bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Counterfactuals and Case Studies
Authors: Levy Jack S.
Published: September 2009

This article shows that counterfactuals can be used along with case studies to make inferences, although strong theories are needed for this. The article also argues that game theory is one approach that provides this kind of theory because a game explicitly models all of the actors' options including those possibilities that are not chosen. The article then indicates that any counterfactual argument requires a detailed and explicit description of the alternative antecedent which is plausible and involves a minimal rewrite of history, and suggests that one of the strengths of game theory is its explicitness about alternatives. The validity of counterfactual arguments is assessed in explaining cases or testing theoretical propositions. Counterfactuals should change as few aspects of the real world as possible in order to isolate their causal effects.
Quantitative Methodology
Authors: Franklin Charles H.
Published: September 2009

This article reviews the history of the quantitative methodology institutions, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the American Political Science Association's Political Methodology Section. It also highlights the role of organizations and institutions in promoting and structuring the development of quantitative methodology in political science. The development of summer programs in quantitative methods is described. There was a market niche for methodology both as a subfield on its own, and as a direct contributor to improving substance through improved methods. The existence of the Society for Political Methodology has increased expectations for graduate training, at least among those who see their careers as methodologists.
Decision Making with Inaccurate, Unreliable Data
Authors: Mezias John M. , Starbuck William H.
Published: September 2009

This article reviews some evidence that decision makers often rely on inaccurate or unreliable data. The article also points out ways decision makers react when they realize their data are inaccurate or unreliable. Lastly, it examines some options for coping more effectively with inaccurate, unreliable data. Business and political journalists generally interview people who have participated in decision making. The participants explain their goals, situations faced, and the logic behind their decisions. Likewise, research about decision making and sensemaking usually assumes managers are aware of and understand their organizations and their organizations' environments. Some studies obtain almost all of their data about decision inputs and premises from the decision makers. Other studies correlate data about firms' actions with managers' perceptions of their organizations or business environments. However, almost no research has examined the accuracy of such perceptions.
Making the Decision to Monitor in the Workplace: Cybernetic Models and the Illusion of Control
Authors: Zweig David , Webster Jane , Scott Kristyn A.
Published: September 2009

This article explores the reliance on cybernetic control models by managers and organizations when making decisions by investigating the desire for people to establish and maintain control. Further, it argues that applying cybernetic models of control to decision making might be inappropriate when applied to humans. Establishing control via the application of cybernetic models is illusory and can lead to a repetitive spiral of increased control. In contrast, research on leadership offers a different paradigm of control. It considers how a manager's behavior can trigger the appropriate response in an employee by activating the employee's working self-concept for how he or she should behave in the workplace. That is, this article examines how employees' desired behaviors and performance can be realized without the need to engage in electronic monitoring.
Linking Rationality, Politics, and Routines in Organizational Decision Making
Authors: Royer Isabelle , Langley Ann
Published: September 2009

The first section of this article introduces a “static” perspective on decision making that views rationality and politics as alternatives whose appropriateness depends on a key contingency: uncertainty. This section considers classic prescriptions from the literature and shows how and why descriptive decision behavior may diverge from them. The second section takes a more “dynamic” perspective, viewing uncertainty no longer as a fixed contingency, but as a contextual variable that evolves over time. The third section adds consideration of the role of routines from both a prescriptive and a descriptive angle, drawing on recent contributions that discuss their “ostensive and performative” dimensions. The article concludes with implications for future research and practice.
Superstitious Behavior as a Byproduct of Intelligent Adaptation
Authors: Denrell Jerker
Published: September 2009

This article reviews the literature on superstitious behavior in psychology. It then illustrates why limited experimentation is a necessary feature of an intelligent learning policy and why limited experimentation can explain why individuals and organizations perpetuate superstitious behavior. It subsequently discusses several sources of superstitious behavior in organizations. Finally, the article notes that an implication of the author's analysis is that innovations will emerge from managers who are inclined to, or forced by stakeholders, to make unreasonable decisions that ignore the costs of experimenting.
Facilitating Serious Play
Authors: Statler Matt , Oliver David
Published: September 2009

This article provides a descriptive account of how researchers at the Imagination Lab Foundation (I-Lab) designed, facilitated, and followed up on organizational interventions involving a process called “serious play”. It additionally describes the outcomes observed in association with these interventions, and closes with a series of reflections on the significance of those outcomes for organizational decision making, especially with regard to the relationship between strategy process and content; the overcoming of psychological defenses; the role of power; and the cultivation of adaptive potential. This article begins by outlining several basic assumptions. It then describes in detail the design and facilitation of interventions involving serious play in organizations.
Structuring the Decision Process: An Evaluation of Methods
Authors: Wright George , Goodwin Paul
Published: September 2009

This article examines the effectiveness of methods that are designed to provide structure and support to decision making. Those that are primarily aimed at individual decision makers are examined first and then attention is turned to groups. In each case weaknesses of unaided decision making are identified and how successful the application of formal methods is likely to be in mitigating these weaknesses is assessed.
Troubling Futures: Scenarios and Scenario Planning for Organizational Decision Making
Authors: Healey Mark P. , Hodgkinson Gerard P.
Published: September 2009

Drawing on research in the psychological sciences that has largely been overlooked in the scenario planning literature, this article argues that when used unskillfully scenarios can anchor and confine, rather than stretch and expand, strategic thinking and that constructing scenarios can itself be a biased activity, one that can induce new and amplify extant biases rather than remove them. Furthermore, unless skillfully introduced, scenario techniques can reduce or increase disproportionately the confidence and uncertainty of decision makers, leading correspondingly to misplaced optimism and threat rigidity among decision makers. In addition, the article highlights how, in some circumstances, the negative emotional impact of scenario analysis can override the potentially positive cognitive effects. Guidelines for using scenarios in organizational decision making are offered throughout.
How Durkheim's Theory of Meaning‐making Influenced Organizational Sociology
Authors: Dobbin Frank
Published: September 2009

Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor has palpably influenced students of organizations, occupations, and stratification. Durkheim's influence has been documented by exploring his contribution to our understanding of the global division of labor. This article examines the influence of Durkheim's theory of meaning on organizational sociology, which has taken a cultural turn since the late 1970s with the rise of the new institutional theory and organizational culture theory. As the founder of the cultural approach in sociology, Durkheim might well have won credit for the cultural turn in organizational analysis. But while he is frequently cited for his influence on symbolic interactionists, Durkheim is rarely cited by social constructionists who study organizations.
The Sociology of Race
Authors: Nkomo Stella M.
Published: September 2009

This article aims to review the seminal work of W. E. B. Du Bois—who has been proclaimed, ‘the first sociologist of race’ (Lewis 2000: 550)—and to explore its relevance for organization studies. This review is done within the complex contours of today's global racial context. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of race as the problem of the twentieth century and while Du Bois wrote primarily about race in the United States, he astutely recognized the problem was global in scope. Globalization today has evoked two visions of how race and ethnicity manifest in the workplace. There is the positive vision of a multicultural global village in which people of different cultures intermingle across boundaries, use technology to bridge physical distance, exchange goods, and leverage capital and resources. In a contrasting vision, cultural harmony and integration remain elusive. Globalization produces a situation in which identities continue to be sources of conflict, marginalization, and political struggle.
Peopling Organizations
Authors: Hallett Tim , Shulman David , Fine Gary Alan
Published: September 2009

Interactionists have long focused on what goes on within organizations—thus their scholarly importance as researchers of work. However, they have avoided conceptualizing organizations as such until quite recently. Their primary concerns are the relationships among individuals and how people create meanings and social relations. Structures and institutions, while never denied, receive secondary attention. Interactionists have made their most significant advances studying interpersonal realms, not in their investigations of ‘institutions’ or ‘society’. This article argues that the value of the interactionist approach for organizational research exists in its emphasis on how interaction and meaning provide a foundation for thinking about the constitutive role of people in organizations. The ‘peopled’ perspective of symbolic interaction stands in stark contrast to the ‘un-peopled’ view that has often characterized organizational sociology.
Sociological Classics and the Canon in the Study of Organizations
Authors: Davis Gerald F. , Zald Mayer N.
Published: September 2009

This article states that a distinctive feature of many parts of sociology, including organizational sociology, is their impulse towards classicism, and their evident variations of the ancestors. The article summarizes the analysis that has been offered in this book. It concentrates on the influence of classic authors and asks questions about the contexts within which the classical texts came about and how such texts became known as ‘classics’. It also looks at canonical changes in the field. It analyses the reasons why studying the classics might help with the theorizing the contemporary transition away from a society of organizations. The analysis in this volume has presented a feast for reflection on the continuing relevance and sometimes irrelevance of past works, this article states. The classics and the canon evolve.
‘Now and in England’ ()
Authors: Jay Elisabeth
Published: September 2009

This article describes a historical trajectory that could be interpreted as leading to the final crumbling away of institutional religion, the breakdown of shared values, and the disappearance of a distinctively national literature, or as the empowerment of the laity in a wider community no longer hedged about with effectively policed border controls. Full empowerment, however, involves access not only to the data, but to knowledge about how that data has been produced and used in the decision-making processes which led people to this stage. This book is designed not only for those academically committed to the interdisciplinary study of literature and theology, but for any general reader interested in the cultural state people find themselves in ‘Now and in England’.
The Study of Literature and Theology
Authors: Jasper David
Published: September 2009

In recent times, the study of ‘literature and theology’ or ‘literature and religion’ has been granted, if often somewhat grudgingly, its place in the curriculum of the academy. Within churches and Christian communities, there has been a rather bemused acknowledgement of the power and importance of literature, resulting in such phenomena as ‘narrative theology’. The study of literature and theology is alive and well, though it remains unsystematic and patchy. The texts of English literature and the doctrines of theology continue to enjoy creative conversations, though perhaps not much more than that, and the fundamental terms of the two fields of study remain unchanged. That change, specifically in theology, may now be beginning at the same time the churches which have been the guardians of Christian theology continue a seemingly irreversible slide into institutional decay.
The Protestant and Catholic Reformations
Authors: Cummings Brian
Published: September 2009

A history of theology in Western Europe that failed to place the sixteenth-century religious Reformations at a prominent place in its narrative would make strange reading. A history of literature in the sixteenth century that placed a similar emphasis on the religious Reformations would, until very recently, have looked decidedly eccentric. In the last ten years, such assumptions have been put into disarray. Increasingly, it is becoming as hard to separate literary production from the processes of religious change as it is the visual and musical arts, where the Reformation has long been a key object of enquiry. Not only evidently devotional works, but literature across the genres, are increasingly seen in this light: the shadow of the Reformation has been observed even across the face of Shakespeare studies. Moreover, secularization itself can be seen as an important dimension of the reaction to religious division.
The Enlightenment
Authors: Lewis Rhodri
Published: September 2009

As is so often the case, the simpler the question, the more difficult it can be satisfactorily to answer it. This article explains why. It investigates: the meaning and usefulness of the term ‘Enlightenment’; the origins and evolution of British Enlightened thought, which emerged a number of decades before that of France or Scotland; and the animating role of theological debate, controversy, and speculation within this. It becomes clear that there was such a thing as a British, and specifically an English, Enlightenment, and that, far from being religiously iconoclastic, it was characterized by deep theological commitment. The article also sketches some aspects of the relationship between British Enlightened thought and literature. It happened at a time in which books, periodicals, and other printed materials were more widely available, and literary texts came both to shape and to animate the whole gamut of Enlightened thinking.
The Victorians
Authors: Wright Terry R.
Published: September 2009

In looking at the Victorians in the context of the development of ‘literary’ modes of understanding theology, this article presents a generic organization that highlights the way in which literary form shapes theological meaning. The second section of the article explores the novel, which became the dominant literary form during this period. Victorian poets also provide an account of the age's engagement with Christianity. The third section focuses primarily on the dramatic monologue, perhaps the single-most-important literary invention of an age when the theatre itself is widely regarded as having undergone a relatively barren time. The point of the dramatic monologue, the discussion argues, is that it explores the particular significance of a particular individual's experience of religion in a particular place and time.
Postmodernism
Authors: Hart Kevin
Published: September 2009

Any general consideration of postmodernism must begin with more than a ritual bow to Jean-François Lyotard, whose The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge extended and accelerated the circulation of the word. Lyotard uses ‘postmodern’ to denote the impact of twentieth-century cultural transformations ‘in the context of the crisis of narratives’, and thereby brings literature onto centre stage in discussion of the postmodern. In treating English literature and theology from the perspective of postmodernism, one can do more than reflect on fiction influenced by cultural postmodernism that also touches on religious matters, and theology marked by postmodernism in one or another sense. One also needs to take account of attempts in Britain to make ‘literature and theology’ into a discipline in its own right and assess the ways in which that has been shaped by postmodern concerns.
The Bible as Literature and Sacred Text
Authors: Hawkins Peter S.
Published: September 2009

Any consideration of the ‘Bible as Literature and Sacred Text’ must begin by recognizing the problematic nature of that deceptively simple conjunction, ‘and’. Although it may imply an easy equivalency, these two identities have never rested easily with one another. For centuries, appreciation for Scripture's artistry sprang from the devout conviction that its divine Author would offer nothing less than perfection. Now, by contrast, biblical writing is typically considered a human endeavour that warrants critical consideration for historical and aesthetic reasons. Given the Bible's importance to Western literature, people study it to gain some notion of the biblical literacy that until recently almost any writer both possessed and expected to find in a reader.
Judges
Authors: Beal Timothy K.
Published: September 2009

Like the literature that precedes and follows in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Judges is clearly the product of a complicated literary history involving the early formation and deformation of Israel in the land of Canaan. It is a book whose coherence is in many ways found in its dissymmetry. In recent decades, such tensions between surface structure and deep chaos, and predictable repetition and disturbing interruption, have made the book of Judges a significant focus of study for new literary approaches in biblical studies. The book of Judges may be divided into three main parts: 1: 1–3: 6, accounts of tribal conquest and failure in Canaan; 3: 7–16: 31, the cycles of thirteen judges who delivered Israelites from oppression by other peoples; and 17: 1–21: 25, narratives of atrocity, civil war, and collapse among the tribes of Israel.
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job
Authors: Nielsen Kirsten
Published: September 2009

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job form the main part of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. They share an interest in everyday life and the desire to create order out of human experiences, but offer no single theology that can be described as ‘wisdom’ theology – only a common concern for the conditions of human life and for human experience as the basis for theology. The conceptual origin of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job is of a world created and therefore ordered, but they disagree on whether man is capable of perceiving that order. They agree that the path to wisdom is through experience, but whether an underlying order can be construed from human concrete experiences is debatable. The three wisdom books are concerned with the human condition; they are not accounts of historical persons, but tales of everyman.
Prophetic Literature
Authors: Sherwood Yvonne
Published: September 2009

One of the reasons that the Prophets have been confined to the peripheries is because the new literary study in Biblical Studies has usually defined itself in opposition to historical criticism, with its emphasis on the text as an uneven composite of sources. The untidy Prophets have proved difficult to fit into models of literature defined on holistic, New-Critical lines. Compiled according to a system that seems perverse by Western standards, oracles are often placed adjacent to one another on the basis of a shared pun or catchword. Generally, the reception of prophecy tends to focus on prophecy as a generic category, so transcending awkward textual specifics. Prophecy has been understood as a high aesthetic category meaning variously, and by no means coherently, inspiration, dissidence, individualism, innovation, and supreme craft.
The Gospel of John
Authors: Reinhartz Adele
Published: September 2009

Like other books of the New Testament, the Gospel of John can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. For the Christian church, it is sacred Scripture that enshrines eternal truths about God, Jesus, humankind, and the relationships among them. For historians, it is a potential source of information about the historical Jesus. This article introduces the literary-critical study of the Gospel of John. It considers the following issues: the Fourth Gospel's literary structure and the basic narrative elements such as plot, setting, characterization, and chronology; some of the literary devices that pervade the Gospel; the ways in which literary approaches to the Fourth Gospel resonate in English literature; and a number of the major literary-critical approaches which have been applied to the Gospel. Finally, the article addresses the question of the Gospel of John and historical criticism, to show how literary-critical approaches can actually complement and even illuminate historical concerns.
William Blake
Authors: Burdon Christopher
Published: September 2009

The labour of that celebrant of Energy and the Prolific, William Blake (1757–1827), has generated an energetic and prolific diversity of interpretation. Though little known to his contemporaries and largely forgotten after his death, Blake's huge output of art and poetry inspired a range of twentieth-century readers, who drew from him or read into him principles democratic and aristocratic; libertarian and nationalist; activist and quietist; and Christian, Gnostic, and atheist. This article first reflects on how this difficult poet-artisan-prophet-artist can be read theologically. It then examines particular motifs, symbols, and beliefs in Blake, and considers how these might inform or subvert Christian and other theologies today. The article looks at the place of energy and imagination; the notions of ‘Divine Humanity’ and ‘One Man’ or Albion; and the depictions of law, sin, liberty, and forgiveness.
George Eliot and Hardy
Authors: Vance Norman
Published: September 2009

George Eliot was the first English translator of the iconoclastically post-Christian commentators David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach. But as a novelist she continued to explore connections between divinity (or ‘the Unseen’) and human goodness in an informal, residually numinous ‘Religion of Humanity’. Thomas Hardy, much more overtly negative about traditional Christianity in his novels, has been less congenial to theologians, though Pamela Dalziel has recently demonstrated his sustained religious seriousness. For Hardy, as for many others, the First World War made it much harder to defend any kind of optimism about human affairs. For him, as for George Eliot, Christianity might have become metaphysically problematic, but it still provided a language and a reference point for moral and social concern, a way of approaching the pain and the possibility of good in the world.
James Joyce
Authors: Cunningham Valentine
Published: September 2009

This article compares James Joyce's work as a supersaturation: the excessive adding of an element to a liquid, going further than is strictly necessary, a severely overdone baptism. Joyce's texts come soaked in religion, supersaturated indeed in the specifically Christian, the Roman Catholic, the Irish Roman Catholic – an awesomeness of detailing, all the more obsessive as these writings' bulk expanded in an almost overwhelming exuberance of Catholicized baroque. While looking at his works, particularly in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the discussion notes that Joyce's fiction, his fabulation, his textuality, and his poetics are shaped by an usurping, heretic, father-killing, word-colonizing metamorphosis.
Cranmer and the Collects
Authors: Gray Donald
Published: September 2009

In the days before universal literacy, linguistic style was most chiefly influenced by that which was heard being read aloud. The place where everyone was subject to this was in church at worship. The first major dose of this wholesome and improving medicine was administered by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The collects provide a rich source of the Archbishop's art. The collect is a short and particular type of prayer that is a feature of the worship of Western Christianity. It asks for one thing and one thing only, and that in the tersest of language. To be good, it must have colour, rhythm, finality, a certain conciseness as well as vigour of thought; but it must be a united petition or it becomes something else rather than a collect.
John Bunyan
Authors: Collmer Robert G.
Published: September 2009

Seventeenth-century Puritanism offers a remarkable spectrum of political and religious diversity. Specifically, Monica Furlong asserted that Puritanism produced ‘two geniuses in the persons of John Milton and John Bunyan’. The complexity of thought and range of knowledge possessed by John Milton stood in sharp contrast to the apparent simplicity and narrowness of view of John Bunyan. Bunyan wrote some sixty works, including The Pilgrim's Progress, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman , and The Holy War, didactic works, his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, his systematic theology, A Confession of my Faith and A Reason of my Practice, and other doctrinal writings. His theology is firmly Bible based. Bunyan's literary creations were not abstractions but sprang from problems and successes either in his immediate experience, or in that of persons with whom he associated.
Bishop Butler
Authors: Branch Lori
Published: September 2009

One of the great ironies of the history of theological writing in England is that Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752) viewed his intellectual projects – scientific in spirit, clouded only by the careful qualifications of his claims – as eminently practical extensions of his pastoral duties as a clergyman. This article suggests that in the rise and fall of Butler's influence, one can see the way in which religion in modernity has tended to become rationalized and secularized into a morality that has no need of faith. In the apologetic quest for rational arguments in favour of Christianity, Butler came to affirm the element of uncertainty in religious belief to an extent so disturbing in the Age of Reason. Butler's gradual recognition of the subtle ways in which people shape their propensity to believe led to an interest in church ritual and self-construction.
Possibilities of Redemption Through the Novel
Authors: Boscaljon Daniel
Published: September 2009

Redemption is a powerful and uplifting theme that acknowledges the human potential to succeed after having failed. Theological understandings of it focus on how humans can restore their relationships with God despite having fallen from grace into sin. Literature takes the same theme of brokenness and renewal and places it in the context of life on earth, thus including understandings of redemption that may stray from those theologically defined. In this way, even ‘secular’ literatures can be seen as doing ‘theological’ work. Although many pre-novelistic works of British literature utilize the theme of redemption – from Gawaine and the Green Knight to the plays of Shakespeare – this article limits the examination to ways in which the theme of redemption is developed through the form of the novel. It looks at books that unsettle or challenge previous understandings.
Body and Word
Authors: Jasper Alison
Published: September 2009

This article uses the term ‘equivocation’ to describe the sense in which Christian incarnational theology appears to have provided a resource or way of thinking about the embodied human condition. For British literary works produced across a period of over a thousand years, that is not wholly negative. Christian convictions about God's investment in the materiality of human existence bear witness to the perception of infinite human longings and seemingly endless possibilities, as well as our fearful limitations. British artists and commentators during this period have not all accepted the authority of a Christian approach, and in the last two or three centuries many have aspired to challenge the more negative or limiting emphases of its teaching. Arguably, the paradigm remains significant, yet it continues to provide both impetus and challenge to ongoing reflections on the nature of unavoidable human incarnation.
Visions of Heaven and Hell
Authors: Volkova Elena
Published: September 2009

In Greek mythology it is only the priest, the artist, and the hero – representing spirit, genius, and courage – who might approach or enter the world of the dead. The aim of their respective descents is to worship the god, to save people from death, and to return home. In the Christian faith by contrast, God miraculously raises people from the dead and descends into hell after his own death on the cross. There he rescues the faithful and opens the door to heaven for them. This article describes the descent into hell, the antinomy of rising and falling, the descent of heaven to earth, the Imaginative ascent to heaven, life as pilgrimage, the road to heaven through hell, and the theodicy of heaven and hell.
The Future of English Literature and Theology
Authors: Hass Andrew
Published: September 2009

This article hopes to offer more general observations about where one might see literature and theology, as a defined field, heading in the near future. It lays out four such general features: post-secularity, globalization, culturality, and interdisciplinarity. Collectively, they all become determinate of the space that literature and theology, either as separate enterprises or as a joint entity, seem already to be filling. The discussion describes the way literature and theology has emerged as a joint field of study within the Humanities. To this end, these categories are taken as markers of a wider state that literature and religion, from Milton to Blake to Joyce, have always heralded, if not embodied: those moments of paradigmatic shift when humans rethink the relationship to the divine.
Historical Biographies of Entrepreneurs
Authors: Corley T. A. B.
Published: September 2009

Basic theory analyses the entrepreneur's role in the economic system. Of the four conventional factors of production, namely: land, labour, capital, and organization (or entrepreneurship), objective demand and supply schedules are possible for the first three. By contrast, a demand curve for entrepreneurship cannot be drawn, as it is for the entrepreneurs themselves to decide whether or not to enter the production process as a freelancer. Harvey Leibenstein, a development economist, however, constructed a supply curve for entrepreneurs, linking their anticipations of per capita income growth with the rate of expansion of entrepreneurship in terms of their contribution to such growth in incomes. Hence many theorists portray the corporate drives of entrepreneurs as forward-looking ones. How, then, can biographies most satisfactorily discuss such drives in a chronological narrative of a life from cradle to the grave? Childhood influences, such as premature responsibilities through a parent's death, and struggles for recognition in early adulthood have to be brought out, as well as the precise explanation of finally winning through.
Evaluating SME Policies and Programmes: Technical and Political Dimensions
Authors: Storey David J.
Published: September 2009

This article is primarily focused on further developing the theme of the political economy way of evaluating the impact of Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) policies. It reaches five key conclusions. First, that evaluation needs to become more central to the policy-making process. Evaluation should not be undertaken solely as a historic accounting exercise to determine whether public money has been spent wisely, although that role is of value. Instead of being, ‘at the end of the line’, evaluation should be used to inform current policy, so that current objectives and targets may be modified in the light of evidence of policy effectiveness. Hence considerations of how policy is evaluated should therefore be incorporated into policy formulation when new ideas are being developed. They could even influence the choices made by governments about how best to engage with SMEs. Specifically, evaluation has to be incorporated as a key element in policy development.
Innovation in Large Firms
Authors: Kuemmerle Walter
Published: September 2009

This article provides a discussion of the complex relationship between large firms and innovation with particular attention paid to entrepreneurial mechanisms in large firms that foster such innovation. It should be noted that while the definition of entrepreneurship in this article covers all types of opportunity-seeking behaviour, the article focuses exclusively on the sub-set of entrepreneurship that results from technological progress and on the innovations associated with such progress. The article surveys the relationship between size and innovation. It elaborates on distinct barriers to innovation in large firms and then discusses factors and processes that help foster and sustain innovation in large firms before concluding with some avenues for further research.
Enterprise Culture
Authors: Della-Giusta Marina , King Zella
Published: September 2009

This article first looks at the rationale for adopting an ‘enterprise culture project’, with specific reference to the case of Britain from the 1980s to the present. It then considers how efforts to promote an enterprise culture might be evaluated, and examines some of the evidence about the impact of enterprise policies in Britain on entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviour. It then reviews some of the academic literature on ‘enterprise culture’ policy and ideology, with a wider discussion of enterprise projects and their implications.
Regional Development: Clusters and Districts
Authors: McCann Philip
Published: September 2009

This article first makes some clarifications regarding the terminology we use and assumptions we make, simply for expositional purposes. It then outlines the basic tenets of the concept of agglomeration and industrial districts, highlighting the mechanisms by which the spatial grouping of activities and the generation of localized economies of scale may be related. It reviews the various hypotheses which are evident in the literature concerning the relationship between the spatial organization of industrial activity and the spatial patterns of innovation. It explains the current trends in thought about these relationships, pointing out the recent popularity of the concept of a cluster. It then investigates the various notions of clusters and industrial districts from a transactions costs perspective, and provides an assessment of the insights generated from these cluster arguments.
Organization Theory and HRM
Authors: Watson Tony
Published: September 2009

This article aims to identify the contributions that have been made by ideas from organization theory to our understanding of the organizational activity of human resource management — and its earlier ‘personnel management’ manifestation. Attention is also given to ways in which greater use might be made of organization theory in the analysis of HRM activities and processes in the future. HRM processes are organizational processes. They occur within all work organizations and they cannot be understood separately from the way in which organizations themselves are perceived.
HRM and the Worker
Authors: Guest David E.
Published: September 2009

This article reveals two ‘ideal type’ approaches to HRM that address the issue of control of workers in rather different ways. The ‘high-commitment’ model appears to cede control to employees by emphasizing self-control alongside but also as a means of generating high commitment. The ‘performance management’ model allows managers to retain control and uses HR practices as a means of directing workers' efforts more effectively. The former emphasizes intrinsic control and intrinsic rewards; the latter emphasizes external control and extrinsic rewards. Attempts have been made to integrate elements of these two contrasting approaches. At a strategic level, this might be achieved through the concept of flexibility.
Employment Subsystems and the ‘HR Architecture’
Authors: Lepak David P. , Snell Scott A.
Published: September 2009

There is an interesting tension that exists within the HRM literature with regard to employment subsystems. On the one hand, a clear pattern is emerging in strategic HRM research that suggests that HR systems geared toward increased commitment and employee involvement can have a dramatic impact on organizational outcomes. Terms such as commitment-oriented HR systems, high-performance work systems, high-involvement HRM, and the like exude a connotation of extensive investment in, and reliance on, employees. This article first reviews the ‘HR architecture’ to provide a backdrop for our discussion of employment subsystems and changing forms of employment. Second, it examines the implications of globalization, strategy, and managing knowledge flows for how companies structure their portfolio of employment subsystems. Throughout the discussion it offers suggestions for future research.
Recruitment Strategy
Authors: Orlitzky Marc
Published: September 2009

This article provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical contributions that have been made to the literature on recruitment strategy. Recruitment can usefully be defined as ‘those practices and activities carried out by the organization with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees’. This definition highlights the important difference between two HR functions that are typically seen as indivisible, or at least difficult to distinguish, namely recruitment and selection. Whereas selection is the HR function that pares down the number of applicants, recruitment consists of those HR practices and processes that make this paring down possible — by expanding the pool of firm-specific candidates from whom new employees will be selected.
Training, Development, and Competence
Authors: Winterton Jonathan
Published: September 2009

This article provides the context for training, development, and competence. In the training section, theory, policy, and practice are considered, including the diversity of national systems for vocational education and training (VET) and the relationship between work organization and workplace learning. The development section is distinguished from training in terms of objectives and scope, while the emergence of Human Resource Development (HRD) is explained not only in terms of a more strategic focus but also in relation to initiatives like corporate universities. The competence section addresses the confusion surrounding the term, contrasting four predominant approaches derived from the USA, the UK, France, and Germany, each of which has influenced other countries to varying degrees. Drawing on these four traditions, a more holistic approach to competence is presented as the model currently being used to structure learning outcomes within the European Qualifications Framework.
HRM and Contemporary Manufacturing
Authors: Delbridge Rick
Published: September 2009

This article outlines the key elements of organization and HRM associated with contemporary high-volume production, in particular the key arguments and characteristics of lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing and the associated high-performance work system model has been influential in the development of management practices throughout manufacturing sectors and beyond. However, they are primarily premised on labor efficiencies and incremental improvement. The article reviews the evidence on the implementation and outcomes of lean adoption. The second main section reviews alternatives to ‘lean’. The requirement for innovation and higher value added noted above has meant that a greater emphasis on creating and managing knowledge than that associated with lean manufacturing has become central. One insightful, and increasingly influential, way of conceiving of this challenge has been developed from the concept of ‘communities of practice’, i.e. groups of largely autonomous and self-organizing experts.
Multinational Companies and Global Human Resource Strategy
Authors: Cooke William N.
Published: September 2009

This article focuses on the salient human resource strategy issues and dynamics that come into play as a function of the multinational reach of companies. Although the overall objectives of formulating and implementing HR strategies are the same for national and multinational companies, global HR strategies must take into account factors germane to direct investments made abroad and the management of cross-border operations. At question herein, therefore, is: What factors or considerations are unique to companies operating across borders and what are the implications of these factors in regard to the successful development and deployment of global HR strategies? The article's aim in venturing to articulate a fairly encompassing framework is to stimulate further discussion and debate about how we can better frame our enquiries and analyses to improve our broader theoretical and practical understanding of global strategic HR issues.
Feminist Theory and the Canon of Political Thought
Authors: Zerilli Linda
Published: September 2009

This article describes the connection between feminist theory and the canon of political thought. It explains that feminist approaches to the canon of political theory are characterized by deep ambivalence and the majority of canonical authors have mostly dismissed women as political beings in their own right and casted them instead as mere appendages to citizen man. The article suggests that the question of how to make political judgments about other cultures and practices that deeply affect women is particularly important for feminist theory today. Globalization and the weakening of nation states have also pressed feminists to raise political demands with an eye to their multicultural and transnational significance.
The Pluralist Imagination
Authors: Schlosberg David
Published: September 2009

This article considers the developments in the aspects of pluralist theory concerning the acknowledgment of the empirical and experiential basis of moral and cultural plurality. It illustrates the longevity of pluralist thought in the field of political theory and the resurrection of earlier pluralist themes in recent theory. It discusses the conflict of pluralist theory with monism and liberalism and traces the history of pluralism in political science.
Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative
Authors: Pocock J. G. A.
Published: September 2009

This article examines the context and narrative problems associated with the study of the history of political theory. It suggests that in order to study the relations between political theory and history, it is necessary to study these terms and reduce them to manageable forms. It explains that the histories of political thought/theory were canonically constructed and they arranged modes of discourse in an order which it had come to be agreed formed the history being presented.
Republican Visions
Authors: Nelson Eric
Published: September 2009

This article examines republican conception of political theory in Europe during the early modern period. It explains that there were two distinct kinds of republican political theory. One was Roman in origin and the other was Greek which valued the natural ordering of the state made possible by the regulation of wealth. The article discusses republicanism in Italy and suggests that the battle between Rome and Greece defined the development of republican political theory throughout the early-modern period.
The History of Political Thought as Disciplinary Genre
Authors: Farr James
Published: September 2009

This article examines the history of political thought between the mid-nineteenth and the later twentieth centuries. It contends that the history of political thought became a disciplinary genre within political science largely because of the works of Robert Blakely, William Dunning, and George Sabine. It contends that a methodological awakening in the later twentieth century brought the disciplinary genre to a close and initiated the latest article in the history of political thought.
The Challenge of European Union
Authors: Bellamy Richard
Published: September 2009

This article examines the political challenges of the European Union (EU). It explains that political theorists and scientists alike have viewed European integration as a laboratory for exploring how far the nation state, and the forms of domestic and international politics to which it gave rise, has been affected by the various processes associated with globalization. It discusses the Charter of Rights and Constitutional Treaty of the EU and suggests that the EU can be plausibly characterized as an intergovernmental organization of an advanced kind, a nascent federation of states, and a new form of post-national and post-state entity.
East Asia and the West: The Impact of Confucianism on Anglo‐American Political Theory
Authors: Bell Daniel A.
Published: September 2009

This article explores the influence of Confucianism on Anglo-American political theory. It describes two recent developments in contemporary Anglo-American political theory which have allowed for substantial engagement with Confucian political theory and may set the stage for further interest in East Asian political theory more generally. One is the communitarian critique of liberal universalism and the other is the feminist emphasis on the politics of the family. This article discusses East Asian contributions to the debate on universalism versus particularism and to the debate on family and justice.
Changing Interpretations of Modern and Contemporary Islamic Political Theory
Authors: Euben Roxanne L.
Published: September 2009

This article examines the interpretation of contemporary Islamic political theory. Political theory is often understood as a field and enterprise at once produced by and coterminous with the West, yet there is a rich tradition of Islamic political thought in which Muslims have long been engaged in their own ‘great conversations’ about the foundations of political life. The article also discusses Islamic modernism and Islamic fundamentalism and describes the pluralisation of Islam.
Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law
Authors: Stimson Shannon C.
Published: September 2009

This article examines the relation between the rule of law and constitutionalism. It attempts to provide a better understanding of the ambiguous construct of the rule of law which still remains in the public imagination as a formative part of political discourse. It analyses the role of the rule of law within the constitutional structure of a progressively more formalized European Union or within the more recently constituted post-communist states of Eastern Europe and considers the manner in which some contemporary jurisprudential and political thinkers have considered the rule of law.