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Maladies afflicting the higher education system in developing countries are well represented by what is happening in India and have been discussed in detail by many researchers and educationists (Anandakrishnan, 2008; Balram, 2005, 2008). The Government of India has formulated different projects and programmes for improving the education scenario in the country. The successive education commissions from Radhakrishnan (1949) through Kothari commission (1966) discussed various issues related to the higher education system and suggested many steps to resolve them. Recently, the Committee to Advice on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education (2009) headed by Yash Pal discussed the challenges faced by the Indian higher education system and recommended complete revamping of the higher education system and evolving it as an Indian model. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC, 2006–2009) in 2007 while recommending several measures to keep up the pace of higher education with the developments of knowledge society and knowledge economy observed that ‘We recognize that a meaningful reform of the higher education system with a long-term perspective is both complex and difficult. Yet it is imperative.’ The view that the reforms cannot easily be carried out is more strengthened by the fact that the vision and recommendations of the Kothari Commission of 1966 (based on which the 1968 educational policy was formulated) are still valid and useful even now (Sam Pitroda, 2007).

The reason of this chapter is to clarify at a conceptual level the phenomenon of shared service centers. The aim of the chapter is to enable managers make better decisions when applying the concept of shared service centers.

This is a conceptual chapter, in which the phenomenon of shared service centers is being rewritten, from an initial cost efficiency level, into a constituting building block in the new nature of the firm.

The findings of this chapter are that especially the combination of financial shared service centers and IT shared service centers are an instrument to organize information outside the structure of the internal organization of the firm, as implied by the changing nature of the firm. Also shared service centers are enablers for new business models, especially those based on human capital.

Executives and managers that have a better conceptual understanding of the application of shared service centers will create more benefits beyond costs savings.

This is the first chapter in which shared service center is reconceptualized in terms of the changing nature of the firm. With that it is also one of the first chapter describing the changing nature of the firm in operational terms. The value of the chapter is that it will help executives to define more efficient change processes. A second value of the chapter is that it opens new avenues of empirical and conceptual research for academia.

The increasing interest in economic, social, and ecological sustainability has important implications for the traditional views on organization effectiveness, organization design, and organization development. Managers need to design organizations to achieve a “triple bottom line.” A review of the organization effectiveness literature suggests that no single model seems to provide the necessary guidance, and there is a clear need for creation, revision, and integration. Organization effectiveness criteria in the future require a clearer modeling of the multistakeholder demands so that organization designers can specify appropriate strategies, structures, systems, and processes as well as the changes necessary to develop them. We propose an integration called “responsible progress” and suggest that it represents an important new stream of organization development theory. The relationships between this new criterion of organization effectiveness and the design features necessary to pursue them must be tested.

The scope of this chapter is place and its identity in view of global changes. The ground for undertaking the topic is the belief that by conscious activity undertaken to protect the value of places we are capable of facing modern changes involving the homogenization of space.

Today we are witnessing a rapid destruction of the existing urban forms, leading to fading legibility of the city structure, destroying the state of subtle balance between space and place, and shaking the sense of identity of city inhabitants. The values of identity, legibility, and a traditional network of meanings and symbols are fading away. The space of flows supplants the space of places, evoking essential changes in the functional structure of cities, almost all over the world.

Is it possible to preserve the tradition and identity of place under globalization conditions? It is a challenge for architects, urban planners, decision-makers, investors, and inhabitants. One potential role of the urban planner is perceived as active participation in creating new qualitative social attitudes, as well as undertaking mediating, promotional, and educational activities. Tools that could be helpful in shaping a new model of place involve comprehensive discussion and education in the field of the value of space, shaping social awareness and grounds for social development. It may be concluded with some caution that such comprehensive discussion will contribute to raising the level of knowledge about the world and the sense of the value of space.

In this paper we extend established concepts of product and process architectures to propose a concept of organization architecture that defines the essential features of the system design of an organization needed to achieve an effective strategic alignment of an organization with its competitive and/or cooperative environment. Adopting a work process view of organization, we draw on concepts of product and process architectures to elaborate fundamental elements in the design of an organization architecture. We suggest that organization architectures may be designed to support four basic types of change in organization resources, capabilities, and coordination, which we characterize as convergence, reconfiguration, absorptive integration, and architectural transformation. We also suggest the kinds of strategic flexibilities that an organization must have to create and implement each type of organization architecture. We identify four basic types of strategic environments and consider the kinds of changes in resources, capabilities, and coordination that need to be designed into an organization's architecture to maintain effective strategic alignment with its type of environment. We then propose a typology that identifies four basic ways in which organizational architectures may be effectively aligned with strategic environments. Extending the reasoning underlying the proposed alignments of organization architectures with strategic environments, we propose a strategic principle of architectural isomorphism, which holds that maintaining effective strategic alignment of an organization with its environment requires achieving isomorphism across a firm's product, process, and organization architectures. We conclude by considering some implications of the analyses undertaken here for competence theory, general and mid-range strategy theory, and organization theory.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to encourage strategy and management researchers to undertake research that captures the relational, unfolding and emergent processes of organizational life.

Methodology/Approach – The wayfinding method weaves concepts from traditional navigation with the wider body of strategy and management research literature. An illustrative case example is presented.

Findings – Six orientations informed by an Indigenous Māori research experience are presented under a trilogy of compass, conduct and contours. These orientations are dynamic dwelling, perceiving process, applying values, making connections, layering up, and expanding validity.

Practical implications – This study will aid researchers’ cultivation of greater methodological dexterity through insights that can assist with adopting a relational approach.

Social implications – The chapter shows how a holistic and relational mode of strategy and management research can help address the rising demand for more sustainable enterprises that create wealth and well-being.

Originality/Value – The chapter provides valuable insights from Indigenous wayfinding for strategy researchers and the organizations they work with.

Kaupapa Māori research brings to the centre and normalises Māori academic success in higher education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Identity as Māori, through Iwi (tribal) affiliations and as tangata whenua (people of the land), are foundational values from a Māori world view. Strong Māori identity is significantly a consistent element in the stories of Māori academic successes. It is part of the ‘cultural capital’ that tauira Māori (students and graduates) take with them into educational institutions, where little active attention is given to it. At issue on a broader level is the resounding ‘silence of the archives’, the lack of information about Māori succeeding in higher education, particularly from a Māori world view. The dominant discourse in Aotearoa/New Zealand positions us into the ‘other’ and as ‘deficit’. In a reversal of this my doctoral research asked how and why do Māori succeed in higher education. Uniquely Māori elements of whenua (land), whānau (family) and connection with marae (meeting ground and complex) are part of the how and the why of Māori academic achievement. This chapter highlights how some Māori began their journeys that result in academic successes and IT qualifications. Their haphazard access to information about IT implicates the poorly developed pathways of entry into IT studies at that time and may explain some of the low uptake of IT qualifications and IT field employment by Māori and other New Zealanders.

Giambattista Piranesi's disturbing images of fantasy prisons set out in his Carceri d'Invenzione have had a profound impact on cultural sensibilities. The chapter explores Piranesi's distinctive visual language and situates it in an eighteenth-century penchant for ruins and what they might signify. The macabre fantasy structures bear little relation to actually existing prison buildings, but they do herald a new aesthetic combining both terror and beauty to sublime effect. The chapter examines the relationships between narrative and visual methods by considering that scholarship in art history which has sought to address the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’.

Much of it belongs to what was once the ‘new art history’ in the 1970s, and which had become critical of how conventional approaches in the discipline had tended to see art as the visualisation of narrative. For example, Norman Bryson's (1981) study of French painting in the Ancien Régime explored the relationships between ‘word’ and ‘image’ by examining the kind of stories pictures tell, drawing a distinction between the ‘discursive’ aspects of an image (posing questions on visual art's language-like qualities and relationships to written text) and those ‘figural’ features that place the image as primarily a visual experience – it's ‘being-as-image’ – that is entirely independent of language.

The focus on language is symptomatic of the ‘linguistic turn’ that has had such a profound influence on intellectual thought since the 1960s, and this chapter will concentrate on one strand in it. In particular, it will introduce the approach Jacques Derrida developed and defined as ‘deconstruction’, which in some important respects revealed the limitations of language, and seeks to create the effects of ‘decentring’ by highlighting how signification is a complex, often duplicitous, process. The chapter then situates Piranesi's images in an account of landscape, not least since he was a leading exponent of the veduta (a faithful representation of an actual urban or rural view) that had achieved the status of a distinctive and popular genre by the eighteenth century.

Research on strategy in new ventures has increasingly drawn upon resource-based theory, and thus has emphasized intangible factors that confer sustainable competitive advantage. These include dynamic and combinative capabilities, networks, routines, and knowledge as resources of new ventures. Yet antecedent to every one of these intangible resources is the management of the venture. But research has seldom considered management and the human resources of new ventures as a critical dimension of strategy content. This paper develops such an argument, and explores the performance contribution of human resources as strategy content in a longitudinal study of technology new ventures.