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Full-Text Articles in Business

Reimagining The Role Of Physical Space In Future Human Thriving, Adrian Young May 2021

Reimagining The Role Of Physical Space In Future Human Thriving, Adrian Young

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

As a positive psychology practitioner and residential planner, I divide energy and effort into two distinct fields; one focused on human welfare and the other on optimal aesthetics and functionality of our physical surroundings. This text explores a philosophical shift in motivation for space design prompted by the experience and new potential that result from COVID-19. Rather than space as a means to epitomize style and serve utility, I urge considering the full complexity of the human experience and what would be most conducive to general well-being as a new leading priority. What influence can environmental design bring to generalized …


Counterpoint: Laying The Groundwork For The First Geospatial Red Team, Rachel Parkin May 2021

Counterpoint: Laying The Groundwork For The First Geospatial Red Team, Rachel Parkin

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

The goal of this synthesis has been to develop a set of principles or strategies to guide the establishment of a permanent red team within the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Over the course of a decade spent working at NGA, I discovered a passion for analytic tradecraft and looking for ways I can push the agency toward a culture that allows critical and creative thinking to thrive. This paper combines my research about organizational culture and reflective narratives about events and observations that shaped my understanding of NGA’s current organizational culture. I identify significant blind spots in our organizational approach …


Systems Thinking: The Organisation As A Living System, Kate Mills May 2021

Systems Thinking: The Organisation As A Living System, Kate Mills

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

Systems thinking is a paradigm that challenges the dominant paradigm of linear, or mechanistic thinking. It is a paradigm based on the perspective that everything in a system is inter-connected and interrelated and that the interplay of components in the system creates an emergent quality with its own behaviour and characteristics. Systems thinking as such is suited to be used for analysis of organisations, as organisations can be seen as a system where the interplay of its components create emergent qualities such as the culture of the organisation. Within systems thinking there are living and non-living systems. Living systems, such …


A Critical Perspective To Managing Generational Diversity In The Workspace In East Asia, Debra Moh Yunni May 2018

A Critical Perspective To Managing Generational Diversity In The Workspace In East Asia, Debra Moh Yunni

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

The paper takes a look at the cultural themes that influence behavior and decision-making processes in East Asia, highlighting dimensions of hierarchy, collectivism and saving face. The social constructs that are shaped by these dimensions cultivate an organizational culture that is top-down and group-oriented. To delve into a more meaningful understanding of the generational conflict in East Asia, an analysis of generational theory and the changing work environment provides an insight into the widening generational gap and the domains of tension experienced by those sharing a multi-generational workspace. The author suggests that managing generational diversity has its roots in fostering …


Ten Elements Of Organizational Transformation: Strategies For Moving Towards Integrated Employment, Jaimie Ciulla Timmons, John Butterworth, Jonathan Lucus, Thinkwork! At The Institute For Community Inclusion At Umass Boston Jul 2017

Ten Elements Of Organizational Transformation: Strategies For Moving Towards Integrated Employment, Jaimie Ciulla Timmons, John Butterworth, Jonathan Lucus, Thinkwork! At The Institute For Community Inclusion At Umass Boston

All Institute for Community Inclusion Publications

This session will share ten key organizational characteristics necessary to strengthen competitive integrated employment outcomes. Get a first-hand look at the RRTC’s Organizational Transformation Toolkit and explore our Provider Employment Leadership Network, a yearlong facilitated Community of Practice of provider leaders in employment. In conjunction with The Arc of the United States, this PowerPoint offers ten essential elements necessary for successful organizational transformation, along with strategies for implementing each element.


The Rise Of Project Network Organizations: Building Core Teams And Flexible Partner Pools For Interorganizational Projects, Stephan Manning Jan 2017

The Rise Of Project Network Organizations: Building Core Teams And Flexible Partner Pools For Interorganizational Projects, Stephan Manning

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This study shifts attention from project-based firms (PBFs) to project network organizations (PNOs) as increasingly important interorganizational contexts of project collaboration. As a result of organizational specialization, PNOs have emerged as generic organizational forms combining the coordination capacity of PBFs with the resource richness of networks. PNOs connect legally independent, yet often operationally interdependent individuals and organizations in strategically coordinated sets of core project teams and flexible partner pools that sustain beyond singular projects. Based on an empirical review of PNOs in film, event organizing, construction, complex product and system development, research, open innovation and international development, core features, antecedents …


Benchmarking, Brokering, And Branding: Resources For Success Across Sectors, Maureen Scully, Lisa Deangelis, Katie Bates Jun 2016

Benchmarking, Brokering, And Branding: Resources For Success Across Sectors, Maureen Scully, Lisa Deangelis, Katie Bates

Emerging Leaders Program Team Projects

The fellows in the Center for Collaborative Leadership's Emerging Leaders Program practice collaborative leadership skills by working together in peer-led teams on projects that involve multiple stakeholders and have a civic impact. The theme that emerged for the 2016 projects was Benchmarking, Brokering, and Branding: Resources for Success Across Sectors - recognizing that the fellows' social capital and ability to step back and take a wide comparative view provided new resources for their partners.


An Experimental Investigation Of Outsourcing Through Competition, Ehsan Elahi, Roger Blake Jan 2014

An Experimental Investigation Of Outsourcing Through Competition, Ehsan Elahi, Roger Blake

Management Science and Information Systems Faculty Publication Series

Our research uses laboratory experiments to examine the theoretical results of competition between suppliers in an outsourcing setup. We consider a supply chain in which a single buyer needs to outsource the manufacturing of a product among N potential suppliers. The buyer allocates demand to suppliers not on the basis of price, but rather on service. We analyze the levels of service suppliers will decide to provide when competing on three different criteria specified by the buyer. For the first, suppliers compete by providing the buyer a specific service level (fill-rate), and for the second by maintaining a specific quantity …


Emerging Capability Or Continuous Challenge? Relocating Knowledge Work And Managing Process Interfaces, Stephan Manning, Thomas Hutzschenreuter, Alexander Strathmann Jan 2013

Emerging Capability Or Continuous Challenge? Relocating Knowledge Work And Managing Process Interfaces, Stephan Manning, Thomas Hutzschenreuter, Alexander Strathmann

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This study examines interface management as a dynamic organizational capability supporting an increasing global distribution of knowledge work, based on an in-depth case of an automotive supplier. We show how local responses to experiences of task and interface ambiguity following the relocation of R&D processes may lead to a shift of organizational attention from ex-ante process design to continuous process and interface management. Findings suggest that flexible interface manager positions and partnership structures across locations facilitate local experimentation with effective transfer and handling of ambiguous and partially tacit tasks. This enhances the firm’s capacity to distribute an increasing variety of …


Securing Access To Lower-Cost Talent Globally: The Dynamics Of Active Embedding And Field Structuration, Stephan Manning, Joerg Sydow, Arnold Windeler Jan 2012

Securing Access To Lower-Cost Talent Globally: The Dynamics Of Active Embedding And Field Structuration, Stephan Manning, Joerg Sydow, Arnold Windeler

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This article examines how multinational corporations (MNCs) shape institutional conditions in emerging economies to secure access to high-skilled, yet lower-cost science and engineering talent. Based on two in-depth case studies of engineering offshoring projects of German automotive suppliers in Romania and China we analyze how MNCs engage in ‘active embedding’ by aligning local institutional conditions with global offshoring strategies and operational needs. MNCs thereby contribute to the structuration of field relations and practices of sourcing knowledge-intensive work from globally dispersed locations.Our findings stress the importance of institutional processes across geographic boundaries that regulate and get shaped by MNC activities.


The Stability Of Offshore Outsourcing Relationships: The Role Of Relation Specificity And Client Control, Stephan Manning, Arie Y. Lewin, Marc Schuerch Jan 2011

The Stability Of Offshore Outsourcing Relationships: The Role Of Relation Specificity And Client Control, Stephan Manning, Arie Y. Lewin, Marc Schuerch

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

Offshore outsourcing of administrative and technical services has become a mainstream business practice. Increasing commoditization of business services and growing client experience with outsourcing have created a range of competitive service delivery options for client firms. Yet, data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN) suggests that, despite increasing market options and growing client quality and cost efficiency expectations, clients typically renew provider contracts and develop longer-term relationships with providers. Based on ORN data, this paper explores drivers of this phenomenon. The findings suggest that providers promote contract renewal by making client specific investments in software, IT infrastructure and training, and …


Ethics, Evidence And International Debt, Julie A. Nelson Jun 2009

Ethics, Evidence And International Debt, Julie A. Nelson

Economics Faculty Publication Series

The assumption that contracts are largely impersonal, rational, voluntary agreements drawn up between self-interested individual agents is a convenient fiction, necessary for analysis using conventional economic methods. Papers prepared for a recent conference on ethics and international debt were shaped by just such an assumption. The adequacy of this approach is, however, challenged by evidence about who is affected by international debt, how contracts are actually made and followed, the behavior of actors in financial markets, and the motivations of scholars themselves. This essay uses insights from feminist and relational scholarship from several disciplines to analyze the reasons for this …


Brief 11: Partnering For Accountability: The Role Of The Chief Financial Officer At An Academic Institution, New England Resource Center For Higher Education, University Of Massachusetts Boston Jan 2002

Brief 11: Partnering For Accountability: The Role Of The Chief Financial Officer At An Academic Institution, New England Resource Center For Higher Education, University Of Massachusetts Boston

New England Resource Center for Higher Education Publications

There is rarely a perception in colleges and universities that everyone owns the financial plan. Deans, department chairs, and division heads are most concerned with their own budgets, rather than the aggregate. Mythologies about how the academic and financial sides of the house operate create artificial divisions and compromise the development of shared responsibility. Driven by myth, each side tends to view the other as a threat to its values and priorities. These views often stereotype the other in ways that become self-fulfilling prophesies. For example, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) believe that academics are inefficient and that CFOs, with their …