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It is doubtful whether Max Weber would have been appreciative of his current status as the father of organisation theory. Weber did not develop the concept of bureaucracy as part of a quest to advance a science of organisations, or in order to do a microanalysis of the internal structure of particular organisational units. The concept of bureaucracy was an ideal-typical concept developed as a point of departure for comparisons across historical periods and geographic settings. Weber’s research was motivated by macroscopic and historical questions such as ‘why did capitalism develop in the West’ and, ‘how do persons in the West and other civilizations attach meaning to their activities?’ Unlike consultants and organisation theorists that make use of him today, it was not a major concern for Weber to develop criteria for the most efficient kinds of organisations. Rather, his concern was to identify variations in administrative and bureaucratic cultures and patterns by the means of the bureaucratic ideal type. It is maintained in modern textbooks in organisation theory that there has been a development from a closed and rationalistic paradigm towards an understanding of organisations as open and natural systems, and Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is taken as a point of departure for this kind of narrative. This classification of Weber as an example of a rational and closed approach is highly questionable. The cross-societal and historical approach used so effectively by Weber, is put on a sidetrack in such mainstream narratives. It would be more in the spirit of Weber to focus on organising as an activity, bureaucracy as an ethos and to study organisations within their particular political and cultural contexts.

The chapter examines a comprehensive review of cross-disciplinary literature in the domain of supply chain forecasting during research period 1991–2017, with the primary aim of exploring the growth of literature from operational to demand centric forecasting and decision making in service supply chain systems. A noted list of 15,000 articles from journals and search results are used from academic databases (viz. Science Direct, Web of Sciences). Out of various content analysis techniques (Seuring & Gold, 2012), latent sementic analysis (LSA) is used as a content analysis tool (Wei, Yang, & Lin, 2008; Kundu et al., 2015). The reason for adoption of LSA over existing bibliometric techniques is to use the combination of text analysis and mining method to formulate latent factors. LSA creates the scientific grounding to understand the trends. Using LSA, Understanding future research trends will assist researchers in the area of service supply chain forecasting. The study will be beneficial for practitioners of the strategic and operational aspects of service supply chain decision making. The chapter incorporates four sections. The first section describes the introduction to service supply chain management and research development in this domain. The second section describes usage of LSA for current study. The third section describes the finding and results. The fourth and final sections conclude the chapter with a brief discussion on research findings, its limitations, and the implications for future research. The outcomes of analysis presented in this chapter also provide opportunities for researchers/professionals to position their future service supply chain research and/or implementation strategies.

The attraction of public private partnerships (PPPs) for governments is that the on-ground fructification of infrastructure projects is far higher than the traditional implementation route through public sector or departmental undertakings. Besides, time overruns are also considerably reduced. However, empirical evidence does not clearly establish that PPPs are cost efficient. This coupled with the risk intensity has impacted the long run flow of private capital to infrastructure PPPs and it therefore calls for a more scientific approach to management of profitability related risks. Appropriate management control systems (MCS) could be the answer, provided they can favorably impact profitability. Aggregating data from road, ports, airports, urban infrastructure, railways and power PPP ventures implemented in India, this chapter attempts to study the relationship between MCS and returns to sponsors through regression analysis. The study concludes that multiple MCS have a significant relationship with sponsors’ profitability.

The perception and communication of risk for organizations are highly topical and difficult to address in higher education (HE) due to its complexity and variety of structures, processes and identities. The omnipresence of managerialism in HE currently also impacts organizational innovation. This is interrogated in terms of the form and effect of innovation and improvization (Cunha, Neves, Clegg, & Rego, 2015). The development of tools to manage risk perception is discussed alongside perceptions of risk and their potential management through agile processes to enable a university-wide collaboration across services to enable a unified and streamlined proactive management of risk and its corollaries of loss.

The focus of this chapter is on the daily management of operational risks in higher education institutions (HEIs). It considers the causes and impact of drift and competitiveness in organizational processes and their impact on organizational efficiency. This chapter will consider risk perception and contract management across HEIs.

Public procurement is important in itself but is also an important intervening force in some business networks. Two aspects are of particular interest. The first is that public purchasing is an important ingredient in public policy in relation to a number of business networks; it is substantial in areas such as transportation, communication, health care and defence, where the ‘public’ is often the most dominating actor. As such it can be one of the measures in innovation policies, as well as in regional and local development policies. The second aspect is that public purchasing is highly regulated by law, based mostly on the assumption of ‘homogeneous, competitive, product markets’. That restricts public procurement in forming close and continuous supplier relationships, thus making more effective use of these relationships, particularly for development purposes. A consequence is that suppliers’ capabilities cannot be used in the same way as in the private sphere. The chapter concludes with a discussion of current developments in regulation that allow closer collaboration with suppliers and the likely benefits, a feature that has been evidenced in prior Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) research.

Originally developed by the Japanese firm Toyota in the 1950s, the core innovation of lean production is to reorient all organizational activity around continuous improvement and the elimination of waste. We use the case of lean production in two healthcare organizations to explore the process of translating management models into new environments (Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996; Mohr, 1998). We draw on insights from organizational sociology and social movement theory to understand the strategies of actors as they attempt to overcome opposition to model transfer (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Friedland & Alford, 1991; Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986). We examine two attempts to export lean production to healthcare organizations: Riverside Hospital, a research and teaching institution, and Lakeview Associations, a managed health provider. We use these cases to illustrate two ways that management models can get lost in the process of institutional translation: model attenuation, and model decoupling.

The 40-letter correspondence concerning the French translation of The General Theory, between John Maynard Keynes and his translator, Jean de Largentaye, is a testimony of their close collaboration, which also involved Piero Sraffa in 1938 and 1939. Largentaye’s lexicon appears at the end of the French edition, providing definitions in French of technical terms used by Keynes. After its publication by Payot in 1942, the French edition of The General Theory was well received in France and no doubt contributed to the economic and social successes of the country in the subsequent 25 years.

When a parameter of interest is nondifferentiable in the probability, the existing theory of semiparametric efficient estimation is not applicable, as it does not have an influence function. Song (2014) recently developed a local asymptotic minimax estimation theory for a parameter that is a nondifferentiable transform of a regular parameter, where the transform is a composite map of a continuous piecewise linear map with a single kink point and a translation-scale equivariant map. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, this paper extends the local asymptotic minimax theory to nondifferentiable transforms that are a composite map of a Lipschitz continuous map having a finite set of nondifferentiability points and a translation-scale equivariant map. Second, this paper investigates the discontinuity of the local asymptotic minimax risk in the true probability and shows that the proposed estimator remains to be optimal even when the risk is locally robustified not only over the scores at the true probability, but also over the true probability itself. However, the local robustification does not resolve the issue of discontinuity in the local asymptotic minimax risk.