Charles C. Snow

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Management and Organization

A collaborative community is an organizational form that is increasingly being used in knowledge-intensive industries to accelerate innovation via collaboration. This study examines key design issues faced by a bilateral broker collaborative community at the point of its formation: (1) whether a critical mass of members is required for community su...

Abstract Articles published in the Journal of Organization Design (JOD) from its inception in 2012 until mid-2018 are reviewed and summarized according to their type: research, point of view, translational, case study, research primer, and Organization Zoo. Using multiple assessment criteria, JOD’s contributions to the field of organization design...

Increasingly, organizations are assessing their opportunities, developing and delivering products and services, and interacting with customers and other stakeholders digitally. Mobile computing, social media, and big data are the drivers of the future workplace, and these and other digitally based technologies are having large economic and social i...

Despite a voluminous literature, business model research continues to be plagued with problems. Those problems hinder theory development and make it difficult for managers to use research findings in their decision-making. In our article, we seek to make three contributions. First, we clarify the theoretical foundations of the business model concep...

Customer co-creation—the active involvement of customers in a firm’s new product development (NPD) processes—has been shown to improve product quality, reduce the risk of a product failing (Shah 2006; Carbonell, Rodriguez-Escudero and Pujari 2009), and, ultimately, enable firms to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (Prahalad and Ramaswamy...

Initiatives to redesign cities so that they are smarter and more sustainable are increasing worldwide. A smart city can be understood as a community in which citizens, business firms, knowledge institutions, and municipal agencies collaborate with one another to achieve systems integration and efficiency, citizen engagement, and a continually impro...

Network theory and analysis have played a prominent role in the field of organization science for more than six decades. Previous articles of the organizational networks literature have discussed the attributes, antecedents, and consequences of networks. Our article focuses on the organizational functions of networks. Specifically, we discuss how n...

The purpose of this article is to describe how organizations have evolved across three periods of modern economic history. These periods can be called the age of competition, age of cooperation, and age of collaboration. The major organizational forms that appeared in each of the three eras, including their capabilities and limitations, are discuss...

The Silences of the Archives, the Reknown of the Story. The Martin Guerre affair has been told many times since Jean de Coras and Guillaume Lesueur published their stories in 1561. It is in many ways a perfect intrigue with uncanny resemblance, persuasive deception and a surprizing end when the two Martin stood face to face, memory to memory, befor...

By 2017, higher education is expected to be a $2 trillion industry worldwide. Within this huge economic engine, the boards of trustees that provide governance to universities and colleges face a complex challenge in that they must serve a variety of stakeholders. Without effective governance, an academic institution's performance is likely to suffe...

Jay R. Galbraith passed away on April 8, 2014. Jay was a leading authority on organization design, a founding member of the Organizational Design Community, and a valued contributor to the Journal of Organization Design. We invited Jay’s colleagues from around the world to offer their comments on his work. The specific question we asked was: What i...

The article presents a response to comments made by R. Delbridge and P. C. Fiss in an earlier issue concerning a decline in typological theories in the publication. The authors agree that theorizing driven by typology would benefit the organization sciences, consider subject areas where they believe new typologies would be welcome, and offer their...

The essence of strategic human resource management (SHRM) is a systemic view of the management of a firm's human resources, as well as an orientation toward the future. The management of human resources must be linked to the organization's total management system, and human resource professionals must work to ensure that the organization anticipate...

Firms increasingly face competitive pressures related to rapid and continuous adaptation to a complex, dynamic, and highly interconnected global environment. Pressing challenges include keeping pace with shorter product life cycles, incorporating multiple technologies into the design of new products, cocreating products and services with customers...

Both small- and medium-size entrepreneurial firms face liabilities such as resource scarcity and scale diseconomies, making it difficult for them to innovate on a continuous basis. In response, experimentation with new ways of organizing for innovation has increased. One successful result is an organizational model called the collaborative communit...

Faced with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change and the restructuring of markets, many firms have been questioning the appropriateness of their own organizational structure and effectiveness. Consequently, we have witnessed much organizational experimentation and the development of new forms of organizing over the last decade. Firms a...

The increased importance of knowledge creation and use to firms' global competitiveness has spawned considerable experimentation with organizational designs for product development and commercialization over the last three decades. This paper discusses innovation-related organizational design developments during this period, showing how firms have...

Purpose – Customer value has recently become a primary focus among many strategy researchers and practitioners as an essential element of a firm's competitive strategy. Many firms are engaged in some form of customer value analysis (CVA), which involves a structural analysis of the antecedent factors of perceived value (i.e. perceived quality and p...

The new multifaceted collaborative organizational forms result in new challenges because of increasing collaboration, innovation and mutual interdependence. Apart from joint purpose and values, coordination is likely, from the point of view of human resource management (HRM), to be an important means to ensure that the involved actors are achieving...

The purpose of our chapter is to analyze Blade.org, a community of firms focused on the development and adoption of open blade server platforms (an innovative computer server technology). Founded in early 2006, Blade.org is a successful community of more than 100 member firms which engage in various forms of collaboration to develop innovative prod...

E very generation of managers experiments with new business mod-els. New business models succeed or fail not only because of their own strengths and limitations, but also because of the amount of fit they enjoy with the management philosophies and organizational processes available to support them. Today, much of the ongoing experimenta-tion with b...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework of a collaborative community of firms and to analyse Blade.org as an example. As a collaborative community, Blade.org focuses on the development and adoption of open blade server platforms (a computer server technology) through the participation of more than 100 member firms. We asser...

Organization design (OD) is a key feature of management theory and practice. It addresses the challenges of constructing and maintaining effective organizations. Essential to its application is the assumption that it can improve organizations and their performance. Faced with the ever-accelerating pace of technological change and the restructuring...

A new form of organizing is emerging in the world of international business (IB) called the multi-firm collaborative network (Miles et al., 2005). Its core competence is the ability to collaborate among a group of firms in both the creation and application of knowledge. For firms that have, or can develop, the ability to collaborate across organiza...

The design of organizations has been an ongoing concern of management theory and practice over the past several decades. Over this time, there has been little change in the fundamental theory, principles and concepts of Organization Design (OD). Recently organizational life has changed dramatically with the advent of: new communication systems, ada...

Strategic entrepreneurship refers to firms' pursuit of superior performance via simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking activities. Both small and large firms face impediments while pursuing strategic entrepreneurship. While small firms' opportunity-seeking skills may be strong, their limited knowledge stocks and lack of market power...

This article discusses the contributions that field methods have made to the theory-development process in strategic management. Field studies drawn from the literature are classified according to their research goal (description, explanation, or prediction) and according to whether they built or tested theory. the overall conclusion is that field...

The supply chain is the central organizing unit in today's global industries. We describe how supply chains have evolved over the last three decades, arguing that their organizational history can be divided into three periods. In the first period, the primary focus was on how to make operations throughout the supply chain more efficient. In the sec...

The overall objective of this chapter is to reinvigorate interest in the configurational approach to organization design. Configurational analysis developed in promising ways in the 1970s and 1980s and then stalled. We believe, however, that the configurational approach can be improved such that it will serve the interests of scholars, managers, an...

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.– Yogi Berra

Organization Design: The Evolving State-of-the-Art outlines the larger role that organizational design is increasingly playing in management theory and practice. The book's chapters review the main theoretical perspectives on organization design, identify important theoretical and practical issues currently facing the field, and suggest ways for va...

In the effort to improve a firm's profitability, managers continuously make decisions about whether to launch new strategic initiatives as well as how to respond to other firms' moves. Managers are more likely to make effective decisions if they fully understand the firm's competitive environment. We examine four key questions that managers regular...

This study investigates how firms in high or low information asymmetry environments obtain performance benefits from their capabilities. Using data obtained from a sample of 234 service firms, the results indicate that service firms in low information asymmetry environments obtain direct performance benefits from the mere possession of capabilities...

Raymond E. Miles is professor emeritus and former dean of the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations from Stanford. He has published five books and over fifty articles based on his research on leadership and managerial philosophies, organizatio...

This study examines the role of entrepreneurship in building cultural competitiveness in or-ganizations. Cultural competitiveness is defined as the degree to which organizations are predisposed to detect and fill gaps between what the market desires and what is currently of-fered. It is examined in this study as the collective result of interaction...

To assess a firm's strategic position, its managers must collect and interpret data regarding the firm itself, its competitors, its stakeholders, and the industry. Having implement a strategy based on that information, the managers further must measure that strategy's effect. The “competitive-edge model” presented in this article provides a series...

This paper analyzes the impact of the Converging Economy on the role and function of human resource management (HRM) practice and research. The forces driving convergence - information technology, globalization, and the importance of human assets - are discussed and then related to both HRM practice and research. We identify and discuss nine cuttin...

According to William E. Coyne, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at 3M, “Most modern companies now recognise that the best way to increase corporate earnings is through top-line growth, and the best route to top-line growth is through innovation”. The ability to innovate, however, comes from a skill that is underdeveloped in most c...

Each major era in business history has featured a particular form of organization. Early hierarchical, vertically integrated organizations have largely given way to network organizations that link the assets and know-how of numerous upstream and downstream industry partners. A number of leading companies today are experimenting with a new way of or...

Sumario: The best way to increase corporate earnings is through top-line growth, and the best route to it, is innovation. The hability to innovate comes from collaboration, what is essentially knowledge creation and utilisation. Understanding this long-linked process will be profitable for companies in the twenty-first century global economy

As the challenges of managing across borders become increasingly complex, companies are exploring innovative ways to organize and manage people. Many are turning to the use of transnational teams composed of individuals from multiple nationalities working on tasks that span multiple countries. This article reports the findings from a study of human...

International companies are rapidly increasing their use of multinational groups (MNGs), sometimes with great success and sometimes severe frustration. The purpose of this paper is to establish a conceptual understanding of the implications of multinational composition for group functioning. Moving across units of analysis, we focus first on the in...

Executive Overview Each major era in business history has featured a particular form of organization. Early hierarchical, vertically integrated organizations have largely given way to network organizations that link the assets and know-how of numerous upstream and downstream industry partners. A number of leading companies today are experimenting w...

To conclude this commentary, it may be worthwhile to clearly state the research direction that the Achrol article has launched. First, the article begins by identifying the forces that are causing network forms of organizing to spread. If network organizations continue to proliferate, as they are likely to do, then marketing as both a function and...

The characteristics and attributes that typify a managerial career are shifting along with developments in organization structure. The competencies needed by a successful manager in today's organizations may be inadequate in the emerging organizational forms of the 21st century. Based on an analysis of organizational trends, as well as on interview...

What is a firm? Why do firms exist? How is production and administration best co-ordinated? What are the reasons for vertical integration? And disintegration? Is there a conflict between establishing and developing long-term relationships on the one hand, and the operation of free market competition on the other? Is there a choice between markets a...

The authors present a model of the learning process in a regional network organization. The model is based on a six-year study of Nordvest Forum, perhaps the only multifirm network in the world to have been purposefully formed to help its member companies learn how to develop and apply knowledge about management and organizational change. The netwo...

The authors report on their two-year study of successful transnational teams, in which they examined how such teams are designed and managed to help their firms pursue global business strategies. Based on this study, they present a comprehensive model of team effectiveness that includes the key characteristics differentiating a transnational team f...

This study advances a nascent perspective in the strategic management literature: a focus on the beneficial effects of competition among firms in an industry. Such a perspective supplements the traditional view of competition as firm rivalry. The overall purpose of the study is to provide a theoretical foundation for the study of the mutual gains a...

It's called a ''network organization''-a lean, highly flexible, ''disaggregated' company that operates through a cluster of down-sized, focused business units. Market mechanisms, rather than layers of mid-level decision makers, drive strategy, and senior managers stand ready to outsource any function that does not meet competitive tests. This form...

This article forecasts the problems that the emerging network form of organization faces as the result of managerial actions which inadvertently damage the operating capabilities of network organization. It examines the managerial mistakes that have plagued and continue to plague earlier functional, divisional, and matrix forms of organization, act...

This study examines the stock market's reaction to public announcements of corporate strategic investment decisions. It includes a wide variety of strategic decisions: formation of joint ventures, research and development projects, major capital expenditures, and diversification into new products and/or markets. Three alternative hypotheses concern...

This report was originally commissioned in 1988 by the Executive Committee of the Business Policy and Planning Division of the Academy of Management. At that time, the Executive Committee, concerned about a number of issues connected with doctoral education, appointed The Committee on the Future of Doctoral Education to study these issues. There ha...

Following a decade of declining productivity and failed organizations, many U.S. companies in the eighties have been forced to rethink their competitive approaches. This search is producing a new organizational form—a unique combination of strategy, structure, and management processes that the authors refer to as the "dynamic network." This new for...

The experiences of 3 electronics companies with different corporate strategies (defending, prospecting, and analyzing) illustrate how the amount of emphasis on particular human resources functions must be dictated by the organization's basic strategy. These functions include recruitment, selection, and placement; staff planning; training and develo...

What determines organizational success or failure—culture? structural characteristics? leadership style? This article argues that success is primarily a product of achieving tight fit (consistency) among strategy, structure and management processes. "Hall of Fame" companies tend to achieve tight fit early, while misfits (e.g., Chrysler in the 1970s...

This paper relates top-management agreement on an organization's strengths and weaknesses with organizational performance. The findings are interesting and provocative, for the data show that agreement among managers is positively related to economic performance, even when controlling for other variables potentially related to organizational perfor...

This article discusses the processes and payoffs of large-system or programmatic action research. Experiences gained from a long-term, action-research program in a large health-maintenance organization indicate that current OD theory and practice do not address satisfactorily major issues associated with large-system development. Viewed in retrospe...

In this article we address the major theoretical and methodological problems encountered in attempts to arrive at valid and reliable measures of organizational strategy. Our discussion is based on a series of empirical studies of the strategic behaviors of nearly 200 organizations in ten industries. In these studies, four different approaches for m...

This study examines relationships among strategy, distinctive competence, and organizational performance. The analysis focuses on the perceptions of top managers in four industries (plastics, semiconductors, automotives, and air transportation). Findings indicate that these managers perceive four strategy types, Defender, Prospector, Analyzer, and...

Following a widespread and growing practice in industrial organizations, some hospitals provide management development programs to improve the performance of managers on their present assignments and to prepare them for more challenging responsibilities in the future. However, even though technical training programs have existed for many years in m...

“Books and articles come and go, endlessly. But a few do stick, and this book is such a one. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process broke fresh ground in the understanding of strategy at a time when thinking about strategy was still in its early days, and it has not been displaced since.” —David J. Hickson, Emeritus Professor of Inte...

Organizational adaptation is a topic that has received only limited and fragmented theoretical treatment. Any attempt to examine organizational adaptation is difficult, since the process is highly complex and changeable. The proposed theoretical framework deals with alternative ways in which organizations define their product-market domains (strate...

Organizational adaptation is a topic that has received only limited and fragmented theoretical treatment. Any attempt to examine organizational adaptation is difficult, since the process is highly complex and changeable. The proposed theoretical framework deals with alternative ways in which organizations define their product-market domains (strate...

In a recent study, Mintzberg, Raisinghani, and Theoret (1976) found that the process by which strategic decisions are made in organizations has an underlying structure. However, it is our belief that the outcome of a particular strategic decision cannot be predicted using only the variables subsumed in the Mintzberg, et al. model. In order to under...

In this article the author provides comments on research that has examined the effectiveness of several different approaches to teaching business policy. The author discusses four educational formats that have been studied and notes the weaknesses associated with each study. The formats examined make use of case studies, simulation methods, in-clas...

This study was designed to investigate the relationship between managerial perceptions of, and organizational responses to, a generally similar organizational environment. The top managers of four firms in the college textbook publishing industry were interviewed about the major adaptations which had occurred in their organizations over a three-yea...