in the subsidiaries in view of the changing conditions. New business developments are observed first in the fast activities around the multinational periphery where updated experiences from ongoing responses create useful insights that can be used strategically if management at headquarters is cognizant about its existence and able to collect this information. We introduce the notion of democratizing the strategic engagement of managers and employees at all levels and locations of the multinational corporation (MNC) as an essential leadership paradigm. The implied interaction between slow central analytical reasoning at headquarters and updated insights from fast decentralized initiatives in local subsidiaries constitutes an effective dynamic responsive mechanism. This dynamic interaction implies that critical strategic decisions made in the MNC must be informed by the diverse updated insights of managers and employees operating on the corporate frontlines tapping into the crowd wisdom readily available in and around the organization.

This paper develops the practice-driven institutionalist perspective by introducing the concept of “restless practices.” Drawing on the practice theory of Theodore Schatzki, the authors distinguish practices by their “teloi”: some practices are devoted to replication, others are restlessly aimed at change. These restless practices are themselves composed of constitutive practices orientated toward “collecting,” “selecting” and “directing.” The authors illustrate restless practices and their constitutive practices by drawing on examples from consulting and standard-setting, both repeatedly generators of purposive, field-level change. The authors conclude that practice-driven institutionalism can accommodate change originating both from local improvisatory activities on the ground and from the designs of restless practices oriented toward fields at large.

In this paper, we consider the estimation of volatility parameters in the context of a linear regression where the disturbances follow a stochastic volatility (SV) model of order one with Gaussian log-volatility. The linear regression represents the conditional mean of the process and may have a fairly general form, including for example finite-order autoregressions. We provide a computationally simple two-step estimator available in closed form. Under general regularity conditions, we show that this two-step estimator is asymptotically normal. We study its statistical properties by simulation, compare it with alternative generalized method-of-moments (GMM) estimators, and present an application to the S&P composite index.