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In SMT manufacturing, automation is the key to achieving the highest throughput at the lowest cost. Complex devices of various shapes and sizes often require final electrical adjustments under operating conditions to ensure conformance to electrical specifications. This paper describes the process of laser trimming completed SMT devices and the advantages it has over conventional trimming methods. The material presented is based on laser trimming systems currently used in SMT production applications that will also be described.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

Faced with institutional demands, organizations often create departments whose work is divorced from technical imperatives. This paper examines workers in one such department: Human Resources. Analysis of HR’s recent history and evidence from an ethnographic study of HR work highlight the institutional origins of conflict between HR’s established “compliance police” role and the “business partner” expectations of line managers. The paper outlines a theory of how organizational responses to institutional complexity contribute to persistent tension in HR and other heteronomous occupations.

Institutional investors—insurance companies, pension funds, investment trust companies and unit trusts—have increased significantly and persistently their ownership of British industry. At the end of 1977 they owned approximately 46 per cent of the ordinary shares in UK quoted companies and in recent years have accounted for over 50 per cent of stock market turnover in UK equities. Their presence in the stock market has been associated with their ability to influence share prices, decide the outcome of takeover battles, and trade outside the London Stock Exchange. As major shareholders in public companies they have been encouraged to participate in managerial decision‐making. For corporate management, the growth of institutional shareholdings provides opportunities to utilise their voting power in takeover situations, encourage their support for the market value of the company, and use financial institutions as sources of new capital.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.

Volumes 70 and 71 of Research in the Sociology of Organizations combine to comprise cutting edge theory and empirical scholarship at the interface of practice and institution in organization studies. As we highlight, this interface has spurred particularly generative conversations with many open questions, and much to explore. We provide a review of scholarly developments in practice theory and organizational institutionalism that have given rise to this interest in building a bridge between scholarly communities. As signaled by recent efforts to construct a practice-driven institutionalism, we highlight how connecting practice theory with the institutional logics perspective provides a particularly attractive focal point for scholarship at this interface due to a variety of shared ontological and epistemological commitments, including the constitution of actors and their behavior. Collectively, the papers assembled unlock exciting opportunities to connect distinct, but related scholarly communities on practice and institution, seeding scholarship that can advance our understanding of organizational and societal dynamics.

The study of markets encompasses a number of disciplines – including anthropology, economics, history, and sociology – and a larger number of theoretical frameworks (see Plattner, 1989; Reddy, 1984; Smelser & Swedberg, 1994). Despite this disciplinary and theoretical diversity, scholarship on markets tends toward either realist or constructionist accounts (Dobbin, 1994; Dowd & Dobbin, forthcoming).¹ Realist accounts treat markets as extant arenas that mostly (or should) conform to a singular ideal-type. Realists thus take the existence of markets as given and examine factors that supposedly shape all markets in a similar fashion. When explaining market outcomes, they tout such factors as competition, demand, and technology; moreover, they can treat the impact of these factors as little influenced by context. Constructionist accounts treat markets as emergent arenas that result in a remarkable variety of types. They problematize the existence of markets and examine how contextual factors contribute to this variety. When explaining market outcomes, some show that social relations and/or cultural assumptions found in a particular setting can qualify the impact of competition (Uzzi, 1997), demand (Peiss, 1998), and technology (Fischer, 1992). Constructionists thus stress the contingent, rather than universal, processes that shape markets.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.