Tom Stoppard on art, Charlie Hebdo - and why it's a bad time to be a voter

An exclusive and wide-ranging interview with Tom Stoppard on the occasion of his new play, The Hard Problem

The relationship between a firm’s ownership structure, governance, and innovation

Firm innovation is key for many companies to continuously thrive in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there are drawbacks to making innovative investments because of the upfront costs and riskiness of future returns. This creates conflicts because managers are under pressure to meet short-term earnings forecasts. A managers’ short-term focus on a firm’s business strategy may not be in the best interests of the shareholders’ long-term vision of a firm. For this reason, a strong corporate governance system can trigger an increased level of monitoring of the decision-making of managers so that it’s aligned with shareholders’ goals. Often, a firm’s long-term strategy focuses on firm innovation. A major influencer of a firm’s innovative strategy is its ownership structure. This research specifically focuses on the impact of ownership concentration, institutional ownership, activist investors, large passive investors, and Board of Director composition on firm innovation. Key components of a firm’s organizational structure, such as ownership concentration and Board member composition, are analyzed to explain the variance iv of innovation when other variables are controlled. Based on a sample of technology firms, the findings show that publicly-traded information technology firms’ level of passive investors and percentage of independent Board members are significant relative to firm innovation. There are also important findings from the unsupported variables, which are the firm’s ownership concentration of shareholders, activist investors, and institutional investors. Finally, inferences are drawn from these results as to whether a firm’s ownership structure and governance affect a firm’s long-term strategy

The Ship Aground

Original poem, inspired by a pub in Rotherhithe of that name; written during Covid-19 lockdown

Delaware & Raritan. 1850

A short story, part of a planned longer work of linked stories, based on the life of Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge: subject of my 2017 biography, "Chief Engineer". "Delaware & Raritan" examines aspects of Roebling's childhood in fiction. Published in Blackbird (ISSN 1540-3068)

Achieving enterprise integration through software customization: part I - evidence from the field

Achieving business and IT integration is strategic goal for many organisations – it has almost become the ‘Holy Grail’ of organisational success. In this environment Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages have become the defacto option for addressing this issue. Integration has come to mean adopting ERP, through configuration and without customization, but this all or nothing approach has proved difficult for many organisations. In part 1 of a 2 part update we provide evidence from the field that suggests that whilst costly, if managed appropriately, customization can have value in aiding organisational integration efforts. In part 2, we discuss in more detail the benefits and pitfalls involved in enacting a non-standard based integration strategy

Making Software Work: Producing Social Order via Problem Solving in a Troubled ERP Implementation

In this paper, we focus on making software work in practice, an important issue given the high failure rate that many companies experience with software products, especially ERP, the focus of this paper. We explore the ways that social order is produced to create a workable information system—accepted and used within the organization. We argue that there are many different ways people solve problems in projects and the practices may be characterized according to stable patterns of coordinated action where compromise is sought or common goals are worked toward. We focus on theories of social ordering in order to illuminate what was occurring at the case organization. More specifically, we examine how despite common aims within an organization there will be different stakeholder groups with unique goals and beliefs about how to achieve their objectives. To overcome these differences, the norm of reciprocity is often adopted in order to produce an orderly state. We look at contentious episodes experienced during an ERP implementation to illustrate the difficulty of trying to always achieve common aims and illustrate the way in which reciprocity helped to move the project forward at these points of conflict. This highlights the importance of establishing reciprocity during controversies where creating a “good enough” solution for all parties takes precedence over the agenda of one particular functional group

Teaching Case Study: Gender Data Trouble in a Student Information System

In 2022, StateU, a large public university in the United States, embarked on a project to collect and use personal pronouns in its information systems. The project lead and functional expert was StateU's Administrative Leader. As she prepared for the first project meeting, she reflected on lessons learned from a past project she led to expand the collection of student gender data to record legal sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. That project involved navigating challenging decisions about user interface design, underlying databases, data privacy and security, and reporting, underpinned by the desire to best serve minoritized and vulnerable populations. She recalled that: "A society with more data about LGBTQ people is not automatically a society that is better for LGBTQ people". She wondered if collecting pronoun data was the right choice in the first place

What Flows Through Data Infrastructures: Blockages, Bends, and Bottlenecks in Sharing Gender Data Between Institutions

There is an increased interest in data infrastructures that accompany digitalization in the public sector where such infrastructures support serving the next generation of citizens better. Literature on information infrastructures provides a robust foundation, but so far theorization of what differentiates data infrastructures has been limited. We conducted a case study of a data infrastructure to share gender identity data in U.S. higher education. By tracing how a university navigated around the cultural, structural, content and material layers of the data infrastructure to share student gender identity data with the state and federal government, we uncover how data were flowing through the infrastructure. Because of differences in the layers of the data infrastructure between institutions, the flow was subject to blockages, bends and bottlenecks. Our findings demonstrate that the nature of data brings challenges in developing data infrastructures across four levels with implications for theory and practice