Despite the prevalence of formal and informal standards for employee attire, research on its role is limited. Social psychological theories suggest that work attire can be a meaningful, expressive symbol associated with one's occupational identity. Organizational theories suggest that work attire can affect both individual and organizational outcomes. Bridging these perspectives, this study considers work attire's potential to influence micro and macro organizational dynamics. A framework of the dimensions influencing factors and outcomes of work dress is used to assess the results of a poll of members of the Canadian Forces, an organization whose work attire is highly conspicuous and rigidly homogeneous. Though a slight majority of participants responded that their uniform did not impact their operational focus, comments indicate both organizational influences and individual concerns with specific attributes of attire. Attitudes toward work attire may be indicative of broader issues of organizational identity.
This paper identifies some of the challenges facing expatriates using an autoethnographic account of situations experienced by the author during her first year of work at a financial services company in Hong Kong. These experiences reveal an erratic business world of apparent nonsense and uncertainty, incomprehensible to an outsider. The challenges facing expatriates stem from the stress and anxiety affecting their work, family and social interactions within the foreign culture. Success in the new environment is dependent on the expatriate's ability to adjust to the new culture. An overview of the current research on the expatriate experience is provided to help the reader make sense of the autoethnographic situations.
Working in collaborative and dispersed (C&D) settings is now common for project teams, especially for those active in multinational companies or in international contexts. The concept of "collaborative maturity" has recently been proposed by various authors in order to identify and measure the competence of a firm working in C&D mode. Many models of collaborative maturity have been proposed, reflecting the increasing importance of this area of research. However, the existing literature is spread among multiple journals in various fields of research. For a better understanding of collaborative maturity and how it is measured, a thorough literature review is conducted and an extension of existing research is proposed. This will serve as the theoretical background for future empirical research. The results should be useful for project managers and academicians with an interest in C&D projects.
Social problems, such unsustainable development, can be too large for any one organization to tackle alone so are increasingly being addressed through cross-sector multi-organizational collaborations. One of the approaches being taken is formulating and implementing a collective (alternatively named collaborative) strategy. Despite the increasing usage of collaborative strategic management in practice, there is relatively little literature on this approach, particularly when considering the implementation of the collaborative strategy. This paper builds on existing interorganizational collaboration theory and organizational strategy implementation theory to determine: 1) a conceptual process model of collaborative strategic management; and 2) factors which affect each phase of cross-sectoral social-oriented collaborative strategic managment.
The paper identifies the characteristics of firm activities that constitute its technology scanning dynamic capability, which enables the firm to translate information about customer needs into information about tangible ways to introduce new products and services to satisfy those needs. The ability to find a specific actionable way to address customer needs is proposed to be measured by a latent construct called technology scanning. Using the literature on marketing, innovation management, knowledge management, new product development, and economics, five dimensions are identified for a technology scanning scale. A strong presence of 'technology scanning' ensures that the firm's resources are targeted to find the solution of the problems that matters most, the ones that were identified as a consequence of high level of market orientation of the firm. This work would shed some light on how managers might solve the problems and needs of the customers identified through market orientation practices. When market orientation guides technology scanning activities, the outcomes are more desirable to the firm.
Entrepreneurship is a recognized concept both for research and practice. It is possible to find university courses, research published in specialized journals, associations dedicated to entrepreneurship promotion and governmental support. In a regional economic development context, a special form of entrepreneurship could achieve other objectives. Social entrepreneurship is an emergent concept earning more popularity than ever around the planet. However the concept is not well known. The objective of the paper is to present an overview of the social entrepreneurship concept.
Information technology-based alliances are rapidly spreading in organizations, which calls upon researchers to develop an adequate theoretical lens to examine this phenomenon and its key associated outcomes, such as the business performance of alliance firms. However, strategic alliances are mostly examined from a transaction cost economics perspective, and the results on performance are inconclusive at best. This paper proposes an alternative lens - the resource-based view - and applies an extended version of it to explain the performance of firms in IT-based alliances. A conceptual model is developed that examines the impact of shared information technology resources on firm performance. Also, a measurement scale for these resources is developed and preliminarily validated.
This paper examines the role of affect in marketing positioning strategy and individual positioning judgements. We examine affect in both the marketing and positioning literatures and argue that vestiges of the dual mind perspective are alive and well in positioning. Viewing 'thinking' and 'feeling' as entirely separate (as in utilitarian vs. hedonic product distinctions) runs counter to advances in neuroscience and devalues individual differences and brain functioning. As a result of our own coding of positioning dimensions, we advocate for a greater understanding of the complex interplay between affect and cognition in positioning strategy and judgements.
This paper provides a critical review of literature on management controls and their context. The review indicates that more emphasis has been placed on organizational than environmental factors and that the effectiveness of different controls in different contexts remains practically unaddressed. In general, research has been ad hoc and focused on results-oriented financial controls, short-term efficiency, and individual level of analysis. Even for commonly studied topics (e.g., budget controls), evidence has often been inconsistent and limited to manufacturing organizations, with little integration and refinement of previous theoretical models based on new evidence. Further research is required to investigate the relative importance of different financial and nonfinancial controls in different types of organizations in order to develop more comprehensive performance measurement and management frameworks.
Potential synergies between international trade and tourism are viewed optimistically by governments, yet research to assess their association is limited. To gain an understanding of trade and tourism relationships, this paper reports on a study which examines both product-related and tourism-related place image effects on consumer behavior simultaneously. Using the U.S. as the country of focus, key product and travel relationships are measured by structural equation modeling of consumer data from South Korea. Findings support the cross-over effect between one's beliefs about a country as a destination and as a producer, and one's willingness to travel to it and/or buy its products, and most strongly, that product beliefs affect views of travel destinations.