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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Washington State school district financial reporting and budget reporting meet the information needs of school board directors charged with governance.

Washington State school board directors were surveyed and asked to rank information items’ usefulness in carrying out their governance role. School district annual reports, budgets and websites were examined to determine whether the identified information was reported and easily transparent to those charged with governance and the public.

Directors rank information on strategic oversight, budget planning and student outcomes as more useful, consistent with the strategic role of new public management. Follow-on analysis of district annual financial reports, budgets and websites reveal that the availability of the information ranked useful by directors is limited. The findings suggest an information gap exists between directors’ information needs and school district reporting. Annual reports and budgets, when provided, often provide typical financial statements and variance data, respectively, rather than reporting on mission-aligned performance measures. The main consequence of the information gap may be compromised decision-making effectiveness.

By directly asking those charged with governance what information they identify as useful and then examining whether the information is reported in the annual report, budget or website, the study links user information needs to information transparency.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how pregnant women with type 1 diabetes integrate new information technology (IT) into their health management activities, using activity theory as an analytical framework.

The research is a multiple case design, based on interviews with 15 women with type 1 diabetes who were pregnant, considering pregnancy, or had recently given birth. A thematic analysis, sensitised by activity theory, was used to analyse the data.

Health management in this setting involves negotiations and contradictions across boundaries of interacting activities. Participants play an active role in managing their health and using new IT tools in particular ways to support their health management. Using new technologies creates both opportunities and challenges. IT-enabled healthcare devices and other information systems open up new treatment possibilities, but also generate new contradictions between interacting activity systems.

The research was conducted with a small sample in a specific context of health management. Further research is needed to extend the findings to other contexts.

Healthcare providers need to accommodate a bottom-up approach to the adoption and use of new technologies in settings where empowered patients play an active role in managing their health.

The findings highlight opportunities to further develop activity theory to accommodate the central role that individuals play in resolving inherent contradictions and achieving alignment between multiple interacting activity systems when incorporating new IT tools into health management activities.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

The learning outcomes are as follows: examining the attributes and characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, understanding the biggest challenges entrepreneurs are facing in the process of developing their own business, understanding how to lead change and create competitive advantage in an emerging economy, identifying the challenges and pressuring the business in facing the retail industry and discussing and debating the challenge of diversification strategy and the risks associated with it.

It was year 2009 when the largest hypermarket in Albania, “Do it Yourself”, opened its doors to the public by bringing in Albania an important investment. This investment was significant for the country because it materialized in the midst of the world economic crisis. The company hired 500 employees, a big number for the size of the country. The 160,000 m² area facility is strategically located 6 km from Tirana International Airport and 8 km from the center of Tirana, the capital city. The interior of the Hypermarket Retail Store occupies 20,000 m² retail, 12,000 m² wholesale and 2,600 m² office space. The rest is green space and parking. Megatek carries a range of 51,000 products in different categories as homemade decorations, lighting and electrical, building materials, tools, gardening, heating and cooling, painting, wood and flooring. The products are available at a brick and mortar store and also online; the products are also home delivered. The company has been devoted to contribute to consumer education, quality service delivery and quality products at competitive prices. Armed with eight years of continuing success, Dionis was facing a critical decision. Should he expand or stand pat? Should he diversify the activity or maintain focus? Meanwhile, Megatek’s challenges on growing its business remain vivid. A couple of changes in the external environment ask for smart responses in the internal environment.

BA and Master level students.

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CSS 11: Strategy

Presents evidence from the literature that Jews are generally to be found on the left side of the political economic spectrum. Various thories have been put foward to explain this phenomenon: historical accident, reaction to stereotypes, intellectualism, and the Mishnah. Concludes that Jews, even orthodox ones, are liberals and leftists.