Search results

This paper aims to analyze the organizational capabilities involved in the adoption of environmental management tools in eight large French firms. The analysis also examines the antecedents that contributed to the emergence of those capabilities and the consequences of their involvement in terms of environmental management.

To analyze the organizational capabilities deployed when environmental management tools are adopted, this paper takes an exploratory approach based on a qualitative study of eight large French firms.

The findings show how organizational capabilities, dynamic and ordinary, are operationalized in the adoption of environmental management tools. This operationalization is made possible by internal and external antecedents and simple and complex routines. The findings also identify two possible configurations of organizational capabilities, each one leading to a specific form of environmental management. The first configuration leads to stand-alone environmental management systems, while the second succeeds in engendering integrated management systems. This study shows that this difference is explained by heterogeneous endowments in terms of antecedents across firms.

The study provides useful information for managers about the conditions that favor and facilitate adoption of environmental management tools and the ways these conditions operate.

The study illustrates the impact of society on large firms’ adoption of certain environmental management practices. It shows that external visibility – which has created strong societal pressure – is one of the external antecedents that led eight large French firms to develop specific organizational capabilities.

In analyzing the antecedents, routines and capabilities involved in the adoption of environmental management tools, the study adds some original, innovative contributions to current knowledge on the conditions for adoption of such tools.

Despite potential pitfalls, users of information technology are increasingly finding it advantageous to interconnect to “network” computer systems. In fact, the widespread use of networking is becoming the next major wave in the evolution of information technology.

This research examines how social media helps increase the dynamic capabilities of health organizations. Using the concepts of “technical fitness” and “evolutionary fitness,” the research focuses on changes in: (1) the number of “likes”; (2) the amount of discussions in these pages; and (3) enabling factors for (1) and (2) over time.

Missouri Hospital Association (MHA) provides a sample of 164 hospitals. The Facebook pages of these hospitals are analyzed. Specifically, the number of “likes” and the amount of discussions are readily available for analysis. Data collection was conducted at two time points.

At time 1, 39% of the hospitals had an official Facebook page, increased to 47% at time 2. On average, there was a 22.2% increase in likes and a 4.0% increase in pages of discussions. Whether measured by staffs or patients’ capacity, size is a significant factor that contributes to the increase in likes and discussions. Yet, the location of a hospital — measured by urbanity — is statistically insignificant. Qualitative analyses suggest that certain patient groups particularly welcomed social media. Beside, pictures, videos, and “happy news” tended to increase usage of social media for hospital stakeholders.

Social media can help health organizations fulfill the social needs of their patients. This research applies several useful concepts. In further study, researchers may examine how hospitals optimize staffs’ and patients’ inputs. Besides, comparing how hospitals’ social media platforms operate differently in other states or countries may yield findings with practical implications.

This paper aims to investigate how employees’ emotional competences affect customers’ responses in the context of emotional-driven and personalized services. Specifically, it proposes a model to analyze the influence of employees’ emotional competence on rapport, trust and loyalty toward the service employee and the company.

The empirical context to validate the proposed theory is the fitness realm. The sample comprises 296 clients from fitness personal training services. Data collection was carried out by means of personal surveys in three relevant fitness clubs in the city of Barcelona (Spain). The study uses partial least squares to test and validate the proposed theoretical model.

Employee emotional competence (EEC) directly affects personal loyalty, trust toward the service employee and rapport. However, higher levels of emotional skills are not significantly associated with loyalty toward the company. The results also suggest that trust significantly enhances loyalty. Interestingly, high levels of rapport between the service worker and the employee could even damage the level of loyalty toward the company.

Prior research documents that emotional intelligence enhances diverse positive customer outcomes, especially in emotionally charged interactions. Nonetheless, few studies have focused on analyzing how customers’ perceptions about services employees’ emotional skills are determining their attitudes and behavioral intentions. This study provides evidence on employee’s influences on consumer behaviors and outcomes, with a specific focus on EEC. It also sheds light on the unintuitive impact of customer employee rapport on loyalty toward the company.

In addressing the future trajectory of knowledge management systems, this paper uses the psycho-social notion of generativity which recently stimulated contributions in technology and innovation for a holistic systemic knowledge management (KM) review. The purpose of this study is to identify current shortcomings and fixations together with their ramifying affordances, all enveloped within a novel KM concept and prototype-system-under-development.

It follows up on prior publications using design science research (DSR) methodologies in compliance with theory effectiveness, a principle expecting system designs to be purposeful in terms of utility and communication. The KM perspective taken prioritizes a decentralizing agenda benefiting knowledge workers while also aiming to foster a fruitful co-evolution with traditional organizational KM approaches.

The notions of generative fit and capacities in their technical, informational and social interpretations prove able to accommodate diverse KM models and to cumulatively synthesize a wide range of related concepts and perspectives. In the process, Nonaka’s renowned socialize, externalize, combine, internalize and Ba model is repurposed and extended to suggest a corresponding complementing seize, imbed, collate, encompass, effectuate workflow embedded in distinct digital ecosystems fully aligned to the diversity of the generative attributes introduced.

Although the prototype development is still in progress, the study conforms to the DSR practice to report on early visions of technology impact on users, organizations and society and also refers to and reflects on aspects of feasibility, suitability, acceptability and the system’s prospect as a general-purpose technology or disruptive innovation.

The paper transdisciplinarily integrates the well-established psychological notions of generativity into its newer digital and systemic KM dimensions. The resulting new insights transparently inform the concept and prototype design, present a holistic framework for individuals and organizations and suggest avenues for new KM applications and KM research directions inspired by the adopted and adapted novel generativity contexts.

I seek to further develop the behavioral approach to strategic management through sketching a communitarian view of the firm. Specifically, I argue that the latter, informed by a practice-based onto-epistemology, especially a neo-Aristotelian understanding of praxis, and the related institutional work of Selznick, suggests the centrality of value commitments firms make, which, through habituation, are integrated to form organizational character. The latter provides firms with certain core competences – a distinctive style with which practitioners enact their tasks. Organizational character helps confront the self-command problem firms face. However, the behavioral consistency that character provides may lead to rigidities when competitive circumstances change, while organizational character, through praxis, may take on features that prevent the leadership of a firm from realizing the novelty of the circumstances in order to modify existing core competences and the accompanying organizational character dispositions.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between selected physical-physiological parameters and efficiency of pistol shooting.

In all, 237 male volunteers, studying at a Turkish Police Academy within the age range of 19-20 years old were investigated. The physical fitness levels were evaluated by valid and reliable test batteries. The efficiency of pistol shooting was evaluated by the total points of the bullets which hit the target from 10 m.

Significant differences were found between the sets of students according to shot accuracy groups for wrist circumference, biceps circumference, femur diameter, hand grip strength, flexibility, aerobic capacity, reaction time, balance, coordination, state anxiety level, anxiety variability, average heart rate, maximal heart rate and heart rate changes. The correlation coefficient between the pistol shooting result and change in heart rate, anxiety variability, mean heart rate during shooting, coordination, state anxiety, maximal heart rate during shooting, balance, hand-grip strength, biceps circumference, femur diameter, wrist circumference and flexibility was significant.

This research identified parameters which were important in profiling a good shooter. In addition, this result could be used for choosing marksmen and guiding shooting training for athletes and police in which shooting skills are important. It was reported that joining simple field physical fitness tests and simple devices such as heart rate polar meters may have an advantage in selecting good shooters. These would save police departments both time and money.

This is the most comprehensive study to date which has evaluated physical fitness in relation to shooting efficiency.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.