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This book offers a new perspective on the professional world of higher education. Using social practice theory, it presents a practice sensibility rooted in concepts which illuminate teaching and learning contexts. The book takes the reader through the social processes occurring within higher education institutions which shape contexts and influence the direction of change; for leaders and managers, educational developers, change agents, and academics, this sensibility will help to identify the successful paths to changes for enhancement and the patterns of policy implementation likely to occur as teaching and learning is enhanced. For researchers of higher education, the practice sensibility offers new possibilities for meaningful research into teaching and learning issues. Teaching and learning regimes are a key focus of the book. As a family of practices performed by a workgroup in higher education over extended periods, they comprise a number of ‘moments’—characteristics derived from structural foundations which shape the workgroup’s practices and frameworks of meaning. These moments condition how teaching and learning is fundamentally understood, what its aims are thought to be, what is considered ‘normal’ practice, how individuals see themselves and others, and how power operates within the workgroup. The material context is significant in this, as are the backstories, personal histories, and institutional sagas. This book develops a completely new approach to Trowler’s concept of teaching and learning regimes. Using both his research and that of others in the field, it presents a more nuanced, fully developed, and sophisticated version of the concept which has great traction for empirical research, the management of change, and the enhancement of the student experience and learning outcomes.

This book demonstrates the importance of the role of knowledge in firms and economies. The authors clarify the theoretical debates on the production and use of knowledge in organizations, and examine the challenges that face those managing knowledge at different levels of the organization. They develop the notion of ‘community’ within the context of the firm and explore the ways in which these communities learn and produce new knowledge, positing from this emphasis a challenging model of distributed governance of knowledge within and beyond firms. Using insights from academic disciplines including economics, science and technology studies, cognitive sciences, economic geography, and management science, the authors use analytical argument and empirical cases to develop a new theorization of knowledge formation and management, and in turn a new conception of the firm.

This book presents the outcomes of the research project on “The New Silk Road: Implications for higher education and research cooperation between China and Europe.” It addresses questions regarding how academic mobility and cooperation is taking shape along the New Silk Road and what difference it will make in the global higher education landscape. It presents a rich collection of contributions by scholars from Europe, China, the USA, Russia, and Australia, combining perspectives from anthropology, computer sciences, economics, education, history, law, political science, philosophy, science and technology studies, sinology, and sociology. Introductory chapters present the global context for the NSR, the development of Chinese universities along international models, and the history and outcomes of EU–China cooperation. The flows and patterns in academic cooperation along the New Silk Road as they shape and have been shaped by China’s universities are explored in more detail in the following chapters. The conditions for Sino-foreign cooperation are discussed next, with an analysis of regulatory frameworks for cooperation, recognition, data, and privacy. Comparative work follows on the cultural traditions and academic values, similarities and differences between Sinic and Anglo-American political and educational cultures, and their implications for the governance and mission of higher education, the role of critical scholarship, and the state and standing of the humanities in China. The book concludes with contributions focusing on the “Idea of a University”; the values underpinning its mission, shape, and purpose, reflecting on the implications of China’s rapid higher education development for the geo-politics of higher education itself.

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level — the terascale — at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view. The kind of Big Science being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of Big Science by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of ‘interlaced’ knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of Big Science; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting. This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust — and where Big Science can head next.

It has long been an interest of researchers in economics, sociology, organization studies, and economic geography to understand how firms innovate. Most recently, this interest has begun to examine the micro-processes of work and organization that sustain social creativity, emphasizing the learning and knowing through action when social actors and technologies come together in ‘communities of practice’; everyday interactions of common purpose and mutual obligation. These communities are said to spark both incremental and radical innovation. This book examines the concept of communities of practice and its applications in different spatial, organizational, and creative settings. Chapters examine the development of the concept, the link between situated practice and different types of creative outcome, the interface between spatial and relational proximity, and the organizational demands of learning and knowing through communities of practice. More widely, the chapters examine the compatibility between markets, knowledge capitalism, and community; seemingly in conflict with each other, but discursively not.

This book highlights the importance of time and timing in economic and social development. ‘Compressed development’ consists of two key features and their interaction: the tendency for development processes to unfold more rapidly (compression) and the institution-shaping influences of major periods of change and growth, especially when countries become integrated into the global economy (era). Using an interdisciplinary conceptual framework of state–market and organization–technology co-evolution, the authors contrast the experiences of ‘early’ and ‘late’ developers such as the United Kingdom and Japan, with countries–most notably China–which have become more deeply integrated with the global economy since the 1990s. Compressed developers experience ‘thin industrialization’, layered types of employment, and ‘double burdens’ or challenges in social development. National development strategies must accommodate global value chains and powerful international actors on the one hand, and decentralization on the other. To cope, and thrive, states must remain developmental, whilst being increasingly engaged and adaptive in multiple levels of governance. Compressed Development explores the historical and contemporary features of economic and social development at the intersection of development studies and studies of globalization. By bringing a new perspective on the ‘middle-income trap’, as well as the emerging digital economy, and the state–market and geopolitical tensions that are currently upending conventional wisdoms, the book offers timely insights that will be useful, not only for students of development, but for policymakers, business, and labour organization seeking to navigate the rushing currents of contemporary capitalism.

This book brings together recent, multidisciplinary, cutting edge research on the globalization of markets for contemporary art. Focusing on different regions including China, Russia, India, and Japan, the chapters in this book study the extent to which art markets have indeed become global. On the one hand, it focuses on organizations such as the art fairs, Internet platforms, and auction houses which have enabled global flows of contemporary art. It shows how art from places such as the Middle East has been transformed into a new asset class. On the other hand, the chapters highlight the multiple barriers which globalization has encountered in art markets. Although markets for contemporary art have indeed emerged across the globe, cross-border flows of works of art have remained comparatively insignificant. The reasons behind these barriers are explored. They include differences in taste across the globe, trade barriers in countries like India and Brazil, and vested interests of actors in local art worlds like Japan. This book recognizes the coexistence of various ecologies of contemporary art exchange and sketches the presence of resilient local networks of actors and organizations within art markets. Some chapters moreover argue that Europe and the United States continue to dominate the global market, especially when considering rankings of success and participation in the most prestigious commercial events such as Art Basel.

The cross-cultural management literature is still dominated by the quantitative approach to cultures which made the research field popular in the early 1980’s. While the hegemony of this approach was being consolidated, a French research group, Gestion & Société, led by Philippe d’Iribarne, was conducting alternative research. Over the past thirty years, the team has carried out investigations in over fifty countries, collecting data from a large sample of companies concerned with making the most of the cultures with which they were dealing. This book provides an overview of the lessons learnt from thirty years of empirical research and of the refinements of a new theoretical approach to national cultures which challenges the mainstream ones. It introduces an interpretative approach to culture considered as a filter through which people understand reality and give it meaning. Throughout the world, employees confer different meanings on the daily situations arising from companies’ operations such as being subject to the authority of a manager, responding to requests from a client, or having one’s work monitored. All interactions within organizational contexts are underpinned by social relations which make sense in different cultural universes of meaning. Drawing upon this interpretative perspective, the book covers the main management issues: leadership, procedures implementation and control, decision-making, industrial relations, customer relations, ethics and corporate social responsibility, interpersonal and corporate communication, multicultural teams, and international transfers of management practices. Finally, the book provides methodological guidelines to enable researchers and practitioners to engage in this alternative approach.

Companies across all industries are engaging in digital transformation to harness the power of advanced information technologies. Building on interviews and diverse case studies, this book describes how data and algorithms are reshaping management practices, organizational structures, corporate culture, and work roles. The book develops a broad framework for understanding digitalization not as a technological change, but as a new normative mindset, ‘the data imperative’. New managerial ideals compel companies to pursue digital omniscience and omnipotence—the abilities to represent and understand the world through real-time data flows and to control customer experiences, physical equipment, and workers with software. The efforts to complement and replace human expertise with data and smart algorithms are associated with shifts in strategic priorities, adoption of powerful modular architectures, new organizational structures, and introduction of artificial intelligence into diverse work roles. Surveying the changes in management and the workplace, this book offers an integrative and balanced account of the ongoing changes. It elaborates how artificial intelligence is changing work at all levels of the hierarchy and envisions how the emerging artificially intelligent organization will change how professionals work. The frameworks and ideas espoused in this book will help the reader understand the ongoing changes in the workplace that affect everyone from executives and professionals to frontline workers.

Innovations create both opportunities and dilemmas. Innovations provide new and purportedly better opportunities, but—because of their newness—they are often more uncertain and potentially worse than existing options. There are new drugs, new energy sources, new foods, new manufacturing technologies, new toys and new pedagogical methods, new weapon systems, new home appliances, and many other discoveries and inventions. To use or not to use a new and promising but unfamiliar and hence uncertain innovation? That dilemma faces just about everybody. Furthermore, the paradigm of the innovation dilemma characterizes many situations even when a new technology is not actually involved. The dilemma arises from new attitudes, like individual responsibility for the global environment, or new social conceptions, like global allegiance and self-identity transcending all nation-states. These dilemmas have far-reaching implications for individuals, organizations, and society at large as they make decisions in the age of innovation. The uncritical belief in outcome optimization—“more is better, so most is best”—pervades decision-making in all domains, but this is often irresponsible when facing the uncertainties of innovation. There is a great need for practical conceptual tools for understanding and managing the dilemmas of innovation. This book offers a new direction for a wide audience. It discusses examples from many fields, including e-reading, online learning, bipolar disorder and pregnancy, disruptive technology in industry, stock markets, agricultural productivity and world hunger, military hardware, military intelligence, biological conservation, and more.

This book shows how firms can generate and nurture ideas. Weaving together lessons from such international leaders as Siemens, Unilever, Skandia, and Sony, along with their own first-hand consulting experiences, the authors introduce knowledge enabling — the overall set of organizational activities that promote knowledge creation — and demonstrate its power to transform an organization's knowledge into value-creating actions. They describe the five key “knowledge enablers” and outline what it takes to instill a knowledge vision, manage conversations, mobilize knowledge activists, create the right context for knowledge creation, and globalize local knowledge. The authors stress that knowledge creation must be more than the exclusive purview of one individual — or designated “knowledge” officer. Indeed, it demands new roles and responsibilities for everyone in the organization — from the elite in the executive suite to the frontline workers on the shop floor. Whether an activist, a caring expert, or a corporate epistemologist who focuses on the theory of knowledge itself, everyone in an organization has a vital role to play in making “care” an integral part of the everyday experience; in supporting, nurturing, and encouraging microcommunities of innovation and fun; and in creating a shared space where knowledge is created, exchanged, and used for sustained, competitive advantage. This book puts practical tools into the hands of managers and executives who are struggling to unleash the power of knowledge in their organization.

This book examines the initial commercial uses of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering is one of the most modern, controversial and dynamic of the science-based technologies. It is not an object, but a set of techniques or way of doing things. The development of these technologies from the 1970s onwards illustrates the changing relationships between universities and firms, and between basic science and research oriented towards commercial uses. The main focus of the book is on two firms — DS Genentech in the United States and Kabi in Sweden — and their activities and ‘knowledge-seeking’ behaviour in the development of human growth hormone and how those ran in parallel with university science. This book was awarded the Schumpeter Society book prize in 1996. This paperback edition includes a new introduction in which the author reflects upon the most recent developments in biotechnology. The book will interest those who wish to understand the complexities of innovation processes in the ‘knowledge society’, for example, management and organisation researchers, economists, policy advisors, and managers and strategists responsible for turning knowledge into product and profit.

Explaining the Future addresses the questions “will this new technology solve the problem that its inventors claim it will,” “will it succeed for any application at all,” “can we narrow down the options before we spend a lot of money on development,” and “how do we persuade colleagues, investors, clients, or readers of our technical reasoning?” Whether the person answering these questions is a researcher, a consultant, a venture capitalist, or a CTO, they will need to be able to answer them clearly and systematically. Most learn these skills only through years of experience. However, by making them explicit, this book makes the learning process more efficient and speeds its readers toward higher-level careers. First, it will provide the tools to think through matching new (and old) technologies, materials, and processes with applications: it covers the questions to ask, the resources needed to answer them, and who deserves trust. Then, it discusses analyzing the information that has been gathered in a systematic way and dealing with uncertainty. Next, there are chapters on communication, including tailoring documents to a specific audience, making a persuasive and structured technical argument, and writing an explanation that is credible and easy to follow. Finally, the book includes a case study: a real worked example that goes from an idea through the twists and turns of the research and analysis process to a final report.

Humankind has always lived in a knowledge society. Yet, although we have been discussing the problem of valid knowledge since Plato and probably before, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that such knowledge came to be seen as an economic resource in its own right rather than as a support for the exploitation of other, more physical economic resources such as land, labour power, energy, etc. In recent years, a new specialization, knowledge management, has evolved to address some of the issues associated with the production and distribution of knowledge. It builds on the idea that organizations do not make good use of their knowledge resources and waste much of these. Knowledge management, however, still lacks a founding theory focused on the nature of knowledge and knowledge flows. The problem is that we cannot have a credible theory of how to manage knowledge in the firm without first developing a knowledge-based theory of the firm. The purpose of this book is to provide some theoretical perspective on the nature of organizationally relevant knowledge and to indicate the kind of research that might generate empirically testable hypotheses and further the development of a knowledge-based theory of the firm. Our theorizing builds on a conceptual framework — the Information-Space or I-Space — by means of which we explore how knowledge first emerges, and then gets articulated, diffused, and absorbed by a population of agents.

Every company can point to a growth strategy. Far fewer, however, systematically implement them; instead, they spend their time on incremental innovations, or rely on acquisitions. Organic, internal growth, accomplished through product line renewal and new service development, is essential to the long-term vitality of corporations across all industries. This book takes on the challenge large corporations have in generating internal innovation—developing new product lines that address new market applications and provide the corporation with new streams of revenue. It integrates the key disciplines—new product strategy, user research, concept development and prototyping, market testing, and business modeling—needed for enterprise growth. The book illustrates its framework with in-depth examples of companies that have leveraged their core technologies to new markets and new types of uses in order to generate impressive results, including IBM, Honda, and Mars. Many of these examples contain templates that readers can use in their own projects. The book ends by addressing the human side of new market applications, providing advice on what executives and innovation team leaders must do to execute the steps of the book's framework for new market applications development.

People and organizations continually strive to achieve effective action. But they do not have to do so in isolation. Available to them, especially on non-routine issues of great importance, is a broad array of advice from executives, change consultants, and academics. This is especially true on topics having to do with organizational learning, transformational change, and employee commitment. Much of this advice is appealing; much of it compelling, and providing it has become big business in its own right. The only problem is, most of it does not work — that is, most of it is not actionable. It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsistencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for concrete actions in concrete settings. This book examines why and how most professional advice on non-routine issues continues to fail. It looks with great care at a limited number of representative examples, drawn from the author's review of more than one hundred books and countless articles. It then places all this material in the context of a different theory of effective action — one that leads not to skilled incompetence, but to specific predictions that can be tested in real life.

This book focuses on the state of organization theory, its purpose, object, and practical relevance. In recent years, disquiet has mounted within the field of organizational analysis, broadly defined, about the overly theoretical and a- or anti-organizational state of organization theory and its consequent lack of practical purchase, not least in the light of pressing economic, social, and political concerns that are often profoundly organizational in nature. The book argues that predominant contemporary modes of theorizing within the field, and in particular the stance associated with them, have had the effect of occluding and dissolving organization theory’s core object—formal organization—and, as a consequence, dissipating its practical focus and reach. The book seeks to contribute to the goal of reviving organization theory as a practical science of organizing and rehabilitating its core object—formal organization—through a re-examination and re-assessment of the outlook, comportment, and attitude—stance—animating its classical antecedents. This ambition is double-edged. For not only does it seek to revive organization theory through reconnecting it with the practical orientation framing classical organizational analysis, it also seeks to indicate how the historic products of that orientation or stance still have considerable traction for analysing and intervening in contemporary matters of organizational concern. Not least, this ‘classical organizational stance’ provides those who adopt it with a method with which to orient themselves both in formal organizational thought and in formal organizational life. It furnishes them with an ethos combining both practical rationality and ethical seriousness.

Accelerating processes of economic globalization have fundamentally reshaped the organization of the global economy towards much greater integration and functional interdependence through cross-border economic activity. In this interconnected world system, a new form of economic organization, termed global production networks (GPNs) in this book, has emerged that brings together a wide array of economic actors, most notably capitalist firms, state institutions, labour unions, consumers, and non-government organizations, in the transnational production of economic value. National and sub-national economic development in this highly interdependent global economy can no longer be conceived of, and understood within, the distinct territorial boundaries of individual countries and regions. Instead, global production networks are organizational platforms through which actors in these different national or regional economies compete and cooperate for a larger share of the creation, transformation, and capture of value through transnational economic activity. They are also vehicles for transferring the value captured between different places. This book ultimately aims to develop a theory of global production networks that explains economic development in the interconnected global economy. It provides robust answers to a fundamental question: how is development in different economies driven by their participation in value activities organized through global production networks? These answers can also offer new theoretical insights into why the organization and coordination of global production networks varies significantly between different industries, sectors, and economies, and why those variations matter for economic development.

The Marxist prediction that capitalist bureaucracy must inevitably neutralize individualistic leadership in industry, has been disproved over and over by the careers of industrial “superstars” from Andrew Carnegie to Henry Ford, Lee Iacocca, Estee Lauder, and David Rockefeller–all of whom could be described as having made their own personal stamp on their respective businesses. How a business replaces its chief executive often determines that firm's future. If a business does not effectively manage the transfer of power, utter turmoil can result, with profound implications not only for the CEO, but also for the other employees, the shareholders, and the community at large. Filled with inside stories from corporate boardrooms and fresh conceptual perspectives, this book describes the factors that affect executive succession. It examines how the management succession process involving chief executive officers of major corporations is affected by the heroic view that CEOs have of themselves. Arguing that personality can also affect the departure styles of retiring CEOs, the book defines four principle types: Monarchs, Generals, Ambassadors, and Governors. The personality of each type is outlined in interviews with real-life business leaders and illustrated with numerous pithy anecdotes.