Organizational culture

[Extract] Organizational culture can be defined as the institutionalizing processes which regulate cognitive, affective, and self-presentational aspects of membership in an organization. These processes also govern the means by which thought, perception, feeling and expression are shaped and hence encompass various auditory, textual, symbolic, physical and narrative forms. Examples of such means would include: organizational modes of communication (memoranda, telephone, email, interne, meetings, etc.), rituals, ceremonies, stories, myths, jargon, gossip, jokes, physical architecture, office layout, decoration and prevailing modes of staff dress

Strategy

[Extract] In organizational terms, strategy refers to a planned series of actions taken to achieve a predefined end or set of ends. Examples of strategic ends might include such things as maximizing the profitability of a given product/service in a given market, increasing the return on investment in a public service, or reducing poverty in a geographical region according to specifically defined criteria. Planned collective or individual actions taken in pursuit of general ends will also form part of a strategic response. With increased usage, the coinage of strategy has arguably become devalued. There is often confusion between what might properly be called competitive tactics and truly strategic thinking. For example, a marketing plan might now be referred to as a marketing strategy. The powerful connotations of the term strategy are often appropriated simply to lend routine organizational activities an air of importance

Leadership learning, power and practice in Laos: A leadership-as-practice perspective

This article contributes to the growing body of literature developed within the leadership-as-practice perspective, focusing on issues of learning and power. It draws on a co-constructed (auto)ethnographic account of an individual’s longitudinal experience of leadership in the context of an international development project in Laos. This person’s circumstances as a non-Lao-speaking foreigner provided him with a unique opportunity to learn about and participate in the embodied, sociomaterial unfolding of leadership practice in an unfamiliar setting. The analysis examines (1) what ‘leadership learning’ involves when viewed through an ‘entative soft’ leadership-as-practice lens and (2) how individual attempts at exercising power and influence can be understood and represented in leadership-as-practice terms. The study highlights that participants are not given equal scope to exercise power within the emerging, hybrid agency orienting the flow of leadership, and that one task of leadership learning at an individual level is to develop reflexive knowledge about one’s own and others’ contribution to the unfolding of leadership process. Such knowledge draws increased attention to the responsibilities commensurate with attempts to exercise influence within leadership practice

Choosing a life: (re)incarnating after leadership

Leadership studies today resembles a bewildering diversity of theories, concepts, constructs and approaches, struggling in huge part for meaning, relevance and impact. As Dennis Tourish so eloquently puts it, much of the literature suffers from ‘unrelenting triviality’ and ‘sterile preoccupations’. Seeking to create a clean break from this current state of leadership studies, After Leadership begins with the premise of a post-apocalyptic world where only fragments of ‘leadership science’ now remain, echoing Alisdair McIntyre’s imagining of such a scene as the basis for re-establishing the foundations and focus of moral theory. From these fragments, the authors seek to construct a new leadership studies that challenges much of the established thinking on leadership, exposes its limitations and biases, and, most importantly, seeks to construct the foundations of a more inclusive, participatory, bold, relational and social platform for leadership in the future. After Leadership thus imagines a brave new world where what leadership is and what we seek from it can be developed anew, rather than remaining bound up in the problematic traditions and preoccupations that characterise leadership studies today. Offering both full length chapter explorations that explore new ways of understanding and practicing leadership, as well as shorter essays that aim to provoke further reflection on leadership and what we seek of it, After Leadership offers a uniquely critical and creative collection that will inspire students, scholars and leadership educators to reconsider their understanding and practice of leadership

Stop whining, start doing! Identity conflict in project managed software environments

In this article we explore the relationship between software developers and IT project managers as expressed through narrative exchanges in an on-line discussion forum. We interrogate a naturalistic data set to show how the conflict between IT professionals and their immediate managers (project managers) is manifest through the identity work that they engage in. To this end, the article draws attention to strategies of resistance and dissent expressed in the narratives of software developers, contrasting these with the performative expectations espoused by project managers. The purpose is to contribute to a critique of project management stemming from the grassroots experience of those involved in its co-construction. While it is difficult to be precise about the demographics of the community studied (given the anonymity of bulletin board forums), the views of several hundred participants are represented in the discussion threads analysed. In response to the performative environments and disciplines of project management, programmers make recourse to performative strategies (in an Austinian sense) that preserve their status, sense of professional identity and organizational power. The aesthetics of programming appear to play an important part in the expression of programmers’ identity; aesthetics which contrast, and are in conflict with, different forms of performative aesthetics present in the identity work of project managers

Investigations into the relationship between behavioural tendencies and social status using the signal crayfish Pacifastacus leniusculus as a model organism

Many studies have shown that animals from a variety of taxa display behavioural tendencies which differ between individuals. If such tendencies are consistent over time and across contexts, they are generally referred to as personalities, temperaments or coping styles. Social conflict is believed to be one of the main factors leading to the evolution of animal personalities. Social conflict may favour the adoption of alternative behavioural options by individuals within a population, thus leading to differing personalities. In many animals, competition for resources leads to the establishment of social hierarchies, through agonistic encounters between conspecifics. Using the signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus) as a model organism this study investigated if crayfish of differing social status display different behavioural tendencies. To this end size-matched dominant and subordinate individuals were tested for boldness and activity at different time points. The behaviour was tested one day before, immediately after, one day after and six days after an agonistic encounter, in order to test whether crayfish display behavioural tendencies which are consistent over time and expressed in different behaviours and to determine whether pre-existing behavioural tendencies predispose individuals to a certain social status or only emerge as a result of status acquisition. The results show dominant and subordinate individuals differed significantly in their defensive behaviour. Subordinates also showed a high degree of consistency in their response to a predatory stimulus but dominants showed no consistency. In addition there was a negative correlation between the amount of low-offensive behaviour displayed during the agonistic encounter and the response to the predatory stimulus during the behavioural trials. Individuals which showed more low-offensive behaviour showed a weaker response to the predatory stimulus. Furthermore, individuals which showed more high offensive behaviour during the agonistic encounter had also spent more time walking on the day prior to the encounter

Public Highways

The history of public highway development throughout many of the world’s civilizations and a discussion concerning their overall importance, features and use

Management education and the ethical mindset: Responsibility to whom and for what?

Paper presented at the European Business Ethics Network (UK) Conference, Ethics in Crisis: a call for alternatives, April 7-9, 2010 at Queen Mary, University of London. Final version published by Springer in Journal of Business Ethics. Original title: Management education and the ethical mindset: Responsibility to whom and for what? Available online at http://www.springer.com/This paper offers an analysis of leadership responsibility associated with differing models of the firm. Following a critique of the classical economic and conventional stakeholder theories of the firm, we proposes an interactive stakeholder theory that better facilitates the kind of ethical responsibility demanded by twenty-first century challenges. Our analysis also leads us to conclude that leadership education and development is in need of urgent reform. The first part of the paper focuses on what it means to lead responsibly, and argues that leading is essentially the practice of responsibility. The second part of the paper challenges standard assumptions about the ‘business of business’, while the third section examines in more depth how leadership education might be configured as a preparation for the enactment of responsible leadership. KEYWORDS: responsible leadership, ethics, leadership education, mindsets, stakeholder theor

A Bayesian Method for Detecting and Characterizing Allelic Heterogeneity and Boosting Signals in Genome-Wide Association Studies

The standard paradigm for the analysis of genome-wide association studies involves carrying out association tests at both typed and imputed SNPs. These methods will not be optimal for detecting the signal of association at SNPs that are not currently known or in regions where allelic heterogeneity occurs. We propose a novel association test, complementary to the SNP-based approaches, that attempts to extract further signals of association by explicitly modeling and estimating both unknown SNPs and allelic heterogeneity at a locus. At each site we estimate the genealogy of the case-control sample by taking advantage of the HapMap haplotypes across the genome. Allelic heterogeneity is modeled by allowing more than one mutation on the branches of the genealogy. Our use of Bayesian methods allows us to assess directly the evidence for a causative SNP not well correlated with known SNPs and for allelic heterogeneity at each locus. Using simulated data and real data from the WTCCC project, we show that our method (i) produces a significant boost in signal and accurately identifies the form of the allelic heterogeneity in regions where it is known to exist, (ii) can suggest new signals that are not found by testing typed or imputed SNPs and (iii) can provide more accurate estimates of effect sizes in regions of association.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS311 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org