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– The purpose of this paper is to provide a viewpoint about how the jazz metaphor can be applied to marketing/management education, in light of the article by Holbrook (2015).
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide a viewpoint about how the jazz metaphor can be applied to marketing/management education, in light of the article by Holbrook (2015).
Design/methodology/approach
This commentary examines the jazz metaphor from the author’s perspective as a jazz musician and management educator and hopefully provides the reader with a brief snapshot into the intricate workings of a jazz group. This commentary also investigates the lessons to be learned from Miles Davis’s approach to leadership and innovation.
Findings
The jazz group can provide a valuable model for modern organisations. The core competencies of a successful jazz group, e.g. collaboration, trust, dialogue and innovation can be employed to bring about a culture of creativity within an organisation.
Research limitations/implications
It may be possible to extend the jazz metaphor and investigate how different aspects of business practice could be aligned with particular genres of jazz.
Originality/value
This commentary expands on Holbrook’s discussion of the marketing manager as Jazz musician and provides examples of how these metaphors can be used in order to augment the marketing/management learning material to offer alternative perspectives to the learning communities and enhance the pedagogical practice
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An overview of the various selection tools currently available for building a better jazz recording collection on compact disc. Evaluative guides, select discographies, general…
Abstract
An overview of the various selection tools currently available for building a better jazz recording collection on compact disc. Evaluative guides, select discographies, general reference works, reviews in periodicals, and World Wide Web sites are suggested to aid in this process. Together, these resources can aid librarians and media selectors in building well‐rounded collections that cover different styles and movements of jazz over the last century, from the latest reissues of albums of historical importance to the best in contemporary recordings. The author concludes with a list of 30 (or so) sound recordings that should be found in any core jazz collection.
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Ethan S. Bernstein and Frank J. Barrett
How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities…
Abstract
How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities of the organization? This chapter explores the organizational decisions and practices leaders can initiate to extend, strengthen, or transform “ordinary capabilities” (Winter, 2003) into enhanced improvisational competence and dynamic capabilities. We call this leadership logic the “jazz mindset.” We draw upon seven characteristics of jazz bands as outlined by Barrett (1998) to show that strategic leaders of business organizations can enhance dynamic capabilities by strengthening practices observed in improvising jazz bands.
Steven Kahl, Young-Kyu Kim and Damon J. Phillips
We explore how the long-run success of cultural products is affected by the identities of the product's originators and early adopters. Using U.S. jazz recordings from 1920 to…
Abstract
We explore how the long-run success of cultural products is affected by the identities of the product's originators and early adopters. Using U.S. jazz recordings from 1920 to 1929, we found that songs were more likely to be later covered from 1944 to 2004 if they followed a pattern of having black originators and white early adopters. Moreover, we provide evidence that this pattern is independent of a song's commercial success, resources available to a song's originators, and group-level indicators such as size and experience. We conclude that late adopters (musicians after World War II (WWII)) were attracted to songs that followed a narrative of both “lowbrow” origins and early adoption by those considered “highbrow” with respect to jazz. The findings also support a new means for considering the role of identities as the building blocks of genres, in particular, and categories more generally.
Colin M. Fisher, Ozumcan Demir-Caliskan, Mel Yingying Hua and Matthew A. Cronin
Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although…
Abstract
Organizational scholars have long been interested in how jazz musicians manage tensions between structure and freedom, plans and action, and familiarity and novelty. Although improvisation has been conceptualized as a way of managing such paradoxes, the process of improvisation itself contains paradoxes. In this essay, we return to jazz improvisation to identify a new paradox of interest to organizational scholars: the paradox of intentionality. To improvise creatively, jazz musicians report that they must “try not to try,” or risk undermining the very spontaneity that is prized in jazz. Jazz improvisers must therefore control their ability to relinquish deliberate control of their actions. To accomplish this, they engage in three interdependent practices. Jazz musicians intentionally surrender their sense of active control (“letting go”) while creating a passive externalized role for this sense of active control (using a “third ear”). Letting go allows new and unexpected ideas to emerge, while the metaphorical third ear can identify promising ideas or problematic execution and, in doing so, re-engage active agency (“grabbing hold”). Examining the practices within creative improvisation reveals the complexity of the lived experience of the paradox, which we argue suggests further integration among organizational research on improvisation, creativity, and paradox.
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Purpose – This study is intended to extend scholarship on the management of organizations by examining the long-term performance of orphaned products.Design/methodology/approach …
Abstract
Purpose – This study is intended to extend scholarship on the management of organizations by examining the long-term performance of orphaned products.
Design/methodology/approach – This study uses the historical context of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression to examine the long-run appeal (performance) of orphaned products – products from start-ups that fail soon after production. I use this setting to determine how factors within the purview of management, as well as the role of changing tastes, affect the appeal of music from short-lived start-ups founded in 1929 and 1933.
Findings/originality/value – I find that while the evolution of tastes has a substantial effect beyond the control of a firm's managers, a start-up's decision-makers were able to positively influence the long-run appeal of music when they (a) recorded tunes with new artists and (b) were able to create an early big hit with the tune. These results demonstrate how and why, even with cultural producers in one of the greatest economic disasters in U.S. history, managerial decisions were meaningful for product performance. Finally, I show that the effect of being a start-up on the long-run appeal of a tune is time-varying such that being a start-up in 1929 or 1933 does not harm a tune's appeal until after World War II. These final analyses point to further ways in which strategy, history, and sociology might combine to further scholarship on the management of organizations.
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Purpose – I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the…
Abstract
Purpose – I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and esthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afro-modernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put.
Design methodology/approach – I engage in an interdisciplinary study of jazz via analyses and commentary on selected texts from several scholarly disciplines.
Findings – To acknowledge the hybridity and social construction of jazz esthetics in no way nullifies the innovations and leadership of African American jazz musicians whose artistic contributions not only significantly shaped modern jazz in the mid-twentieth century but also whose musical voices continue to sound and set esthetical standards in contemporary expressions of jazz (and beyond).
Originality and value – My chapter is highly interdisciplinary, bringing philosophical explanations of race, discourse, and the ontology of music into conversation with numerous sociological and (ethno)musicological insights about jazz.
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Joby John, Stephen J. Grove and Raymond P. Fisk
The purpose of this article is to establish the efficacy of jazz improvisation as a useful metaphor to understand and implement features that contribute to excellent service…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to establish the efficacy of jazz improvisation as a useful metaphor to understand and implement features that contribute to excellent service performances.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper begins by presenting services as performances that often require flexibility and adaptability in their enactment. It then offers the metaphor of jazz improvisation as a means to comprehend and communicate the dynamics of such flexibility and adaptability. Jazz elements are used to illustrate their application to service delivery issues.
Practical implications
Similar to jazz, services deal with complex and real time delivery circumstances; this makes services prone to uncertainty at the service encounter. Lessons from jazz offer service managers guidelines for improvisation by each player in their ensemble that can enable them to adapt to customers and produce a coherent and cohesive performance.
Originality/value
The jazz improvisation metaphor offers a template and guidelines to comprehend and enact principles pertaining to adaptability in services contexts that may be useful for managers in designing service delivery and training frontline service employees.
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The stand‐out works this year are a number of comprehensive general discographies. Before reviewing them in detail in Part Two, I would like to single out three of them here for…
Michael Gold and Steve Hirshfeld
To provide a metaphorical language, a contextual framework, and a specific set of social behaviors to help business executives and managers envision, discuss and implement changes…
Abstract
Purpose
To provide a metaphorical language, a contextual framework, and a specific set of social behaviors to help business executives and managers envision, discuss and implement changes to encourage flexibility and creative freedom and allow the immediate absorption and rapid integration of new and different ideas.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper combines experiential and theoretical knowledge in innovation, change management, and strategy formation. It uses existing research and case studies in which the concept of jazz as a model for organizational improvisation is applied through organizational interventions. The scope of the paper ranges from theoretical argument and description of new idea processes, to multiple industry examples of innovative companies, to specific case studies.
Findings
Applications of the concepts were effective in giving people a way to understand the flexibility and creativity needed to improvise within the structured environments of most corporate cultures. Through the use of live music, experiential exercises in enhanced listening skills, spontaneous rotation between leading and supporting roles, and the use of collaborative creative thinking in solving real‐time problems, corporate cultures were able to understand new ways of collaborating and adapting to change through organized improvisation.
Originality/value
Experiential evidence suggests that teaching organizations to improvise is a catalyst for positive change. Using the model of the jazz ensemble in conjunction with specific cooperative behaviors as a tool to teach organizational improvisation is highly effective when integrated with a well conceived strategy vision and a passionate belief in its potential and a commitment to bringing it to a business reality.
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