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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of chief information officer’s (CIO’s) strategic knowledge and structural power on enterprise systems (ES) success in the context of systems usage.

Drawing upon knowledge-based view, this study links CIO’s strategic knowledge, structural power, ES assimilation and firm performance in an integral model. Sample data were collected in China and partial least squares technique was used to test the model.

Empirical results suggest that CIO’s strategic information technology (IT) knowledge, strategic business knowledge and structural power have significant influence on ES assimilation. While ES assimilation mediates the association between CIO’s strategic knowledge, CIO’s structural power and firm performance. Another interesting finding in the study is that the imbalance of CIO’s strategic business knowledge and strategic IT knowledge is negatively associated with ES assimilation.

This study enriches the extant literatures in IS leadership by showing the significant role of CIO’s knowledge balance and authority in promoting the assimilation of ES within the organization. The empirical findings can provide guidelines for the top executive to select a person who is familiar with both strategic business and IT knowledge to take charge of ES, also, to provide the person with appropriate structural power, in order to achieve the benefits of ES successfully.

This longitudinal study looked at the impact of top managers’ personal power and structural power on divestiture two years later, using a sample of 46 sales and spin‐offs and a set of 46 control firms matched by size and industry in the USA. The impact of divestiture on top managers’ power during the two years following the divestiture was also looked at. Results of pair‐wise matched t‐tests reveal that firms whose top managers have less structural power are more likely to divest one year later. Logistic regression analysis shows that top managers’ structural power continues to predict divestiture one year later, even after controlling for change in net income and change in earnings per share. Divestiture also seems to result in less structural power of top managers during the two years after divestiture.

This study empirically aims to examine the relation between CEO power and firm engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). It undertakes an in-depth analysis of how the structural, ownership and expert dimensions of CEO power affect individual dimensions of CSR.

This study uses ordinary least squares and industry fixed-effects regressions. It also uses instrumental variable-generalized method of moment regressions to test the robustness of empirical results.

Results indicate that CEO power is negatively related to CSR. However, the relation between CEO power and CSR is influenced by CSR strengths, as power is negatively related to CSR strengths and is not related to CSR concerns. Results also indicate that the structural and ownership dimensions of CEO power are negatively related to CSR, and the expert dimension has no significant effect on CSR. Moreover, results show that CEO power is not related to the product dimension of CSR performance.

CEO power is measured using the structural, ownership and expert dimensions of power. However, CEOs also acquire power through social networks and connections outside the corporation which is not covered in this study.

This study uses comprehensive measures of CEO power and CSR. It is the first study that examines the effect of dimensions of CEO power on individual dimensions of CSR performance.

This study aims to examine the structural power wielded by the audit committee (AC) and the various bases of its power, whilst also exploring the behavioural tactics used by the AC to leverage its power in the oversight of the external audit.

Empirical evidence was drawn from semi-structured interviews with external auditors and AC members in Malaysia.

The AC’s structural power is derived from its formal and network position in the organisation. The AC possesses three forms of organisational-based power (legitimate, coercive and informational) resultant from its formal position, and these combine with the AC’s personal power (will and expert). The AC uses its personal power base to develop trusting relationships and to promote the exchange of information with other key corporate governance actors in the network position. Furthermore, the AC applies at least four behavioural tactics (assertiveness, ingratiation, rationality and coalition formation) to exercise its bases of power.

This study attempts to describe the AC’s structural sources of power, its organisational and personal power bases, and the behavioural tactics it uses when exerting its power.

Organizational researchers have long recognized the important role that top managers play within entrepreneurial firms (Ireland, Hitt and Sirmon 2003). Utilizing Covin and Slevin’s (1989) conceptual framework, the current study explores three key entrepreneurial characteristics of top managers and the impact these characteristics have on firm performance. Specifically, we argue that top managers with a high tolerance of risk, those who favor innovative activities and those who display a high degree of proactiveness will positively impact firm performance. In addition, this study examines the influence of top managers’ prestige, structural and expert power on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance. We conclude the study with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggestions for future research in this area of study.

This study explores the effect of CEO power on earnings quality. If powerful CEOs make the information environment more opaque, they can easily conceal information to hide self-dealing behavior through earnings manipulation. Conversely, if powerful CEOs who are well-protected create a transparent information environment, they will provide better quality earnings.

The author constructs a composite index for CEO power by combining seven CEO characteristics and employs two variables including discretionary accruals and earnings response coefficient as proxies for earnings quality.

The author’s main results show a significant negative relation between CEO power and the firm's earnings quality. In addition, CEOs with stronger structural power and expert power are more likely to generate lower earnings quality, while those with stronger ownership power are more likely to provide higher earnings quality.

The findings suggest that CEO power reduces the firm's earnings quality because CEOs with structural power or expert power may destroy governance monitoring mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to address school–NGO interactions by analyzing the power of foundations – a specific type of third sector organization or NGO in education.

Data are collected through a quantitative survey, qualitative interviews, official documents, reports and websites. Social network analysis and grounded theory are used to analyze the data with the aim to develop a theoretical approach.

The study identifies three dimensions, i.e. relational, structural and discursive dimensions of power. Based on the analysis of an illustrative multi-stakeholder initiative, the paper highlights the role of foundations in framing educational settings, concepts and structures of the education system as such.

The three-dimensional power perspective offered in this paper is particularly useful for scholars investigating school–NGO interactions or multi-stakeholder partnerships in education. Furthermore, it is of crucial importance for practitioners, school principals and education administrators dealing with school–NGO interactions given that foundations seem to be increasingly able to draw on new sources of power in these interactions.

While the number and power of the third sector in education continues to rise worldwide, there is wide consensus that NGO power in education has, to date, hardly been researched. This paper contributes to this dearth of research by uncovering foundations’ different sources of power and by developing a theoretical approach for analyzing the power of third-sector organizations in education.

Drawing on the literature of chief technology officer (CTO) and trusting relationship theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of trusting relationship of CTO‐chief executive officer (CEO) on the CTO's participation in technology strategy, based on empirical study of Chinese high‐tech firms, in order to maximize CTO's strategic decision‐making role. Taking into account the weight of power in Chinese culture, this study takes CTO's power distribution as moderator, to study whether it strengthens the impact of trusting relationship of CTO‐CEO on CTO's participation in technology strategy.

CTOs of high‐tech firms from Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Beijing are taken as samples. A questionnaire survey is conducted by using random sampling method.

The results show that trusting relationships of CTO‐CEO has a significant positive impact on CTO's participation in technology strategy. The two dimensions of trusting relationships of CTO‐CEO, cognitive trust and emotional trust also have a significant positive impact on CTO's participation in technology strategy and each dimension of CTO's power distribution has a significant moderating effect on partial paths.

The results are analyzed from both the data level and theoretical level. Conclusions on the management inspiration of CEO and CTO in high‐tech firms are drawn.

Is labour's decline permanent, or is it merely a temporary weakening, as Beverley Silver suggests in her recent book, as the labour movement is unmade and remade in different locations and at different times? The article aims to examine this question in South Africa, one of the newly industrialised countries of the 1960s and 1970s, now largely bypassed by new manufacturing investment destined for countries such as India and China.

The paper concentrates, through six case studies, on the growing non‐core and peripheral zones of work and examines the impact of the restructuring on labour.

The evidence presented is ambiguous. While there have been significant innovative union organising experiments, it may be that the structural weakening of labour has been too great and that the new sources of power are too limited, to permit effective reorientation.

It is concluded that significant progress will only be made if there is a concerted effort to commit resources and above all to develop new associational strategies that recognise the potential for symbolic power as an alternative to the erosion of structural power of workers and the unions that represent them. Unless such a shift is made the crisis of labour movements internationally may be better understood as a permanent crisis than the temporary one Silver suggests.

The paper identities the potential for new strategies to develop and sustain associational and symbolic power that might compensate for weakened structural power and facilitate a remaking of the labour movement under new conditions.

Goffman (1963) provided us with an explanation of the operation of stigma in microinteractional contexts. However, his definition and explication of the experiences and processes of stigmatization predate what many consider to be the most major shift in discourse and categorization to develop in the twentieth century – the rise of the language of risk. In this chapter, I discuss the intersections of risk discourse and stigma. Drawing on my empirical research with families affected by incarceration, I illustrate the shift toward structural stigma as an exercise of power and governance. I argue that contemporary “common-sense” understandings and usage of the term stigma emphasize negative individual interactions while ignoring the ways that risk categorizations, even in seemingly benign contexts, create structural disadvantage and serve to “other” stigmatized individuals. Singular focus on stigma at the microinteractional level, particularly in destigmatization campaigns, obscures the pervasive structural stigma couched in the language of risk management that permits systematic marginalization.