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In elite sport competitions there are small margins, and small advantages may be the key to big success. Details that in many other setting would be considered insignificant can have a major impact on results. Awareness about risks therefore becomes a key concern in such projects, and this is often viewed as the essence of project management. Compensations for negative outcomes do not make sense. Delays, cost‐overruns or compensations are not viable options. In such situations, success depends on the ability to manage risks with a high degree of reliability, reflects the ability to mobilize, use and develop new knowledge. This paper aims to offer an opportunity to investigate mechanisms for knowledge development and transfer in relation to risk management in a mindful organization.

The starting point was formal documents and plans, but the main data source is semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with all major actors involved. The data are representative in the sense that they provide a comprehensive mapping of critical elements in Olympic projects, strategies for dealing with them and how knowledge from earlier projects were exploited. As data were collected they were systematized through open coding, identifying recurrent themes relating to major concerns, influence of earlier experience, knowledge sharing, relationships between experiences and new project team members, etc. The next step was to recode descriptive categories in ways that captured underlying analytical or theoretical dimensions relating to different types of risk, knowledge and knowledge carriers.

The article links risk management to knowledge development and transfer in a mindful organization. Three mechanisms are crucial for successful project‐based learning: relating different competences; reflecting on experiences; and routinizing lessons learned. Such processes are at the core of a mindful organization. Knowledge transfer and risk management are an integrated part of best practice. In Olympiatoppen there is little codification of knowledge in formal systems and detailed operating procedures. Knowledge is mainly carried by individuals – and activated, evaluated and used in a setting where relationships play a key role. The ability to exploit such mechanisms for knowledge transfer is generally attracting attention as an essential success factor in project‐based learning.

The paper contributes to the literature on knowledge development in projects in the following ways: first, knowledge development and transfer is linked to risk management and the concept of mindful organization. In a mindful organization knowledge transfer and risk management are an integrated part of best practice. Second, it pays special attention to the social aspects of knowledge transfer; particularly the role of personal knowledge and problem solving capacities and the importance of social relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how much value national governments worldwide place on political, economic, scientific, artistic, religious, legal, sportive, health-related, educational and mass media-related issues. This knowledge is critical as governments and policies are typically expected to be congruent with the importance these issues have for society.

Drawing on theories of polyphonic and multifunctional organization, the authors recoded and analyzed a US Central Intelligence Agency directory to test the cabinet portfolio of a total of 201 national governments for significant biases to the above issues.

The results suggest that governments worldwide massively over-allocate their attention to economic issues.

The authors conclude that this strong pro-economic governance-bias likely translates into dysfunctional governance and development at both the national and supra-national level.

The strategic importance of the purchasing function increases, as its task become more dynamic in various interfaces with different suppliers. Changes in these customer–supplier interfaces pose specific challenges. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the purchasing function handles the interplay of interface changes.

This study applies a qualitative single case study design. Data are collected through observations and interviews conducted before, during and after a concrete change of interface taking place between a buying firm and its suppliers and customers.

Three main findings are identified to redefine the tasks of the purchasing function. The first concerns the new ways of defining the purchasing tasks. The main issue is to balance tasks with the simultaneous changes influencing other interfaces and relationships. The second is the division and alignment of tasks in intra- and inter-organizational networks with regards to who decides and coordinates what. Third, the inter-connected performance relates to how other actors perform their tasks. For the purchasing function, managing supplier interfaces influences and is influenced by how the firm simultaneously manages its user interface.

For management, a new way to evaluate the performance of the purchasing function is needed by including relationship management and interactive capabilities.

This study contributes with new insights into how managing the dynamics of changing interfaces requires interactively defined purchasing tasks, division and alignment of tasks and inter-connected performance vis-à-vis others in the wider network setting.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize the need for debate in operationalizing the planetary boundaries framework when accounting for the Anthropocene.

This paper’s aim is achieved through a literature review focusing on the assumptions around the Anthropocene, planetary boundaries and organizations. The author conducted an integrated review of 91 documents discussing the operationalization of the planetary boundaries framework and the need for debate.

This paper develops two major findings. First, the author identifies the four main dimensions of the planetary boundaries that need to be debated: social, normative, narrative and control aspects. Second, the author exposes proposals in the literature that have the potential to fuel the debate, but which are themselves a source of debate.

This paper argues that, while being scientifically informed, the planetary boundaries framework leaves decision-makers with critical choices and decisions that need to be openly debated. This paper identifies some relevant proposals for doing so.

This paper underlines the need to open forums of debate for scientists and other stakeholders to raise the democratic legitimacy of the planetary boundaries framework.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the very first papers to investigate dimensions of the planetary boundaries that need to be debated to respond to the challenge of its operationalization.

This conceptual article aims to contribute to the design of a theory of family-influenced firms by a framework for the management of business-family dilemmas.

It combines systemic principles with the tetralemma, a tool from ancient Indian logic that families and businesses can use to manage and reframe dilemmas without dissolving the dilemmatic tensions or blurring their boundaries.

In applying the tetralemma, the article offers a range of suggestions, such as observing business and family as two discrete, yet codependent, social systems and envisioning conceptual and methodological imports from codependency research and therapy into family business research and practice.

The article proposes a framework for the selective and flexible navigation of family-business tensions without dissolving them or blurring their boundaries.

The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a knowledge work context for the purpose of becoming a learning organization while enhancing performance. This is important to study because many organizations struggle to enhance efficiency in the short term while still trying to be long-term learning oriented (i.e. learning organization development).

The authors draw on theory on learning interventions to show how lean practices for problem-solving can foster learning and help an organization to become adaptive. This study’s subject is a non-production department of 100 employees at the LEGO corporation. The authors applied survey results from a natural experiment lasting 18 months between a pre-measurement survey and a post-measurement survey. The results were compared to a control department of 50 employees who were not exposed to the lean practices intervention. The authors’ focus was on the individual level as individuals have different perceptions of lean practices, performance, and learning.

Using repeated-measures tests, difference-in-difference regressions analyses, and structural equation models, the authors find that a package of contemporary lean practices for problem-solving, along with leaders who function as learning facilitators, significantly improved learning organization dimensions while also enhancing efficiency and quality and that learning organizations positively mediate the relationship between the lean intervention and quality-related performance, while efficiency is directly affected by the lean interventions. Data from LEGO's key performance indicators (KPIs), benefit trackers, on-site observations and more than 40 interviews with managers provided results that were consistent with the survey data. A detailed description of the lean practices implemented is provided to inspire future implementations in non-operations environments and to assist educators.

The authors contribute to the learning literature by showing that a learning-to-learn approach to lean management can serve as an active and deliberate intervention in helping an organization becoming a learning organization as perceived by the individual organizational members. The authors also add to the lean literature by showing how a learning approach to lean, as used by LEGO, can positively affect short-term efficiency and quality and create a foundation for a longer-term competitive advantage (i.e. a learning organization) in a non-production context. By contrast, most of the lean literature streams treat efficiency separately from a learning organization and mainly examine lean in a production context.

The extant literature shows three research streams on lean, learning, and performance. The authors built on these streams by trying to emphasize both learning and efficiency. Prior research has not empirically tested whether and how the application of problem-solving lean practices combined with leaders as learning facilitators helps to create a comprehensive learning organization while enhancing performance in a non-production context.

Studies on the work integration of persons with disabilities (PwD) and the role of social dialogue therein are scarce. The study examines how the different systems of workers’ representation and industrial relations in Slovakia and Norway facilitate PwD work integration. Taking a social ecosystem perspective, we acknowledge the role of various stakeholders and their interactions in supporting PwD work integration. The paper’s conceptual contribution lies in including social dialogue actors in this ecosystem.

Evidence was collected via desk research, 35 semi-structured in-depth interviews with 51 respondents and stakeholder workshops in 2019–2020.

The findings from Norway confirm the expected coordination of unions and employers in PwD work integration. Evidence from Slovakia shows that in decentralised industrial relations systems, institutional constraints beyond the workplace determine employers’ and worker representatives’ approaches in PwD integration. Most policy-level outcomes are contested, as integration occurs predominantly via sheltered workplaces without interest representation.

This paper identifies the primary sources of variation in the work integration of PwD. It also highlights opportunities for social partners across both situations to exercise agency and engagement to improve PwD work integration.

By integrating two streams of literature – social policy and welfare state and industrial relations – this paper examines PwD work integration from a social ecosystem perspective. Empirically, it offers novel qualitative comparative evidence on trade unions’ and employers’ roles in Slovakia and Norway.

The present article pertains to recent advances in social systems theoretical analyses of moral communication.

An introduction to basic concepts and requirements for systems-theoretical approaches to morality and communication is provided, as is an introduction to 14 contributions to a pertinent special issue of Kybernetes.

The review of these 14 cases suggests that social systems theory enables researchers to study moral communication without necessarily performing it.

This article reappraises and challenges Niklas Luhmann's occasionally distanced attitude to morality, which has occasionally been understood as a form of moral communication itself.

This article is devoted to conditions and examples of how theories may be applied as methods in the fields of management research and organization studies.

An introduction to minimum requirements for a successful refunctionalization of theory as method as well as to nine contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management on “Theory as method” is provided.

The review of these nine cases suggests that the use of theories as methods is not necessarily harmful for the former, and particularly not for the more robust among them.

This article sheds new light on the value of theoretical monism or loyalty and calls for a reassessment of the relative value of expertise in a specific research field, method and or theory.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an effective way to assess landslide risk quantitatively. Quantitative assessment plays an important role in mitigating the landslide risk and developing a landslide risk-based warning system. However, efficient risk assessment on the large deformation failure process of slope with spatially variable soils is a challenging problem.

Combining the Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) and the higher-order material point method – the B-spline Material Point Method (BSMPM) – the concept of MC-BSMPM to assess the landslide risk quantitatively is proposed in this paper. The overall dynamic evolution of soil slope failure has been simulated by the BSMPM, and the probability density function of the sliding duration, the sliding kinematic energy, the sliding mass and the sliding distance of the landslide are obtained based on the MCS. Through the four risk assessment parameters of the sliding duration, the sliding kinematic energy, the sliding mass and the sliding distance, the landslide risk could be assessed quantitatively.

It is found that the post-failure behavior of the landslide conforms well to a normal distribution as the soil physical parameter is in a normal distribution. The variation of soil’s shear strength affects the dynamic motion of the landslide greatly.

The result shows that the landslide hazard cannot be estimated comprehensively by the deterministic BSMPM, while the landslide risk could be more clearly understood and quantitatively assessed with more details by the proposed method, which demonstrates that the MC-BSMPM method is an effective way to assess the landslide risk quantitatively.