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This study aims to extend by way of replication an earlier study, “Blind man’s bluff: The ethics of quantity surcharges” (Gupta and Rominger, 1996) by testing several hypotheses regarding changes in the surcharging phenomenon that may have occurred over time.

The original study was constructed from data collected 20 years ago. This study went beyond a mere replication. A key difference between this study and the original study was in the method of data collection. In the earlier study, students were used to collect data. In this study, the author personally and carefully recorded the prices of the same 60 items that were noted in the original study. These new prices were then compared with the original ones. Several matched paired t-tests were administered to analyze the mean differences between the two sets of data.

The tests showed a highly significant difference in today’s pricing structure in comparison to the quantity surcharging phenomenon from the prior study. It was found that both the quantity of the items surcharged and the magnitude of the surcharges decreased in comparison to the surcharging reported in the original study.

Reasons are given regarding what changed and why and suggestions are given for future research in the areas of private or in-store branding, the proliferation of “big box” stores and the changes in the frequency and magnitude of surcharging that may be occurring over time.

This study indicates that the quantity surcharging phenomenon has lessened. In fact, in mature markets which include big box discounters, the quantity surcharging phenomenon of 20 years ago may have given way to today’s quantity discount.

Responding to Colbert’s (2004) call for research examining the complexity of work systems’ effect on performance, and following Meyer and Dunphy’s (2014, 2015) work determining the general manner by which the complex mechanism of strategy choice and its implementation effect corporate performance, the purpose of this paper is to specify and test a model of the effects of workplace factors affecting employee responses to the demand for increased knowledge in using technology.

Drawing on the literature on the resource-based view of strategy and the knowledge-based (KB) view of human resource management system implementation, theory is developed, and hypotheses are generated, regarding employee attitudes toward skill development, technology, employment security, and feedback and their impact on competence and impact. Meaningfulness, self-determination, work conditions, and intensity are controlled for. Data from a sample of 888 employees, 24 managers, and corporate executives across eight Detroit-area automotive supplier firms are used to test the model using structural equation modeling.

Individual psychological states of competence and impact are positively and strongly associated with KB psychological climates that foster and condition positive beliefs about the importance of learning new skills and about the effects of the diffusion of new technologies on employees.

The complexity of the interactions of management implementation of workplace practices on employee performance still needs more sorting out. Only unionized employers pursuing high-involvement work systems were studied. Other types of employers would have very different workplace climates.

Only unionized employers pursuing high-involvement work systems were studied. Other types of employers would have very different workplace climates.

In order to have employees be receptive to changing technology and the resulting, increased demands for knowledge and skill, employers have to provide long-term employment security.

The results provide the specific manner by which employers can increase employee receptiveness to increase workplace knowledge and training to have more impact on their performance.

Explores the relationship between culture and innovation. Discusses culture at some length, noting some differences between national behaviours – such as the relative importance of a group versus an individual. Infers that existing cultural conditions determine the way in which innovations are adopted. Indicates that cultures which value creativity, technical ability and higher education are more successful at adopting innovations. Identifies a relationship between innovation and the status given to entrepreneurial efforts. Suggests that cultures emphasizing individualism and freedom are more likely to be creative and, therefore, to benefit more from innovative ideas. Refers to previous studies on culture and innovation (mentioning Hofstede’s work). Investigates the role religion plays, in particular the cultural bias against technology that is prevalent in traditionalist religious countries. Concludes that strongly religious countries are not receptive to innovation.

Before 1500 Britain was not considered a major European power. Three hundred years later Britain led the way for the Industrial Revolution and held sway economically and militarily during the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the United Kingdom lose her empire, her military leadership and, most of all, her capacity to lead the world in technological innovations. What were the circumstances which first thrust England into world leadership and then led her into technological decline? Examines the rise and fall in a sociocultural context and attempts to generalize the results into a modern context to understand better the innovation phenomenon.

Purpose – Institutional investors need to move beyond first- and second-generation interpretations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) (based on negative filters), and also beyond third and fourth generations (based on positive and integrated filters), which are more sophisticated but still limited, and toward a fifth generation of SRI and CSR. A fifth-generation model systematically incorporates critical intangibles, such as human capital analysis, into the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment process.

Methodology – This chapter incorporates a literature review and draws on a range of qualitative research and case studies on the current and potential role of regulators to regulate nontraditional measures of value.

Findings – The power of institutional investors is currently based on incomplete information from listed companies on how they create value, yet it rests on superior knowledge and insight into the workings of the companies in which they invest, and is only as strong as the quality of the information it uses to make investment decisions on behalf of clients.

Research implications – More research on the role of human capital analysis, and its regulatory consequences, is required.

Practical implications – Regulators need to act within the context of these fifth-generation models in order to create the environment for more transparent investment recommendations.

Originality of chapter – This chapter contributes a qualitative and conceptual perspective to the debate on the role of regulation beyond the global financial crisis.

The purpose of the paper is to present a theory of the leadership process within the substantive setting of a cleaned‐up bureaucracy.

Orthodox grounded theory is employed within the setting of a large public‐sector organization in an eastern state of Australia.

A leadership process model is presented which depicts a core social process within which subordinates' view of leadership is formed. Subordinates in cleaned‐up bureaucracies view leaders as people who service them, thus facilitating the movement of subordinates towards the minimization of their “attainment differences”. This view is far from the New Leadership notions of the charismatic, visionary, transformational leader or the captain‐like instrumental and authoritative leader.

Findings are derived on the basis of a substantive case study of one cleaned‐up bureaucracy in a particular country. Further research needs to expand this base to encompass other organizations in a wider range of countries across different cultures.

The grounded theoretical model draws attention to the intermediation and brokering role of leaders below the top management team who need to find ways to accommodate within the unilateral dictates of the senior executive strategies designed to minimize the attainment differences of subordinates.

The paper responds to recent calls to situate leadership process research within specific organizational and change contexts. Not all organizational change involves movement away from existing structures, systems or principles. Rather, some change efforts involve movement within the framework of existing structures, systems or principles, in the sense that they are aimed at tightening up rather than breaking down these concepts. Thus, change efforts are often aimed at cleaning‐up bureaucracies so they can achieve their prime objectives more efficiently. The leadership literature is far less rich in analysing such situations, a deficiency which this paper is aimed at filling.

Little is known about how and why pilots are useful in the context of organisational change. There has similarly been little attention to processes of distributed leadership in organisational change. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical argument relating to how key aspects shaping organisational change can be addressed by distributed change leadership through the mechanism of pilots.

The paper contribution is to review extant literature on change management and distributed leadership to build a model of distributed change leadership.

The paper outlines how the model of distributed change leadership can be applied through a pilot strategy to help engender commitment and learning, as well as contextualising the change to cope with the complexities of the situation.

The paper concludes with a discussion on the opportunities distributed leadership through pilots can bring to the effectiveness of organisational change interventions. The paper identifies a series of research propositions to help guide future directions for research. Finally the paper explores practical implications of the suggestions.

There is an absence of discussion on distributed leadership within the context of change management. Further the mechanism of pilots shaped by distributed leadership has not been explored. This paper is intended to provide a stimulus for exploring this important area in terms of shaping thinking and designs for organisational change to enhance effectiveness.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

Discusses feasibility, desirability and value of Japanese management strategies in a Western context. Major Japanese companies are at the leading edge in refining management strategies, techniques and styles, for example, with regard to having a long‐term perspective and the continuous improvement of quality, stock control, skill formation, communications, training and employee development. As possible models can these approaches be transferred to different cultures?