David Hannah, Michael Parent, Leyland Pitt and Pierre Berthon
The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the mechanisms that organizations use to keep their innovations secret. This paper examines how, when and why secrecy…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth the mechanisms that organizations use to keep their innovations secret. This paper examines how, when and why secrecy appropriation mechanisms (SAMs) can enable innovators to appropriate value from their innovations.
Design/methodology/approach
Building from an extensive literature review of innovation and secrecy, the paper presents a number of implications for theory and research in the form of testable propositions.
Findings
This conceptualization proposes that SAMs can have both positive and negative effects on a number of organizational dynamics. SAMs involve tradeoffs, and the key to understanding whether they create value to organizations lies in understanding that these tradeoffs exist and the nature of these tradeoffs.
Practical implications
While most managers recognize the importance of secrecy in innovations, many struggle with the practical challenges of doing so. The paper presents guidance for managers to overcome these challenges.
Originality/value
This paper adds to previous research that has identified secrecy as an important appropriation mechanism for firms by digging deeper into the details of SAMs and exploring their sources, characteristics and effects.
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Linda W. Lee, David Hannah and Ian P. McCarthy
This article explores how employees can perceive and be impacted by the fakeness of their company slogans.
Abstract
Purpose
This article explores how employees can perceive and be impacted by the fakeness of their company slogans.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual study draws on the established literature on company slogans, employee audiences, and fake news to create a framework through which to understand fake company slogans.
Findings
Employees attend to two important dimensions of slogans: whether they accurately reflect a company’s (1) values and (2) value proposition. These dimensions combine to form a typology of four ways in which employees can perceive their company’s slogans: namely, authentic, narcissistic, foreign, or corrupt.
Research limitations/implications
This paper outlines how the typology provides a theoretical basis for more refined empirical research on how company slogans influence a key stakeholder: their employees. Future research could test the arguments about how certain characteristics of slogans are more or less likely to cause employees to conclude that slogans are fake news. Those conclusions will, in turn, have implications for the morale and engagement of employees. The ideas herein can also enable a more comprehensive assessment of the impact of slogans.
Practical implications
Employees can view three types of slogans as fake news (narcissistic, foreign, and corrupt slogans). This paper identifies the implications of each type and explains how companies can go about developing authentic slogans.
Originality/value
This paper explores the impact of slogan fakeness on employees: an important audience that has been neglected by studies to date. Thus, the insights and implications specific to this internal stakeholder are novel.
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Kirsten M. Robertson, Brenda A. Lautsch and David R. Hannah
The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes underlying a systems perspective on work–life balance (WLB), with a particular focus on the tensions and role negotiations…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the processes underlying a systems perspective on work–life balance (WLB), with a particular focus on the tensions and role negotiations that arise within and across work and non-work roles.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors employed a qualitative methodology, conducting 42 interviews with lawyers at large law firms, which is a context notorious for long work hours.
Findings
While a cornerstone of a systems view is that balance is social in nature, and that negotiations occur among stakeholders over role expectations, the process through which this happens has remained unexamined both theoretically and empirically. The authors learned that negotiating around work and non-work role expectations are often contested, complex and fluid. The authors contribute to the literature by elaborating on how these negotiations happen in the legal profession, describing factors that inhibit or facilitate role negotiation and exploring how interdependencies within work systems and across work and non-work systems shape these negotiation processes.
Originality/value
The findings offer a more nuanced conceptualization of the system-level perspective on WLB, and in particular an enriched explanation of work and non-work role negotiation. The authors encourage employers who are interested in promoting WLB to ensure that their employees feel empowered to negotiate their roles, particularly with others in their work systems.
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Sean T. Hannah and David A. Waldman
Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of…
Abstract
Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of research has the possibility of creating significant new theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. We overview the major areas of behavioral ethics research concerning moral cognition and conation, and then we concentrate on existing neuroscience applications to moral cognition (moral awareness, moral judgment/reasoning, effects of moral emotions on moral reasoning, and ethical ideology). We also demonstrate the usefulness of neuroscience applications to organizational behavioral ethics research by summarizing a recent study on the neuroscience of ethical leadership. We close by recommending future research that applies neuroscience to topics such as moral development, group ethical judgments and group moral approbation, and moral conation (e.g., moral courage and moral identity). Our overall purpose is to encourage future neuroscience research on organizational behavioral ethics to supplement and/or complement existing psychological approaches.
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This paper examines the national solidarity in Brunei Darussalam during the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequential impact on younger generations. Utilising Emile Durkheim's…
Abstract
This paper examines the national solidarity in Brunei Darussalam during the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequential impact on younger generations. Utilising Emile Durkheim's solidarity theories, I examine how young people's social media use builds on state discourse in the pandemic. I contend that a shift towards an organic society is visible through a social cohesion that is based on differentiated roles. I argue that the citizenry plays a vital role in the forward momentum toward Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0, which illustrates that solidarity cannot be forged as a top-down directive. By prompting economic and creative divisions of labour, the local use of social media in a public health crisis has shown the government a new way to foster solidarity. Significant implications for youth as future leaders of the nation are discussed.
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This chapter focuses on Norwegian farm families by analysing succession patterns across generations and genders in “beanpole” families, i.e. those with several living generations …
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Norwegian farm families by analysing succession patterns across generations and genders in “beanpole” families, i.e. those with several living generations (Brannen, Moss, & Mooney, 2004). The focus is on transfer of property in the case of farm families and its importance for gender relations. Succession here refers to the transfer of farm management control, which may be seen as a continuous, multi-phase process in farm families which begins when the successor is young with gradual assumption of specific responsibilities within the farm business (Symes, 1990). One aim of the chapter is to connect changes in succession praxis in the case of farm families in Norway with the societal changes of three-four generations over the twentieth century. The dynamics of families and households are regarded as key elements of issues such as farm structure (Bengtson, 2001; Bokemeier, 1997; Hareven, 1996; Willson, Shuey, & Elder, 2003), and farm families offer an interesting case for examining intergenerational relations (Brandth, 2002; Elder, Rudkin, & Conger, 1995; Elder, Robertson, & Rudkin, 1996; Lee & Cassidy, 1981; Melberg, 2003).
Hannah S. Lee and David A. Griffith
This study examines the process of establishing a viable brand in a new foreign market through successful market entry governance by utilizing various types of branding alliances…
Abstract
This study examines the process of establishing a viable brand in a new foreign market through successful market entry governance by utilizing various types of branding alliances to transfer corporate brands. Drawing from corporate illustrations and building upon Ghosh and John's (1999) governance value analysis (GVA) model, a decision model for managers is developed providing theory-based guidance for market entry strategies. Relational governance can be considered as a continuum ranging from strong relational (i.e., joint ventures, co-branding) to weak relational (i.e., joint promotion, marketing alliance) forms. Firms should organize their market entry strategy based upon brand equity resources, specific investments made by the partner, and environmental uncertainty (market volatility and cultural distance), so as to transfer the desired brand image and associations into local markets by maximizing the level of value created and value claimed. This study contributes to the international marketing literature by providing a theoretically strong decision model, supported by corporate examples, of how firms enter markets using various types of brand alliances. It also advances the practice of international marketing in regard to branding by providing insights as to how managers in the global marketplace can effectively transfer brand images and build global brand equity, minimizing firm costs while maximizing the value created and claimed from the brand.
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Jose Luis Rocha, Ed Brown and Jonathan Cloke
The concept of corruption is frequently represented as relating to social practices that violate established rules and norms. This paper, however, seeks to demonstrate that…
Abstract
Purpose
The concept of corruption is frequently represented as relating to social practices that violate established rules and norms. This paper, however, seeks to demonstrate that corrupt practices are often only possible because they in fact draw on existing institutional mechanisms and cultural dispositions that grant them a certain social approval and legitimacy. The paper aims to explore these issues through a detailed exploration of corruption in Nicaragua, which outlines how competing élite groups have been able to use different discourses to appropriate resources from the state in quite different ways, reflecting the use of contrasting mechanisms for justifying and legitimizing corruption.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper focuses on two key periods of recent Nicaraguan political history: that which occurred during the administration of ex‐President Arnoldo Alemán and the events that unfurled in the aftermath of a chain of bank bankruptcies that occurred in Nicaragua during 2001. These events are explored in the context of David Harvey's ideas of “accumulation by dispossession.”
Findings
In contrast with more classic practices of corruption in Nicaragua that have openly violated existing formal rules and norms but appealed to an ethos of redistribution and a historically‐specific concept of “the public” in order to imbue their actions with legitimacy, the corrupt practices related to recent banking bankruptcies engaged in an extensive instrumentalization of formal state institutions in order to protect élite parochial interests and to achieve “accumulation by dispossession” through appealing to the legitimating support granted by multilateral financial institutions.
Originality/value
The paper illustrates sharply the inadvisability of perspectives that narrowly define corruption in legalistic terms. Such perspectives focus exclusively on the state as the location of corruption, whereas clearly, in Nicaragua as elsewhere, corruption is a far more complicated phenomenon which crosses the artificial boundaries between private and public sectors. It also evolves and takes a myriad different forms which are intimately connected with the ongoing struggles for control of accumulation processes, suggesting a much more integral role for corruption within accumulation strategies than often allowed for in both orthodox economic and Marxist literatures on capital accumulation.