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Success in research – or ‘mastery’ as we call it – can lead to interdisciplinarity arising among the increasingly fragmented disciplines of science: researchers in molecular biology can be assisted by advances in the physics of atomic imaging, when they become aware of a development's potential and feel motivated to take advantage of it. The unpredictability of advances in scientific research makes the location and nature of interdisciplinarity largely unpredictable. This unpredictability means that organisational structures in which scientific research takes place – and in which our students are trained – are likely to lag behind interdisciplinary synergies developing in the laboratory. The lag time suggested by our model explains the challenges faced by leaders of interdisciplinary programmes in higher education. One can conclude that opportunities for interdisciplinarity in science are held back by discipline-bound institutions.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.

In this chapter, the authors theorize organizational integration by extending, elaborating, and combining various theoretical perspectives, such as structural contingency theory, organization economics, and organizational culture. The aim of this study is to provide the foundation for a holistic theory of integration that examines the different relevant facets of integration and a comprehensive set of tools – integrative devices – by which integration can be sought by those who design the organization. To this end, the authors examine the integration challenge that arises from various types of subunit interdependence – pooled, sequential, and reciprocal – and theorize which configurations of integrative devices are more likely to be effective in a given task environment. The authors close by discussing directions for future research on organizational integration.

By revisiting the agency theory literature, this paper aims to both incrementally advance historical viewpoints and reveal four prominent influences on agency theory: Weber and Simon, The Great Depression, Cooperation and the Chicago School. This is critical given that understanding the history behind the authors’ major theoretical lenses is fundamental to using these theories to explain various phenomena.

Drawing on a plethora of archival sources and following the influence-mapping approach used by other management history scholars, this manuscript synthesizes historical accounts and archival information to provide a clearer picture of the major historical influences in the formation of agency theory.

We shed light on four areas related to management history that helped propel agency theory. Whereas past scholarship has not recognised them as influencers, we find and show how the industrial revolution, unionization, the stock exchange and other management approaches all played a role in the development of agency theory’s core tenants.

We extend upon the influential people and events that shaped agency theory, thus providing a fuller understanding of the theory’s usefulness. Moreover, we fill in gaps enabling scholars to better understand the context in which the core tenants of agency theory were developed.

How do organizations respond to negative feedback regarding their innovation activities? In this chapter, the authors reconcile contradictory predictions stemming from behavioral learning and from the escalation of commitment (EoC) perspectives regarding persistence under negative performance feedback. The authors core argument suggests that the seemingly contradictory psychological processes indicated by these two perspectives occur simultaneously in decision makers but that the design of organizational roles and reward systems affects their prevalence in decision-making tasks. Specifically, the authors argue that for decision makers responsible for an individual project, responses given to negative performance feedback regarding a project are dominated by self-justification and loss-avoidance mechanisms predicted by the EoC literature, while for decision makers responsible for a portfolio of projects, responses to negative performance regarding a project are dominated by an under-sampling of poorly performing alternatives that behavioral learning theory predicts. In addition to assigning decision-making authority to different organizational roles, organizational designers shape the strength of these mechanisms through the design of reward systems and specifically by setting more or less ambiguous goals, aspiration levels, time horizons of incentives provided, and levels of failure tolerance.

Civil wrongdoings with consequent financial and other loss or damage to employers, employees and third parties may result in the course of various trade union activities. These day to day trade union activities take a variety of forms. The most common ones are inducement of breach of contract, conspiracy, trespass, nuisance, and intimidation. Each of these activities constitutes a tort which, unless the statutory immunities apply, would normally give rise at common law to an action for damages or, as is more frequent, enable the aggrieved party to obtain an injunction.

There is considerable evidence that long periods of success in organisations can lead to ossification of strategy and strategic inertia. Burgelman (2002) shows how co-evolutionary lock-in occurs through the creation of a strategy vector. He demonstrates that the internal selection environment can become configured to create sources of inertia that dampen the autonomous strategy process, driving out unrelated exploration and creating a dominance of the induced, top-down strategy process. While this study shows how lock-in occurs, it does not address how a company breaks out of co-evolutionary lock-in. This is the focus of this paper. We argue that to understand how an organisation breaks out of a strategy vector a more complete conceptualisation of the structural context, and in particular the under specified cultural mechanisms, is required. It also requires an understanding of the linkages between the structural context and the new core capabilities required for breakout. Thus we first expand on what is known about strategy vectors and review research from the strategy process tradition that explores the linkages between strategy, culture and strategic change, to build a more comprehensive picture of the structural context. Our model demonstrates the extent of interconnectedness between the ‘hard’ (e.g., control systems and organisation structure) and ‘soft’ (e.g. beliefs, symbols and stories) components, and that development of new required capabilities is dependent on a holistic shift in all these aspects of the structural context, including, therefore, change in the organisation's culture. We then illustrate the link between lock-in, capability development and culture change through the case of the famous Formula One team, Ferrari. We finish with a discussion of the implications of our findings for strategic change.