Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability: Issues and Challenges

University education rarely focuses its attention and imagination on teaching students how to turn a vision into reality; how to design, develop, and lead social change organizations. The author co-created the Social Entrepreneurship Collaboratory (SE Lab) at Stanford University and then Harvard University as a model educational program designed to achieve this goal. The SE Lab is a Silicon Valley influenced incubator where student teams create and develop innovative pilot projects for US and international social sector initiatives. The lab combines academic theory, frameworks, and traditional research with intensive field work, action research, peer support and learning, and participation of domain experts and social entrepreneurship practitioners. It also provides students an opportunity to collaborate on teams to develop business plans for their initiatives and to compete for awards and recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Students in the SE Lab have created innovative organizations serving many different social causes, including fighting AIDS in Africa, promoting literacy in Mexico, combating the conditions for terrorism using micro-finance in the Palestinian territories, and confronting gender inequality using social venture capital to empower women in Afghanistan

Collaborating to desegregate a black school: how can a low power stakeholder gain voice?.

This longitudinal action research examines a black school's process of desegregation. Based upon stakeholder, desegregation and collaboration theory, the school's segregated mode was analyzed through understanding its identity as it was conctituted in its stakeholders' network and assessing the incentives to collaborate among different stakeholders. As a way to gain voice, the interventions were orieted towards shifting the schoo's network boundaries and creating personalized relationships with stakeholders around an educational curriculum in wich heterogeneity itself had a function. According to the 'ethics of care' principle, stakeholders shared responsibilities for the needs of all pupils.Desegregation; Processes; Theory;

Introduction to the special issue: Social construct within an information society

Managing Information Systems (IS) is increasingly complex, as multiple stakeholders try to communicate, act, and interact for social and business gain. Understanding and managing these complex stakeholder relations and the contingencies of successful communication among culturally diverse stakeholder groups are some of the major challenges for professional communicators in the third millennium. Such challenges have important implications for communication between user and developer groups as training and education of the users becomes more complex. In an effort to connect information system practice with communication theory, this special issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication looks at information systems as social constructs of an information societ

Enhancing the Benefits Management Model for Complex eHealth Efforts

This thesis suggests five ways to improve BM in complex eHealth efforts. First, the concept of BR was defined to clarify the existing conflation of the BR and BM concepts. Second, an extended and enhanced BMM was developed that incorporated the BM context, levels of complexity for both organizational and interorganizational initiatives, and the critical aspects of learning and governance. Third, three propositions concerning learning and governance in BM were suggested based on the new model, which can be used to inform future BM studies and guide empirical work. Fourth, the propositions were further translated into a six-question checklist to stimulate learning from the BM process itself. Finally, I provide suggestions for BM governance in interorganizational ICT efforts aiming to realize societal benefits.publishedVersio

Understanding the Complexity of Benefits Management in an Interorganizational eHealth Effort

Information and communication technology (ICT) is an intervention for the future provision of healthcare services and diverse types of technologies are being implemented. However, realizing the benefits of such efforts is challenging. Moreover, collaboration among organizations has become common, which increases the complexity level and making the benefits of ICT efforts even more challenging to realize. As benefits management (BM) practices have not been designed for complex situations, a deeper contextual understanding of BM practices is required. To address this issue, a case study was conducted in a Norwegian interorganizational eHealth effort. The results provide an overview of four central concepts describing interorganizational complexity, as well as organizational and external concepts that challenge current BM practices. The case study findings highlight the need for updated BM practices and provides three novel suggestions for improving BM practices in interorganizational eHealth efforts

Exploring Why Organisations Differ in Board Configuration: Do Organisations’ Age, Size and their Years Being Public Matter? Findings from Greek Listed Manufacturing Organisations

In this paper building upon several theories (agency theory, stakeholder theory and resource dependence theory) and by utilising data from 161 Greek manufacturing companies that were listed in the Athens Stock Exchange on the 31st December 2008, we explore the relationships between the organisational characteristics of the firms (organisational age, organisational size and years listed in the stock market) and the Board configuration (board size, board leadership structure and directors’ dependence/independence). Both descriptive and inferential statistics (ANOVA tests) were utilised to answer the research questions. Interestingly and in alignment with the literature, the findings showed that larger organizations tend to have larger boards and greater proportions of external and independent directors. However, no more strong relationships have been identified between the organisational characteristics and the board configuration. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this study examines the listed Greek manufacturing companies during very turbulent times, the start of the financial crisis in Greece, which may have an impact on the configuration of the boards at that time

Improved resource efficiency and cascading utilisation of renewable materials

In light of various environmental problems and challenges concerning resource allocation, the utilisation of renewable resources is increasingly important for the efficient use of raw materials. Therefore, cascading utilisation (i.e., the multiple material utilisations of renewable resources prior to their conversion into energy) and approaches that aim to further increase resource efficiency (e.g., the utilisation of by-products) can be considered guiding principles. This paper therefore introduces the Special Volume “Improved Resource Efficiency and Cascading Utilisation of Renewable Materials”. Because both research aspects, resource efficiency and cascading utilisation, belong to several disciplines, the Special Volume adopts an interdisciplinary perspective and presents 16 articles, which can be divided into four subjects: Innovative Materials based on Renewable Resources and their Impact on Sustainability and Resource Efficiency, Quantitative Models for the Integrated Optimisation of Production and Distribution in Networks for Renewable Resources, Information Technology-based Collaboration in Value Generating Networks for Renewable Resources, and Consumer Behaviour towards Eco-friendly Products. The interdisciplinary perspective allows a comprehensive overview of current research on resource efficiency, which is supplemented with 15 book reviews showing the extent to which textbooks of selected disciplines already refer to resource efficiency. This introductory article highlights the relevance of the four subjects, presents summaries of all papers, and discusses future research directions. The overall contribution of the Special Volume is that it bridges the resource efficiency research of selected disciplines and that it presents several approaches for more environmentally sound production and consumption