Actualizing Organizational Core Values: Putting Theory into Practice

The literature on organizational culture and leading by shared values suggests a prescriptive model for use by leaders in actualizing stated organizational core values. Utilizing a qualitative case study approach, this study sought to examine the efficacy of this theoretical model in representing actual efforts by practitioners to embed diversity as a new organizational core value. Leadership actions to embed and actualize diversity as an institutional core value at two private universities were examined and compared. Findings suggest the theoretical model inadequately addresses the critical role of contextual assessment and under represents the dynamic cyclical nature of value embedding and actualization processes, particularly with respect organizations with high stakeholder turnover such as institutions of higher education

Economies through transparency

The notion of transparency is widely used as an analytical tool and as a guideline to propose and enforce new configurations of economic life. Focusing on several transparency-making devices, this paper tries to explore both the pervasiveness of this notion and its ambivalence in a number of relevant sites. We begin by exploring the deployment of transparency in the economic literature at large. We identify three thematic areas, namely, markets and price discovery, corporate management and institutional investors, and state regulations and economic policy. We then tackle these three areas of meaning through three brief case studies: (1) transparency and anonymity in the context of exchange automation, (2) ballot statement controversies in the light of corporate governance principles and (3) the use of transparency at state level in the context of the EU financial regulation. In the concluding section, we try to condense our findings into a tentative typology. We point to an important, yet not always explicit distinction between ‘literal' transparency and ‘abstract' transparency, and we observe combinations between ‘disciplinary' and ‘enabling' uses of transparency-making devices. These articulations of transparency, we suggest, are central to the development of new instruments of government.Transparency ; economic sociology ; governmentality ; stock exchange ; pension funds ; European Union

An investigation on the socio-cognitive foundations of reputation robustness

Scholars have consistently found that a positive reputation can lead to many benefits for organizations (e.g., Cable & Turban, 2003; Deephouse, 2000; Rindova et al., 2005; Roberts & Dowling, 2002), thereby constituting a fundamental resource for competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). As a result, academics have advocated for a better understanding of what makes reputations stable to the effects of negative events and/or information (e.g., Carter & Ruefli, 2006; Flanagan & O’Shaughnessy, 2005; Love & Kraatz, 2009). However, despite such an acknowledgement, we still know relatively little about what makes a firm’s reputation resistant to new events or information, apart from the fact that highly positive reputations are likely to be more resistant (Coombs & Holladay, 2006; Flanagan & O’Shaughnessy, 2005; Love & Kraatz, 2009). To date, scholars who have examined similar topics have looked at reputation stickiness (e.g., Schultz et al., 2001), meaning stability over time in absence of disruptions, and reputation resilience (Rhee & Valdez, 2009), referring to the ability of the reputation to recover after disruptions. This dissertation can be positioned in relation to these two other terms as I look at the stability of a firm’s reputation in the presence of events and/or information that can potentially change it. In this regard I use the term reputation robustness. After an initial chapter reviewing the literature on organizational reputation, this dissertation comprises three other chapters investigating different facets of the same phenomenon. In chapter two, I introduce the concept of reputation robustness in order to help explain why the reputation of some organizations is more robust against negative events than the reputation of other organizations. By building on a review of extant reputation research, I identify two sets of factors that are relevant for the understanding of reputation: cognitive and contextual factors. Starting from this review, I put forward a series of propositions on the role of the identified factors in moderating the effect of negative events on stakeholders’ reputation judgments and explain how this improves our understanding of reputation management. In chapter three, I elaborate on the role of familiarity in making people’s reputation judgment more robust in light of new information and investigate such a relationship empirically through two experiments. Results lend support for the hypothesis that familiarity mitigates the effect of both positive and negative information on people’s reputation judgments. The fourth chapter focuses on the role of ambivalence in moderating the effect of new information, but also more generally in influencing the way in which new information regarding an organization is interpreted. Through one experiment, I find that the reputation judgments of highly ambivalent people are more influenced by new information. At the same time, I find that highly ambivalent people use new information to reduce their sense of ambivalence toward the focal organization, when possible. Overall, this dissertation contributes to research on organizational reputation by improving the understanding of the variables influencing reputation’s robustness to new events or information. In particular, the findings demonstrate that there is more to reputation than its level (whether bad or good) that might cause it to be more or less robust, as suggested by extant research. As discussed in the thesis, these variables are related to stakeholders’ cognitive and contextual characteristics and go beyond the ability of the organization to consistently deliver a positive performance

Ambivalence in digital health: co-designing an mHealth platform for HIV care

In reaction to polarised views on the benefits or drawbacks of digital health, the notion of ‘ambivalence’ has recently been proposed as a means to grasp the nuances and complexities at play when digital technologies are embedded within practices of care. This article responds to this proposal by demonstrating how ambivalence can work as a reflexive approach to evaluate the potential implications of digital health. We first outline current theoretical advances in sociology and organisation science and define ambivalence as a relational and multidimensional concept that can increase reflexivity within innovation processes. We then introduce our empirical case and highlight how we engaged with the HIV community to facilitate a co-design space where 97 patients (across five European clinical sites: Antwerp, Barcelona, Brighton, Lisbon, Zagreb) were encouraged to lay out their approaches, imaginations and anticipations towards a prospective mHealth platform for HIV care. Our analysis shows how patients navigated ambivalence within three dimensions of digital health: quantification, connectivity and instantaneity. We provide examples of how potential tensions arising through remote access to quantified data, new connections with care providers or instant health alerts were distinctly approached alongside embodied conditions (e.g. undetectable viral load) and embedded socio-material environments (such as stigma or unemployment). We conclude that ambivalence can counterbalance fatalistic and optimistic accounts of technology and can support social scientists in taking-up their critical role within the configuration of digital health interventions

Health technology assessment: a sociological commentary on reflexive innovation

This study provides a sociological commentary on the current debates within health technology assessment (HTA), specifically in response to the approaches taken in France, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. It argues that HTA is part of a wider reflexive innovation system that seeks to order current and prospective technologies. The study discusses the socio-political process of HTA priority setting, the rhetorical role of HTA, the localised and contingent use of HTA, and the policy gap between guidelines and practice. It argues for the development of new types of methodologies for assessment and for a stronger social embedding of HTA practice

Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc

This book is a significant contribution to the studies of everyday life in Eastern Europe under communist rule. It is the third in a series of volumes edited and written with Susan E. Reid, which examine the material culture of the Eastern Bloc: see Style and Socialism (Berg, 2000) and Socialist Spaces (Berg, 2003). Reviewing these titles in the London Review of Books, Sheila Fitzpatrick credits Crowley and Reid as ‘two cultural historians who have played a leading role in the development of studies of the everyday in the former Soviet bloc’. The 14 essays explore how leisure and the consumption of luxury goods formed zones that communist states sought to shape, and thereby to extend the reach of their authority. Yet at the same time, they also presented opportunities for people to assert their individuality and enjoy unlicensed pleasures. This contrasts strongly with the conventional scholarship on the Soviet Bloc, which stresses poverty and repression. Crowley's contribution was to write, with Reid, a 21,000-word critical review of existing debates about leisure and luxury in the Bloc and make a number of propositions about the way in which these concepts and practices need to be further conceptualised and researched. This essay also functions as an introduction to the book. The origins of the book lie in a conference organised by Crowley and Reid at the V&A Museum in London in 2007. Following publication, Crowley was invited to talk about the themes in this volume at Södertörn University, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies in Stockholm (2012). A review of this book was published in Slavic Review (2011). Crowley and Reid were also interviewed about the volume in an hour-long podcast for New Books in Eastern Europe Studies (2012)

Cyberspace As/And Space

The appropriate role of place- and space-based metaphors for the Internet and its constituent nodes and networks is hotly contested. This essay seeks to provoke critical reflection on the implications of place- and space-based theories of cyberspace for the ongoing production of networked space more generally. It argues, first, that adherents of the cyberspace metaphor have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which theories of cyberspace as space themselves function as acts of social construction. Specifically, the leading theories all have deployed the metaphoric construct of cyberspace to situate cyberspace, explicitly or implicitly, as separate space. This denies all of the ways in which cyberspace operates as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial practice. Next, it argues that critics of the cyberspace metaphor have confused two senses of space and two senses of metaphor. The cyberspace metaphor does not refer to abstract, Cartesian space, but instead expresses an experienced spatiality mediated by embodied human cognition. Cyberspace in this sense is relative, mutable, and constituted via the interactions among practice, conceptualization, and representation. The insights drawn from this exercise suggest a very different way of understanding both the spatiality of cyberspace and its architectural and regulatory challenges. In particular, they suggest closer attention to three ongoing shifts: the emergence of a new sense of social space, which the author calls networked space; the interpenetration of embodied, formerly bounded space by networked space; and the ways in which these developments alter, instantiate, and disrupt geographies of power

The Faculty Notebook, September 2017

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Favouritism: exploring the 'uncontrolled' spaces of the leadership experience

In this paper, we argue that a focus on favouritism magnifies a central ethical ambiguity in leadership, both conceptually and in practice. The social process of favouritism can even go unnoticed, or misrecognised if it does not manifest in a form in which it can be either included or excluded from what is (collectively interpreted as) leadership. The leadership literature presents a tension between what is an embodied and relational account of the ethical, on the one hand, and a more dispassionate organisational ‘justice’ emphasis, on the other hand. We conducted 23 semi-structured interviews in eight consultancy companies, four multinationals and four internationals. There were ethical issues at play in the way interviewees thought about favouritism in leadership episodes. This emerged in the fact that they were concerned with visibility and conduct before engaging in favouritism. Our findings illustrate a bricolage of ethical justifications for favouritism, namely utilitarian, justice, and relational. Such findings suggest the ethical ambiguity that lies at the heart of leadership as a concept and a practice