Market-level information and the diffusion of competing technologies:an exploratory analysis of the LAN industry

Market-level information diffused by print media may contribute to the legitimation of an emerging technology and thus influence the diffusion of competing technological standards. After analyzing more than 10,000 trade media abstracts from the Local Area Networks (LAN) industry published between 1981 and 2000, we found the presence of differential effects on the adoption of competing standards by two market-level information types: technology and product availability. The significance of these effects depends on the technology's order of entry and suggests that high-tech product managers should make strategic use of market-level information by appropriately focusing the content of their communications. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The dynamics of organizational change : an analysis of power, professions and new managerialism in the case of CoastElectric

It is widely accepted that the Thatcher years and their immediate aftermath were associated with substantive social and organizational change. The privatisation programme, 'the rolling back of the State', prosecuted by the successive Conservative Governments from 1979-1997 was a central pillar of Governmental policy. This thesis seeks to engage with privatization through the of CoastElectric, a newly privatised Regional Electricity Company. This thesis contributes to the extant understanding of the dynamics of organizational change in four major ways. Firstly, the study into CoastElectric addresses the senior management decision making within the organization: in particular, it will attempt to make sense of 'why' particular decisions were made. The theoretical backdrop to this concern will draw on the concepts of normalization, cultural capital and corporate fashion. The argument presented in this thesis is that the decision-making broadly corresponded with that which could be considered to be at the vanguard of mangerialist thought. However, a detailed analysis suggested that at different junctures in CoastElectric's history there were differences in the approach to decision making that warranted further analysis. The most notable finding was that the relative levels of new managerialist cultural capital possessed by the decision-making elite had an important bearing upon whether the decision was formulated either endogenously or exogenously, with the assistance of cultural intermediaries such as management consultants. The thesis demonstrates the importance of the broader discourse of new managerialism in terms of shaping what is considered to be a 'commonsensical, rational' strategy. The second concern of this thesis is that of the process of organizational change. The study of CoastElectric attempts to provide a rich account of the dynamics of organizational change. This is realized through, first, examining the pre-existing context of the organization; second, through analyzing the power politics of change interventions. The master concepts utilised in this endeavour are that of: dividing practices, the establishment of violent hierarchies between competing discourses; symbolic violence; critical turning points; recursiveness; creative destruction; legitimation strategies and the reconstitution of subjects in the workplace.

A sociological analysis of four police consultative committees in Birmingham

Consultation between the police and the community was a recommendation of Lord Scarman in his report into the Brixton riots in 1981. By 1982 the West Midlands Police Authority had established local consultative committees on each police sub-division. This thesis is a study of four Police Consultative Committees in Birmingham, using qualitative methods of attendance at committee meetings and interviews with committee members. The research was carried out between 1990 and 1992 - ten years after formal consultation was established, and aimed to examine the relationship between the micro social processes of the committees and key sociological theoretical concepts. The analysis of the four committees contextualises them within the social and political parameters of urban policing in the late 1980s. Each committee is taken as a case study to highlight the following aspects of consultation:- relations between the police and black communities; membership, representation and accountability; responding to community conflict; crime prevention agencies and networks of social control. The findings are then generalised to the sociological theoretical concepts of hegemony, legitimation, community conflict and social control. The central proposition of this thesis is that, whilst these committees are not fulfilling the role Lord Scarman envisaged for them (of involving local community representatives in policing strategies and policies), they do have important policing and political roles. It is argued that they offer a platform from which senior police officers can engage local people into supporting policing objectives without actually involving them in determining those objectives. Furthermore, such committees have political symbolism in that they enable the government to be seen to be responding to the issues of accountability and relations between the police and black communities following the urban disorders, without actually devolving any statutory powers to the community.

Top-down or bottom-up: the real choice for public services

This article considers two contrasting approaches to reforming public services in order to meet the needs of people living in poverty. The first approach is top-down, involves categorising individuals (as 'hard to help', 'at risk', etc) and invokes scientific backing for justification. The second approach is bottom-up, emancipatory, relates to people as individuals and treats people who have experience of poverty and social exclusion as experts. The article examines each approach through providing brief examples in the fields of unemployment and parenting policy - two fields that have been central to theories of 'cycles of deprivation'. It is suggested here that the two approaches differ in terms of their scale, type of user involvement and type of evidence that is used for their legitimation. While the article suggests that direct comparison between the two approaches is difficult, it highlights the prevalence of top-down approaches towards services for people living in poverty, despite increasing support for bottom-up approaches in other policy areas.

The role of government research establishments : a study of the concept of public patronage for applied research and development

This thesis follows the argument that, to fully understand the current position of national research laboratories in Great Britain one needs to study the historical development of the government research establishment as a specific social institution. A particular model is outlined in which it is argued that institutional characteristics evolve through the continual interplay between internal development and environmental factors within a changing political and economic context, and that the continuous development of an institution depends on its ability to adapt to changes in its operational environment. Within this framework important historical precedents for formal government institutional support for applied research are identified. and the transition from private to public patronage documented. The emergence and consolidation of government research laboratories in Britain is described in detail. The subsequent relative decline of public laboratories is interpreted in terms of the undermining of a traditional role resulting in legitimation crisis. It is concluded that it is no longer feasible to consider the public research laboratory as a coherent institutional form, and that the future of each individual laboratory can only be considered in relation to the institutional needs of its own sphere of operation. Nevertheless the laboratories have been forced into decline in an essentially unplanned way which may have serious consequences for the maintenance of the scientific and technical infrastructures, necessary for material progress in the national context.

Legitimacy building strategies in conditions of discretionary legal enforcement:a logic of social action approach

The present study explores strategies used to legitimize the transfer of organizational practices in a situation of institutional upheaval. We apply the logic of social action (Risse, 2000) to analyze the effectiveness of consequence-based action and communication-based action, in terms of higher coordination, lower conflict, and overall higher economic performance. Consequence-based legitimation is obtained by using a system of distributor incentives tied to performance of specific tasks, while communicative legitimation can be achieved by recommendations and warnings. Our setting is an export channel to European emerging economies. Our results indicate that in the absence of legitimacy, as manifested in discretionary legal enforcement, consequence-based legitimation is more effective than communicative legitimation in reducing conflict, increasing coordination, and ultimately in improving the performance of the export dyad. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.

Európai Egyesült Államokat – de most rögtön? (United States of Europe - Right now?)

Ez a tanulmány öt pontban vizsgálja meg, hogy a költségvetési és a bankunió azonnali megvalósítására vonatkozó uniós tervezetek mennyiben járulhatnak hozzá a sikeres európai válságkezeléshez, továbbá hogy megvalósításuk milyen föltételrendszert igényel. ______ The article addresses the issue if, and to what degree, the project of the fiscal and banking union in the EU, launched in June 2012 and finalized in the Council of December 2012, pre-suppose or result in a supranational arrangement. The argument suggests that severe limitations, both in terms of economics and legal arrangements, as well as of lacking democratic legitimation, result in a watered down version of ambitious projects of Brussels.

Authority and stratification in the Bahamas: The quest for legitimacy

This longitudinal study provides a detailed description of the transition in the Bahamas from British colony to independent country. It analyzes the ongoing process of legitimation and delegitimation of Bahamian political parties and of the transfer of authority from the white minority to the black majority. It is a story of social and political struggles that take place within the quarter century following World War II. These struggles are analyzed within a theoretical framework which focuses on the meaning of symbols used to support claims to authority, and/or which function to delegitimize alternative claims. Specifically, this study looks at the delegitimization of the institutions of colonialism and the concurrent profession of symbols to support both independence and a fully enfranchised democracy in the Bahamas. ^ The research methodology includes an extensive analysis of official British colonial documents, private governmental dispatches, and contemporaneous newspaper articles. The sources were primarily the Public Records Office of Great Britain; the Archives of the Bahamas; and the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies. Secondary literature on civil rights, political science, religion, Black Nationalism, corruption, social theory, and popular culture was studied. Two hundred days of participant observation, spread over seven years of study, resulted in notes from which information was gleaned. During that time, seventeen open-ended interviews with a cross section of Bahamians (male and female, black and white) who lived through this period were recorded, information from which was also incorporated. ^ A detailed description of the socio-historical process, and an analysis of data, demonstrates how the black majority's desire for political representation, and future independence, pressured Great Britain to come into line with the desires of the majority of Bahamians. The symbolic universe that had historically divided white from black now urged dramatic social and political change. ^ The documents and testimonials studied demonstrate how symbols and symbolic events supported and/or undercut the claims to legitimacy proffered by different groups in the Bahamas in their respective attempts to solidify their social and political position within the society. ^

State collapse and politicized identity: Somalia and Sudan

Scholarship on how to rebuild failed or collapsed states provides scant theoretical guidance in the search for specific warning signs or mechanisms of collapsing states. This thesis argues that state collapse is a societal response to an identity crisis politicized by the state apparatus in response to a legitimation crisis. As regime legitimacy deteriorates, identity politics are deployed to build support for the regime, but typically at the cost of increasing other forces of internal conflict. Absent a mediating force to suppress internal conflict, the state collapses once the regime has been removed. Somalia and Sudan proceeded through this trajectory during their civil wars, though with different outcomes. Somalia fragmented into clan and subclan groups that continued their inimical relationship perpetuating the war following Siyad Barre's coup. Sudan maintained two core identity groups separated by the implementation of sharia that survived each state legitimation crisis, though the state's physical solidity endured.

Da maniva ao grolado: práticas produtivas e patrimoniais no processo identitário dos Tremembé de Almofala (CE)

The indigenous political scene in Brazil is undergoing transformations that need to be better analyzed by scholars in the field of the Social Sciences. The deficit in the policy of indigenous land demarcation emerges as the largest obstacle in the conquest of collective rights. Therefore, a study to analyze renewed strategies in the struggle for social rights, and their implications in local everyday life relations, is urgent. In this context, the aim of this research is to understand the current social dynamics of identity among the Tremembé people of Almofala, in the state of Ceará, Brazil, with a fieldwork conducted in the flour mill of the Casa de Farinha Comunitária project, in the Lameirão community. Specific aims are: a) to analyze the processes involved in the project in order to comprehend their meanings and appropriations as well as their everyday life and political uses; b) understand the strategies to fight for social benefits; c) analyze the local ethnic classifications grounding the construction of the Tremembé identity in Almofala. Methods deployed are ethnography of communities, used to apprehend the social production of networks of relationships, and a social cartography of practices. The realization of rights demanded by the indigenous populations in Brazil is intertwined with a process of social and legal legitimation their identity and cultural heritage. Such legitimation works as a safeguard mechanism of rights secured by the Constitution. Therefore, to own a “cultural heritage” is perceived as a “passport” to benefit from emerging rights. Amid this context, changes in the traditional processing of the cassava root, a productive practice shared locally by diverse social groups, is reified as cultural heritage by the Tremembé people of Almofala and their network of collaborators in the pursuit of accessing distinctive public policies. Furthermore, the research came across specific social arrangements of local subjects which unfolded internal struggles, enabling to understand the dynamics of the Tremembé of Almofala identity process.

Quando fé e gestão se encontram: compreendendo uma ONG de filosofia protestante sob as lentes da prática e do Sensemaking

We find in Brazil the reality of religious pluralism. From the end of XIX century until now, the religious scenario became more diversified in a process of acceptance and legitimation of different religions. In the same period, the Third Sector was largely developed up until its current form: complex, broad and plural as well. In this context, we find non profitable organizations that provide services under a religious phylosophy. One in particular, placed in Uberlândia-MG, protestant, has the fearures of a big company and is the largest one among the ones that provide social services and receive public funds in the city: Missão Luz. Thinking about the organization, some questions came to mind: is there a noticeable influence of the religious orientation on practices? How do managers understand and make sense of their practices? Adopting Chanlat’s (1996) concept of management mode, the perspective proposed by the Practice Based Studies (GHERARDI, 2013) and the sensemaking studies (WEICK, 1995), I developed a research that intended to understand Missão Luz’ management practices. Three sources of data were used – documents, shadowing and interviews – to understand, in the most complete way, organization’s management practices, using managers’ perspective. Results pointed to a noticeable relation between faith and management. Ten practices were identified among managers: council decisions, appreciation for excellence, respect for authority figures, giving second chances to employees, desire to be a reference, results quantification, search for professionalization, organization, formalization and standardization. The first five practices were heavily influenced by religious principles, and the five last were influenced by instrumental rationality, usually found in the Second Sector. It was noticed that faith was also related to those last practices, justifying them for their contribution for achieving excellence e consequent action of glorifying God. Practices are maintained e passed by the cultivation of the Mission’s DNA, an organization’s way of doing things, and by the belief of the role of the leader maintaining this DNA. Associated to practices, sensemaking moments were analyzed, situations where there order was disrupted and managers had to make sense e act on this understanding. These situations were divided in three themes: “fly the flag of the company”, changes in schools’ management and God’s purpose and sovereignty. The paper is finished with some suggestions for future researches.

Publics, visibilité et reconnaissance en art contemporain : étude du cas de Ai Weiwei

Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de ce mémoire a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Literatura en el espacio público : Rivas y su obra: un punto de inflexión en la recuperación de la memoria histórica

Tras una revisión diacrónica del tratamiento del tema de la guerra civil en la narrativa gallega, el artículo analiza la función performativa que en ese contexto han desempeñado una serie de obras narrativas de Manuel Rivas y su eficacia como factores de legitimación y dinamización del proceso de recuperación de la memoria histórica. Como conclusión se propone considerar a Rivas como un emprendedor de la memoria (Jelin) y sus obras como 'lieux de memoire' (Nora) por su condición de artefactos culturales de integración social.

Euphoria in financial markets: how Indian companies generate value in their cross-border acquisitions

In this paper, we investigate the effect of euphoria on returns derived by Indian companies in their cross-border acquisitions. Cognitive legitimacy generated at the country level facilitated firms in deriving higher value from internationalization. In addition, overoptimism after the legitimacy-building event led to euphoria in financial markets and short-term abnormal returns. Hence we argue that the springboard effect created by legitimacy is short-lived, as euphoria fades away over time. Using cross-border and domestic acquisitions by Indian companies during 1999-2009, and controlling for fundamental factors, both financial and non-financial, we find support for our euphoria hypothesis. Because of overoptimism, Indian companies experienced short-term abnormal returns in their cross-border acquisitions in the few years following the legitimation process, but not in later years.