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This paper details an experimental study (n=197) that explores how different types of managerial change justifications affect employees’ reactions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of managerial justification of a controversial decision in referential terms, ideological terms or a combination of the two.

A randomized controlled experiment was used applying case-based video clips to ensure vividness and realism in the experimental manipulation.

The results show that referential justification caused a drop in the perceived trustworthiness of management, such that it reduced employees’ perceptions of the manager’s integrity. The effect was most pronounced in participants having elevated levels of dispositional resistance to change. The drop in perceived integrity was indirectly associated with reduced intention to support the change together with adverse affective and cognitive reactions to change.

A robust test of different change justifications in a randomized, controlled setting, which also highlights the psychological mechanisms through which referential change justifications reduce follower trust. This result should help managers more readily understand the components of successful communication in organizational change.

With the transition into a knowledge economy, the concept of leading knowledge workers (KWs) has gained an increasing amount of attention in organisational studies and among practitioners. The emerging literature on the leadership of KW addresses an important phenomenon, but theoretical underpinnings and empirical inquiry into leadership effectiveness in a KW context do not agree on a common conceptualisation of KWs. Thus, a concerted research effort seems warranted.

The purpose of this study is to take stock of the existing literature on the leadership of KW. Based on a critical literature review, this paper provides a timely synthesis of the diffuse literature and identifies research gaps facing the leadership of KW field.

This paper suggests that the literature to date is deficient in terms of theory and evidence for how KWs are different from other classes of workers and argues that this deficiency stands in the way of developing ideas about how KWs could be effectively led.

This paper extends a discussion on establishing “KW” as a clear, independent construct and how the nomological network in which KW is situated (i.e. leadership antecedents, and workplace outcomes) may be elucidated, extended and researched.

This paper extends beyond the identified research gaps and findings to present an agenda for future research. Specifically, we propose that insights from research in educational psychology should be used as a platform for theorising about how to lead in a KW context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the way change implemented effects organizational learning. More specifically, we study the relationships between the use of social accounts, participation and organizational learning in the context of strategic change. The use of social accounts and participation are often promoted during change, but up to this point, their influences on organizational learning have not been studied.

A multi‐change and multi‐organization study, using a critical incident technique (i.e. informants provide information from a specific change experience), provides the data for testing a set of theory driven hypotheses that link aspects of the change process to learning outcomes.

Findings show that social accounting and participation are positively associated with organizational learning, but that the influence of social accounting is negatively moderated by participation. Social accounts framed as threats to system survival were unrelated to organizational learning.

In order to maximize learning during change organizations should attempt to involve members with different values and expertise throughout the process. The use of formalized communication programs would add little to organizational learning if participative change processes are applied. Although threat appeals could be useful for creating readiness for change, their impact on organizational learning seem to be marginal.

For knowledge intensive and learning dependent organizations, the study provides some guidance to change management.

This paper investigates how respondents to conjoint experiments process information and choose among product profiles, and how this varies with their knowledge about the product. Models for estimating conjoint attribute weights are almost exclusively based on principles of compensatory decision making. The paper aims to explore to what extent and in what way these basic principles of conjoint modelling are violated.

Data were obtained from a verbal protocol study where 18 undergraduate students each performed a total of 28 stated choice tasks while “thinking aloud”.

Results show that cognitive operations consistent with compensatory decision rules constitute a majority of the total number of operations performed across tasks and respondents. However, few respondents exhibited a consistent use of compensatory‐type processes throughout their choice sets. Results suggest that individual preferences interact with characteristics of the choice sets to instigate changes in information processing. It also appears that complete strategies are seldom used. Finally, respondents' knowledge about the product influences the cognitive operations that respondents use in solving conjoint tasks.

Results are based on responses from 18 undergraduate students, which makes generalizations hard.

One implication of this work is that one should apply a more flexible model framework to allow detecting the existence of non‐compensatory strategies.

This paper is one of few which aim to implement findings in behavvioral decision research within the context of conjoint analysis.

This paper aims to address whether the order of entry yields competitive advantage in the discount grocery industry. More specifically, the paper aims to investigate whether such advantages are based on the effects of entry on consumer perceptions rather than factors such as technological leadership or cost efficiency.

The paper combines perceptual measures of overall preferences and attribute‐level beliefs with objective measures of attribute levels in order to explore whether entry‐based advantages in this industry are due to the relationships between entry and consumer perceptions.

The findings show that early entrants are perceived to be significantly superior to later entrants. This finding also hold true for store attributes documented to be similar across chains.

A number of papers have shown relationships between order of entry and indicators of competitive advantage. This is the first study that rules out “economic performance” based explanations for such advantages, i.e. superior efficiency, technological leadership or the pre‐emption of scarce resources.

Libraries must actively support humanities text files, but we must remember that to focus exclusively on texts tied to specific systems is to put ourselves in opposition to the needs of the researchers we intend to serve. A working model of the sort of system and resource provision that is appropriate is described. The system, one put in place at the University of Michigan, is the result of several years of discussions and investigation. While by no means the only model upon which to base such a service, it incorporates several features that are essential to the support of these materials: standardized, generalized data; the reliance on standards for the delivery of information; and remote use. Sidebars discuss ARTFL, a textual database; the Oxford Text Archive; InteLex; the Open Text Corporation; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); the machine‐readable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition; and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.

This short poem seeks to encapsulate a cynical view of the value of risk assessment.

The poem was written at the time of the collapse of the banks, despite their elaborate risk assessments. It juxtaposes modern belief in risk assessment with other historical and fallible means of prediction. The poem is a triolet, a medieval French form comprising one eight‐line stanza with a regular rhyming scheme and repetition of lines. It is concise, with nursery rhyme simplicity, and a refrain that sinks into the conscious.

The images of runes, the tarot, and astrology counterbalance the scientific language and basis of risk assessment and the hard‐nosed, factual business of insurance.

The poem reminds us that the greatest risk is the one that is impossible to foresee.

The poem is unique in its use of a medieval French form to examine a modern phenomenon.

This paper presents the architecture of a system for robotic welding of complex tasks. The system integrates off‐line programming, control of redundant robots, collision‐free motion planning and sensor‐based control. An implementation for pipe structure welding made at Odense Steel Shipyard Ltd., Denmark, demonstrates the system can be used for automatic welding of complex products in one‐of‐a‐kind production.

This case study is informed by a call for new ways to analyse the enactment of organisational culture using discourse analysis and researcher reflexivity. The colliding research approaches used in this paper open up cultural symbolic data for analysis in ways that allow participants to reflect on their own organisational experiences. The methodology that is employed examines corporate culture narrative from a multifaceted viewpoint to show ways in which organisations seek to maintain their structure and identity in the marketplace. The study draws on narrative and performance methods to show how perceptions about organisational reality can be reinterpreted and communicated in the context of corporate cultural identity and enterprise risk management.