One-size-fits-all cluster policies have been rightly criticized in the literature. One promising approach is to focus cluster policies on the specific needs of firms depending on the stage of development (emergence, growth, sustainment or decline) their cluster is in. In this highly insightful book, these stage-specific cluster policies are analysed and evaluated. Moreover, several chapters also focus on smart specialization policies to promote regional development by taking into account the emergence and adaptation of clusters and industries. In so doing, the book contributes to a newly emerging literature on how the cluster life cycle concept can inform policies and how these policies differ from static approaches that ignore the dynamism of clusters. The underlying idea is to foster the ability of clusters to renew themselves and to generate new developmental paths, thus preventing stagnation and decline. This state-of-the-art exploration of smart specialization from a cluster life cycle perspective is an invaluable book for academics in the fields of economic geography, entrepreneurship, innovation, industrial economics, regional studies and cluster research. It will also appeal to regional policy makers and practitioners dealing with public policy. Contributors include: Y. Al-Saleh, B.T. Asheim, A. Auer, M. Benner, P. Cooke, D. Fornahl, J.K. Fosse, M. Fromhold-Eisebith, M. Grillitsch, R. Hassink, A. Isaksen, K. Koschatzky, H. Kroll, T. Lammer-Gamp, B. Lageman, S. Mahroum, R. Martin, G. Meier zu Koecker, J. Nordhause-Janz, R. Normann, R. Ramlogan, D. Rehfeld, M. Rothgang, E. Schnab, T. Stahlecker, F. Toedtling, M. Trippl, E. Uyarra, J. Vicente

This book contributes a basic framework for and specific insights into interdisciplinary connections between production, logistics, and traffic subsystems. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents an overview of interdisciplinarity in value-added networks and freight traffic. This includes an introduction to the topic and a description of an integrated framework of production, logistics, and traffic. Furthermore, it describes the barriers and challenges of interdisciplinary decision-making and project management. In turn, the second part presents domain-specific perspectives on interdisciplinary decision support, exploring domain-specific challenges of interdisciplinary interfaces and requirements for management methods and instruments from the standpoint of production management, logistics management, traffic management, and information technologies.

Take an innovative approach to a climate of change within your workplace or organization with this guidebook on diversity and inclusion.

Author Maura G. Robinson, an authority on diversity and inclusion, has been helping companies create systemic process of change for more than twenty years. In "the Inclusion Revolution Is Now," she explores as you can

create an environment of inclusion where all employees are accountable for their behaviors, and able to work together to accomplish the organizational goals.

recognize that civil diversity impedes systemic processes of change to occur. So diversity is viewed as an initiative or a program with no sustainability at the organizational level.

ensure employees willingly practice inclusion regardless of personal beliefs.

While there is still racism, prejudice, sexism, and other exclusionist attitudes among people in the workplace, organizational leaders have the power and responsibility to mandate a climate of inclusion. Supporting diversity and inclusion is also a prerequisite for capitalizing on the ideas that diverse people can bring to your organization.

Most diversity practices used by organizations do not actually promote inclusion, and exclusion continues to exist. There's a better way to achieve inclusion, and it starts with "the Inclusion Revolution is Now."

Among the most significant features of Sims and Dennehy's book are a focus beyond valuing and managing cultural diversity, and a demonstration of the interdependency that exists between a number of important individual differences (i.e., alienation, receptivity, style, power). They discuss some personal yet theoretical insights on answers and questions that are important in increasing our recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and differences in general. In eleven original essays contributors examine a wide assortment of behaviors, issues, and individual differences while offering their reflections on answers and future questions that are key to leveraging diversity and difference in organizations.

Recent literature has emphasized the projected changes in organizational demographics and the fact that globalization also is changing the face of organizational landscapes. Taken together these trends are serving to increase the need to understand and appreciate cultural diversity in virtually all organizations. Many books already exist that attempt to address this topic. Each one attempts to provide a guide to dealing with a variety of racial, ethnic, or cultural backgrounds. The intent of Sims and Dennehy's book is to go beyond offering ideas or to serve simply as a guide to improve the management of diversity. Thus, a major goal of this book is to have its readers reflect on their personal diversity and difference experiences and to create a forum for answers and questions on the value of diversity and differences for all. The main thread that ties everything together in this book is the strategy of creating value through repeated emphasis on our need to look beyond valuing and managing diversity to the interdependency of a variety of individual variables that shape our lives.

The book begins by offering a bridge-building model as a tool that colleges and universities can use to decrease the alienation experienced by minority students on predominantly white campuses and to increase the social consciousness of all institutional constituents. The next chapter suggests that diversity is essential to learning, and good conversation is a powerful way to learn from diversity. The book then introduces a model that seeks to place the issue of diversity management as one part of an overall development change process. The notion that the success of some organizations in enhancing diversity is dependent upon the vision and strength of management is emphasized in the next chapter, which, by taking a different perspective, presents the argument that current corporate infrastructures do not promote diversity. Unless a company builds new internal support systems that encourage diversity of thought and action, employees hired to make the company more diverse will merely be homogenized into the prevailing culture. In the following chapter the role of training in U.S. organizations is discussed as a major component in increasing the recognition, understanding, and appreciation of diversity and difference. The concept of difference-based approach to advocacy and its relation to issues of gender are introduced as cornerstones of creating work environments that are supportive of employees' needs to balance work and family. The next chapter provides data for analysis of the expatriate's learning experience and applies the learning from expatriate experiences to those issues faced by minorities in a domestic setting. A need to create new intellectual diversity that focuses on foreign language skills applicable to the needs of economic, scientific, and technological markets is emphasized in the next chapter. Next, a comparison is made of the decision-making processes and practices of Japanese and American managers at a Japanese company in the United States. The author's pioneering findings can be generalized to understand decision-making in different cultures and organizations. The role of diversity educator is then discussed and the author persuasively argues that active learner participation, self-disclosure, and a trusting supportive environment are prerequisites to understanding and appreciating diversity. The book concludes with a review of the important points discussed by the contributors to this book, offers questions in need of answers, and identifies future issues on diversity and differences.

"Lessons Learned" is a knowledge management approach for organizational learning and improved performance and productivity. However beneficial this approach is, few organizations have been able to implement the processes necessary for organizational success Utilizing Evidence-Based Lessons Learned for Enhanced Organizational Innovation and Change links the theoretical foundation of the "lessons learned" approach with current tools and evidence-based research in support of organizational development. Outlining best practices and emerging research in organizational learning, this publication is ideal for project managers, academicians, researchers, and upper-level students looking to implement these processes into their project management cycle, particularly in the risk management and quality control processes.

You may be: - trying to fix the healthcare system in your country... - dealing with family break-up... - exploring change - and making it happen - in your organisation... - worrying about how to look after your elderly parents... In any case, you'll know that with some problems it's hard to know where to start - we can't define them, we get in a muddle thinking about them, we may try to ignore some aspect/s of them and - when we finally do something - they usually get worse. These problems are so entangled they become 'messy situations' and our first mistake is to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem. But Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways of approaching these situations and unravelling them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world's foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them. Specifically, she sets out a series of sophisticated and challenging - but practical and easily learned - skills and techniques for thinking better when you're'in a mess'. Whether you're new to Systems Thinking or have long experience, the book invites you to develop your skills through working with your own messy situations. It's written for managers, project managers, team leaders, 'change leaders', strategists, policy makers and concerned citizens as well as university students from a broad set of disciplines. Organisations and readers in education, healthcare, environmental management, IT planning and social care are just a few of those likely to find it helpful.

The chapters in this collection address a variety of concerns in organizational theory, ranging from the evolution of organizations and cross-cultural analyses of managerial behavior to the micro-sociology of knowledge brokering within organizations and the etiology of organizational messes. Swaminathan, examines resource partitioning theory, an important theoretical perspective in population ecology. The next three chapters, broadly construed, address issues of organizational innovation, learning, and adaptation in complex environments. The next contribution, by John Carroll, Jenny Rudolph, and Sachi Hatakenaka examines how high-hazard organizations learn from experience. As with all organizations, high-hazard organizations such as nuclear power plants and chemical plants attempt to learn from experience in order to improve performance and, of course, to avoid catastrophic failure. Unlike many other kinds of organizations, however, failure to learn from prior experience-especially with respect to learning effectively from errors and mishaps-can prove extremely costly and even fatal. Hence, these organizations must balance between learning and control, and must do so under conditions of considerable oversight and scrutiny. provocative analysis of the role disorganization plays in organizational life. The two following chapters in this volume provide important overviews of theory and research on classic phenomena within organizational theory, followed by original theoretical syntheses. Robert Baron's chapter then undertakes a fresh and useful examination of the burgeoning literature on entrepreneurship and the two final chapters in the volume examine essential issues related to our understanding of organizations and the cultural environments in which they are embedded.

Many corporations, in their attempt to create innovative products and services, have focused on the concept of building teams. While many groups fizzle, on rare occasions the members of a group will experience an extraordinary eruption of excitement, transcending an organization's rigid confines to achieve astonishing results. These individuals, say Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, are lucky enough to be members of a "hot group," a phenomenon they lucidly and enthusiastically describe in their ground-breaking new book Hot Groups.
A hot group is not a name for a newfangled team, task force, or committee. Rather, a hot group is defined by a distinctive state of mind coupled with a style of behavior that is intense and sharply focused on its ultimate goal. Stretching themselves beyond their own expectations, members of a hot group plunge into enterprises that have the potential to change, even ennoble, their own and others' lives.
Neither trendy fabrication nor new management fad, hot groups have existed since the dawn of civilization, perhaps invigorating groups of cavemen to hunt together furiously for food before winter's approach. Today, examples of hot groups abound in territories such as Silicon Valley, where impassioned people have blazed paths through the burgeoning computer industry. Consider the hot group that created the original Macintosh and revolutionized the personal computer market. John Sculley, who joined Apple in the early 1980s, described a "magnetic field" that surrounded the Macintosh hot group members, and Bill Gates, Microsoft's mastermind, reported that a hot programming group to which he once belonged "didn't obey a 24-hour clock." Instead, they programmed for days at a time, pausing only to eat and talk about software with fellow programmers. Here also are examples of hot groups at work in other industries: the individuals that created the blockbuster TV drama "Hill Street Blues"; the Navy and civilian personnel that transformed a standard cruiser into a guided missile cruiser in less than 12 months; and even the ad hoc crisis management group advising President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis. Indeed, the inspiring case studies found throughout Hot Groups illustrate that well-nourished hot groups can profoundly transform any type of organization.
Still, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt recognize the risks inherent in loosening an organization's structural soil enough to accommodate these groups. Consequently, they address such issues as how to provide the kind of leadership required by a hot group, how to mesh a hot group with the regimented structure of the overall corporation, how managers can encourage new hot groups, and how best to cope with an overheated hot group.
Drawing on decades of research and experience with groups and organizations throughout the world, Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt have written an intensely engaging book about a phenomenon that will become increasingly important in our rapidly changing world. Expertly carving a path through this unmapped terrain, they lucidly demonstrate how managers and executives can ignite hot group sparks in their own organizations.

While it is possible for a company achieve short-term profit, it is much more difficult to sustain corporate success over time. This book is intended for those who run, or want to run, a business whatever its size or activity, with the objective of making it sustainable so that it will be a legacy for future generations. Indeed, the real purpose of corporate strategy is not only to make quick profits, but more importantly to create an organization that will endure. There is much to learn from the experience of established firms that have existed for a hundred years or more. They provide the material for this clear and concise book, which details the main elements of corporate strategy. Recognizing that each firm is unique, the book resists the temptation of quick fixes, instead offering lessons to be pondered and used on a case-by-case basis.

Technology in the world today impacts every aspect of society and has infiltrated every industry, affecting communication, management, security, etc. With the emergence of such technologies as IoT, big data, cloud computing, AI, and virtual reality, organizations have had to adjust the way they conduct business to account for changing consumer behaviors and increasing data protection awareness. The Handbook of Research on Social and Organizational Dynamics in the Digital Era provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings on all aspects of social issues impacted by information technology in organizations and inter-organizational structures and presents the conceptualization of specific social issues and their associated constructs. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as business management, knowledge management, and consumer behavior, this publication seeks to advance the practice and understanding of technology and the impacts of technology on social behaviors and norms in the workplace and society. It is intended for business professionals, executives, IT practitioners, policymakers, students, and researchers.

Instances of wrongdoing in and by organizations have featured heavily in news headlines in recent years. Why do organizational participants - employees, managers, senior officials - engage in illegal, unethical, and socially irresponsible behavior? The dominant view of wrongdoing as an abnormal phenomenon assumes that the perpetrator is a rational, proactive actor, working in isolation. However, Palmer develops an alternative approach in this book examining wrongdoing as a normal occurrence, produced by actors with no positive inclinations to engage in this practice, but whose behaviour is shaped by the immediate social context over a period of time. The book provides a comprehensive critical review of the theory and research on organizational wrongdoing. By using rich case study material, it illuminates different perspectives, potential explanations, policy implications, and suggestions for the way forward for the improvement of organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Good management skills alone won't get executives and their organizations far enough. What is also needed is the seemingly indefinable, evanescent, quirky, and paradoxical quality called leadership. Leadership lies in the emotional side of management. It pumps life into organizations and gives meaning to management structures. Leadership is symbolic, charismatic, inspirational--no matter how it is defined, Barach and Eckhardt prove that it can be DEGREESIlearned DEGREESR. Their book is thus a solidly researched, readable assessment of what leadership actually is, its various dimensions, its place among other necessary executive skills, and how it can be nurtured and propagated. With examples from the worlds of business, politics, sports, and the military and buttressed by sound academic studies, Barach and Eckhardt succeed in making the concept of leadership come alive and--of greatest value to organizations and their people--useful.

Barach and Eckhardt start by describing the emotional side of management, the paradoxical nature of leadership, and how it fits into the full set of executive responsibilities and skills. They go on to break leadership down into its 20 components. In chapters devoted to each component, they provide readers with well-documented descriptions of leadership's characteristics: desire, decisiveness, vision, integrity, anchoring, following, kinship, caring, inspiring, listening, telling, mentoring. They reassemble the parts and show how leadership works in Washington, D.C. Closing with a detailed discussion of the 6 most important leadership issues that Barach has identified in his decade-long study of the topic, the authors offer readers an opportunity to discover issues familiar to them personally, how to analyze them, and make use of the results.

As evidence builds that the Theory Y model of management, built on commitment and involvement, is far more successful in the workplace than the bureaucratic and authoritarian Theory X model, organizations seek new and more specific guidance in how to reinvent themselves into the Theory Y mode. Schuster outlines a step-by-step process to transform management theory into practice--he calls it Strategy A. As proof that the process works, he describes one firM's five-year-long intervention, in which Strategy A was applied with dramatic success. Other examples of Strategy A's successes are recounted here: how it worked in companies like Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Disney, and elsewhere. Executives in the private and public sectors will find this a necessary resource to help them guide their organizations into this newly appreciated management style, while their academic colleagues will find new ways to communicate to their students its impressive benefits.

Part I delineates the foundation and definition of Strategy A. Chapter 1 describes organization culture and why it is an important determinant in organization performance. Schuster then explains the urgency of devising methods for improving productivity and competitiveness, summarizes results from his study of Fortune 1300 largest companies, and introduces Strategy A as an intervention process. Reviewing the work of other researchers, Schuster examines several successful contemporary American firms utilizing Strategy A, and then presents the results of his own research of one particular firM's performance. In Part II Schuster examines the principal steps in the application of Strategy A, discusses their rationale, and shows how other American firms have benefited from them.

Lissack and Gunz have gathered many of the leading practitioners from the science of complexity and its emerging applications to management--to give us an up-to-date, comprehensive understanding of this important new field and how it can change the way we think about the organizations. Complex systems, which consist of many interacting entities and exhibit properties such as self-organization, evolution, and constant novelty, exist in all domains of our world. The metaphors and models derived from complexity, say Lissack and Gunz, can be used to make sense of these systems and help managers shape them.

The three chapters in Part I introduce the topic of complexity science and how it relates to modern management practice, providing a context for the section on strategy, creativity, communications, and applications that follow. Part II examines strategy from a complexity perspective and complexity from a strategy perspective. In Part III the authors look at the intersection of complexity, creativity, and communication. Part IV on applications, examines how complexity-influenced theories of management actually affect routine management practice. Throughout, the book makes clear that what worked in a simpler, clearer world will not work today. State of the art yet basic enough to remain timely well into the future, this book will prove indispensable for organization decision makers everywhere and their academic colleagues.

The ability to implement change quickly is crucial to an organizations's success--not only in traditionally sedate industries, but also in today's fast-moving hi-tech ones. Sherman and Chaganti, from their study of 100 American corporations, half in stable industries, half in volatile ones, find that a firM's structure of governance bears heavily on the speed with which the firm can reorient itself. What are the characteristics of firms that change quickly? What inhibits others? And what, precisely, is the impact of a firM's stockholders, board and top management on its ability to adapt? Sherman and Chaganti provide answers to these and other questions, in the first book yet to focus entirely on the determinants of time in corporate reorientations.

In order for a firm to develop or sustain a competitive advantage, it must not only adapt correctly to environmental change, but also adapt quickly. This study examines the factors associated with the time a firm takes to initiate reorientation. The results of the research indicate that even in relatively large organizations, reorientations are not rare and occur routinely. Further, deterioration of a firM's financial condition tends to hasten its initiation of reorientation. However, the determinants of time taken to initiate reorientation differ in firms with relatively high prior performance and firms with relatively low prior performance.

This volume explores the concepts, themes, methods, and procedures of organization staffing. As author Aharon Tziner notes at the outset, although organizations usually attempt to predict the likely future performance of each applicant in terms of productivity, rarely do they consider the likelihood of the applicants finding gratification in their work-related needs and aspirations. Organizations which fail to consider these needs in the initial hiring process run the risk that extremely talented staff may eventually abandon the organization because of a lack of personal fulfillment. The short--and long-term consequences of these erroneous staffing policies range from decreased staff morale and efficiency to seriously impaired profitability. Tziner here offers a functional and integrated conceptual framework that enables organizations to maximize the probability that staffing decisions will result in optimal work adjustment and the enhancement of organizational productivity.

Tziner begins with an overview of the theoretical foundations of organizational staffing and a discussion of some basic concepts in the field. Subsequent chapters examine the process and methods of job analysis, predictors and measuring tools, and the staffing process. A separate chapter on staffing methods and instruments covers biodata, reference checks, the interview, psychological tests, graphological tests, situational tests, assessment centers, and peer evaluation. The following group of chapters address the cost of personnel programs, performance appraisal systems, work adjustment, and work-related attitudes. In the final chapter, Tziner shows the reader how to recognize the symptoms of work maladjustment. Numerous figures and tables illustrate points made in the text. Four appendices include additional helpful information such as guidelines for a structured interview and examples of performance appraisal rating formats. Industrial and organizational psychologists as well as human resources professionals will find Tziner's work an enlightening and practical guide to a long-overlooked aspect of the organization staffing process.

Responsible behaviors in the realm of business continue to remain a crucial component of organizational development. By exploring core aspects of contemporary corporate strategies, businesses can create more value in social welfare initiatives. CSR 2.0 and the New Era of Corporate Citizenship is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on the ways in which corporate entities can implement responsible strategies and create synergistic value for both businesses and society. Featuring extensive coverage across a range of relevant perspectives and topics, such as corporate citizenship, stakeholder engagement, and business ethics, this publication is ideally designed for students, academics and researchers seeking current concise and authoritative research on the business case for corporate social responsibility.

The development of Critical Realism (CR), as a philosophy of science, is generally attributed to a series of books by Roy Bhaskar. It has proven to be influential, not least because it has an affinity with many people's views about the way the world fits together, both within and outside of academia. Whilst there are numerous contributions outlining CR theory in sociological and organizational research, as well as general texts about realist ontology, work delineating the consequences of these views for research practice is an emerging area of interest. This book aims to fill a significant gap in the literature by providing a practical guide to the application of CR in empirical research projects. More specifically, it explores the methodological consequences of committing to a CR ontology-the assumptions that researchers from this tradition make about the nature of reality. These assumptions are important because ontological commitments, which relate what we believe exists, often affect our epistemological concerns, which relate to our beliefs about how whatever exists can be studied and known. Thus, for a researcher, ontology and epistemology are important because they have consequences for the possibilities and limits of the research methods, techniques, and analyses that they employ. The book explains what CR is and outlines the logic of research design. In a series of chapters on major social science research methods, purpose-written by experts in the relevant technique, the book contains extended illustration of how to conduct inquiry using CR.

The latest edition of the gold-standard guide for leadership development In the new seventh edition of The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations, best-selling leadership authors and business scholars James Kouzes and Barry Posner deliver an essential strategic playbook for effective leadership. The book's actionable advice is grounded in robust research and deep insights into the complex interpersonal dynamics of the workplace. Premier authorities in the field, the authors frame leadership as both a skill to be learned and as a relationship to be nurtured. They demonstrate how to achieve extraordinary results in the face of contemporary business challenges with engaging stories, current case studies, and straightforward frameworks for those who seek continuous, incremental improvement. The book also offers: Incisive commentary on the shift toward team-oriented and hybrid work relationships Key insights into how to break through a new and pervasive level of cynicism amongst the modern workforce Strategies for leveraging the electronic global village to deliver better results within your team, in your department, and across your organization Perfect for every practicing and aspiring leader who wants to stay current, relevant, and effective in a rapidly evolving business environment, The Leadership Challenge will help you remain impactful and capable of inspiring and motivating your constituents at every level.