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The purpose of this paper is to explore how and when holacracy works for organizations.

The paper illustrates the idea by drawing insights from the case of Zappos and Gidley’s framework of future organizations.

The paper provides a balanced view on holacracy and how it can be beneficial for organizations. The potential of holarchical structures will be fruitful only if the structure-culture fit is achieved. The paper also highlights the lessons learned from previous implementations of holacracy and concludes with possible solutions for organizations.

The structure-culture fit is still a pertinent question especially when organizations are growing in size. Organizations need to address the intergenerational differences and core tenets of organizational culture while adopting flat structures to promote flexibility and individualization. New ideas and ways of organizing are therefore best treated as experiments guided by strategic vision and a defined direction.

The paper extends the existing knowledge on holacracy by applying Gidley’s framework and providing practical insights for practitioners in implementing holacracy.

The purpose of this paper is to present the experiences and findings of a university course in workplace spirituality in a time and stage where corporate greed and organizational instability run rampant.

The authors analyzed workshop dialogues and reviewed of participants' findings on corporations as well as their own changed perceptions.

There are some interesting common factors in corporations that perform according to spiritual guidelines and a highly interactive program on organizational analysis contributes tremendously to the levels of responsibility and awareness of participants.

Limitations to the research are: the population used for data was limited, as it consisted of business and management students at the MBA level; and the findings were only gathered from one cohort, and might provide increased themes when extended over multiple courses in multiple semesters. Future research could apply this study on other populations for a greater foundation in findings.

Organizations that adhere to the spiritual mindset are more successful, have happier employees, and are more aware of their environmental responsibilities.

The paper shows that in these times when corporate greed, dishonesty, and environmental neglect have been exposed so dramatically, courses on workplace spirituality are of high importance and lead to valuable insights for immediate and non‐immediate stakeholders.

In this conceptual essay, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the structure of databases and other information systems provides valuable information beyond their content. The author contends that reading databases – as a separate, distinct activity from retrieving and reading the documents that databases contain – is an under-studied form of human-information interaction. Because the act of reading databases encourages awareness, reflection, and control over information systems, the author aligns the author’s proposal with “slow” principles, as exemplified by the slow food movement.

This paper presents an extended argument to demonstrate the value of reading a database. Reading a database involves understanding the relationship between database structure and database content as an interpretation of the world. For example, when a supermarket puts vermicelli in the pasta section but rice vermicelli in the Asian section, the supermarket suggests that rice vermicelli is more “Asian” than “noodle.” To construct the author’s argument, the author uses examples that range from everyday, mundane activities with information systems (such as using maps and automated navigation systems) to scientific and technical work (systematic reviews of medical evidence).

The slow, interpretively focused information interactions of reading databases complement the “fast information” approach of outcome-oriented retrieval. To facilitate database reading activities, research should develop tools that focus user attention on the application of database structure to database contents. Another way of saying this is that research should exploit the interactive possibilities of metadata, either human-created or algorithmically generated.

This paper argues that information studies research focuses too heavily on seeking and retrieval. Seeking and retrieval are just two of the many interactions that constitute our everyday activities with information. Reading databases is an area particularly ripe with design possibilities.

Leaders are important social actors in organizations, centrally involved in establishing and maintaining institutional values, a view that was articulated by Philip Selznick (1957) nearly a half-century ago, but often overlooked in institutionalists’ accounts. Our objective is to build on Selznick’s seminal work to investigate the value proposition of leadership consistent with institutional theory. We examine public interview transcripts from 52 senior executives and discover that leaders’ conceptualizations of their entities align with the archetypes of organization (i.e., economic, hierarchical, and power oriented) and institution (i.e., ideological, creative and collectivist) and cohere around a set of relevant values. Extrapolating from this, we advance a theoretical framework of the process whereby leaders’ claims function as transformational mechanisms of value infusion in the institutionalization of organizations.

This article integrates strategy mapping, risk management and management control into a risk‐based approach to strategy execution. It uses strategy mapping as a tool to visually depict the firm's strategy and then assess its risks. Based on this risk assessment, the firm's management control system is designed to manage those risks which are seen to have the greatest probability to negatively impact firm profitability. The proposed framework can be used on a stand‐alone basis or be used to complement Kaplan and Norton's work on strategy mapping.

This article draws from the confluence of the risk management, management control, and strategy mapping literatures to illustrate how firms can improve their handling of risk.

Strategy mapping is an effective tool to identify risks, while Simons' Levers of Control provides an effective alternative to manage the risks identified.

A firm's future profitability depends on its ability to identify and manage risk. Given that firms only profit when they successfully manage risk, the design and application of its management control system must flow from an assessment of the risks assumed in its strategy. The primary advantage of an integrated risk‐based management control system is that it allows managers, in real time, to steer the firm towards the good things that were outlined in its strategy and away from any bad things.

The article extends Kaplan and Norton's work by proposing strategy mapping as a tool to identify and then to help manage risks.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of rising concerns about income inequality on the reputation of large global employers. In an era in which middle class incomes have stagnated for several decades, the continuing decline of labor unions seems paradoxical. The paper suggests that the impassivity of the workforces of the developed countries may be coming to an end and that thoughtful employers can and should be doing more to address the needs of their employees from both a benefits and job satisfaction perspective. Otherwise, they may face renewed repetitional threats that could translate into regulatory penalties.

The paper cites evidence of an increasing concern about income inequality in the developed economies and examines best practices in employee relations from a number of leading corporations to suggest ways in which companies can manage new repetitional threats relating to the way they manage their employees.

The paper provides insights into three strategies that well-managed companies can adopt with respect to their employee relations: they can become leader brands, consistently pursuing employee benefits strategies at the cutting edge; they can develop a distinctive employee investment strategy; or they can create workplaces focused from innovation from the bottom up.

Due to the anecdotal nature of the evidence adduced to suggest best practices in employee relations, further research needs to be done to examine the question presented in a more empirical fashion.

The employee relations strategies described can be deployed by any corporation seeking to create a new employee compact with its employees to safeguard its reputation and be perceived as a builder, rather than despoiler, of communities.

Concerns about income inequality and its negative impact on the social fabric are being voiced by leading voices in the business community. If the strategies recommended in the paper are adopted broadly, this could have a significant impact on the regeneration of struggling communities.

Although substantial attention has been devoted to the subject of income inequality from an economic perspective, there is very little in the literature that addresses income inequality from the viewpoint of its impact on corporate reputation and the threat of future anti-business government action.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the relevant literature on transparency, provide a comprehensive definition of transparency, and present a new framework for facilitating the adoption of transparency as an ethical cornerstone and pragmatic strategy for organizational responsible business management.

A systematic literature review – a methodology adopted from medical sciences to eliminate research bias – was conducted. In doing so, the definitions, antecedents, and consequences of transparency are accessed and synthesized.

Based upon this process transparency is defined as the extent to which a stakeholder perceives an organization provides learning opportunities about itself. A conceptual framework emerged from the data. It describes when transparency is especially important, what organizations can do to be more transparent, and the potential benefits of transparency.

The transparency framework can be used as a guide for organizations attempting to change their behavior, image, and performance by adopting transparency as a value in their organization. In addition, the framework can be used to create and adopt a universal (i.e. industry-wide or even societal-wide) code of conduct. Furthermore, this review, definition, and framework provide a template for academics to advance transparency theory, and empirically test the construct’s application.

As a new research field, transparency has lacked a concise definition as well as a conceptual framework. This is the first comprehensive summary of transparency. In addition, this study contributes to the methodology of evaluating construct definitions to advance empirical research.