Business Commons^™

Last-Minute Coordination: Adapting To Demand To Support Last-Mile Operations, Kedong Chen, Hung-Chung Su, Kevin Linderman, William Li

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

In the highly competitive e-commerce industry, customer-facing warehouses are crucial as the “order penetration points” for e-commerce last-mile operations. This research examines how warehouses use last-minute coordination, an unstructured mechanism, to ensure sufficient inventory at the order penetration points. Previous research has focused on structured mechanisms like contracts and inventory management systems to enhance warehouse performance. However, these mechanisms can be ineffective when faced with unforeseen local contingencies. To adjust inventory and adapt to changes in supply and/or demand, warehouses need to engage in unstructured, last-minute coordination with other warehouses. Using coordination and loose coupling theories, we find that coordinating …

Building A Systems View Of Strategic Discourse Across Organizational Meetings, Brendan O'Rourke, Martin Duffy

Books/Book Chapters

The purpose of this paper is to explore and expand the theoretical resources available to conceptualise organisational strategy meetings as a ‘system’, rather than as singular strategic events or episodes.

The paper begins by reviewing the Meetings literature to explore the existing theoretical guidance on conceptualising meetings as a collective and integrated set of activities, rather than as singular events in isolation of each other. The Systems literature is reviewed to identify concepts which may be adopted to enable a systematised view of meetings. The central focus of the paper is to explore the theoretical ways through which organisations’ meetings …

Strategic Discourse Across Organizational Meetings:Towards A Systems Perspective., Brendan K. O'Rourke, Martin Duffy

Conference Papers

Strategic Discourse across Organizational meetings: Towards a Systems Perspective Abstract This paper presents a tentative theoretical conception of how organizational meetings may be viewed as a system rather than as individual events. Perspectives from process metaphysics(Langley and Tsoukas, 2010), meso-discourse analysis (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000, 2011) and systems thinking (von Bertalanffy, 1969) are adopted, to explore and expand the theoretical resources available to conceptualise a ‘system of meetings’. The primary data draws from 130+ hours of recorded meeting proceedings, spanning 58 meeting events, from multiple sub-groups within a medium sized company.

Telling Stories Of Libraries And Leadership, Audrey Defrank

Criss Library Faculty Proceedings & Presentations

A presentation outlining the four frames of leadership and storytelling as they relate to libraries. Leadership Orientation Questionnaire; Overview; Inspiration; Leadership; Reframing Leadership; Structural Frame; Human Resources Frame; Political Frame; Symbolic Frame; Where do you fit in the frame?; Native American Storytelling; Organizations as Cultures; Story Narrative; Telling the Story.