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The purpose of this study is to show that an important antecedent of perceived knowledge quality is an employee’s position in the organizational network due to their participation in different interest groups. In particular, this study theorizes that brokers establish a network of groups, which increases perceived knowledge quality vis-a-vis the social capital that employees draw on.

To test this study’s hypotheses on the influence of the structural position of knowledge brokers on the positive effects of social capital on perceived knowledge quality, this study combines data from an online survey with longitudinal archival data from a youth-care organization who used an enterprise social network (ESN) for knowledge sharing.

This study found a mitigating effect of being a broker on the relationship between trust and perceived knowledge quality, and also between inter-team interaction and perceived knowledge quality for lower levels of both trust and inter-team interaction on perceived knowledge quality.

Although the hypotheses are supported, in light of prior research, the authors would have expected stronger and positive effects.

This research is particularly interesting because it emphasizes the important role of social capital. For organizations that deal with trust issues, it might help to stimulate employees to broaden their activity on ESNs by becoming active in multiple groups.

While knowledge sharing on ESNs is generally conducive for creating organizational value, there is a lack of understanding of what drives employees’ perception of the quality of shared knowledge, and how this perception may depend on their position in the social network. To investigate this question, the authors turn to social capital theory.

If public trust in health care is to be used as a performance indicator for health care systems, its measurement has to be sensitive to changes in the health care system. For this purpose, this study has monitored public trust in health care in The Netherlands over an eight‐year period, from 1997 to 2004. The study expected to find a decrease in public trust, with a low point in 2002.

Since 1997, public trust in health care was measured through postal questionnaires to the “health care consumer panel”. This panel consists of approximately 1,500 households and forms a representative sample of the Dutch population.

Trust in health care and trust in hospitals did not show any significant trend. Trust in medical specialists displayed an upward trend. Trust in future health care, trust in five out of six dimensions of health care and trust in general practitioners actually did show a decrease. However, only for trust in macro level policies and trust in professional expertise this trend continued. For the remaining trust objects, after 1999 or 2000, an upward trend set in.

No support was found for our overall assumption. Explanations for the fact that trust did increase after 1999 or 2000 are difficult to find. On the basis of these findings the study questions whether the measure of public trust is sensitive enough to provide information on the performance of the health care system.

The aim of this research is to study public trust in health care on its abilities to be used as a performance indicator for health care systems.

The 15 years spanning from the end of the nineteenth century till the outbreak of the First World War formed, perhaps, the richest period in the history of Marxian economics. The main development between the time of Marx's writing and that of the German-Russian debates was the change in the competitive nature of the capitalist system. In the early stages of capitalism, the forces of competition created an imperative for capitalist firms to invest all their profits, or lose out in the competitive struggle to other firms which did. However, as large firms and oligopolistic structures emerged, the nature of competition changed, with price competition no longer the only form, leading to an erosion of this imperative, and an increase in capitalist consumption. Kalecki showed that, in this case, total profits were determined by capitalist's consumption and investment expenditures. The result, according to Kalecki, was a chronic tendency towards stagnation in capitalist economies. The long boom could be explained as ‘exports’ to a market external to the private sector, namely armaments and military expenditures.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship among alliance motivation (AM), execution of cooperation (EC) and alliance performance of strategic alliance for commercializing technology and developing products.

The measurements were constructed and tested empirically through a survey of 320 strategic alliances in the food processing industry in Thailand. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were applied to refine scales for measuring AM, execution and cooperation performance.

This research found that firms adopted social interaction with alliance partners in order to establish mutual expectations about technology characteristics, access opportunity and organisational management styles, factors that are shown to have positive influences on both commercial and partnership performance. Findings also confirm a significant positive impact of technology characteristics, access opportunity, market potential and financial benefit on the adoption of a formal partnership agreement, but a significant impact only on commercial performance.

Further research should use random samples in different industries in other emerging economies, and other data analysis methods to assess decision-making in strategic technology alliances that may include different types of partnerships.

The findings are also useful for managers who leverage operations with external resources obtained through strategic alliances parameters both in the process of managing relationships and achieving results.

This article contributes to extant literature by developing a practical measurement system of AM, actual EC and resulting performance in an emerging economy country. It also contributes to clarify the decision-making of firms that form strategic alliances for commercializing technology and developing products to facilitate more quality management research in other industries and countries.

In this essay, we argue that understanding of meaning in relation to organizational networks warrants a more prominent place in organizational theorizing, because it fulfils a distinct role in the emergence and evolution of networks. Whereas prior studies have tended to address network structures or narrative structures, we suggest that organizational processes might be better understood when addressing the role of meaning and network structures simultaneously. We explain the implications of our argument in an online context, given the growing significance of digitally enabled networks on organizational sociality, and draw on examples in the context of organizational knowledge sharing to support our argument. We conclude by introducing a communication flow model to support the further development of research on organizational meaning networks.

Sages and seers in ancient India specified dharma, artha, kama and moksha as the four ends of a moral and productive life and emphasised the attainment of a proper balance between the spiritual health and the material health. However, most of their intellectual energy was directed towards the attainment of moksha, the salvation from birth‐death‐rebirth cycle. Kautilya, on the other hand considered poverty as a living death and concentrated on devising economic policies to achieve salvation from poverty but without compromising with ethical values unless survival of the state was threatened. Kautilya's Arthashastra is unique in emphasising the imperative of economic growth and welfare of all. According to him, if there is no dharma, there is no society. He believed that ethical values pave the way to heaven as well as to prosperity on the earth, that is, have an intrinsic value as well as an instrumental value. He referred the reader to the Vedas and Philosophy for learning moral theory, which sheds light on the distinction between good and bad and moral and immoral actions. He extended the conceptual framework to deal with conflict of interest situations arising from the emerging capitalism. He dedicated his work to Om (symbol of spirituality, God) and Brihaspati and Sukra (political thinkers) implying, perhaps, that his goal was to integrate ethics and economics. It is argued that the level of integration between economics and ethics is significantly higher in Kautilya's Arthashastra than that in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or for that matter in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

Online communities form a challenging and still-evolving field for social network research. We highlight two themes that are at the core of social network literature: formative processes and structures, and discuss how these might be relevant in the context of online communities. Processes of tie formation might evolve differently in online communities. Second, we discuss how network structures emerge in different ways than previously studied, and should therefore be interpreted differently.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the origin of economics as a separate science.

A very comprehensive approach is presented for determining the origin of economics as a science. Three kinds of inter‐related issues are discussed: how to interpret and evaluate earlier, particularly ancient, writings, the specification of the requirements for declaring economics as a science and the definition, scope and methodology of economics.

Application of the most stringent requirements for declaring economics as a separate science to Kautilya's Arthashastra validated A.K. Sen's claim that it is the first book on economics.

According to Kautilya, economics is a separate science but not independent of other disciplines and particularly of ethics. Whereas, most of the current research ignores this inter‐dependence and consequently does not fully capture reality.

It implies that the inter‐dependence between economics and other disciplines should be encouraged and vigorously explored.

It validates Redman's assertion, “The history of economics as a science is, in my view, still waiting to be properly written”.