Search results

In both Britain and the USA, the majority of the shares in quoted companies are owned by institutional shareholders such as pension funds and insurance companies. But, in most cases these major shareholders are “passive”, that is they prefer not to become involved in the management of the companies in which they invest – unless there is a crisis. By this time unfortunately it is often too late to prevent their shareholders or pensioners from losing money. In this article Rolf Carlsson describes how the Wallenberg family through their holding company Investor AB have helped a number of Swedish companies to become world leaders by working with their managers as active investors. He tells the story of ABB and L.M. Ericsson but the Wallenberg sphere of influence has also included Atlas Copco, SAAB Scania, SKF, Swedish Match, Alfa Laval, Stora and Electrolux. Also he explains how the Wallenberg family evolved the competencies and structures which they needed to fulfil their role as an active investor. These competencies included: choosing the right businesses in which to invest; “meta‐management” – recruiting and appointing the right chief executives; “legitimization” – building the Wallenberg reputation and good name in Swedish society and internationally by pursuing socially responsible and ethical policies; and nurturing corporations so they can become global leaders. The family works through two key structures: Investor AB – an investment company which has a board of non‐executive directors and two executive vice chairmen most of whom are experienced CEO’s from industry and commerce; and independent company boards, with strong CEO’s – which they change as necessary to ensure that they have the competencies required to deliver the agreed strategies. The Wallenberg’s approach to active ownership is entrepreneurial: “the need for incessant renewal”.

Argues that effective board leadership requires directors to achieve a balance between entrepreneurship (i.e. paying attention to strategy, corporate renewal and innovation on the one hand) and corporate governance. Posits that medium sized firms have a dilemma in knowing how to expand their businesses in a rapid fashion. Highlights how companies manage this type of move from a corporate type of governance to a more corporate entrepreneurship.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued against planned economies that “the close interdependence of all economic phenomena makes it difficult to stop planning just where we wish…once the free working of the market is impeded beyond a certain degree, the planner will be forced to extend his controls till they become all-comprehensive” (Hayek, 1944, p. 79). According to Hayek, and especially Mises, there exists no stable condition in-between laissez faire capitalism and the planned economy. Once politicians engaged in acts of interventionism further interventions would successively lead them towards a condition where the state fully planned and controlled the economy and civil society. According to Austrians, ‘interventionism’ thus represented an unstable and self-reinforcing condition (Burton, 1984, p. 110). In John Gray's words “whenever an interventionist policy…fails to achieve the desires result, the practical and theoretical response of the interventionist ideologue is to demand an extension of the policy to new fields…interventionist policies will always interpret the failure of any such policy, not as a reason in favour of its abandonment, but rather as one supporting its wider application”(Gray, 1984, p. 32).

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence of regulations, perceptions, and promotions on the emergence of an innovation system for wood‐framed multi‐storey buildings in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom (UK).

This descriptive paper made a qualitative analysis of information collected mainly from secondary sources such as reports, newspapers, journal publications, conference proceedings and general internet search.

Results showed that the conditions for market growth of multi‐storey construction seemed to be the most favourable in Sweden followed by the UK and Germany. The regulations are stringent in Germany, followed by the UK and Sweden. In all countries, the construction professionals seemed to have negative perceptions regarding engineering properties of wood. Similar negative perceptions exist among the general public in Germany and the UK, but not in Sweden. The wood construction promotional activities in Germany and the UK are directed to all types of houses, while in Sweden multi‐storey buildings are targeted.

An important implication of this paper was that it highlighted the usefulness of cross‐country surveys at the European level, in order to better understand observed differences in the adoption of innovative systems. However, there might be shortcomings in the comparability of the information across the countries analysed because it was difficult to make an objective assessment of the claims made in some of the information sources. Also, there was varying and limited information about the survey methodologies used in some of the reviewed studies.

The study showed that market intervention is needed to promote radical or really new innovations such as wood construction. The variations in the promotional measures undertaken partly explained the variations in growth of wood construction system in the three countries.

The paper applied a theoretical framework on technology transition to analyse emergence of wood construction system in Germany, Sweden and the UK. The framework can be applied to analyse the development of wood construction system in other countries also.

The purpose of this research paper is to contribute to strategy theory by differentiating different types of top management narratives and trying to understand the interplay between them as well as the dynamics over time.

The study was designed from an interpretative narrative approach. Narratives were produced from deep interviews and organisational documents covering a period of more than 25 years.

Two kinds of narratives were detected – builders and cleaners. The builders' narratives illustrate how personal life‐stories are embedded in the strategic development processes but the cleaners' narratives are organisational stories without personal life‐stories and cover no actual development. The concept meta‐narrative helped to understand strategic changes over time and was embedded in the myth‐periods involved. The meta‐narrative identified was built on an idea of a going concern and on the role to produce physical large objects for long‐term use.

Owing to the longitudinal design of the study a cyclical pattern with related managerial narratives were produced. The dichotomy builders and cleaners could be developed studying other longitudinal business strategies and also by connections to meta‐narratives derived from more general economic theories.

Builders and cleaners focus on either business or organisational/financial aspects but neither of both. Awareness of this, learning strategic management requires co‐operation between different actors.

The longitudinal design describes and analyzes a cyclical pattern of managerial patterns, while other studies based on narratives cover more limited organisational events in time and space.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the creativity/project management (PM) encounter in TV production.

The paper is prompted by several questions. Does the project work form constitute a threat to creativity, inventiveness or innovation in problem solving? Is it also indirectly a threat to development? Is PM the beast killing off much of the creativity, the beauty that exists in the world? Is it the other way around? Or what is the character of the encounter? Is there even an encounter? An ongoing study of TV production companies provides empirical illustrations to our reasoning.

First, the PM focus on time performance in TV production can trigger innovative and creative responses to challenging targets because deadlines are good inspirations for creativity when time has to be compressed. Second, developing formats for TV production programs and series requires different PM creativity skills. Third, strategic development might be helped by a more strictly formulated PM procedure in order to activate attention to strategic issues in the turbulent industry.

It is rare to obtain deep insights of the lived experience of PM in the TV industry in general and more recently evolving TV cases such as in Sweden. This case study adds to our knowledge base in a PM sector viewing itself as highly creative. It also introduces readers to the idea of developing TV formats as a project product and contrasts creativity in design or TV shows with creativity in producing them. Considering the ongoing “projectification” and the commonly held views on the needs for creativity in project work, the questions are more than relevant and need to be explored further and beyond mere lip service.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe associations between the strategic (market/industry) context, the operational requirements, and the work design of in‐house, inbound call centres in the financial sector.

This cross‐sectional study uses data from a survey conducted between February 2002 and September 2005 as part of the Global Call Centre Industry Project, which included call centres from 17 countries. The present analysis is based on a sub‐sample of 375 call centres from that survey.

Managers of in‐house, inbound call centres in the financial‐services sector claim that they adopt a relationship‐oriented approach to the work of their call centres; however, the present study demonstrates that they fail to design their employees' work appropriately to meet this requirement. This is especially the case for call centres in the insurance sector.

The original data collection was undertaken in a much broader context than this delineated study. There is a need to develop the concepts of relationship building and work design in the context of call centres. There is also a need to explore the perspective of employees with regard to operational requirements and work design and the customer's perception of service quality.

If managers of call centres in the financial‐services sector really wish to encourage relationship building between employees and customers, they need to reconsider the current work design of their call centres.

The paper enhances knowledge of how operational requirements are linked to work design in call centres.

By studying the marketing of advertising space, this paper aims to study how class, gender and region were portrayed in terms of economic considerations in adverts selling advertising space to potential advertisers. The paper studies how readers were discursively transformed into consumers in this material and how different consumer groups were depicted, divided and framed during Sweden’s early consumer culture. By doing so, the paper highlights the tensions between aiming at a mass audience, on the one hand, and striving to reach more and more specific consumer groups on the other hand.

Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Intersectional analysis is used to see how notions of class and gender intersected during the analysed period.

The sectioning of the press is in the paper stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding it. The gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the paper argues that the political press needed to commercialise their readerships to attract advertisers and survive economically.

The paper concludes that mass marketing and segmentation processes were in many senses parallel in the studied material. Statements of reaching all social classes diminished over time, but notions of the masses were prevalent in both the worker and the women categories. However, how advertisers choose between different media for their advertising campaigns or how they adopted different marketing methods towards different segments are beyond the scope of this paper.

This paper aims to reveal the challenges and problems of technology commercialization in an industrial development organization in Iran.

To achieve the objective of this paper, a mixed-methods case study was used. Initially, 15 in-depth interviews with technology commercialization experts were conducted and 43 themes were extracted as problems of technology commercialization. The outcomes of the interviews informed the development of the questionnaire. Subsequently, a survey of 205 experts was performed to examine the responses obtained from the interviews. The main problems were identified through exploratory factor analysis and evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis.

Seven factors are identified as the main difficulties of technology commercialization, including weakness in the commercialization process, challenges of the business environment, weak organizational structure, inefficient project management, ineffective cooperation with non-governmental sectors, failure to collaborate with stakeholders and conflicting political behaviors.

The outcomes of this research inform the organization’s managers of the poor conditions and barriers of the technology commercialization process. The findings also help managers to overcome the challenges that are under the control of the organization.

This paper contributes to the knowledge on technology commercialization by exploring the main factors that form barriers to and difficulties of technology commercialization in an industrial development organization and suggesting appropriate solutions.