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This paper presents a viewpoint that considers the construction of ‘expertise’ as an impediment to successfully using cross-functional expertise in the organization. The construction of expertise forms a bounded perspective that creates hidden impediments to success that culminate in organizational underachievement.

Experiential knowledge of the authors that incorporated 20 years of organizational management experience and extensive practice of hiring experts to progress organizational learning, knowledge, and development is the primary basis of this work.

A common misperception of ‘expertise’ relates to a limiting perspective on what expertise is? Organizations segregate expertise (silo) as a way of increasing functionality and division of labor in an organizational structure. However, organizational underachievement is not due to functional arrangement in the organization’s structure (which is a commonly held belief) rather a byproduct of a bounded perspective necessary to construct expertise.

Organizations who understand that the bounded perspective of expertise is the source constraining use of their acquired expertise gain insight to an actionable opportunity to rectify cross-functional restraints. Core elements are offered to minimize the impact of organizational silofication.

This paper is unique in that it introduces a bounded perspective as the source impeding the use of workplace expertise rather than functional placement.

The aim of this article is to present a viewpoint from learning as individual and group cognition for the benefit of organization learning scholarship.

Conceptual viewpoint of the author.

The results demonstrate that perspective of intentionality is important for understanding how learning as cognition develops into organizational learning.

Organizations that recognize perspective as the agency by which learning as cognition develops organizational learning have a better opportunity to remain competitive.

This paper provides a basis to advance understanding on how perspective influences learning as cognition as a developmental process for organizational learning.

We study the relationship between firms’ top management teams (TMT) and internationalization complexity. We consider the effect of three different sets of TMT characteristics – international business orientation intensity, education intensity, and team diversity – on three different and increasingly complex facets of internationalization - international markets intensity, international operations intensity and international country diversity. We argue that more international, highly-educated and diverse TMTs are better able to face the complexity derived from international competition. The results of our empirical analysis show that TMTs having foreign managers or managers with international experience are more likely to be in charge of firms facing higher international operations intensity. Conversely, more educated and more diverse TMTs are associated with complexity deriving from international diversification.

THERE are now so many meetings of the Library Association and its branches and sections that the good custom of recording meetings and the discussions at them has fallen into desuetude. In a way it is a gain, for when the discussion was commonplace the account of a meeting became a mere list of those who attended and spoke, bones without flesh; but in the days when The Library Association Record really was a record, its reports were a part of the educational and informational material of every librarian. Something should be done about this, because 1938 opened with a series of meetings which all deserved the fullest report. The principal one was the investiture meeting of the President of the Library Association on January 17th. The attendance was greater than that at any meeting of librarians in recent years, of course other than the Annual Conference. Chaucer House was beautifully arranged, decorated and lighted for the occasion, an atmosphere of cheerfulness and camaraderie pervaded the affair. The speeches were limited to a few preliminary words by the retiring President, the Archbishop of York, before placing the badge on his successor's neck; a brief, but deserved panegyric of Dr. Temple's services by Mr. Berwick Sayers; and then a delightful acknowledgment from His Grace. The serious point the Archbishop made was his surprise at learning the wide extent of the library movement and his conviction that it must be of great value to the community. His lighter touch was exquisite; especially his story of the ceremonial key, which broke in the lock and jammed it when he was opening a library in state, and of his pause to settle mentally the ethical point as to whether he could conscientiously declare he had “opened” a place when he had made it impossible for anyone to get in until a carpenter had been fetched. Altogether a memorable evening, which proved, too, as a guest rightly said, that one cannot easily entertain librarians, but, if you get them together in comfortable conditions, they entertain themselves right well.

Group incentive schemes have been shown to be positively associated with firm performance but it remains an open question whether this association can be explained by the motivating characteristics of the group-incentive scheme itself, or if this is due to factors that tend to accompany group-incentive schemes. We use a controlled experiment to directly test if group-incentive schemes can motivate sustained individual effort in the absence of rules, norms, and institutions that are known to mitigate free-riding behavior.

We use a controlled lab experiment that randomly assigns subjects to one of three compensation contracts used to incentivize an onerous effort task. Two of the compensation contracts are group-incentive schemes where subjects have an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of their coworkers, and the third (control) is a flat-wage contract.

We find that both group-incentive schemes resulted in sustained, higher performance relative to the flat-wage compensation contract. Further, we do not find evidence of free-riding behavior under the two group-incentive schemes.

Although we do find sustained cooperation/performance over the three work periods of our experiment under the group-incentive schemes, further testing would be required to evaluate whether group-incentive schemes can sustain cooperation over a longer time horizon without complementary norms, policies, or institutions that mitigate free-riding.

By unambiguously showing that group-incentive schemes can, by themselves, motivate workers to provide sustained levels of effort, this suggests that the “1/n problem” may be, in part, an artifact of the rational-actor modeling conventions.

Prior research has tended to view cross-country distance as an obstacle. Yet, differences across countries are a key reason for firms to internationalize. To address this discrepancy, this paper puts forward a unifying framework which (1) synthesizes and delineates the different types of cross-country distance, (2) provides a logic for analyzing cross-level influences of distance on internationalization decisions, and (3) highlights the opportunities brought about by distance. The paper argues that firms are more likely to be able to realize these opportunities when they have internationally experienced managers and diverse, well-functioning top management teams at the helm. The paper also highlights the complex influences of distance, calling for the use of cognitive and behavioral research methodologies to further our understanding of the role of distance in internationalization. An illustrative example of Vodafone Group PLC is included.

We live in an age of unparalleled access to personal data. Technological advances that seem second nature today allow for the mass accumulation of personal information by even the smallest of companies. The same technology also can be used directly by the state to accumulate mass information on its citizens. In the hands of government law enforcement officials, these surveillance advances also can be used to greatly enhance the state’s ability to exercise social control – a circumstance that has both positive and negative connotations. This chapter discusses the increasingly important confluence of privacy rights, surveillance, and social control as seen from a constitutional standpoint.

After years of limiting the expectations of privacy that citizens may have in their day-to-day lives, several recent Supreme Court decisions have attempted to take account of the privacy expectations held by individuals in today’s ever-evolving technological world, and in doing so have limited the ability of law enforcement to engage in surveillance without first obtaining a warrant. Yet more needs to be done. Specifically, the author argues that the law of standing must be updated to permit judicial claims by individuals who challenge the legality and constitutionality of comprehensive surveillance programs.

Managers and entrepreneurs are increasingly being challenged to respond to a world where it is harder to effectively make and implement their decisions. Over half the decisions managers make are never implemented. We have observed entrepreneurs and managers in a wide range of situations in various countries, who illustrate a different set of assumptions for making decisions. They illustrate an entrepreneurial logic, a process of creatively defining and taking action to make sense out of situations which require new frameworks, assumptions and understandings. They assume that many challenges are not predictable and controllable. Certain control‐oriented attitudes and behaviors inhibit people from thinking this way, such as attempts to make decisions without fully understanding the right question, and overly relying on statistics. Certain reframing attitudes and behaviors – diversity in thinking, asking the right questions, and reframing and adapting quickly – illustrate ways to make sense of the paradoxes and uncertainties in the new economy.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the influence of offshoring on entrepreneurial activity (i.e. the introduction of new products and services).

Methodology/approach – Conceptual

Practical implication – The framework proposed in this study provides some indication to managers about designing an offshoring strategy. Particularly, we aim to inform managers that offshoring various functions may differentially influence firm innovation and that the effect also depends on the governance mode used for the offshore operations and managerial oversight of the offshoring process.

Originality/value of chapter – We provide a theoretical framework that proposes that the offshoring of knowledge intensive services (KIS) and that of labour-intensive services (LIS) will differentially influence the ability of firms to introduce new products and services. While the offshoring of KIS has an inverted U-shaped influence on entrepreneurial activity, the offshoring of LIS has a positive impact. In addition, we propose that these relationships are conditioned by organisational (i.e. governance mode) and managerial (i.e. TMT reflexivity) factors. Specifically, we argue that the degree of integration with the offshore affiliate and TMT reflexivity each moderate the non-linear relationship between offshoring KIS and innovation in such a way that the positive effects of low levels of offshoring KIS will be stronger and the negative effects of high levels of offshoring KIS will be lower. In addition, we argue that the degree of integration constrains and TMT reflexivity enhances the relationship between offshoring LIS and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a counter-narrative to accounts of specific species extinction. The authors place humanity’s ways of organising at the core and recognise that only fundamental re-appraisal of humanity’s taken-for-granted narratives offers hope for biodiversity and sustainability. The authors challenge producers of accounts of all sorts to reconsider the context and level of resolution of their accounts. The authors argue that humankind is the root cause of most (if not all) current species extinctions; that such extinctions represent one reason why humanity might itself be threatened with extinction; and why human extinction might be a good thing. The authors need to imagine other, better, futures.

The piece is an essay which assembles a wide range of literature in order to support its contentions.

There are many individual accounts of species which explore the (albeit very serious) symptoms of a problem without, the authors maintain, examining the systematic source of the problem. The source problem is western mankind’s organisation and somewhat taciturn conception of humanity. There is a lack of accounts offering new possibilities.

The piece is an essay and, consequently, limited to the quality of the argument presented. The essay suggests that the principal implications relate to how producers of counter-accounts frame their construction of accounts and how accounts of species extinction need to be more cognisant of underlying causes.

Without substantial change, planetary ecology, including humanity, is very seriously threatened. Imagining a plausible future is a most practical act of faith.

The essay suggests that as accountants the authors might think to approach the counter-accounts with a lower level of resolution: one that is directed towards a more challenging notion of what it is to be human.

Whilst building upon the growing sophistication in the understanding of (new) accounts and responding to the emerging literatures on biodiversity, species extinction and utopian vision the authors offer what the authors believe to be a unique suggestion in the accounting literature about the extinction of mankind.