Conversations about dependency must balance competing concerns too often consolidated into opposing narratives. On the one hand, our cultural premium on autonomy casts dependency as a weakness and a tragedy, if not a moral failing. On the other hand, efforts to resist this dominant narrative reframe dependency as the rule and not the exception. Extending this delicate balancing act to emerging modalities of dementia care poses additional questions. What should we make of apparently increasing levels of dependence (...) on technology, as opposed to on humans? Confronting both the technophobic and technophilic extremes at once––alongside the polarized views of dependency that underlie them––provides us with clearer resources for reformulating narratives about technology in dementia care. What we need is an account of dependence that recognizes its ubiquity and moral significance while also acknowledging that it requires work that is widely devalued and that can exacerbate vulnerabilities. (shrink)

Based on an empirical study of a research team in natural science, the author argues that collaborating scientists do not trust each other completely. Due to the inherent incompleteness of trust, epistemic trust among scientists is not sufficient to manage epistemic dependency in research teams. To mitigate the limitations of epistemic trust, scientists resort to specific strategies of indirect assessment such as dialoguing practices and the probing of explanatory responsiveness. Furthermore, they rely upon impersonal trust and deploy practices of (...) hierarchical authorship. (shrink)

We make many decisions in our livesand we weigh the benefits against thedrawbacks. Our decisions are based on whatbenefits are most important to us and whatdrawbacks we are willing to accept. Decisionsabout what we eat are made in the same way; butwhen it comes to safety, our decisions areusually made more carefully. Food containsnatural chemicals and it can come into contactwith many natural and artificial substancesduring harvest, production, processing, andpreparation. They include microorganisms,chemicals, either naturally present or producedby cooking, environmental contaminants, (...) andpesticides. Since the chance of being harmed bythese potential hazards is called risk, riskanalysis might be better termed as the scienceof safety, because risk management is anessential part of it. It would, however, bedifficult and shortsighted to maintain thatquestions about risk and safety can have nomoral dimension. Risk and safety become mattersof moral concern when they raise furtherquestions about responsibility, accountability,and justifiability. The question of risk cannotbe ignored in any ethical investigation ofgenetic engineering, novel foods, animalwelfare, and individual choices. However, foodis more than metabolic fuel. It hasphysiological, psychological, social, cultural,and aesthetic associations that merge to form agestalt that people endanger and maintain. Thecontribution of any food towards anindividual's well being is as complex as theindividual himself. In this context, thebenefits of consuming food that containshazards may outweigh the risk. (shrink)

Although natural resource scarcity is a pressing issue for many organizations, it has received little attention in management research. Drawing on resource dependence theory, this article theorizes how organizations manage uncertainty from their dependence on scarce natural resources. For this end, it explains how socio-ecological processes involving anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem services cause this form of uncertainty. It then proposes that organizations develop wide-ranging responses to such uncertainty, depending on their predominant institutional logics, from protecting and restoring ecosystems that provision (...) critical natural resources to further developing those ecosystems for optimal resource yields at the risk of degrading them. The article adds to the limited existing research on the unique challenges of managing natural resource scarcity and extends resource dependence theory by accounting for socio-ecological dynamics that create uncertainty regarding natural resources. (shrink)

Ko and Neuberg present a valuable framework for understanding how environmental affordances are managed as goals shift across life stages. We review research highlighting the importance of not only the individual’s shifting relation to the environment but also the level of opacity of the to-be-learned information and the reciprocal social and cultural interaction between the learner and the teacher as well. We argue that focusing on these social and cultural aspects of development is critical to understanding such ecological affordances.

This study attempts to identify differences in the perceptions of top management (defined as CEOs, directors, and presidents) and employees (defined as middle and supervisory management) regarding (a) the effects of dependent care responsibilities on job performance, and (b) the extent of a firm's responsibility in providing support for those faced with caring needs concerning eldercare, childcare, substance abuse, and mental/physical handicaps.The results indicate that these two groups have significantly different perceptions of the effect of dependent care responsibilities on job (...) performance, and on the firm's responsibility in providing support for three types of dependent care. (shrink)

The ways in which societies and institutions institutionalize and practice invention management reflects not only how new ideas are valued, but also imaginaries about the role of science and technology for societal development. Often taking the US Bayh-Dole-Act as a model, many European states have recently implemented changes in how inventions at academic institutions are to be handled to optimize their societal impact. We analyze how these changes have been taken up—and made sense of—in regions with different pre-existing infrastructures, practices (...) and semantics of invention management. For doing so, we build on a comparative analysis of continuities and changes in infrastructures, practices and semantics of invention management in North-Rhine Westphalia and Saxony to reflect on how academic institutions have been handling inventions along transforming socio-political contexts. Building on document analysis and qualitative interviews with research managers, we discuss ongoing differences in practices of invention management and the semantic framing of the societal value of inventions in NRW and Saxony, and discuss how this can be understood before the background of their ideological, political and economic separation until reunification in 1990. Joining the conceptual perspectives of path dependencies and sociotechnical imaginaries, we argue that two critical incidents in the history of these states allowed for wide-ranging institutional alignments, but also allowed path dependencies in practices and semantics of invention management to prevail. (shrink)

Children dependent on life-prolonging medical technology are often subject to a constant background risk of sudden death or catastrophic complications. Such children can be cared for in hospital, in an intensive care environment with highly trained nurses and doctors able to deliver specialised, life-saving care immediately. However, remaining in hospital, when life expectancy is limited, can considered to be a harm in of itself. Discharge home offers the possibility for an improved quality of life for the child and their family (...) but comes with significant medical risks. When making decisions for children, two ethical models predominate, the promotion of the child’s best interests or the avoidance of harm. However, in some circumstances, particularly for children with life-limiting and/or life-threatening illness, all options may be associated with risk. There are no good options, only potentially harmful choices. In this paper, we explore decisions made by one family in such circumstances. We describe a model adopted from risk management programmes beyond medicine, which offers a potential framework for identifying risks to the child that are morally permissible. Some risks and harms to a child, not ordinarily permitted, may be acceptable when undertaken in the pursuit of a specified desired good, so long as they are as low as reasonably practicable. (shrink)

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this (...) paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way. (shrink)

The paper assesses Knowledge Management Maturity(KMM) in the universities to determine the impact of knowledge management on performance excellence. This study was applied on Al-Azhar University and Al-Quds Open University in Gaza strip, Palestine. This paper depends on Asian productivity organization model that used to assess KMM. Second dimension which assess performance excellence was developed by the authors. The controlled sample was (610). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability Correlation using Cronbach’s alpha, “ANOVA”, (...) Simple Linear Regression and Step Wise Regression. The overall findings of the current study suggest that KMM is suitable for measuring performance excellence. KMM assessment shows that both universities maturity level is in level three. Findings also support the main hypothesis and it is sub- hypotheses. The most important factors effecting performance excellence are: Processes, KM leadership, People, KM Outcomes. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first comparative study in the universities of Palestine explores the status of KMM using the Asian productivity Model. (shrink)

Being able to effectively respond in the event a crisis is relevant to an organization''s survival. Whether or not an organization is prepared for a potential crisis depends upon senior officials, and other personnel operating within the company. Corporations with established crisis management teams are able to communicate and effectively respond in the event of a crisis. The purpose of this paper is to suggest effective crisis management depends upon several team-related factors that may influence an organization''s response and its (...) ethical responsibility. First, the term crisis is defined, followed by an overview of the differences between crisis communication and crisis management. Second, a review of relevant literature regarding teams and effectiveness is examined. Third, several propositions regarding team effectiveness and crisis management are provided. Finally, ethical concerns in regards to the crisis team and the corporation are reviewed. (shrink)

Although previous studies primarily claim that government-dependent firms can actively engage in compliance activities in order to achieve political legitimacy, access government resources, and build competitive advantages, these studies largely ignore how firms react when firm-dependent governments exert coercive pressures. We thus introduce institutional theory and the behavioral theory of social performance to develop a model of modest imitation, and we propose that the more governments depend on privately owned firms, the more firms demonstrate average social performance in order to (...) balance efficiency concerns with political legitimacy threats. Meanwhile, whether firms imitate peers’ social performance depends on the magnitude of institutional rigidity. In turn, issue salience and spatial proximity undermine modest imitation, and political connections strengthen modest imitation. We study how all listed, privately owned firms react to the Chinese government’s call for social engagement in poverty alleviation initiated in 2015. This study uses a two-stage Heckman selection model to correct for sample-selection bias, and the results provide strong support for our arguments. This research thus extends our understanding of modest imitation in response to coercive pressure from-dependent governments. (shrink)

Dependency is a keyword in disability studies. The article reviews the negative force of the term and why disability researchers and activists have made the case for the independence of disabled people. But dependency, I claim, is a feature of any human life and I argue that disability studies needs to neutralize the term and appropriate dependency as that which binds people, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. I argue that we can acknowledge dependency and work (...) toward an ideal of "managed dependency.". (shrink)

This paper addresses the nurse manager's role regarding chemically-dependent nurses in the workplace. The manager may intervene by: terminating the contract of the impaired colleague; notifying a disciplinary committee; consulting with a counselling committee; or referring the impaired nurse to an employee assistance programme. A dilemma may arise about which of these interventions is ethically the best. The ethical theories relevant to nursing involve ethical relativism, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, Kohlberg's justice, and Gilligan's ethic of care. Nurse managers first need to (...) understand these theories in order to clarify their own perceptions and attitudes towards chemical dependency, and then satisfactorily resolve this ethical dilemma. Education and social learning are routes to a better understanding of chemical dependency and to broadening the ethical dimensions of nurse managers. (shrink)

Being able to effectively respond in the event a crisis is relevant to an organization's survival. Whether or not an organization is prepared for a potential crisis depends upon senior officials, and other personnel operating within the company. Corporations with established crisis management teams are able to communicate and effectively respond in the event of a crisis. The purpose of this paper is to suggest effective crisis management depends upon several team-related factors that may influence an organization's response and its (...) ethical responsibility. First, the term crisis is defined, followed by an overview of the differences between crisis communication and crisis management. Second, a review of relevant literature regarding teams and effectiveness is examined. Third, several propositions regarding team effectiveness and crisis management are provided. Finally, ethical concerns in regards to the crisis team and the corporation are reviewed. (shrink)

The increasing pressures to conserve biodiversity—particularly for industries based on the exploitation of natural resources—have reinforced the need to implement specific measures in this area. Corporate commitment to preserving biodiversity is increasingly scrutinized by stakeholders and now represents an important aspect of business ethics. Although stakeholder involvement is often essential to the management of biodiversity, very few studies in the literature have focused on the details of this involvement. The objective of this paper is to analyze how mining and forestry (...) companies can manage biodiversity issues through stakeholder involvement based on a content analysis of 430 sustainability reports using the Global Reporting Initiative framework. The paper elucidates the reasons for such involvement, the nature of stakeholders involved, and the types of measures employed to manage biodiversity. Stakeholders’ motives for becoming involved revolve around four main issues: complexity and knowledge management; self-regulation and relationships with public authorities; legitimacy and social responsiveness; and commercial and strategic objectives. The stakeholders involved in biodiversity initiatives are essentially non-governmental organizations, experts and universities, public authorities, and coalitions of companies. In the end, the initiatives identified can be grouped into three categories: management practices, socio-political actions, and research and conservation measures. The paper provides various examples of these initiatives and shows how they can be implemented in collaboration with different stakeholders depending on the company’s objectives. The contributions the study makes to the literature on biodiversity management and the managerial implications of the study are analyzed in the discussion section. (shrink)

Since its inception, Stakeholder Management Capability (SMC) has constituted a powerful hermeneutic through which business organizations have understood and leveraged stakeholder relationships. On this model, achieving a high level of capability largely depends on managerial ability to effectively bargain with stakeholders and establish solidarity vis-à-vis the successful negotiation, implementation, and execution of "win–win" transactional exchanges. Against this account, it is rightly pointed out that a transactional explanation of stakeholder relationships, regarded by many as the bottom line for stakeholder management, fails (...) to provide managerial direction regarding how to resolve a variety of normative stakeholder claims that resist commoditization. In response to this issue, this paper has two overlapping goals. It seeks to elaborate a discourse theoretical approach to the problem by first drawing out Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and delineating the various types of rational discourse. Second, the paper attempts to present concrete implications for SMC relative to reshaping the contours of rational, process, and transactional analysis in light of central discourse theoretical conclusions. (shrink)

Although non-profit organisations typically have high representation of females on their boards, relatively little is known about the effects of gender diversity in these organisations particularly in relation to financial management. In this archival study, resource dependency theory and agency analysis are combined to provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis of gender diversity on effective financial management in member-governed, community financial institutions. The investigation is possible due to the unique characteristics of the organisational form and region being examined—credit unions (...) in Northern Ireland. The sector has not been subject to external regulation on board gender, yet a wide array of gender mix on boards ranging from 100 % male to 100 % female are in existence. In addition, effective financial management is crucial to their survival and their ability to meet member objectives. Boards with higher female representation exhibit superior financial management first, in respect of loan book quality in the period of austerity following the financial crisis and second when measured against return on assets. (shrink)

Social entrepreneurship increasingly involves collective, voluntary organizing efforts where success depends on generating and sustaining members’ participation. To investigate how such participatory social ventures achieve member engagement in pluralistic institutional settings, we conducted a qualitative, inductive study of German Renewable Energy Source Cooperatives. Our findings show how value tensions emerge from differences in RESCoop members’ relative prioritization of community, environmental, and commercial logics, and how cooperative leaders manage these tensions and sustain member participation through temporal, structural, and collaborative compromise strategies. (...) We unpack the mechanisms by which each strategy enables members to justify organizational decisions that violate their personal value priorities and demonstrate their varying implications for organizational growth. Our findings contribute new insights into the challenges of collective social entrepreneurship, the capacity of hybrid organizing strategies to mitigate value concessions, and the importance of logic combinability as a key dimension of pluralistic institutional settings. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess knowledge management maturity at HEI to determine the most effecting variables on knowledge management that enhance the total performance of the organization. This study was applied on Al-Azhar University in Gaza strip, Palestine. This paper depends on Asian productivity organization model that used to assess KM maturity. Second dimension assess high performance was developed by the authors. The controlled sample was (364). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability Correlation (...) using Cronbach’s alpha, “ANOVA”, Simple Linear Regression and Step Wise Regression. The overall findings of the current study suggest that KMM is suitable for measuring and lead to enhance high performance. KMM assessment shows that the university maturity level is in level three. Findings also support the main hypothesis and it is subhypotheses. The most important factors effecting high performance are: Processes, KM leadership, People, KM Outcomes, Knowledge Process. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first study at HEI in Palestine explores the status of KMM using the Asian productivity model. (shrink)

In a world filled with poverty, environmental degradation, and moral injustice, social enterprises offer a ray of hope. These organizations seek to achieve social missions through business ventures. Yet social missions and business ventures are associated with divergent goals, values, norms, and identities. Attending to them simultaneously creates tensions, competing demands, and ethical dilemmas. Effectively understanding social enterprises therefore depends on insight into the nature and management of these tensions. While existing research recognizes tensions between social missions and business ventures, (...) we lack any systematic analysis. Our paper addresses this issue. We first categorize the types of tensions that arise between social missions and business ventures, emphasizing their prevalence and variety. We then explore how four different organizational theories offer insight into these tensions, and we develop an agenda for future research. We end by arguing that a focus on social-business tensions not only expands insight into social enterprises, but also provides an opportunity for research on social enterprises to inform traditional organizational theories. Taken together, our analysis of tensions in social enterprises integrates and seeks to energize research on this expanding phenomenon. (shrink)

This study used a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate curriculum management's direct and indirect effects on university graduate programmes' viability. The study also examined the role of institutional effectiveness in mediating the nexus between the predictor and response variables. This is a correlational study with a factorial research design. The study's participants comprised 149 higher education administrators (23 Faculty Deans and 126 HODs) from two public universities in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire designed by the researchers was (...) used for data collection. The questionnaire was duly validated with an acceptable scale and item content validity indices. The dimensionality of the instrument was determined using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Convergent validity was based on Average Variance Extracted (AVE), whereas discriminant validity was based on Fornell-Lacker criteria and the Hetero-Trait Mono-Trait (HTMT) ratio. Acceptable composite reliability estimates of internal consistency were reached for the three sub-scales. Following ethical practices, the questionnaire was physically administered to respondents and retrieved afterwards. Smart PLS (version 3.2.9) and SPSS (version 26.0) programs were used for all the statistical analyses. This study uncovered significant direct and indirect effects of curriculum management on the viability of graduate programmes. Institutional effectiveness significantly impacted graduate programmes’ viability while mediating the nexus between curriculum management and graduate programmes’ viability. Curriculum management and institutional effectiveness jointly explained a significant proportion of graduate programmes’ viability variance. The result of this study proved that graduate programmes’ viability depends, to a great extent, on how much curriculum is managed and how effective institutions are with their services. The result of this study can enable institutions seeking to run viable graduate programmes to re-evaluate their curriculum management practices and the effectiveness of their services. (shrink)

The purpose of this investigation is to develop a new methodological basis for studying the market opportunities of the multinational corporation (MNC) on the basis of the synthesis of modern scientific methods for further forecasting their change. The results showed the degree of dependence of the effectiveness of business management on the trends in the field development and competitor’s actions, market access opportunities, the use of MNC opportunities, their strategic positions, and the totality of internal factors that determine the profitability (...) of activities. The practical value of the obtained results is to identify areas for increasing the efficiency of MNC business management and forecasting the dynamics of sales volumes of their products on the market. (shrink)

Much work in MKM depends on the application of formal logic to mathematics. However, much mathematical knowledge is informal. Luckily, formal logic only represents one tradition in logic, specifically the modeling of inference in terms of logical form. Many inferences cannot be captured in this manner. The study of such inferences is still within the domain of logic, and is sometimes called informal logic. This paper explores some of the benefits informal logic may have for the management of informal mathematical (...) knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how organizations’ impression management evolves in response to rising stakeholder pressures regarding organizations’ corporate responsibility initiatives. We conducted a comparative case study analysis over a period of 13 years for two organizations—Exxon and BP—that took extreme initial stances on climate change. We found that as stakeholder pressures rose, their IM tactics unfolded in four phases: advocating the initial stance, sensegiving to clarify the initial stance, image repairing, and adjusting the stance. Taken together, our analysis of (...) IM over these four phases provides three key insights about the evolution of IM in the face of rising pressures. First, when faced with stakeholder pressures, it seems that organizations do not immediately resort to conforming but tend to give in gradually when pressures increase and start to come from relatively powerful stakeholders. Second, evolution of IM seems to be characterized by path dependence, i.e., even as organizations’ positions evolve, they continue to show their conviction in their initial positions and try to convey that their subsequent positions flow logically from the previous ones. Finally, IM involves navigation between symbolism and substance, and companies tend to strive toward harmonizing their symbolic and substantive actions as stakeholder pressure increases. (shrink)

Ranchers and pastoralists worldwide manage and depend upon resources from rangelands across Earth’s terrestrial surface. In the Great Plains of North America rangeland ecology has increasingly recognized the importance of managing rangeland vegetation heterogeneity to address conservation and production goals. This paradigm, however, has limited application for ranchers as they manage extensive beef production operations under high levels of social-ecological complexity and uncertainty. We draw on the ethics of care theoretical framework to explore how ranchers choose management actions. We used (...) modified grounded theory analysis of repeated interviews with ranchers to compare rancher decision-making under relatively certain and uncertain conditions and describe a typology of practices used to prioritize and choose management actions that maintain effective stewardship of these often multi-generational ranches. We contrast traditional decision-making frameworks with those described by interviewees when high levels of environmental and market uncertainty or ecological complexity led ranchers toward use of care-based, flexible and relational frameworks for decision-making. Ranchers facing complexity and uncertainty often sought “middle-ground” strategies to balance multiple, conflicting responsibilities in rangeland social-ecological systems. For example, ranchers’ care-based decision-making leads to conservative stocking approaches to “manage for the middle,” e.g. to limit risk under uncertain weather and forage availability conditions. Efforts to promote heterogeneity-based rangeland management for biodiversity conservation through the restoration of patch burn grazing and prairie dog conservation will require increased valuation of ranchers’ care work. (shrink)

Managers of multinational companies often favour an aggressive tax avoidance strategy that pushes the legal limits onto the advantage of shareholders and the disadvantage of the spirit of democratically legitimized tax laws. The public and media debate whether such aggressive behaviour is immoral. Aggressive tax avoidance is a subset of the aggressive legal interpretations potentially observable in all fields which places little weight on the will of a democratically legitimized legislation. A thorough ethical analysis based on the deontological approach of (...) Kant demonstrates that aggressive tax avoidance as a special case of operating on the edge of legal boundaries is potentially immoral. Applying the Kantian “contradiction of conception or will” test shows that this maxim might not be conceived or willed as a general law of nature. If all natural or legal persons aggressively interpret laws on all subjects and in every imaginable situation, then central principles of the system of law we all rely upon would be severely compromised. Therefore, aggressive tax avoidance by managers of multinational companies may violate the managers’ moral duty to obey not only the letter but also the intention or spirit of the law. The validity of the argumentation depends critically on the formulation and interpretation of the respective maxims and on assumptions about the legal system. Preserving central elements of Kantian philosophy, the article demonstrates the complexity of a philosophical argumentation which tries to justify the moral intuitions that underpin the common negative evaluation of aggressive legal strategies in business. (shrink)

Management decision-making is a daily task that managers of various levels solve in every organization. Degree of difficulty of this process depends on the scope of authority, responsibility level, manager’s position in organizational hierarchy; on the changes in the environment, unpredictability of which causes emergence of significant amounts of alternatives. For this reason, managers do not rely only on intuition or personal experience (which limited with selective perception, cognitive ability, ability to withstand stress and/or the presence of bias), but use (...) tools (methods) that have stood the test of time and practice; are based at the analysis of a significant amount of primary and secondary information; involve team-building to find the optimal option or to generate ideas. A significant amount of research papers are devoted to such methods, however, the author forms a synergetic approach which contains a detailed analysis of their correlation with the key factors of the competitiveness of enterprise, such as organizational culture and leadership. Existing decision-making practices, problems and style of management at the tourism enterprises are revealed from conducted survey (the first half of 2014) in tourism firms of Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, in which 729 tourism managers took part. The most popular decision-making practices in tourism branch were specified, among them are modeling and monitoring of previous results. The study proved the hypothesis of the author concerning strong connection of decision-making management and type of organizational culture. Moreover, 63% of managers were dissatisfied with low attention to organizational culture at their companies. The basis for future research and the synergetic matrix for decision-making management were worked out in the article which give preconditions for further studies and improvements in tourism management of Ukrainian enterprises. (shrink)

Extant research notes a tendency to propound the idea that female managers are secondary to men. Gender differences constitute an ethical issue and the discursive constructions of gender management are central to research in business ethics. Drawing on evidence gathered from a time–space intersection that has been widely neglected by research in this area, we address whether female business leaders develop gender-stereotypic management styles as well as their propensity to adopt masculine management patterns such as making risky decisions and implementing (...) formal management systems. Our findings suggest that gender-stereotypic management styles are chosen strategically and target-driven, which implies a selective use of masculine and feminine management styles. Furthermore, as part of the masculine approach, female business owners adopt risk-taking decisions and implement formal management systems. Our results provide support for the argument that gender is context dependent and, hence, the findings of this study may be useful for contemporary jurisdictions featuring male-dominated societies and a strong intervention by the State in the economy. (shrink)

Addressing climate change is among the most challenging ethical issues facing contemporary business and society. Unsustainable business activities are causing significant distributional and procedural injustices in areas such as public health and vulnerability to extreme weather events, primarily because of a distinction between primary emitters and those already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Business, as a significant contributor to climate change and beneficiary of externalizing environmental costs, has an obligation to address its environmental impacts. In this paper, we explore (...) the role of firms’ climate change targets in shaping their emissions trends in the context of a large multi-country sample of companies. We contrast two intentions for setting emissions reductions targets: symbolic attempts to manage external stakeholder perceptions via “greenwashing” and substantive commitments to reducing environmental impacts. We argue that the attributes of firms’ climate change targets are diagnostic of firms’ underlying intentions. Consistent with our hypotheses, while we find no overall effect of setting climate change targets on emissions, we show that targets characterized by a commitment to more ambitious emissions reductions, a longer target time frame, and absolute reductions in emissions are associated with significant reductions in firms’ emissions. Our evidence suggests the need for vigilance among policy-makers and environmental campaigners regarding the underlying intentions that accompany environmental management practices and shows that these can to some extent be diagnosed analytically. (shrink)

This paper takes a qualitative view of the administration of personnel management function and its implication for the school. In this paper, the meaning of personnel management, various personnel management functions of educational managers and their implication for the effectiveness of the school system were discussed. The paper concluded that personnel management is inevitable to the school system because it is as important as the establishment of the school itself. The need for personnel to be managed in the school, (...) cannot be over-emphasized. Every educational manager should understand that the benefits of personnel management functions are dependent on the implementation of these functions during the staffing process. Therefore, efforts should be made to perform these functions discussed in this paper. If adhered to, it can lead any school to success in terms of goal attainment and increased productivity. It was recommended among several others that educational managers should set clear standards that specify what is acceptable in the organization as well as the guidelines for performing tasks. This will ensure that every worker understands what is expected of them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: There are many proposals in the literature on how to “manage values.” Many of these proposals have in common the assumption that the relevant values in science can be “packaged for transfer”: they can be put in an envelope for scientists to hand to stakeholders or policymakers, or for members of the public or ethical experts to hand to scientists. The central aim of this paper is to argue that packaging values for transfer is a practical impossibility. The central (...) argument of the paper concerns the best stance to take on how values in science should be conceptualized. Specifically, I argue that we need to return to a decision-theoretic definition of values (as, I argue, is strongly suggested by a close reading of Rudner, Jeffrey, and Hempel.) Further, I argue for a picture of these values that is nonpsychologistic, stance relative, and always and everywhere entangled with credences. I call my account of the nature of values in science the Putnam-Hempel account. Unfortunately, the Putnam-Hempel account forces us to see that any proposal that depends on packaging values for transfer will ultimately suffer from great difficulties. (shrink)

Knowledge management is important in the construction industry, but there is a dramatic gap between rhetoric and reality, highlighting mistaken expectations of technology. We report on a case study of a major construction company. The UK construction industry, with scarce academic qualifications, and limited use of IT, depends on knowledge sharing, and, crucially, on tacit knowledge. Economic crisis presents particular problems, and recent trends in work organization have far-reaching implications. The industry depends on human knowledge, with limited systems support. A (...) shared concern for health and safety provides the surest guarantee of sustainability of both knowledge and the company. (shrink)

This article argues that the introduction of value based management in a decentralized, hierarchical, and rule-based organization will add to existing informal and formal systems instead of replacing them. Consequently, employees' perception of and willingness to embrace and operationalize centrally imposed values were assumed to be dependent upon existing emotional, social, and formal processes and structures. Hierarchical regression analysis on data from a maritime company (N = 408) gathered in Norway in 2004 – which claims to be a learning and (...) value based company – showed that affective commitment and group coherence correlated positively with perception of values among employees. Formalization was positively but insignificantly correlated, whereas loyalty toward immediate superiors was significantly negatively correlated with perception of values. (shrink)

To achieve its goals of managing andrestricting access to psychiatric care, managedcare organizations rely on an instrument, theoutpatient treatment report, that carriessignificant implications about how they viewpsychiatric patients and psychiatric care. Inaddition to involving ethical transgressionssuch as violation of patient confidentiality,denial of access to care, spurious use ofconcepts like quality of care, and harassmentof practitioners, the managed care approachalso depends on an overly technical,instrumental interpretation of human beings andpsychiatric treatment. It is this grounding ofmanaged care in technical reason that (...) I willexplore in this study. I begin with a reviewof a typical outpatient treatment report andshow how, with its dependence on the DSM-IV,on behavioral symptoms and patient`functioning'', on the biomedical model ofpsychiatric illness, and on gross quantitativemeasures, the report results in a crude,skeletonized view of the human being as acongeries of behavioral symptoms and functions. I then develop the managed care construal ofhuman existence further by showing itsgrounding in technical reason, exploring thelatter in its modern embodiment and deriving itand its opposite, practical reason, fromAristotle''s distinction between technical andpractical reason, techne and phronesis. Inthis analysis of the role of technical reasonin managed care, I point out that managed caredid not have to develop its rationale de novobut could rather lift its arguments, e.g. thebiomedical model, from contemporary psychiatryand simply apply them in a restrictive manner. Finally, I conclude this study by arguing forpsychiatry''s status as a discipline ofpractical knowledge. (shrink)

The Cuban government has undertaken the task of transforming insect pest and weed management from conventional to organic and more sustainable approaches on a nationwide basis. This paper addresses past programs and current major areas of research and implementation as well as provides examples of programs in insect and weed management. Topics covered include the newly constructed network of Centers for the Reproduction of Entomophages and Entomopathogens (CREEs), which provide the infrastructure for the implementation of biological control on state, cooperative, (...) and private farm operations. CREE programs include the mass rearing and release of Trichogramma spp. to manage insect pests of cassava, tobacco, sugarcane, and improved pasture. The entomopathogens, Bacillus thuringiensis, Beauveria bassiana, Metarhizium anisopliae, and Verticillium lecanii, are being mass produced in the CREEs and applied to control a number of key insect pests. A traditional method employed by peasant farmers of using the predatory ant Pheidole megacephala (Fabricius) in the biological control of sweetpotato and banana insect pests has been further developed and implemented. Efforts are underway to rear nematode species that attack insect pests and identify plant extracts with insecticidal qualities as potential management tools. Weed management has moved away from dependence on herbicides and toward alternative techniques that include weed suppression based on rotation schemes, limited use of selective herbicides, and new tillage equipment and practices. (shrink)

Platform companies use techniques of algorithmic management to control their users. Though digital marketplaces vary in their use of these techniques, few studies have asked why. This question is theoretically consequential. Economic sociology has traditionally focused on the embedded activities of market actors to explain competitive and valuation dynamics in markets. But restrictive platforms can leave little autonomy to market actors. Whether or not the analytical focus on their interactions makes sense thus depends on how restrictive the platform is, turning (...) the question into a first order analytical concern. The paper argues that we can explain why platforms adopt more and less restrictive architectures by focusing on the design logic that informs their construction. Platforms treat markets as search algorithms that blend software computation with human interactions. If the algorithm requires actors to follow narrow scripts of behavior, the platform should become more restrictive. This depends on the need for centralized computation, the degree to which required inputs can be standardized, and the misalignment of interests between users. The paper discusses how these criteria can be mobilized to explain the architectures of four illustrative cases. (shrink)

Purpose of the article: Knowledge is increasingly importance for the economic well-being of businesses. Core competencies of management are the generation and processing of information, used to develop a competitive advantage. Information has become established as a commodity in its own right which can be bought and sold. Four out of five goods traded on the market now consist of services or relate to information in the broadest sense. Knowledge is created when different pieces of information are linked on the (...) basis of a particular intellectual background and meaningfully interpreted. Accordingly, knowledge incorporates not just information but also experience, (pre)- judgements, rules of thumb and worldviews. Knowledge is always associated with human beings. Methodology/methods: This article is based on literature research. The original article was written in German and translated into English, supported by a translation agency. Scientific aim: A questionnaire is being drawn up on the basis of the research results. This will allow the appraisal of these influencing factors and framework conditions by small and medium sized enterprises to be surveyed and evaluated. Findings: Social systems arise through and are sustained by communication. Actions of managers primarily consist of communication. For cognitive simplification, all humans repeat actions that have previously proved successful. Previously accumulated knowledge thus becomes a significant barrier to learning. An organisation’s ability to learn depends not only the general willingness of its workforce to learn but also on the newness and/or compatibility of knowledge acquired from a partner. Conclusions (limits, implications etc): Developing or acquiring competition-relevant knowledge is generally time-consuming and costly. As a complementary function to knowledge acquisition, the retention of knowledge carriers in the form of people and materials forms another component of knowledge management. It is important to recognise early on those knowledge carriers who promise high potential in the future. (shrink)

AI technologies hold great promise for addressing existing problems in organizational contexts, but the potential benefits must not obscure the potential perils associated with AI. In this article, we conceptually explore these promises and perils by examining AI use in organizational contexts. The exploration complements and extends extant literature on AI management by providing a typology describing four types of AI use, based on the idea of co-constitution of AI technologies and organizational context. Building on this typology, we propose three (...) recommendations for informed use of AI in contemporary organizations. First, explicitly define the purpose of organizational AI use. Second, define the appropriate level of transparency and algorithmic management for organizational AI use. Third, be aware of AI’s context-dependent nature. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement (CE) in research is valuable for instrumental and intrinsic reasons. Despite existing guidance on how to ensure meaningful CE, much of what it takes to achieve this goal differs across settings. Considering the emerging trend towards mandating CE in many research studies, this study aimed at documenting how CE is conceptualized and implemented, and then providing context-specific guidance on how researchers and research regulators in Uganda could think about and manage CE in research.MethodsWe conducted qualitative interviews and focus (...) group discussions involving forty-one respondents who were experienced in HIV/aids biomedical research involving CE. Thirty-eight of these were directly or indirectly associated with Uganda’s leading research institution in the field of HIV/aids. They included Principal Investigators, Community Liaisons Officers, Research Ethics Committee members and Community Advisory Board Members. Three respondents were from Uganda National Council for Science and Technology. Data were collected between August 2019 and August 2020, using audio-taped focus group discussions and key informant interviews, transcribed and analyzed manually to generate themes and subthemes.ResultsThree major themes emerged: goals or value of CE; the means of CE, and, the evaluation of CE. Goals or value of CE generated four subthemes representing the overarching goals of CE: (1) Promote communities’ agency; (2) Generate and sustain trust; (3) Protect and promote communities’ rights and interests; and, (4) Help studies optimize participation in the form of enrolment and retention of participants. What usually comes under the nomenclatures of methods, strategies, and approaches of CE, such as town-hall meetings, sports events, drama, and the like, should simply be understood as the means of CE, and it is not desirable to hold pre-conceived and fixed ideas about the best means to conduct CE in research since a lot depend on the context. Finally, the study found that despite CE’s critical importance, which suggests the need to track and evaluate it, CE is currently intermittently evaluated, and for inadequate motivations.ConclusionsExisting guidance on how to conduct robust CE in research is no substitute for creativity, flexibility, and reflexivity on the part of both researchers and research regulators. (shrink)

Ghost-Managed Medicine exposes the conspiracy to conceal all of the players in the marketing of drugs, including ghostwriters, key opinion leaders, patient advocacy organizations, contract research organizations, publication planners, and even medical journal editors and publishers. The credibility of the claims conveyed by the industry depends on the invisibility of these players.

Manager stewardship behavior, defined as an ethical initiative whereby managers subjugate their personal interests to protect their organization’s long-term welfare, has been widely considered beneficial for organizations and subordinates. However, is manager stewardship behavior also viewed as good in the eyes of peers? This research examines peer reactions to manager stewardship behavior. Drawing on person perception theory, we expect that a peer may credit and support manager stewardship behavior or stigmatize and undermine it depending on his or her attributions (organizational (...) concern versus impression management). Study 1 (a vignette experiment: _n_ = 200) found that manager stewardship behavior is related to credit evaluation by a peer and subsequently increases peer support and decreases peer undermining when attributed to organizational concern motives; however, it is related to stigma evaluation by a peer and subsequently increases peer undermining and decreases peer support when attributed to impression management motives. Study 2 (_n_ = 221) replicated the results of Study 1 using a field survey design. These findings expand our understanding of the implications of stewardship behavior from a peer perspective and offer insight for managers into how to engage in stewardship behavior wisely. (shrink)

Dependency stands for manygrievances and is generally considered asymptom of oppression. An opposing concept,offered as the preferred state, isself-reliance. Dependency and self-reliance arekey concepts in sustainable developmentprograms that feature participatory approaches.Some of the ways in which development projectsemploy the concepts of dependency andself-reliance, however, are troubling.Dependency and self-reliance in two programsfor participatory sustainable development areexamined, one in Canada and the other in NewZealand. Frameworks for dependency and self-reliance aredrawn from social psychology and philosophy toexamine problematic (...) aspects associated with theconcepts. Analysis produced a proposal foruse of the term situatedinterdependence as a way to cast the outcomesof participatory sustainable development moreprecisely. The location of the cases (Canadaand New Zealand) centers the discussion withina context of industrialized agriculture, butalso points to issues pertinent to developingcountries. (shrink)

Institutional and resource dependency theories are used to develop a conceptual framework that describes how an “issue pacesetter” affects corporate issue management. The pacesetter model is developed in the following steps: changed stakeholder expectations, pacesetter emergence, heightened attention and pressure, decision making under pressure, and implementation and compliance. The model is then applied to analyze the confrontation between the mainline pharmaceutical industry and AIDS activists and stakeholders over access to AIDS medications in Africa. Analysis of this confrontation demonstrates that (...) issue pacesetters increased the effectiveness of stakeholders in placing institutional pressure on the pharmaceutical industry and contributed to the industry changing its regulations regarding access to AIDS drugs. (shrink)

This research explores how stakeholder scholarship can evolve into a puzzle-solving tool, akin to more advanced scientific fields. Only a unified stakeholder management science can address issues like firms that, despite the looming threat of climate disaster, prioritize profits over environmental concerns. Such unification, however, depends on a computational turn of mind outlined herein. Stakeholder scholarship has failed to progress toward this end, because stakeholder theory has fallen short of shedding light on the inner workings of the firm in search (...) of the mechanisms that govern its relations with stakeholders, instead lingering over the outermost parts of the social phenomena where stakeholder macro dynamics are obvious. This lays open several hurdles that must be overcome for stakeholder scholarship to become a puzzle-solving tool at the service of the environment and society. Thus, a computational fix may be within reach in the next few decades if the following five steps, elaborated upon herein, guide the transition: 1) probe firm-level mechanisms, 2) focus on qualitative institutional data, 3) adopt computational language to reduce ambiguities, 4) develop algorithms for how activities discharge powers or capacities to fulfill functions, and 5) break with peer-review silos that have made stakeholder theory self-referential. (shrink)

In order to accommodate empirically observed violations of the independence axiom of expected utility theory Becker and Sarin (1987) proposed their model of lottery dependent utility in which the utility of an outcome may depend on the lottery being evaluated. Although this dependence is intuitively very appealing and provides a simple functional form of the resulting decision criterion, lottery dependent utility has been nearly completely neglected in the recent literature on decision making under risk. The goal of this paper is (...) to revive the lottery dependent utility model. Therefore, we derive first a sound axiomatic foundation of lottery dependent utility. Secondly, we develop a discontinuous variant of the model which can accommodate boundary effects and may lead to a lexicographic non-expected utility model. Both analyses are accompanied by considering some functional specifications which are in accordance with recent experimental results and may have significant applications in business and management science. (shrink)

Contrary to assumptions that changes in brain networks are possible only during crucial periods of development, research in the past decade has supported the idea of a permanently plastic brain. Novel experience, altered afferent input due to environmental changes and learning new skills are now recognized as modulators of brain function and underlying neuroanatomic circuitry. Given findings in experiments with animals and the recent discovery of increases in gray and white matter in the adult human brain as a result of (...) learning, the old concept of cognitive reserve, that is the ability to reinforce brain volume in crucial areas and thus provide a greater threshold for age-dependent deficits, has been reinforced. The challenge we face is to unravel the exact nature of the dynamic structural alterations and, ultimately, to be able to use this knowledge for disease management. Understanding normative changes in brain structure that occur as a result of environmental changes and demands is pivotal to understanding the characteristic ability of the brain to adapt. (shrink)

Functionalists, especially those inspired by American Legal Realism, downplay the importance of abstract concepts and their interrelations in legal reasoning. Hence, they stress shallow, narrow, and isolated concepts, in order to be close to the facts in a transparent way. In this paper, we address an often-overlooked function of law: managing legal concepts themselves. That is, one aspect of law is partially self-referential. Various devices involved in legal reasoning are designed to make the system of legal concepts work better, from (...) fine-tuning the results of the use of concepts to tinkering with the concepts themselves. This requires us to look at law as a system, but one that is both inward-looking and operating on itself, and, at the same time, concerned with how law operates in the real world. Law also uses various devices to manage the system of concepts, and these devices in turn serve various functions. These functions include maintenance, modulation, and modification of concepts, depending on the actual or potential misfiring of the concepts in question. As we will suggest, this offers deeper insight into the role that legal fictions, equity, and presumptions play in the law. (shrink)

This article reviews the relationship between managed care and public health. Managed care, with its seemingly infinite structural and organizational variation, dominates the modern American health-care system for the non-elderly U.S. population. Through its emphasis on standarhzed practice norms and performance measurement, coupled with industrial purchasing techniques, prepayment, risk downstreaming, and incentives-based compensation, managed care has the potential to exert considerable influence over the manner in which the health-care system is organized and functions. Given the degree to (...) which the attainment of the basic public health goal of protecting the public against population health threats for which there are known and effective medical interventions depends on the successful interaction between public health policy and the medical care system, the importance of a viable working relationship between public health and managed care is difficult to overstate.The potential for conflict between public health and medical care is nothing new; indeed, delineating the boundaries of public health to shape and influence medical practice has occupied the energies of policymakers and the medical industry for well over a century. (shrink)