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Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

The essential message set forth here is that if we are to truly understand leadership processes, they need to be couched in the form of the organizational system within which they occur These organizational systems are understood to include the hierarchic (managerial), professional (specialized), task (entrepreneurial), and group (team). Research results reported in this chapter support the tie between leadership and organizational form, and a role motivation theory of leadership is proposed. Implications are drawn for charismatic/transformational theorizing and future research. On a number of grounds, it appears that these theories need to be tested in a much broader set of organizational types than has been the case to date.

The development of the large modern corporation, and the separation of ownership from control, has raised questions about the objectives these companies set themselves. Discusses the markets and hierarchies model of organizational structures. Analyses the claim that specific organizational structures lead to superior profitability. Concludes that relatively few firms have adopted the structure claimed to yield the highest profits and that there is no evidence to support the view that internal structure and profitability are linked in the manner described by the model.

Much recent work on hybrids has focused on the strategies and practices these organizations develop to manage the institutional contradictions associated with straddling competing logics. Less attention has been paid to what we call the liability of novelty, defined as the heightened institutional challenges new hybrid forms face both internally and externally. These, we argue, go beyond the liability of newness commonly associated with new venture formation. In this chapter, we use the case of Incubate, a Muslim social incubator in Germany. This case is particularly instructive insofar as Incubate is a hybrid in both substance and mode of organizing: Its mission integrated domains of religion, commerce, and community, and its mode of organizing straddled the digital–analog divide. Neither Incubate’s members, nor its external stakeholders could rely on existing institutional templates to make sense of it. It was not only organizationally new, but also institutionally novel. As a consequence, it experienced what we distinguish as descriptive and evaluative challenges. It was both “not understood” and “not accepted.” This chapter outlines four practices to address these challenges: codifying, crafting, conforming, and configuring, and categorizes them along internal versus external as well as forming versus transforming dimensions.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Purpose – The broader aim of the research is to better understand the origins of firm heterogeneity in terms of strategy and structure, looking beyond convergence pressures resulting from economic and institutional forces.

Design/methodology/approach – To identify firm-specific differences, the paper uses an in-depth analysis of two matched cases, comparing the introduction of diversification strategies and decentralized organizational structures in two Dutch banks. Based on detailed archival research it tries to understand how different outcomes were shaped by political processes involving a variety of internal and external actors.

Findings – The research shows the importance of these processes and, in particular, the role of management succession as a trigger for organizational changes as well as the potential power of management consultants based on a combination of their own “political” skills and the opportunity provided by internal divisions. Moreover, the study confirms the view that organizational change requires a change in dominant ideology.

Research limitations/implications – The research was able to go beyond the limitations of extant studies based on cross-sectional data or single cases. It demonstrates the usefulness of historical analysis when examining changes in strategy and structure. Its results need to be confirmed by conducting similar studies in different contexts.

Originality/value – The paper provides new insights into the complex and dynamic processes of organizational change and shows how external consultants – within a specific set of circumstances – were able to manage these processes. The results are valuable to scholars studying organizational change and those looking at consultants and their role. They might also provide insights for practicing managers working or planning to work with consultants.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The “first generation” (Lammers, 1978, p. 486) of comparative analysis of organizations in sociology (e.g., Blau, 1965; Stinchcombe, 1959) focused on the “nuts and bolts” of organizational structure as the key criterion with which to derive organizational typologies (Perrow, 1967; Pugh, Hickson, & Hinings, 1969). This initial cohort of analysts saw the intrinsic features – or “organizational attributes” (Blau, 1965, p. 326) – constitutive of the “technical core” of the organization, such as features related to the organization of the production process (Perrow, 1967) or the structure of allocation of discretion and authority (e.g., Etzioni, 1961), as the royal road to the development of a cogent approach to comparative analysis of organizations.

Leaders derive their capacity for driving institutional change from their power over organizations, but prior research says little about how leaders with limited power over a dominant intraorganizational group can acquire such a capacity for institutional action. This chapter develops a multilevel model that helps to understand how leaders of public service organizations were able to introduce “contract organization” form of organizational governance that enabled them to outsource the provision of public services to private firms. By doing so, this chapter adds to existing accounts of how power and political processes can give rise to organizational and institutional change.

The purpose of this paper is to adapt concepts from resiliency theory to understand the conditions under which social enterprises may remain true to form and purpose or are likely to change their character. This leads us to consider issues of governance, economic incentives associated with different organizational forms of social enterprise and the effects of the financial environment, the role of organizational slack and the influence of organizational leadership on the dynamics of social enterprises. Three case studies of organizations in the USA are analyzed to illustrate the application of resiliency theory to the stability of social enterprises. The fact that all forms of social enterprise must reconcile the tensions of social purpose and market raises important questions about the dynamics of these enterprises.

Theory and case study analysis.

Governance, financial incentive structure, organizational slack and leadership influence the stability of social enterprises.

First application of resiliency theory to the analysis of social enterprise stability.