The Failure of Organizational Learning from Crisis – A Matter of Life and Death?

The continuing failure of organizations to learn from crisis has many costs, social, political, financial and individual and may be attributable to a misunderstanding of learning processes. This paper maps out contributions to learning from crisis from a number of fields. Central to the paper's argument is that the separation of policy development from practice, in theory and action, has contributed to a failure to learn. The paper considers two cases where the failure of child protection services resulted in the deaths of the children concerned. These two cases, separated by seven years, were connected by the failure of the same local authorities and agencies. The paper concludes with a number of observations concerning the public inquiry process.     

Interpretive Style,Motivation, Ability and Context as Predictors of Executives’ Creative Performance

Creativity has overtaken financial capital as the principal constraint facing businesses. Upper-level executives must, therefore, be able to develop creative solutions to strategic and administrative issues in order for firms to remain viable. Executive creativity not only contributes directly to corporate differentiation and innovation, it also helps create an environment that encourages, or perhaps requires, creative contributions from others. Executives are critically important knowledge workers that direct and enable the creative efforts of intellectual assets within a firm. Unfortunately, few empirical studies have sought to examine the creativity of knowledge workers beyond the narrow confines of basic research or R&D labs. This article presents an initial empirical test of an integrative theory of creative individual work performance in the domain of executive work. The study shows that by simultaneously considering executives’ interpretive style, motivation to pursue creative outcomes, creative ability, and work setting one can explain substantial variation in executives’ creative work performance.     

Revealing the ‘real’ me, searching for the ‘actual’ you: Presentations of self on an internet dating site

This paper considers the presentation of self on an internet dating site. Thirty men and 30 women were interviewed about their online dating experiences. They were asked about how they constructed their profiles and how they viewed other individuals’ profiles. Which types of presentations of self led to more successful offline romantic relationships were also investigated. Additionally, gender differences were examined. In line with previous research on presentation of self online, individuals were quite strategic in their online presentations. However, important differences between initiating a relationship on an internet dating site and other spaces (online and offline) included the type of self disclosed as well as the depth of breadth of information individuals self-disclosed about themselves before any one-on-one conversations took place.     

Organizing Individual and Collective Creativity: Flying in the Face of Creativity Clichés

The growing complexity of problems requires collective solutions to produce creative outcomes. Organizational theory on creativity has been extensively developed in recent decades, but two problematic issues remain. First, no current comprehensive model explains the development of collective creativity. Second, no empirical research has been conducted on the process of theory dissemination and its relevance within the managerial community. This paper provides evidence which can inform the design of collective creative projects within organizations, flying in the face of some managerial clichés. We design a research project which enables managerial sensemaking to emerge and which proposes a comprehensive approach to the design of team creativity. From a research design involving 24 managers and 98 eleven‐person groups, results confirm that creativity is not only about creative genius, and design for creativity is not a matter of linear correlation but implies a more sophisticated and integrative approach according to which individual creative skills, team dynamics and organizational solutions interact with each other to produce a collective creative performance.     

Organizational context,social interpretation,and the implementation and consequences of geographic information systems

An interpretive approach was applied to understand the social meanings of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) being implemented in two local government agencies in the United States. We assumed that information technologies, like other knowledge systems, are subject to social construction and that resulting social interpretations may shape their implementation and use. Guided by a framework linking social context with organizational processes, the research used inductive methods to describe the social constructed frames of meaning pertaining to GIS. Findings revealed strikingly different patterns of implementation and social consequences from the same technology. These findings demonstrate the role of social interpretations in the implementation of information technology. Social interpretations mediate between organizational context and the process of implementation to produce particular consequences of technology. The results support the notion of emergent causality and the importance of process in understanding the social consequences of technology     

Application of Self Organizing Map and SRTM data to characterize yardangs in the Lut desert,Iran

Yardangs, an exclusive landform due to intensive wind erosion, cover a large area in the hyper-arid Lut desert of Iran. This paper presents a new approach using Self Organizing Map (SOM) as unsupervised algorithm of artificial neural networks for analysis and characterization of yardangs.Nowadays, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) with 3 arc sec data (approximately 90 m resolution) and nearly world wide coverage provides uniform good quality data.The SRTM 3 arc sec data were re-projected to a 90 m UTM grid. Bivariate quadratic surfaces with moving window size of 5 × 5 were fitted to this DEM. The first derivative, slope steepness and the second derivatives minimum, maximum curvature and cross-sectional curvatures were calculated as geomorphometric parameters used as input to the SOMs. 42 SOMs with different learning parameter settings, e.g. initial and final radius, number of iterations, and the effect of random initial weights on average quantization error were investigated. A SOM with a low average quantization error (0.1040) was used for further analysis. Feature space analysis, morphometric signatures, three-dimensional inspection, auxiliary data like Landsat ETM+ and high resolution satellite imagery from QuickBird facilitated the assignment of semantic meaning to the output classes in terms of geomorphometric features. Results are provided in a geographic information system as thematic maps of landform entities based on form and slope, e.g. yardangs (ridge), corridors (valley) or planar areas.The results showed that all yardangs and corridors were clearly recognized and classified by this method when their width was larger than the DEM resolution but became unrecognizable if their width is much smaller than the grid resolution. The identified yardangs and corridors are aligned NNW–SSE parallel to the prevailing direction of the strong local 120 days wind and cover about 31% and 42% of the study area respectively. The results demonstrate that SOM is a very efficient tool for analyzing aeolian landforms in hyper-arid environments that provides very useful information for terrain feature analysis in remote regions.     

自然与设计的和谐——论包装设计的绿色化

人类的设计与自然的关系是密不可分的,随着社会的不断发展,人类的设计已影响到了人与自然的和谐。自然可载人,亦可负人。为了人类与自然能够和谐共存,包装设计就要顺应自然的发展,人们通过对绿色包装的进一步认识,转变成绿色的设计理念,从而使当今包装设计的绿色化成为今后包装发展的必然趋势。     

Organizational form, incentives and the management of information technology: Opening the black box of outsourcing

In this work, we attempt to show how operations researchers can effectively manage the production costs of computing services. The thesis of this paper is that an outsourcing firm, by virtue of the fact that it manages the IT function for multiple firms, is privileged to information not available to the focal firm. We derive the conditions under which this privileged information allows the partner firm to construct superior incentives for its employees, resulting in superior IT management. Further, we detail the circumstances under which outsourcing will not provide additional benefit, and what sorts of partners are likely to provide the greatest benefit. The two main findings are that for low levels of uncertainty, both in-house and relational management are equally acceptable. However, as uncertainty increases, the value of relational management increases. Conclusions are drawn and extensions are proposed, related to economies of scale and transactions costs.     

The Effect of Organizational Factors on the Business Value of IT: Universalistic,Contingency, and Configurational Predictions

The authors seek to expand the scope of theoretical approaches and organizational factors that are used in concert to examine the effect of organizational factors on IT business value in the present study. They explore the relationships among IT infrastructure capability, a set of five organizational factors, and IT business value using three dominant approaches in organizational research: the universalistic, contingency, and configurational approaches. The ensuing predictions are empirically tested through interviews with senior executives in 57 organizations.     

Between Autonomy and Paternalism: Crisis Managers’ Constructions of Citizens’ Responsibilities in the Context of Crises and Contingencies

Public discussions about the division of responsibilities between state and citizen in crises have led to reformulated policies. These are interpreted and put into practice by crisis managers. Hence, their understandings of citizens’ responsibilities are central for actions and resource allocation. This qualitative study focuses on Swedish crisis managers’ understandings of citizens’ (moral) responsibilities and practices of ‘doing’ responsibilities. Three overarching forms of ‘doing responsibilities’ were found as follows: assignment, assessment and differentiation. These ways of constructing responsibilities were permeated by two diverging rationales: the autonomy rationale and the paternalism rationale. The two rationales add up to a partly contradictory complexity that may explain individuals’ differing responsibility taking. Further, not recognizing this contradiction may negatively affect citizen's willingness to take responsibility when desired.     

Understanding EU Crisis Decision‐making: The Case of Chechnya and the Finnish Presidency

Why did the European Union accept a limited policy risk by adopting sanctions against a difficult target, Russia, in the Chechnya conflict and what does this case tell about the EU's crisis management practice? The explanation of the decision is based on problem framing, the exertion of power and the justifications of decision‐making. The analysis shows that occasionally the Union may adopt a bold policy, if a situation is framed as a grave crisis, a strong leadership of large members emerges advocating a firm response and pressures of public opinion preclude passivity; in addition, the policy is considered justified by groupthink based on anticipation, by institutional arguments as well as lessons learnt, which are likely to lead to stronger commitments. Yet the policy is likely to be a bounded one because of constraining values and goals, previous institutional commitments and practices, countervailing policy lessons and rational recognition of the Union's limited influence. Moreover, a bold policy may prove to be inconsistent over time. As a rule the pivotal role of large EU members, established practices as well as the decentralisation and consensus‐seeking tendencies combine to limit the Union's crisis response to a restricted and supporting diplomatic and economic role. The ongoing efforts to enhance the EU's crisis management capacity are yet to change significantly these habitual patterns.     

Strategy and Cognition: Understanding the Role of Management Knowledge Structures,Organizational Memory and Information Overload

The nature of our thinking about strategic management changed throughout the 1990s, highlighting a number of psychological issues associated with the pursuit of effective strategy. This paper draws attention to new academic thinking from the fields of organizational and cognitive psychology and is intended to bring insights for the reflective practitioner. It is argued that we must think differently about what it means to be intelligent in a modern organization and what it takes to be an effective implementer of strategic change. In the first of two papers, the role of managerial knowledge structures is considered. The strategic risks are problems created by information overload. The need to consider cognitive styles, intuition, creativity and emotional intelligence is highlighted.