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I received a traditional undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Under the very inflexible British system of higher education then in place in South Africa, my civil engineering degree allowed me just one elective in four years – either German-English or French-English technical translation. I was not allowed to enroll in courses in such “irrelevant” fields as economics or law, much less sociology.

The opinion that the spiritual controls the physical gave rise to this chapter. The spiritual in this chapter was regarded as the philosophical and organisational theories controlling the practical aspect of construction supply chain management (CSCM). It was discovered that there is a significant omission in adopting theories to explain supply chain management's (SCM) adaptation and modelling in the construction industry. Therefore, this chapter reviews theories such as resource-based view theory (RBV), principal agency theory (PAT), resource dependency theory (RDT), transaction cost economics theory (TCE) and game theory. Each of the theories was analysed to uncover how they support the practice and variables for modelling the construction supply chain (CSC). The existing models of the CSC were also examined in this chapter. It was found that most models were developed drawing on the frameworks of the global supply chain forum (GSCF) and supply chain operations reference model (SCOR). Owing to the shortcoming of GSCF, this book adopted the framework and principles of SCOR for modelling the management of CSC in the era of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). Also, most of the existing CSC models, such as the seamless CSCM model, maturity model and others, were developed using the SCOR framework.

Cultural portraits usually begin with a description of the context, but as this material is covered elsewhere in this volume, this introduction will be mercifully brief. At any time during the last four decades, there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of Stanford University faculty and doctoral students interested in studying organizations. They have been scattered across the campus, often in small groups within larger schools and departments. They have been based in the Sociology Department and the Organizational Behavior and Strategy areas at the Graduate School of Business. There were always a handful at the Education and Engineering schools, as well as a scattering of individuals doing related work in Psychology, Political Science, and Anthropology. In spite of their numbers, before the Stanford Center for Organizational Research (SCOR) was founded in 1972, many of these faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral students felt rather isolated. They had little contact with colleagues across campus who shared their interest in organizations and little collective clout when resources were being distributed.

Micro and small enterprises (MSEs) represent 99% of Peruvian firms, contribute 42% of Peru's Gross Domestic Product, and employ half of the country's labor force. Despite their relevance for the Peruvian Economy, they have low survival rates and are characterized by low productivity and processes inefficiencies. This chapter explores whether the adoption of Business and Supply Chain Management (SCM) practices influences MSEs' performance. We conducted a field study using data from 50 MSEs located in Piura, Peru, specifically from trade, service, and manufacturing sectors. We used the data collection guidelines from the MIT GeneSys to measure the firms' adoption of Business and SCM practices. Our results show that MSEs with higher adoption of Financial Planning, Supply Chain Planning, Supplier Relationship Management, Marketing, Procurement, and Stock Control practices are more likely to have higher revenue (i.e., sales). In addition, a multiple regression analysis reveals that while SCM practices do not seem to directly explain productivity growth in MSEs (as business practices do), they, however, seem to influence the performance of business practices, and, thus, have an indirect effect on the productivity growth of MSEs.

Operating as a promising regional university well into the 1960s, Stanford witnessed a “great leap forward” in the 1970s and 1980s. Guided by the visionary leadership of its president, Wallace Sterling, and provost, Frederick Terman, Stanford began its meteoric climb into the ranks of the nation's top tier universities. This more general history has been told and retold in numerous publications (e.g., Lowen, 1997; Gillmor, 2004) and need not be recounted here.

We describe some recent contingent capital securities (CoCos) and explore the issues that confront their development. We take the view that bank CoCos should be designed to maintain confidence in a bank before a crisis begins because once a crisis commences it is difficult to see how a bank can assure the capital market without the support of state aid. With this overriding objective in mind we find that, in at least some respects, existing examples of bank CoCos have got the ‘right’ design. Existing bank CoCos are unfunded as they should be as there is no need to structure these securities to provide additional liquidity. If funding turns out to be necessary then a liquidity crisis is already underway and the CoCo has already failed in its attempt to maintain confidence in the bank. Moreover, existing CoCos use the simpler single trigger that we favour rather than dual trigger structure recommended by some.

For many years, Stanford University has had a major organizations research faculty distributed across at least four schools and numerous departments. By its existence, that faculty has recruited others of similar quality. It has attracted a strong group of students who in due course have gained their doctorates at Stanford and have populated North American, European, and Asian universities.

When I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 1993, the university was a thriving site of organizational research. The department of sociology served as a sort of epicenter, with workshops on organizational ecology (led by Mike Hannan), organizations in the world polity (John Meyer and Francisco “Chiqui” Ramirez), and healthcare organizations (Dick Scott). In the school of education, Jim March was intriguing a new generation of students with his puzzles and wisdom. In addition to Mike Hannan's joint appointment, the Graduate School of Business featured such luminaries as Jeff Pfeffer, Joanne Martin, Jim Baron, Joel Podolny, and Bill Barnett. Slightly further afield, Ray Leavitt and Michael Fehling had begun to train engineers to think about organizational issues, as they developed computer simulations with nuanced attention to cognitive and decision-making processes. Steve Barley would join (what was then) the department of industrial engineering in 1994 and Mark Granovetter would join the department of sociology in 1995, adding fresh insights from the sociology of work and economic sociology, respectively, to what was already a firm foundation for organization studies. The umbrella organization that linked many of these efforts was the Stanford Consortium on Organizational Research (SCOR), which had been guided by Dick Scott's able leadership since 1988 and hosted an annual organizations conference at the beautiful Asilomar retreat in Monterey, California.

Charged with a daunting task of organizational analysis, the good Stanford graduate of my era dutifully turns for inspiration to Dick Scott's Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems. It is not quite the Bible, but it has a far more useful index and bibliography. And, as a beginning, I often encourage my own students to consider the basic “elements of organizations” that Scott presents in the form of a simple “diamond” typology, originally attributed to Harold Leavitt (1965) and in the most recent edition (Scott & Davis, 2007) updated to reflect the work of Nadler, Tushman, and Nadler (1997). This typology directs attention to five key components of any organizational phenomenon: (1) the participants; (2) the formal structure; (3) the informal structure; (4) the technology; and (5) the environment. Considering each of these elements may shed some light on the Stanford experience.