Leveraging Professional Intellect in the Virtual Age

The paper explores the nature of professional intellect and the requirements for managing it, an area acknowledged as being under-researched. Five case studies in the professional accounting services sector were conducted and the findings were used to identify the structure and evolution towards a knowledge-based accounting practice using Venkatraman’s (1995) model of the virtual organisation. The majority of firms, with one exception, were in the first stage of evolution (extension of Business Process Re-engineering) for all three virtual dimensions, competence leverage, work configuration and market experience. The issues confronting professional accounting practices in moving to the stages of recreating the organisation and recreating value were identified as the need to maximise creative forms of professional intellect, making knowledge management a professional discipline and changing current organisational culture

Alternative routes to good jobs in the service economy: Employment restructuring and human resource management in incumbent telecommunications firms

This is a practitioner report detailing findings from a three-year study on organizational restructuring and employment outcomes at 10 incumbent telecommunications firms, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. It presents background on markets, ownership, and institutions in the case study firms and countries, and compares restructuring policies in three areas: downsizing and employment adjustment; diversifying employment contracts; and work organization and human resource Management. The report concludes with policy recommendations, based on findings from the study.ESRC Grant RES-061-25-044

10-year Portuguese football strategic plan: sustainable growth

This analysis serves as a complement to the 10-year Portuguese Football Strategic Plan conducted jointly with Federação Portuguesa de Futebol and Deloitte. After measuring the impact of fan engagement, women’s football, academic football, broadcasting rights, and international exposure, this report was directed towards the emerging rise of the gaming and eSports industry. This analysis aims to understand what has already been implemented across different sports concerning technology and how Portuguese football can incorporate different innovations. The goal is to increase both the number of fans and their experience when consuming football in Portugal

Military Transformation and the Defense Industry after Next

Though still adjusting to the end of the Cold War, the defense industry is now confronted with the prospect of military transformation. Since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, many firms have seen business improve in response to the subsequent large increase in the defense budget. But in the longer run, the defense sector\u27s military customers intend to reinvent themselves for a future that may require the acquisition of unfamiliar weapons and support systems.https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-newport-papers/1016/thumbnail.jp

Collected Papers: Entrepreneurship

These collected papers serve as a student exercise in critical thinking. The aim is to explore and discover knowledge relating to differing aspects of entrepreneurship. Critical thinking skills, academic writing and the ability to build arguments are all skills we consider an essential part of our student progression. Our students understand critical thinking as an intellectually disciplined, cognitive process which involves the reflective, active analysis and evaluation of knowledge and arguments in order to develop their own defensible knowledge and arguments. Reading and writing are enquiries that require an action rather than just repeating what has been previously stated or done, it is an act of discovery. It is for this reason we are not offering definitions of entrepreneurship or explanations of any aspects of the challenges in entrepreneurship education and practice, we will leave this to our students. Whether our approach to entrepreneurship education on this particular module serves to empower and emancipate or to just challenge and explore, might be open for debate. It can be argued that entrepreneurship education should be a way of action rather than a specific subject area . We don’t disagree, but in this instance embrace the subject area as a means to building knowledge, skills and exploring the subject area with our students

From one dominant growth mode to another:Switching between strategic expansion modes

In this PhD thesis, chapter 1 narrates the extant literature showing that firms expand through the organic growth strategy, others through the acquisition strategy, and some by a combination of these two modes. It also reveals that firms sometimes switch from one dominant growth mode to the other, but we have limited insight on why top managers switch modes and how these strategic switch processes unfold. After showing that extant literature is silent about these gaps, chapter 2 reveals that behavioral theory of the firm (BTOF) stand a chance to offer plausible explanations but rather through a newly emergent stream instead of the dominant performance feedback. Chapter 3 adopts qualitative, interpretative grounded theory permitting us to tap into the lived experiences of top managers and annual reports to form the basis of emerging theory. While the context of the study is discussed in chapter 4, case-by-case and cross-case data analyses are explored in 5 and 6, respectively. Lastly, chapter 7 offers three theoretical contributions a) performance anxiety as a major driver leading top managers to switch strategies, from one growth mode to another b) explaining this through forward-looking logic (performance prospects) of BTOF, instead of backwardlooking logic (performance feedback), and c) exposing the three phases that bring to bear the situational, action-formation and transformational mechanisms at work, and in doing so reveal the unfolding processes taking place during the formation of a specific switch mode