Vincent Hazleton and William Kennan
Examines social capital as a theoretic construct with the potential to enhance our understanding of public relations contribution to the organizational bottom line. There are…
Abstract
Examines social capital as a theoretic construct with the potential to enhance our understanding of public relations contribution to the organizational bottom line. There are three classes of outcomes: increased and/or more complex forms of social capital, reduced transaction costs, and organizational advantage. Like economic capital, social capital is not always used wisely and can produce negative consequences for actors.
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Hilary Fussell, Jill Harrison‐Rexrode, William R. Kennan and Vincent Hazleton
The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between social capital, transaction costs, and organizational outcomes.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the connection between social capital, transaction costs, and organizational outcomes.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is based on a survey of 176 employees of a high‐tech manufacturer of electronics located in the Mid‐Atlantic region of the USA. The survey included three self‐report measures: social capital, transaction costs, and organizational outcomes. Self‐report items were used to measure three dimensions of social capital: structure, relationships, and communication. Transaction cost items measured information exchange, problem solving, conflict management, and behavior regulation. Questions measuring organizational outcomes included quality, change, equity, and fairness.
Findings
The central finding of this research is the significant association between social capital and both transaction costs and organizational outcomes. As expected, trust served as a predictor of both transaction costs and organizational outcomes. In addition, the social capital components of access, timing, and network ties were significantly associated with transaction costs and organizational outcomes.
Research limitations/implications
The items used to measure the communication dimension of social capital did not demonstrate sufficient reliability to be entered into the analysis.
Practical implications
The results suggest an alternative approach to considering the connection between communication management and organizational achievement. This approach, also, theoretically centralizes communication and communication related concerns as foundational for social capital analysis.
Originality/value
This study offers a valuable alternative theoretic approach to understanding the impact of communication on organizational affairs.
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This chapter argues that aspiring hegemons face a wide array of complex and distinct military challenges. Managing scarce military resources requires a subtle and complex global…
Abstract
This chapter argues that aspiring hegemons face a wide array of complex and distinct military challenges. Managing scarce military resources requires a subtle and complex global strategy that is likely to generate cognitive overload for the political system. As a result of cognitive overload, aspiring hegemons are likely to flail around, rapidly shifting from one global strategy to another. Such strategic flailing will occur independently of whether or not the economy is in crisis, though clearly economic crisis will exacerbate the tendency towards strategic incoherence. The chapter examines U.S. global strategy since the end of the Cold War, looking at the focus on “rogue regimes,” a growing concern with “global chaos,” worry about the rise of a peer competitor (China), and the debates about the root causes of, and best strategies to mitigate, terrorism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role of culture and notions of national identity and their role in the formulation of grand strategy.
The conflict of expectations which centres in the university has always existed. Abelard had his difficulties with the lay society in which he lived, and student riots against the…
Abstract
The conflict of expectations which centres in the university has always existed. Abelard had his difficulties with the lay society in which he lived, and student riots against the faculty were not unknown in the Italian universities of the middle ages, that time which is so often advanced as the hey‐day of the well‐organized academic life. It is obvious, however, that within the last few years in Britain, the conflict has become if not more severe, at least more overt. Also, as the universities in Britain inescapably become larger and physically more complex, the direct action produced by the conflict of immediate expectations has become more public. It may even, on occasion as at LSE, paralyse the day‐to‐day functioning of the institution as an administrative structure. Such physical paralysis in turn offends the expectations of those who believe that they are paying for a piece of machinery, which may be seen to be in order by the regular movement of its parts, and be heard to work by the reassuring repetition of familiar sounds. It is rather a dismal fact, that these complex physical structures, like some lumbering dinosaurs, seem at present grossly affected by apparently tiny hostile activities. All this is to view the present pressures inside these institutions wholly as the result of the personal will of different interest groups, and indeed this is a useful picture for many purposes, though it is not the only, nor even a completely satisfactory one. It is a useful way to see the forces acting on a university teacher in Britain now, by looking at one's own expectations and how one sets out to achieve them. This puts a personal view into perspective, stimulating some of that ‘disinterested criticism’ that is rightly thought to be part of the academic life. It is a distinctly uncomfortable kind of introspection.
Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some…
Abstract
Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.
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The Russian poet, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921), was arrested in 1921 on the false charge of conspiracy and was shot. The Soviet Union's existence ended as abruptly and…
Abstract
The Russian poet, Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (1886–1921), was arrested in 1921 on the false charge of conspiracy and was shot. The Soviet Union's existence ended as abruptly and unexpectedly as did Gumilev's. No major political structure in modern history has collapsed so rapidly. Left is the scarred memory of an enormously rich history. Libraries are the souls of memory. Russian libraries face an extremely important role as the skins of the past are shed for a new soul.
Roots of global Terrorism are in ‘failed’ states carved out of multiracial empires after World Wars I and II in name of ‘national self‐determination’. Both sides in the Cold War…
Abstract
Roots of global Terrorism are in ‘failed’ states carved out of multiracial empires after World Wars I and II in name of ‘national self‐determination’. Both sides in the Cold War competed to exploit the process of disintegration with armed and covert interventions. In effect, they were colluding at the expense of the ‘liberated’ peoples. The ‘Vietnam Trauma’ prevented effective action against the resulting terrorist buildup and blowback until 9/11. As those vultures come home to roost, the war broadens to en vision overdue but coercive reforms to the postwar system of nation states, first in the Middle East. Mirages of Vietnam blur the vision; can the sole Superpower finish the job before fiscal and/or imperial overstretch implode it?
Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the…
Abstract
Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.