Management are aliens! Rumours during organisational change

Rumors collected from a large public hospital undergoing change were content analyzed, and a typology comprising the following five broad types of change-related rumors was developed: rumors about changes to job and working conditions, nature of organizational change, poor change management, consequences of the change for organizational performance, and gossip-rumors. Rumors were also classified as positive or negative on the basis of their content. As predicted, negative rumors were more prevalent than positive rumors. Finally, employees reporting negative rumors also reported more change-related stress as compared to those who reported positive rumors and those who did not report any rumors. The authors propose that rumors be treated as verbal symbols and expressions of employee concerns during organizational change

THE IMPORTANCE OF INDUSTRY STRUCTURE FOR THE DETERMINATION OF FIRM PROFITABILITY: A NEO-AUSTRIAN PERSPECTIVE

This paper is concerned with exploring the degree to which industry structure determines firm performance. Most of the business policy literature follows Porter in arguing that industry structure has an important influence on firm level profit rates. the arguments contained in this paper take a counter position. It is argued that a plausible alternative to the hypothesis that industry structure matters is the hypothesis that (holding demand constant) individual firm differences are the most important determinant of firm profitability