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Book part
Publication date: 17 October 2017

Paul Lewis

This chapter uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek with that of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known…

Abstract

This chapter uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek with that of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this chapter that, while the Ostroms began explicitly to describe polycentric systems as a class of complex adaptive system from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, they had in fact developed an account of polycentricity as displaying most if not all of the hallmarks of organised complexity long before that time. The Ostromian and Hayekian approaches can thus be seen to share a good deal in common, with both portraying important aspects of society – the market economy in the case of Hayek, and public economies, legal and political systems, and environment resources in the case of the Ostroms – as complex rather than simple systems. Aside from helping to bring out this aspect of the Ostroms’ work, using the theory of complex systems as a framework for comparing the Hayekian and Ostromian approaches serves two other purposes. First, it can be used to show how one widely criticised aspect of Hayek’s theory of society as a complex system, namely his account of cultural evolution via group selection, can be strengthened by an appeal to the work of Elinor Ostrom. Second, it also helps to resolve a tension – ultimately acknowledged by the Ostroms themselves – between some of their explicit methodological pronouncements and the actual, substantive approach they adopted in their analysis of polycentric systems.

Details

The Austrian and Bloomington Schools of Political Economy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-843-7

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 August 2006

Meike Tilebein

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss whether complexity science can help overcome management's dilemma of how to balance efficiency and innovation.

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Abstract

Purpose

The primary objective of this paper is to discuss whether complexity science can help overcome management's dilemma of how to balance efficiency and innovation.

Design/methodology/approach

Complexity science provides an interdisciplinary theoretical approach for studying complex adaptive systems (CAS), which exhibit adequate combinations of both emergent efficiency and emergent innovation. Based on prominent models from complexity science, a generic framework of CAS is proposed that shows the design levers of such systems. This framework then serves to assess recent literature on applications of complexity science to firms. Applications cover a broad range of objectives and four organizational levels: the individual resource, the organizational sub‐unit (SU), the organizational, and the network levels. The generic framework is used to classify the applications' objectives in terms of efficiency and innovation, and to identify the design levers they use.

Findings

CAS offer a valuable theoretical perspective on efficiency and innovation. However, the proposed framework shows that these systems are not utilized to their full potential when applied to firms. Typical applications address either emergent efficiency or emergent innovation and thus fail to balance both.

Research limitations/implications

The paper does not provide an exhaustive literature review on management applications of CAS, but selects exemplary literature.

Originality/value

The paper gives a comprehensive overview of the CAS' perspective in management science. For further research, the proposed generic framework of CAS may serve to analyze, evaluate and integrate applications in order to overcome the efficiency‐innovation dilemma.

Details

Kybernetes, vol. 35 no. 7/8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0368-492X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 9 July 2004

Margaret S Archer

Why do emotions matter? Across the centuries the same answer has been returned; they are the salt of life without which it would lack savour. Thus, St Augustine asked rhetorically…

Abstract

Why do emotions matter? Across the centuries the same answer has been returned; they are the salt of life without which it would lack savour. Thus, St Augustine asked rhetorically if we would not consider a general apatheia to be the worst of human and moral defects. Today, Elster repeats this refrain: “simply, emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter. Creatures without emotion would have no reason for living nor, for that matter, for committing suicide. Emotions are the stuff of life” (Elster, 1999, p. 403). However, it is a different question to ask about their purpose in relation to other things and other doings, but a necessary one because salt has to flavour something else. The answer developed here is that emotions are commentaries on our concerns. Emotions are about something and those somethings are the things we care about most or cannot but care about to some extent. As commentaries, emotions tell us how much we care and how we are doing in relation to concerns which are not reducible to our feelings about them.

Details

Theory and Research on Human Emotions
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-108-8

Article
Publication date: 1 August 2004

Deborah A. O'Neil, Diana Bilimoria and Argun Saatcioglu

This study, examines women's career types and their effects on women's satisfaction with their career success and their attributions of the sources of this career success. The…

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Abstract

This study, examines women's career types and their effects on women's satisfaction with their career success and their attributions of the sources of this career success. The study proposes a typology of four career types that are determined by the manifestation of a woman's career pattern and career locus. It finds empirical evidence of three distinct career types for women: achievers, navigators and accommodators. Women having accommodator career types are significantly less satisfied with their career success than women having navigator career types and achiever career types.

Details

Career Development International, vol. 9 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1362-0436

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 November 2016

Robert L. Axtell

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes…

Abstract

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

Details

Revisiting Hayek’s Political Economy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-988-6

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 May 2005

Deborah A. O'Neil and Diana Bilimoria

This study aims to explore the nature of women's career experiences over the life course by examining career patterns, career locus, career contexts, and career beliefs.

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Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to explore the nature of women's career experiences over the life course by examining career patterns, career locus, career contexts, and career beliefs.

Design/methodology/approach

A qualitative, inductive approach to data gathering and analysis was employed, using life story surveys, semi‐structured interviewing, thematic analysis, grounded theory, code development and descriptive statistics.

Findings

The data revealed distinct patterns of how women's careers develop over time, particularly with regard to the impact of career contexts (societal, organizational, and relational) and women's own changing images of their careers and career success. A three‐phase, age‐linked model of women's career development is proposed: the idealistic achievement phase; the pragmatic endurance phase; and the reinventive contribution phase.

Research limitations/implications

Future studies should test replicability of these findings to determine whether this three‐phase model is embedded in the particular socio‐historical context of the times in which the particular women in this sample have lived or is universally applicable across different eras and changing realities.

Practical implications

Better organizational efforts are needed to ensure that women receive ongoing coaching and mentoring, work for managers who support their development, have access to organizational resources and opportunities to develop their skills, are given challenging assignments, are acknowledged for their unique talents, and are recognized for aptitude learned through life experiences and “non‐traditional” work histories.

Originality/value

This is a rare, women‐only study that looks at the career dynamics of women over the life course.

Details

Career Development International, vol. 10 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1362-0436

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 22 November 2011

Gérald Naro and Denis Travaillé

The aim of this paper is to confront the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with Simons’ levers of control model and to discuss its role in the various phases of the strategic process. The…

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Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this paper is to confront the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with Simons’ levers of control model and to discuss its role in the various phases of the strategic process. The authors examine the role of the BSC as a tool of interactive and diagnostic control by making a distinction between its design phase and its phase of use.

Design/methodology/approach

An action research approach, based on two cases, was used to investigate the role of the balanced scorecard in strategic processes.

Findings

The results show that the BSC generates a process of collective elucidation favouring the forming of emergent strategies and a process of control of the change favouring the collective representations on the strategy. The BSC thus seems to be a relevant tool for interactive control during its implementation stage. On the other hand, the authors’ observations also show the failure of the BSC as a system of diagnostic control and of interactive control during its using stage. Ultimately, it is shown that the model of Simons provides the BSC with a relevant theoretical framework to clarify the practice of strategic control.

Research limitations/implications

The study highlights the interest of field studies, and more particularly, processuals and longitudinal approaches, in management accounting research.

Practical implications

The study of two cases underlines the strategic contribution of the BSC by highlighting its role in building a strategy.

Originality/value

The field study allows us to observe how the design of a management control tool such as the BSC occurs during the strategy‐forming phase.

Details

Journal of Applied Accounting Research, vol. 12 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0967-5426

Keywords

Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 29 March 2022

Héloïse Berkowitz and Michael Grothe-Hammer

Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges

Abstract

Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations’ ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the “decidability” of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective’s mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges’ governance success while the emergence of “non-decidability” of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

Details

Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-829-1

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 December 2020

Niloofar Nobari, Ali Mobini Dehkordi, Morteza Akbari and Hamid Padash

Organizations need actionable knowledge to cope with environmental uncertainty, make effective decisions and develop innovation strategies. Since innovation evolves through…

Abstract

Purpose

Organizations need actionable knowledge to cope with environmental uncertainty, make effective decisions and develop innovation strategies. Since innovation evolves through generations, the present study aims to unravel and define innovation intelligence, considering this transformation, and discuss how environmental uncertainty is resolved in each one.

Design/methodology/approach

This article is a conceptual paper that employs a typology and model approach in its research design

Findings

Contexts are categorized into ordered and unordered (according to the Cynefin framework), in which intelligence with prediction and control approaches are applied for uncertainty management, respectively. Also, the three generations of innovation management, namely, technology push, market pull and a combination of these two (hybrid), intelligence benefit from a prediction approach, and in the networked (collaborative) generation, intelligence takes advantage of a control approach.

Research limitations/implications

The conceptual approach adopted in this research is limited to, and focused on, understanding intelligence, innovation intelligence and presenting preliminary insights into their relationship with uncertainty management.

Practical implications

This research guides decision-makers to adopt the appropriate intelligence approach to manage uncertainty during their innovation management process and illustrate it by the industry uncertainty matrix and COVID-19 pandemic situation.

Originality/value

This study proposes a typology of intelligence based on different knowledge pyramids. Also, it introduces innovation intelligence and its relation to knowledge management and environmental uncertainty management that has not yet been clearly addressed in the literature. Moreover, it determines the uncertainty management approaches for each variant of innovation intelligence.

Details

VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, vol. 52 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2059-5891

Keywords

Abstract

Details

Philosophy, Politics, and Austrian Economics
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-405-2

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