Administrative Science Quarterly

Through a review and integration of the heretofore rather distinct literatures dealing with (1) policy making in administrative agencies, (2) the use of scientific and technical information in public policy, and (3) the utilization of policy research, this paper develops preliminary conceptual frameworks of the variables affecting the acquisition and the utilization of technical information by administrative agencies. Although previous research, based largely upon case studies of a few decisions within a single agency, has resulted in numerous bivariate hypotheses, the number of variables involved and recognized problems of generalizing the results suggest that future research be oriented toward a number of strategies capable of simultaneously examining the effect of numerous variables over large numbers of cases.

This paper examines organizational adaptations to an environmental jolt--a sudden and unprecedented event (in this case, a doctors' strike)-- that created a natural experiment within a group of hospitals. Although adaptations were diverse and appeared anomalous, they are elucidated by considering the hospitals' antecedent strategies, structures, ideologies, and stockpiles of slack resources. Assessments of the primacy of the antecedents suggest that ideological and strategic variables are better predictors of adaptations to jolts than are structural variables or measures of organizational slack. Although abrupt changes in environments are commonly thought to jeopardize organizations, environmental jolts are found to be ambiguous events that offer propitious opportunities for organizational learning, administrative drama, and introducing unrelated changes.

This paper outlines a role-based approach for conceptualizing and investigating the contention in some previous research that technologies change organizational and occupational structures by transforming patterns of action and interaction. Building on Nadel's theory of social structure, the paper argues that the microsocial dynamics occasioned by new technologies reverberate up levels of analysis in an orderly manner. Specifically, a technology's material attributes are said to have an immediate impact on the nonrelational elements of one or more work roles. These changes, in turn, influence the role's relational elements, which eventually affect the structure of an organization's social networks. Consequently, roles and social networks are held to mediate a technology's structural effects. The theory is illustrated by ethnographic and sociometric data drawn from a comparative field study of the use of traditional and computerized imaging devices in two radiology departments.

Literature concerning relationships among structural attributes of organizations and literature focusing on the adoption of innovations are integrated, and a model of innovation adoption is tested against data gathered in a nationwide survey of United States hospitals. The data are consistent with the hypothesis that increased organizational size leads to specialization, functional differentiation, and decentralization. The expectation that increased size, specialization, functional differentiation, and decentralization lead to innovation adoption is supported by the data. The impact of size on adoption, while substantial, is primarily indirect, operating through its effect on structural attributes. Adoption of innovations represents only one form of resource allocation. The theoretical model predicting adoption behavior may be useful for understanding relationships among size, structure, and other forms of resource allocation in organizations.

This ethnographic study of interpretations of stress among hospital social workers reveals concrete ways in which institutional systems take form in the mundane actions and interpretations of individuals embedded in these systems. It also reveals how organizational cultures reflect and reinforce institutional conditions that have been negotiated in the interactions of individuals. Here, the institutional systems of medicine and social work come together in the everyday work of the social workers and result in two patterns of cultural dominance. Within these distinct types of culture emerge two forms of stress experience, including a dominant form, consistent with medical ideology, and a marginalized form, consistent with social work ideology. Some surprising patterns of interpretation emerge, including interpretations of ambiguity and burnout as normal, social, and desirable when the social work ideology is dominant. This institutional analysis of stress has theoretical, practical, and epistemological implications.

This study proposes and tests a preliminary model concerning the antecedents and outcomes of employee commitment to organizations using a cross-validational framework. The study was carried out among 382 hospital employees and 119 scientists and engineers. It was found that for both samples personal characteristics, job characteristics, and work experiences influenced commitment. Moreover, commitment was found to be strongly related to intent and desire to remain for both samples and moderately related to attendance and turnover for one sample. Performance was generally unrelated to commitment. Results are compared with earlier findings and implications for future research are discussed.

The theories of exchange and of collective action were used to guide a study of the sources of satisfaction of the participants in a medical specialty society. This survey of two groups of participants, leaders and members, showed that the leaders of this nationally recognized professional association were more satisfied than were the regular members; that even though leaders and members have similar professional interests, the two groups evaluated the association differently; and that the involvement of leaders in the activities of other professional associations affected their satisfaction with this association. These results indicate empirical support for exchange theory and for the distinction among kinds of rewards made by the theory of collective action. Structural sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction are identified for future research.

This paper suggests that there are five problems with contingency theory, ranging from a simple lack of clarity in its theoretical statements to more subtle issues such as the embedding of symmetrical and nonmonotonic assumptions in the theoretical arguments. Starting from Galbraith's (1973) contingency theory about organizing for effectiveness, several traditional contingency hypothesis were tested along with more precise hypotheses developed from knowledge of the five problems with contingency theory. Data were drawn from a study of organizational effectiveness in acute care hospital operating room suites. Although traditional contingency notions were not supported by the data, the more precise hypotheses received stronger empirical support. The study data suggest that relationships between technology, structure, and organizational effectiveness are more complicated than contingency theory now assumes. The paper concludes by suggesting formulation of a contingency theory of organizational effectiveness that includes interactive, nonmonotonic, and symmetrical arguments.

The effects of group problem-solving method and problem-situation complexity on attempts at implementing group solutions were investigated in a laboratory-field setting. Group members were supervisory nurses from various organizations, who were randomly assigned to three groups in a balanced research design which included three group decision-making processes and three levels of problem-situation complexity in implementation. The dependent variable was the number of attempts at implementing group-derived solutions in home organizations. The results showed that structure in group decision-making processes led to increased rates of implementation attempts at all levels of problem-situation complexity. There was a significant complexity-by-process interaction effect among the decision-making processes, which supports the conclusion that the type of group decision-making process and the problem-situation complexity should be considered in order to optimize the number of implementation attempts.g

This article outlines a social information processing approach to explain job attitudes. In comparison with need-satisfaction and expectancy models to job attitudes and motivation, the social information processing perspective emphasizes the effects of context and the consequences of past choices, rather than individual predispositions and rational decision-making processes. When an individual develops statements about attitude or needs, he or she uses social information--information about past behavior and about what others think. The process of attributing attitudes or needs from behavior is itself affected by commitment processes, by the saliency and relevance of information, and by the need to develop socially acceptable and legitimate rationalizations for actions. Both attitudes and need statements, as well as characterizations of jobs, are affected by informational social influence. The implications of the social information processing perspective for organization development efforts and programs of job redesign are discussed.

This paper describes the results of a study that examines how formal analysis is actually used in practice in three different organizations. Four main groups of purposes for formal analysis--information, communication, direction and control, and symbolic purposes--are identified and related to the nature of the social and hierarchical relationships between those who initiate analysis, those who do it, and those who receive it. It is concluded that, far from being antithetical as often assumed, formal analysis and social interaction are inextricably linked in organizational decision making and that different structural configurations may generate different patterns of use of analysis.

This study tested whether leadership instability--a systemic pattern of frequent succession in the top management position of an organization--was associated with sociopolitical structures that define the relationship between the board and chief executive officer (CEO), controlling for temporal patterns of the organizational life-cycle stage. In organizations that are not profit maximizing and subject to considerable uncertainty, such governance properties were hypothesized to affect leadership instability independent of organizational growth or decline. Results of regression analyses demonstrate strong main effects of board-CEO relations, net of the impact of organizational life cycle, on leadership instability.

This paper outlines a broad conceptual framework for participation in organizations, which provides an overview of four defining dimensions of participatory social arrangements in organizations and their often complex interdependencies. The dimensions of participation discussed in this paper include the social theories underlying participatory social systems and the values and goals each of them implies for participation, the major properties of participatory systems, the outcomes of participation in organizations, and the contextual characteristics of participatory systems which limit or enhance their potential. The view of participation presented in this paper is of a multidimensional, dynamic social phenomenon, the study of which transcends questions unique to any given discipline paradigm and which requires an integration of micro and macro questions. The implications of this conceptualization for theory building, research, and methodology are briefly discussed.

This research examined the development of an occupational role from one month before the role incumbent's graduation from training to five months into the first job. Kahn et al.'s (1964) theory of "expectation-generated role stress" provided a conceptual framework for the development of a causal model of role development. A national sample of 181 physicians' assistants (PAs) and their supervising physicians reported by questionnaire on actual and expected PA task performance and participation in decision making at three points during the period of interest. Task data were used to derive three measures of objective role ambiguity and conflict. In addition, PAs provided data on perceived role ambiguity and conflict and attitudes about work, A path analytic technique was applied to the model to examine changes over time. Results suggest that, during the first months of employment, the role occupant passes through different stages of development, during which the determinants of outcomes change. This notion of changing causal structure was supported by the identification of four casual patterns of outcomes, the changing strength of prediction models, and the changing effects of discrepancies between pre-job expectation and on-the-job reality. Role-development stages are discussed in terms of rational and emotional processes, and implications for theory, research, and practice are proposed.

The population ecology view that variation in sets or clusters of organizations should be isomorphic with variation in cluster environment was used here to explain structural variation among hospital clusters. The structural characteristics studied were range of services offered within the cluster, average size of hospitals in the cluster, and cluster differentiation. In the causal model that was developed and evaluated, variation in the patient environment and variation in the supplier environment were compared. Four lagged panels of data on a national sample of fifteen hospital clusters demonstrated the relative superiority of supplier variables over patient variables. Supplier group preferences were more powerful than patient needs in determining the range of services offered by the cluster. Furthermore, increasing the range of services in the cluster had a positive, significant effect on average hospital size, whereas size apparently exerted no effect on range of cluster facilities. Cluster differentiation seems to be causally affected by range of services, average hospital size, and by the periodic closing of hospitals over time.

Much research on internal labor markets has been hampered by the failure to differentiate the wide variety of ILMs, by accounts of their determinants that too heavily emphasize isolated causal factors, by the lack of detailed material describing the economic and organizational dimensions of their design and implementation, and by the neglect of managerial perceptions of and motivations for constructing ILMs. This paper presents detailed case studies of three organizations that have constructed very different ILMs. Based on this material, a model of the determinants of ILMs is developed that centers around the concepts of costs, commitment, and rewards and that attempts to assess the interactions of effects of markets and hierarchies on ILMs. The model is built on the premise that the underlying imperatives typically held to affect ILMs are inevitably filtered through managerial beliefs and the constraints on managerial decision making. The implications of these findings for theory and research on ILMs are discussed.

This study examined changes in dominant values and levels of technological development, conceptualized as environmental constraints, and related them to differences in orientation and structure in a sample of rehabilitation organizations. The relationship found between date of organizational founding and orientation was interpreted as tentative support for the propositions advanced by Stinchcombe and Burns about the general relationship between social structure and organizational structure. The relationship found between income from grants and orientation indicated the importance of external control of resources as one type of environmental constraint.

Socialization in professional schools was postulated to be a function of the degree of attitude and value consistency among significant others during the educational process. Three otherwise comparable schools of nursing having varying degrees of consistency in profession-relevant attitudes and values among teachers, staff nurses, and head nurses were studied. As a test of socialization, students entering and graduating from each school were compared for evidence of a shift in attitudes and values toward those of significant others in each of the schools. The school with the most consistency among significant others evidenced the greatest socialization, the school with the least consistency evidenced the least shift in attitudes and values. It was concluded that degree of socialization among students does vary directly with degree of attitude and value consistency among significant others in a school.

This paper proposes a theoretical synthesis of the concepts of organizational size, technology, complexity, and structural differentiation. It suggests and finds that the most important determinant of differentiation in the division of labor is the scope of an organization's task, a technological dimension, and not organizational size. Neither horizontal nor vertical differentiation is thought to be determined by size while the scope of the task is proposed as a determinant of horizontal differentiation. The findings, however, support only the inference of a moderate causal connection between either size or task scope and either form of differentiation. Throughout the analysis and discussion the contrast between causal inference based on associations of levels and change rates is discussed. When dealing with the organizational processes addressed in this paper, both associations must be examined to adequately portray the complexity of the causal processes inferred.

Human factors engineering concerns the design of equipment in accordance with the mental and physical characteristics of operators. Human factors engineers advise design engineers, but the organizational context limits their influence and restricts their perspective. The discussion of organizational context in this paper explains why military and industrial top management personnel are indifferent to good human factors design and shows how the social structure favors the choice of technologies that centralize authority and deskill operators and how it encourages unwarranted attributions of operator error. The role of equipment and system design in shaping cognitive maps and mental models is explored, and the technology-social structure paradigm is questioned.

A theory was developed on the creation, growth, and decline of relationships among organizations and was tested, using a longitudinal study of 95 dyadic relationships among child care and health organizations in Texas. Using LISREL V, the test of the theory showed that substantial revision of the model was required to explain the data adequately. When the model was revised, important new patterns were revealed in the development of interorganizational relationships over time: (1) Perceptions of dependence on others for resources spurs the development of interorganizational relationships. Resource dependence is a powerful direct determinant of communications, resource transactions, and consensus; (2) The growth of interorganizational relationships is fostered by frequent communications to formalize the relationship and build consensus about the terms of the relationship among the parties involved; (3) Monetary transactions and client referrals entail different patterns of coordination; and (4) Consensus among parties in an interorganizational relationship is both a positive outcome of initial resource dependence and communications and has a negative influence on subsequent perceptions of resource dependence.

The relationships among input uncertainty, means of coordination, and criteria of the organizational effectiveness of hospital emergency units were explored using data from 30 emergency units in six midwestern states. Input uncertainty generally was not associated with the use of various means of coordination. However, input uncertainty affected relationships between the means of coordination and the effectiveness criteria. Specifically, programmed means of coordination made a greater contribution to organizational effectiveness under conditions of low uncertainty than under conditions of high uncertainty. Conversely, nonprogrammed means of coordination made a greater contribution to organizational effectiveness when uncertainty was high than when it was low. Findings were interpreted and suggestions were advanced as to how emergency units might best solve their coordination problems under varying conditions of uncertainty.

Key decisions in crises are often made by a small, tightly knit group of individuals. This group, facing the need for quick and short realigments of problem-solving procedures and mobilization of resources, experiences a high level of emotional and physical stress. Stress, surprise, restricted amount of time for response, and threats to high-priority goals characterize a crisis situation (Hermann, 1972). Unfortunately these attributes of crisis make the decision-making and implementation processes vulnerable to malfunctions. This paper develops a conceptual model of the crisis-decision process, focusing on links susceptible to emergence of pathologies and proposes preventive measures to increase the coping abilities of decision units.

New medical imaging devices, such as the CT scanner, have begun to challenge traditional role relations among radiologists and radiological technologists. Under some conditions, these technologies may actually alter the organizational and occupational structure of radiological work. However, current theories of technology and organizational form are insensitive to the potential number of structural variations implicit in role-based change. This paper expands recent sociological thought on the link between institution and action to outline a theory of how technology might occasion different organizational structures by altering institutionalized roles and patterns of interaction. In so doing, technology is treated as a social rather than a physical object, and structure is conceptualized as a process rather than an entity. The implications of the theory are illustrated by showing how identical CT scanners occasioned similar structuring processes in two radiology departments and yet led to divergent forms of organization. The data suggest that to understand how technologies alter organizational structures researchers may need to integrate the study of social action and the study of social form.

Seventy-eight case studies of decision making were profiled to identify the nature of the process. Analysis revealed evaluative, historical model, off-the-shelf, search, and nova process types. These processes differ in their approach to idea generation, the guarantors applied, and process-management rationale. Variations in each type are described to lay out the distinctions between the processes. The study found that managers do not use the normative methods prescribed by scholars for good decision making. Most decision processes were found to be solution centered, which seemed to restrict innovation, limit the number of alternatives considered, and perpetuate the use of questionable tactics.

The traditional explanation of the relationship between structure and technology in the design of an organization is developed to include the implementation phase. A model of the implementation phase uses worker discretion as a linking mechanism to explain the impact of structure on human service technologies. A path analysis of data from 30 human service organizations supports the specification of technological routinization in a dependent relationship with four structural variables.

This paper analyzes the evolution in regulation of medical devices and the dynamics by which regulation insulates manufacturers of medical devices from effective control by hospitals. Based on a theoretical framework developed by Zald and an exploratory study of the control environment of the medical device industry, three predictions are made to explain this process. These predictions suggest that internal adaptation of hospitals to technological innovation may be a reaction to a historical imbalance of power in relationships between hospitals and manufacturers of medical devices, rather than simply a mechanistic adaptation to technological imperatives. This focus becomes crucial as hospitals are held to higher performance standards by accrediting agencies and legal requirements, making hospitals more dependent upon the quality and reliability of medical devices to meet these standards.

This paper develops and tests the argument that technology should be thought of as representing the work of each level of organization as well as different subunits in an organization. Predictions of divergent effects of individual task and subunit workflow technologies on staff characteristics and subunit structures were tested on 142 patient care wards in a stratified random sample of 16 hospitals. The data rather clearly support the conclusion that as we move from tasks to workflow, the effects of technological predictability shift from individual job qualifications and specialization to systems of subunit coordination and control. The effects of technology are compared to those of subunit size and it is concluded that while size continues to have independent effects, it is a less powerful predictor of subunit structure than technology.

The purpose of this study was to describe and differentiate empirically the technology of seven types of nursing subunits (n=71) in hospitals. Technology was measured by a 34-item questionnaire given to a random sample of five nurses from each subunit (response rate 95.5 percent). Data analyses were performed on subunit scores. By factor analysis, three independent technological factors were identified, which were labelled uncertainty, instability, and variability. Significant differences (α=.05) between some of the types of subunits were shown in terms of these three factors. From the application of Q technique, three categories of nursing subunits were identified, which were interpreted in terms of their degree of indeterminacy of their technologies.

To test the implications of field work in a psychiatric hospital for children, this study focuses on the effects of network properties of organizational units, personal network position, and other individual attributes, on individual power. The contextual analysis is carried out by two linked regression equations, one at the individual and one at the contextual level, a procedure that has methodological advantages over a single regression model. The results suggest that sheer complexity can undermine inequalities among bureaucratic units and occupational groups, and that organizational democracy is fostered when complex role relations promote extensive interunit communication. Specifically, we find that a main mechanism that endows individuals with power is found in the local domains of participation, i.e., the organizational units of which they are members, and that the capacity of such a unit to empower its members depends on its integration in organization-wide communication networks. The basis of this integration is conceived as overlapping circles of weak ties that inhibit segmentation along occupational or organizational lines and sustain wide participation by rewarding those who participate.

Growing disillusionment among new members of organizations has been traced to inadequacies in approaches to organizational entry. Current directions of research on organizational entry and their limitations are described, and a new perspective is proposed. The new perspective identifies key features of newcomers' entry experiences, including surprise, contrast, and change, and describes the sense-making processes by which individuals cope with their entry experiences. Implications for research and practice on organizational entry are drawn.

Contemporary conceptualizations of organizational effectiveness are selectively reviewed. Dominant goal-based models are found deficient in providing evaluative criteria that apply to the organization as a whole, that permit comparison across organizations, and that point to an appropriate direction for organizational change. It is argued that Barnardian participant-satisfaction model, augmented by a principle of social justice, provides a more useful framework for assessing organizational value.

A change in technology from batch to mass production in a hospital dietary department is examined using a time-series analysis of structured interview data. Closeness to the change, as rated by management, is used as a moderator variable, with the prediction that the technological change would affect the work and social structure, satisfaction, and absenteeism of the close group, but not of the comparison group. As expected, the comparison group is virtually unaffected, while several characteristics of the work change in the close group. Contrary to expectations, social structure, satisfaction, and absenteeism of the close group are not affected. These findings are contrasted with previous research and theory. The usefulness of the time-series design is demonstrated.

A study of 315 hospitals with matrix management programs was used to test several hypotheses concerning matrix management advanced by earlier theorists. The study verifies that matrix management involves several distinctive elements that can be scaled to form increasingly complex types of lateral coordinative devices. The scalability of these elements is evident only cross-sectionally. The results show that matrix complexity is not an outcome of program age, nor does matrix complexity at the time of implementation appear to influence program survival. Matrix complexity, finally, is not determined by the organization's task diversity and uncertainty. The results suggest several modifications in prevailing theories of matrix organization.

This study examined the organizational context in which medical societies composed of women physicians were formed in the last decade of the nineteenth century in America. The inquiry was centered on the relationship between the number of existing organizations and the formation of a particular category of association. Two explanations for a relationship between the number of organizations and the establishment of women's medical societies were investigated: (1) the opportunities existing organizations allow for individuals to acquire skills they can use to start other organizations; and (2) the importance of social networks built within existing organizations. The results showed more medical societies in the cities where women's medical societies emerged than in a matched set of cities. The results would seem to imply that it is the presence of organizations similar to the focal one that is related to the formation of a particular kind of organization not the overall level of organizational activity.

This study investigates the relationships between overall job satisfaction and the five task dimensions of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback-from-job for employees at different stages of their careers, as measured by their length of employment on their current jobs, as well as in their current organizations. Basically, the analysis shows that the strength of the relationships between job satisfaction and each of the task dimensions depends on both the job longevity and organizational longevity of the sampled individuals. For employees new to an organization, for example, only task significance is related positively to job satisfaction, while autonomy has a strongly negative correlation. The study presents other significant correlational differences and discusses the implications of its findings for task design, as well as for managing new employees. Approximately 3500 respondents from four different governments--two metropolitan, one county, and one state--participated in the collection of survey data.

This study of 247 medical group practices explores the structural characteristics of these emerging organizational forms. As size and complexity of services increase, group practices tend to increase the number of hierarchical levels of authority and become more formal and bureaucratic. Complexity of services was found to have more influence on the formation of subdivisions, while size was more influential in terms of levels of administration. Large group practices, and especially large multispecialty groups, appear to engage in a highly organized corporate style of medical practice. In these organizations, important professional decisions are shifted from the clinician to the administrator.

Overton, Schneck, and Hazlett's (1977) measurement of nursing subunit technology was replicated using 157 subunits of 9 types located in 24 hospitals in Alberta. A 21-item questionnaire was given to nurses, and the answers were subjected to factor analyses. Results indicated three dimensions of technology: instability, uncertainty, and variability. Because of the similarity of these variables to those in the Overton, Schneck, and Hazlett study, the results suggested a high degree of construct validity for the measure. The technological dimensions also differentiated among the types of subunits in the same pattern as in the original study. A relatively quick method of obtaining measures of instability, uncertainty, and variability by using composite scores was tested and found reliable.

This study distinguishes two sources of critical contingencies for organizations: environment and strategy. In turn, it explores how coping with each type of contingency is related to power within top management teams. Executives had high power if, by virtue either of their functional area of scanning behavior, they coped with the dominant requirement imposed by their industry's environment. Power patterns within each industry were further affected by the extent to which executives coped with the contingencies posed by their organizations' particular strategies. A temporal critical contingencies model of power is proposed.

Marie-Laure Djelic explores the convergent and divergent trends in the evolution of business systems and organization in Western Europe in the post-war period. She examines in particular the influence of a large-scale, cross-national transfer of the American corporate model, including the Marshall Plan and the involvement of American business in European reconstruction. She focuses on France, West Germany, and Italy, looking in turn at the physical, ownership, organizational, and governance structure of each after 1945. Her core argument is that the model had varying degrees of success in each of those three countries and, in some areas, encountered significant resistance. The book underscores the socially constructed and historically contingent nature of structural arrangements shaping conditions of industrial production in capitalist countries today. National systems of industrial production are not given and necessary; they are made and shaped through time by actors with particular interests, often in direct confrontation with other groups. This shaping is taking place within particular institutional contexts, in peculiar political and geopolitical conditions. Foreign actors, in geopolitical power positions, can, it is argued, play a particularly significant role in such processes.

We used the techniques of event-history analysis to examine empirically the duration of dyadic interorganizational attachments through a study of auditor-client relationships. These attachments were found to have positive duration dependence. In the early stages of these attachments the rate at which these interorganizational relationships ended increased with time. After this early "honeymoon" period, the rate at which relationships ended decreased with time, consistent with notions that assets specific to the relationship develop over time. Furthermore, we found that relationships in which the task was more complex tended to be of longer duration.

To better understand the factors that support or inhibit internally-focused change, we report the results of an inductive study of one firm's attempt to improve two of its core business processes. Our data suggest that the critical determinants of success in efforts to learn and improve are the interactions between managers' attributions regarding the cause of poor organizational performance and the physical structure of the workplace, particularly delays between investing in improvement and recognizing the rewards. Building on this observation, we propose a dynamic model capturing the mutual evolution of those attributions, managers' and workers' actions, and the production technology. We use the model to show how managers' beliefs about those that work for them, workers' beliefs about those who manage them, and the physical structure of the environment can coevolve to yield an organization characterized by conflict, mistrust, and control structures that prevent useful change of any typ

Although it might be considered the domain of many research areas, self-employment has not been studied vigorously. We draw upon the ideas of related areas to develop a sound design for the study of self-employment. Using retrospective career life-history data from West Germany, we model the process by which individuals move into and out of episodes of self-employment. Specifically, we examine: (1) the process of entry into self-employment at various stages of the career; and (2) the career differences between the self-employed and the conventionally employed. In general terms, the findings show that those factors which account for one stage of the self-employment experience do not necessarily account for others. More substantively, our findings point to the strong effects of social structural variables, especially those related to the family, as well as to the effects of previous self-employment experience.

Strategy at the Leading Edge features short reports on conferences, new research and experiments by academics, organizations and consultancies for all those involved in strategy and strategic management. Contributions (two hard copies and a disk) should be sent to Martin Whitehill, City University Business School, Frobisher Crescent, Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8HB E-mail: m.whitehill@city.ac.uk.

This book explains how the self regulatory system for U.S. securities firms works with three tiers of supervision. Overseeing the whole system is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which directly supervises the self-regulatory organizations such as the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Securities Dealers. In turn, these self-regulatory organizations oversee the broker-dealers who conduct the daily business of buying and selling securities. The system relies heavily on the firms' internal supervisory systems to prevent violations of securities laws, since they are in the best position to track their own internal activities. Firms may be fined, or subject to even more stringent penalties, if their supervisory systems fail. This book is an in-depth examination of how this regulatory system works, the types of regulatory problems with which broker-dealer firms must deal, why some firms have more problems than others, and what the experience with the system suggests about ways of improving self regulatory systems generally.

This book traces the evolution of the large industrial corporation in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom from the 1950s to the 1990s. It combines long-run trends with illustrative case studies of leading companies and their managers to present a rich and complex picture of corporate change. In particular, the authors highlight the paradox of increasingly similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across advanced industrial nations with continuing marked differences in corporate ownership, control, and managerial elites. Despite strong institutional contrasts between the leading European economies, and regardless of the decline of the American model of management, big business in Europe has continued to follow a strategic and structural model pioneered in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century and encapsulated long ago in Alfred Chandler's (1962) Strategy and Structure. This finding of similar patterns of corporate strategy and structure across Europe challenges recent relativist perspectives on organizations found in postmodern, culturalist, and institutionalist social science. Nevertheless, it does not endorse standard universalist accounts of convergence either. The book distinguishes between Chandlerism, with its original ideology of universalism, and the broader Chandlerian perspective, an enduring but evolving core of good sense about the corporation in certain kinds of advanced economies. Thus the authors show how the surprising success of conglomerate diversification and the increasing adoption of more 'networked' multidivisional structure simply extend the core principles of the Chandlerian perspective. They argue that the extent to which Chandlerian principles have held good across the advanced economies of Western Europe through the whole post-war period makes them a model for the kind of adaptive and bounded social scientific prescription appropriate to a changing and varied world. The book contributes to contemporary academic debates on relativism and universalism by proposing a middle-way based on a boundedly-generalizing social science. For policy-makers, it suggests the possibility of steady economic convergence independent of radical and external pressure and sensitive to other aspects of national social structures. For business decision-makers, it offers a more positive model of diversification, especially conglomerate diversification, as well as a new networked organization appropriate to the demands of today's knowledge economy.

Getting organizations going is one thing. Stopping them is another. This book examines how and why organizations become trapped in disastrous decisions. The focal point is Project Taurus, an IT venture commissioned by the London Stock Exchange and supported by numerous City Institutions. Taurus was intended to transform London's antiquated manual share settlement procedures into a state of the art electronic system that would be the envy of the world. The project collapsed after three year's intensive work and investments totalling almost L500 million. This book is an in depth study of escalation in decision making. The author has interviewed a number of people who played a key role and presents a most readable account of what actually happened. At the same time she sets the case in the broader literature of decision making. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780198289531/toc.html

Human dignity, the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to enjoy the respect of others, is necessary for a fully realized life. Working with dignity is a fundamental part of achieving a life well-lived, yet the workplace often poses challenging obstacles because of mismanagement or managerial abuse. Defending dignity and realizing self-respect through work are key to workers’ well-being; insuring the dignity of employees is equally important for organizations as they attempt to make effective use of their human capital. In this book Randy Hodson, a sociologist of work and organizational behavior, applies ethnographic and statistical approaches to this topic, offering both a richly detailed, inside look at real examples of dignity in action, and a broader analysis of the pivotal role of dignity at work.

Transforming Management in Central and Eastern Europe analyses changes in enterprises in seven European countries since 1989 - Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia. Economic trends have differed vastly between these countries, but nevertheless, there are common objectives, common problems, and significant similarities in developments. This book shows the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Socialist and the post-Socialist periods. It argues that Central and Eastern European countries are developing a distinctive, hybrid form of post-Socialist economic system, largely dominated by enterprise managers in alliance with state administrationsDSpoliticized managerial capitalism. Privatization has not transformed management practices, competition has.