Sustaining entrepreneurial business: a complexity perspective on processes that produce emergent practice

This article examines the management practices in an entrepreneurial small firm which sustain the business. Using a longitudinal qualitative case study, four general processes are identified (experimentation, reflexivity, organising and sensing), that together provide a mechanism to sustain the enterprise. The analysis draws on concepts from entrepreneurship and complexity science. We suggest that an entrepreneur’s awareness of the role of these parallel processes will facilitate their approaches to sustaining and developing enterprises. We also suggest that these processes operate in parallel at multiple levels, including the self, the business and inter-firm networks. This finding contributes to a general theory of entrepreneurship. A number of areas for further research are discussed arising from this result

A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

Self organising cloud cells: a resource efficient network densification strategy

Network densification is envisioned as the key enabler for 2020 vision that requires cellular systems to grow in capacity by hundreds of times to cope with unprecedented traffic growth trends being witnessed since advent of broadband on the move. However, increased energy consumption and complex mobility management associated with network densifications remain as the two main challenges to be addressed before further network densification can be exploited on a wide scale. In the wake of these challenges, this paper proposes and evaluates a novel dense network deployment strategy for increasing the capacity of future cellular systems without sacrificing energy efficiency and compromising mobility performance. Our deployment architecture consists of smart small cells, called cloud nodes, which provide data coverage to individual users on a demand bases while taking into account the spatial and temporal dynamics of user mobility and traffic. The decision to activate the cloud nodes, such that certain performance objectives at system level are targeted, is carried out by the overlaying macrocell based on a fuzzy-logic framework. We also compare the proposed architecture with conventional macrocell only deployment and pure microcell-based dense deployment in terms of blocking probability, handover probability and energy efficiency and discuss and quantify the trade-offs therein

Exploring performance management in four UK trade unions

Purpose This article explores performance management in four UK trade unions. Specifically, the extent to which managers in the four unions accept or dismiss the unitarist, disciplinary and performative values that arguably characterise performance management practices. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative research design was adopted to investigate trade union managers’ interpretations of performance management. Managers were targeted because they hold the power to shape performance management practices in their specific areas. The research employed qualitative semi-structured interviews. Findings Performance management in trade unions is linked to the structure, purpose and orientation of different types of trade union. It is also linked to the wider environmental context. The trade union managers’ interpretations of performance management are linked to disciplinary and performative values. As such they are comparable to the unitarist forms of performance management described in the literature. There are moreover, similarities and differences between the approaches to performance management between trade unions and for profit or public sector organisations. Originality/Value The article adds to the emerging literature on internal trade union management by highlighting a particular aspect of human resource management

Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management

Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT

Self-organizing peer-to-peer social networks

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 The Authors.Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems provide a new solution to distributed information and resource sharing because of its outstanding properties in decentralization, dynamics, flexibility, autonomy, and cooperation, summarized as DDFAC in this paper. After a detailed analysis of the current P2P literature, this paper suggests to better exploit peer social relationships and peer autonomy to achieve efficient P2P structure design. Accordingly, this paper proposes Self-organizing peer-to-peer social networks (SoPPSoNs) to self-organize distributed peers in a decentralized way, in which neuron-like agents following extended Hebbian rules found in the brain activity represent peers to discover useful peer connections. The self-organized networks capture social associations of peers in resource sharing, and hence are called P2P social networks. SoPPSoNs have improved search speed and success rate as peer social networks are correctly formed. This has been verified through tests on real data collected from the Gnutella system. Analysis on the Gnutella data has verified that social associations of peers in reality are directed, asymmetric and weighted, validating the design of SoPPSoN. The tests presented in this paper have also evaluated the scalability of SoPPSoN, its performance under varied initial network connectivity and the effects of different learning rules.National Natural Science of Foundation of Chin

An emergence perspective on entrepreneurship: processes, structure and methodology

This paper explores entrepreneurship from the perspective of emergence, drawing on literature in complexity theory, social theory and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is conceptualised as the production of emergence, or emergent properties, via a simple model of initial conditions, processes of emergence that produces emergent properties at multiple levels (new phenomena such as products, services, firms, networks, patterns of behaviour, identities). Conceptualisation through emergence thus embraces actors, context, processes and (structural) outcomes. This paper builds on previous work that theorises the relationship between entrepreneurship and social change. We extend that work by considering the methodological implications of relating processes of entrepreneurship to the emergence of new phenomena

Kite-marks, standards and privileged legal structures; artefacts of constraint disciplining structure choices

As different countries and regions continue to develop policy and legal frameworks for social enterprises this paper offers new insights into the dynamics of legal structure choice by social entrepreneurs. The potential nodes of conflict between exogenous prescriptions and social entrepreneur’s own orientation to certain aspects of organization and what social entrepreneurs actually do in the face of such conflict is explicated. Kite-marks, standards and legal structures privileged by powerful actors are cast as political artefacts that serve to discipline the choices of legal structure by social entrepreneurs as they prescribe desirable characteristics, behaviours and structures for social enterprises. This paper argues that social enterprises should not be understood as the homogenous organisational category that is portrayed in government policy documents, kite-marks and privileged legal structures but as organisations facing a proliferation of structural forms which are increasingly rendered a governable domain (Nickel & Eikenberry, 2016; Scott, 1998) through the development of kite marks, funder / investor requirements and government policy initiatives. Further, that these developments act to prioritise and marginalise particular forms of social enterprises as they exert coercive, mimetic and normative pressures (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) that act to facilitate the categorising of social enterprises in a way that strengthens institutional coherence and serves to drive the structural isomorphism (Boxenbaum & Jonsson, 2017; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) of social enterprise activity. Whilst the actions of powerful actors work to maintain (Greenwood & Suddaby, 2006) the social enterprise category the embedded agency of social entrepreneurs acts to transform it (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009). The prevailing Institutional logics (Ocasio, Thornton, & Lounsbury, 2017; Zhao & Lounsbury, 2016) that serve to both marginalise and prioritise those legal structures are used to present argument that the choice of legal structure for a social enterprise is often in conflict with the social entrepreneur's orientation to certain aspects of how they wish to organise. Where the chosen legal structure for a social enterprise is in conflict with the social entrepreneur's own organising principles as to how they wish to organise then this can result in the social entrepreneur decoupling (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009) their business and/or governance practices from their chosen legal structure in order to resolve the tensions that they experience. Social entrepreneurs also experiencing the same tension enact a different response in that they begin to create and legitimate new legal structures on the margins of the social enterprise category through a process of institutional entrepreneurship (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Hardy & Maguire, 2017)

Community Self-Organisation from a Social-Ecological Perspective: ‘Burlang Yatra’ and Revival of Millets in Odisha (India)

In this paper, I focus on the revival of an Indigenous community seed festival known locally as Burlang Yatra (‘Indigenous Biodiversity Festival’) in the district of Kandhamal in Odisha (India). This annual event brings together millet farmers to share knowledge and practices, including exchange of Indigenous heirloom seeds. Such community seed festivals remain largely underappreciated (and underexplored). Investigating Burlang Yatra through a social-ecological lens allowed for a greater understanding of its capacity to build and strengthen relationships, adaptation, and responsibility, three key principles that together link the social and the ecological in a dynamic sense. These principles, driven by intergenerational participation and interaction as well as social learning, can be seen as fostering ‘social-ecological memory’ of millet-based biodiverse farming. The festival’s persistence and revival illustrate a form of grassroots self-organising that draws on values of an Indigenous knowledge system. Within a restorative context, it has the capacity to repair and restore cultural and ecological relationships that the community has with their own foods and practices. This paper offers a new understanding of community self-organising from a social-ecological perspective and particularly in a marginalised context as supporting the revitalisation of Indigenous food systems