Rethinking managerial roles in change initiatives

Organisational change that is initiated by middle management rather than top management is more likely to gain employee support. This is the conclusion of a recent study co-authored by Bas Koene, assistant professor in RSM’s Department of Organisation and Personnel Management

Contextual Influences on Evaluative Style and its Effectiveness: Three Avenues for Future Research

Many accounting studies have investigated the effects of differences in evaluative style on subordinate managers’ attitudes and performance. These studies have usually based the distinction of different evaluative styles on the extent to which a superior uses and relies on accounting performance measures when evaluating subordinate managers’ performance. The literature on this concept of evaluative style has become known as RAPM (reliance on accounting performance measures). Recently, this literature has been subject to severe criticism. This paper argues that to gain relevance for the accounting and management community, future research on evaluative style needs to (1) incorporate the development in management accounting and control towards a broad array of information, (2) recognize the importance of organizational context and control system d

Entrepreneurs, institutional entrepreneurship and institutional change

The intersection of entrepreneurship research and institutional theory has begun to attract increasing scholarly attention. While much recent research has studied "institutional entrepreneurs" credited with creating new or transforming existing institutions to support their projects, less attention has been paid to the institutions that constitute the menus from which cho

Contingent Employment in the Netherlands

In the last decade the Dutch labour market has demonstrated an admirable capacity to generate jobs. Consequently, the unemployment rate has significantly decreased. However, the newly generated jobs are a-typical in the sense that they are not full-time jobs based on open-ended contracts. Instead, the job growth has relied on the growth of part-time and contingent jobs. While the creation of part-time jobs seems to be employee-driven, contingent employment, in contrast, seems to be driven by motives of employers to gain numerical flexibility. Data from the Netherlands show that, with the exception of student workers, contingent work is predominantly involuntary. This paper analyses the growth of contingent employment in the Netherlands

Understanding the development of temporary agency work in Europe

This article develops an explanatory framework for understanding the growth and development of temporary agency work (TAW) and the related industry. The analysis shows that explanations based on economic logic are helpful in understanding the choice of TAW in general. These explanations, however, fall short when trying to explain the growth of agency work over time or the variation in its use among European countries. To cope with these shortcomings, we extend our explanatory base to include a variety of sociocultural dynamics. Our analysis shows how deep-seated national work-related values ('deep embeddedness') affect the way TAW is regulated nationally. It also demonstrates how differences in more changeable norms, attitudes and practices ('dynamic embeddedness') affect the process of embedding agency work as a societally acceptable phenomenon, providing a basis for its subsequent proliferation

Proteomic markers with prognostic impact on outcome of chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients under chemo-immunotherapy: results from the HOVON 109 study

Despite recent identification of several prognostic markers, there is still a need for new prognostic parameters able to predict clinical outcome in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients. Here, we aimed to validate the prognostic ability of known (proteomic) markers measured pretreatment and to search for new proteomic markers that might be related to treatment response in CLL. To this end, baseline serum samples of 51 CLL patients treated with chemo-immunotherapy were analyzed for 360 proteomic markers, using Olink technology. Median event-free survival (EFS) was 23 months (range: 1.25–60.9). Patients with high levels of sCD23 (>11.27, p = 0.026), sCD27 (>11.03, p = 0.04), SPINT1 (>1.6, p = 0.001), and LY9 (>8.22, p = 0.0003) had a shorter EFS than those with marker levels below the median. The effect of sCD23 on EFS differed between immunoglobulin heavy chain variable gene-mutated and unmutated patients, with the shortest EFS for unmutated CLL patients with sCD23 levels above the median. Taken together, our results validate the prognostic impact of sCD23 and highlight SPINT1 and LY9 as possible promising markers for treatment response in CLL patients

The value of relationships in a transactional labour market: constructing a market for temporary employment

Introduction In recent decades, the concept of ‘normal’ employment has been challenged. For example, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2003) argue that the global, social and political landscape was characterised by an ‘epochal’ shift during the last decades of the 20th Century, echoing theorists from a wide range of political and intellectual persuasions (Paradeise 2003; Gorz 1999; Granovetter 1998; Rifkin 1996; Handy 1995; Harvey 1990). All of these scholars have pointed to increasing individualization and changing expectations about contractual specifi cations of rights and obligations in all areas of private and public life (Sennett 1998; Gellner 1997; Lyotard 1984). Kallinikos (2003: 595) described these trends as increasingly eroding work communities where ‘modern humans are involved in organizations qua roles, rather than qua persons’. In employment studies, this has led to a focus upon workforce, labour market and employment flexibility. It has generated extensive debates on, successively, the extent – and costs and benefits to employers and workers – of atypical work and contractual arrangements (for example, Barley and Kunda 2004; Rubery et al. 2004; Auer and Cazes 2003; Purcell et al. 1999; Burchell et al. 1999; Atkinson 1985) and – as part of the human resource management and performance debate – HRM architecture and selective labour contracting strategies with specific attention to temporary employment (Boxall and Purcell 2011; Vidal and Tigges, 2009; Koene and van Riemsdijk; 2005; Kalleberg 2003; Lepak and Snell 1999; Pfeffer 1994). Essentially, it has been argued that competitive pressures in the marketplaces for goods and services, allied to changes in technology which have affected production, provision and transferability of goods and services, have led to increased individualisation and (re)commodifi cation of labour, (Esping-Andersen 1990:37) to an extent that represents a tectonic shift from the traditional perspective of employment as preferably permanent and stable. ..