Search results

In this article, we focus on alternative dispute resolution procedures, in particular third party procedures. We describe eight different procedures and provide examples of how these procedures are used in different cultural contexts. We then evaluate the procedures in terms of how they impact four key criteria that have been noted in the literature related to negotiation: process criteria, settlement criteria, issue-related criteria, and relationship criteria. We subsequently explore the potential impact of culture on evaluations of these criteria. We finish with a discussion of future directions for research and practice, emphasizing that procedural recommendations should be made carefully when the criteria for effectiveness and applicability are derived from US-centric research. In other words, there is not “one best choice” for third party procedures universal to the myriad cultures on our planet.

In this paper, we review the literature on hierarchical team decision making — teams in which a formal leader makes decisions based upon the input from a staff or subordinates or other informed parties. We structure our review around the Multilevel Theory of team decision making (Hollenbeck et al., 1995), integrating the disparate works within this literature. We then provide recommendations to practitioners interested in building, maintaining, and maximizing the effectiveness of hierarchical teams. Finally, we conclude by addressing weaknesses of the literature to date and avenues for future research.

This paper aims to focus on a little studied but important type of conflict, zero‐sum situations. These conflicts are less likely to take place than those in which participants can come to an integrative agreement, but knowing how to best strategize for zero‐sum conflicts can lead to better outcomes in these situations.

Participants in the study utilized two specific strategies – purposive or contingent – in a rock‐paper‐scissors elimination tournament. The use of the strategy and the outcome were measured in a controlled setting.

Results demonstrate that using a strategy in a win‐lose conflict situation significantly predicts success. Further, competitive individuals are more likely to utilize strategies than other personality types.

This paper builds on the theory that individuals in conflict situations have preferences, pursue goals, and behave purposefully. In particular, the paper studies the antecedents to strategies employed in a conflict situation and that strategy's effect on the outcome.

Fred R. Blass is an Assistant in Management at Florida State University. He received a Ph.D. in Management from Florida State University, and before joining the faculty at Florida State, served on the Department of Management faculty at the United States Air Force Academy. Blass has research interests in power and influence in organizations and organizational socialization. He has published his research in such journals as Human Resource Management and The Leadership Quarterly. Also, he has presented his research at both national and regional professional conferences.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

The concept of institution has been used by scholars from across a number of disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, the philosophical roots of this concept have not been well examined, nor have implications for contemporary institutional analysis been fully appreciated. Returning to the works of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty reveals a depth of thinking that has otherwise been overlooked by institutional theorists. In particular, the author’s analysis reveals two critical insights. First, whereas organizational scholars have closely linked the concepts of institution and taken-for-grantedness, these two concepts were originally understood to be phenomenologically distinct. Second, a detailed examination of Merleau-Ponty’s later work poses the concept of flesh – the twining of the visible and the invisible – as the basis for the interplay of institutions. In turn, the idea of flesh as the foundation of institution invites a more radical reimagining of the growing bifurcation between microfoundations and macrofoundations.

This chapter offers a conceptual perspective of what students need to understand to understand entrepreneurship, and educators’ views on how best to educate students in it, in response to calls for a greater understanding of the learning environment. The research uses the lens of the threshold concept framework to inform a conceptual approach to entrepreneurship education. The threshold concept framework posits that in any academic discipline there are concepts that have a particularly transformative effect on student learning representing a transformed way of understanding something, without which the learner cannot progress.

Research was undertaken in three stages to identify what is distinctive about thinking like an entrepreneur, how to educate students to think like entrepreneurs and how students understand thinking like entrepreneurs. The first and second stages of the study are the focus of this chapter. Candidate threshold concepts in entrepreneurship and educators’ perspectives of effective ways to educate students in entrepreneurship are presented.

Data from 11 individual and group semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 entrepreneurship educators in 10 higher education institutions across the UK was integrated with findings from a Delphi survey with 10 expert entrepreneurs.

By offering the perspectives of entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurs, this chapter makes a valuable contribution to a conceptually grounded and innovative approach to entrepreneurship education.

In this chapter, the authors introduce Ludwik Fleck and his ideas of “thought style” and “thought collective” to suggest a re-thinking of the divide between “micro” and “macro” that has perhaps more inhibited than inspired organization studies in general, and institutional theory in particular. With Fleck, the authors argue that there is no such thing as thought style-neutral cognition or undirected perception: meaning, constituted through a specific thought style shared by a thought collective, permeates cognition, judgment, perception, and thought. The authors illustrate our argument with the longitudinal case study of Sydney 2030 (i.e., the strategy-making process of the City of Sydney, Australia). The case suggests that – regardless of its actual implementation – a strategy is successful to the extent to which it shapes the socio-cognitive infrastructure of a collective and enables those engaged in city-making to think and act collectively.