Toward a Process Theory of Making Sustainability Strategies Legitimate in Action

We draw on a three-year qualitative study of the processual dynamics of implementing a sustainability strategy alongside an existing mainstream competitive strategy. We show that despite the legitimacy of the sustainability strategy at the organizational level, actors experience tensions with its implementation at the action level vis-à-vis the mainstream strategy, thus creating the potential for decoupling. Our findings show that working through these tensions on specific tasks, enables actors to legitimate the sustainability strategy in action and to co-enact it with the mainstream strategy within those tasks. Cumulatively, multiple instances of such co-enactment at the action level reinforce the organizational-level legitimacy of the sustainability strategy and its integration with the mainstream strategy. We draw these findings together into a dynamic process model that contributes to the literature on integration of dual strategies at the action and organizational levels as a process of legitimacy making

Emotion management as struggle in dirty work: the experiences of exotic dancers

We further the research to date on ambiguity, ambivalence and contradiction in organisation studies by integrating the dirty work and emotion management literatures. Our intent is to better understand the complex cognitive processes underpinning everyday experiences of those working in what has been perceived to be a high-breadth high-depth stigmatised occupation, that is, exotic dancing. Dancers’ stories reveal they are acutely aware of social and moral taint associated with the work and in turn their self-identities. They adopt a number of strategies to manage their spoiled identities and we contribute by unpicking the cognitive processes that underpin these strategies. In extending strategies of emotional ambivalence at work and stigma management, we conclude that through a lens of emotion management as struggle, exotic dancers, and more broadly dirty workers, do not ‘resolve’ the ambivalence, contradiction and ambiguity they confront but can be seen to experience at best a type of contingent coherence in their everyday work

Beyond Baby-Splitting: Arbitrator Decision-Making Patterns in Employment Cases

That arbitrators tend to “split the baby” by issuing compromise awards is amongst the hoariest of clichés in the dispute resolution field. While the idea of arbitrators as baby-splitters has been challenged by commentators and lacks support in empirical evidence, the idea is surprisingly persistent. More importantly, it may be continuing to influence the decisions of actors whether or not to use arbitration to resolve disputes. A 1997 survey conducted by David Lipsky, Ronald Seeber, and Richard Fincher found that 49.7% of general counsels of Fortune 1000 corporations reported that concerns about compromise decisions was one of their reasons for not using arbitration

Mapping Specialisation and Fragmentation of Regulatory Bodies

The objective of the Flemish database is to determine the current level of proliferation of regulatory bodies and to map how regulatory regimes are structured (i.e. what kind of organizations are involved and what are their characteristics?). This paper explores whether there are ‘groups’ of regulators who share certain characteristics with other members of the same group, but differ from other groups. In specific, we test whether the sector in which a body is active and the level of government to which it belongs, have an impact on the organisational form of the body and the tasks it performs. We find that economic regulators differ significantly from other areas. They are more insulated from politicians, are more specialised and seem to have a relatively strong legal mandate. The level of government seems to be a relevant explanatory factor as well. Federal bodies are more insulated from government than other levels. In addition, they are more specialised in regulation and have a rather limited legal mandate. The results confirm the relevance of comparing different regulatory areas and levels of government.

Pro-social Behavior in the Global Commons: A North-South Experiment

Differences in group affiliation may affect the level of cooperation in global commons situations such as programs for the conservation of resources which generate benefits that transcend state boundaries. We design a real-time, cross-cultural common pool resource (CPR) experiment purposely using participants from cultures that derive different benefits from biodiversity (extraction versus conservation) to analyze the effect of group affiliation on cooperative behavior. In addition, we elicit real donations to local and international conservation funds to augment our CPR results. In the CPR environment, we find evidence that group affiliation affects hehavior such that heterogeneity contributes to over-extraction in the commons. In the donation stage, we show that nationality affects the distribution of donated earnings between the local and global funds. We also examine the possibility that altruistic preferences to donate to a conservation fund are endogenous, in that they reflect the level of cooperation in the CPR game.common pool resource, group affiliation, cooperation, cross-culture, dicator game, endogenous preferences, experiment

Institutional Cognition

We generalize a recent mathematical analysis of Bernard Baars' model of human consciousness to explore analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cogntivie modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, seem able to multitask, supporting several such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Surprisingly, such multitasking, while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it. This suggests that organizations (or machines) explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, would still be subject to analogs of the subtle failure patterns explored in Wallace (2005b, 2006). We compare and contrast our results with recent work on collective efficacy and collective consciousness

Machine Hyperconsciousness

Individual animal consciousness appears limited to a single giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a shifting, highly tunable, Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, can support several, often many, such giant components simultaneously, although they generally function far more slowly than the minds of the individuals who compose them. Machines having multiple global workspaces -- hyperconscious machines -- should, however, be able to operate at the few hundred milliseconds characteistic of individual consciousness. Such multitasking -- machine or institutional -- while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it, and introduces characteristic failure modes involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. This suggests that machines explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns analogous to, but more complicated than, those explored in Wallace (2006a). By contrast, institutions, facing similar challenges, are usually deeply embedded in a highly stabilizing cultural matrix of law, custom, and tradition which has evolved over many centuries. Parallel development of analogous engineering strategies, directed toward ensuring an 'ethical' device, would seem requisite to the sucessful application of any form of hyperconscious machine technology