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Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Information and communications technology (ICT) offers enormous opportunities for individuals, businesses and society. The application of ICT is equally important to economic and non-economic activities. Researchers have increasingly focused on the adoption and use of ICT by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as the economic development of a country is largely dependent on them. Following the success of ICT utilisation in SMEs in developed countries, many developing countries are looking to utilise the potential of the technology to develop SMEs. Past studies have shown that the contribution of ICT to the performance of SMEs is not clear and certain. Thus, it is crucial to determine the effectiveness of ICT in generating firm performance since this has implications for SMEs’ expenditure on the technology. This research examines the diffusion of ICT among SMEs with respect to the typical stages from innovation adoption to post-adoption, by analysing the actual usage of ICT and value creation. The mediating effects of integration and utilisation on SME performance are also studied. Grounded in the innovation diffusion literature, institutional theory and resource-based theory, this study has developed a comprehensive integrated research model focused on the research objectives. Following a positivist research paradigm, this study employs a mixed-method research approach. A preliminary conceptual framework is developed through an extensive literature review and is refined by results from an in-depth field study. During the field study, a total of 11 SME owners or decision-makers were interviewed. The recorded interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 10 to refine the model to develop the research hypotheses. The final research model is composed of 30 first-order and five higher-order constructs which involve both reflective and formative measures. Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is employed to test the theoretical model with a cross-sectional data set of 282 SMEs in Bangladesh. Survey data were collected using a structured questionnaire issued to SMEs selected by applying a stratified random sampling technique. The structural equation modelling utilises a two-step procedure of data analysis. Prior to estimating the structural model, the measurement model is examined for construct validity of the study variables (i.e. convergent and discriminant validity).

The estimates show cognitive evaluation as an important antecedent for expectation which is shaped primarily by the entrepreneurs’ beliefs (perception) and also influenced by the owners’ innovativeness and culture. Culture further influences expectation. The study finds that facilitating condition, environmental pressure and country readiness are important antecedents of expectation and ICT use. The results also reveal that integration and the degree of ICT utilisation significantly affect SMEs’ performance. Surprisingly, the findings do not reveal any significant impact of ICT usage on performance which apparently suggests the possibility of the ICT productivity paradox. However, the analysis finally proves the non-existence of the paradox by demonstrating the mediating role of ICT integration and degree of utilisation explain the influence of information technology (IT) usage on firm performance which is consistent with the resource-based theory. The results suggest that the use of ICT can enhance SMEs’ performance if the technology is integrated and properly utilised. SME owners or managers, interested stakeholders and policy makers may follow the study’s outcomes and focus on ICT integration and degree of utilisation with a view to attaining superior organisational performance.

This study urges concerned business enterprises and government to look at the environmental and cultural factors with a view to achieving ICT usage success in terms of enhanced firm performance. In particular, improving organisational practices and procedures by eliminating the traditional power distance inside organisations and implementing necessary rules and regulations are important actions for managing environmental and cultural uncertainties. The application of a Bengali user interface may help to ensure the productivity of ICT use by SMEs in Bangladesh. Establishing a favourable national technology infrastructure and legal environment may contribute positively to improving the overall situation. This study also suggests some changes and modifications in the country’s existing policies and strategies. The government and policy makers should undertake mass promotional programs to disseminate information about the various uses of computers and their contribution in developing better organisational performance. Organising specialised training programs for SME capacity building may succeed in attaining the motivation for SMEs to use ICT. Ensuring easy access to the technology by providing loans, grants and subsidies is important. Various stakeholders, partners and related organisations should come forward to support government policies and priorities in order to ensure the productive use of ICT among SMEs which finally will help to foster Bangladesh’s economic development.

Paul D. Bliese is currently the commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit – Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Social Psychology from Texas Tech University. His research interests include multilevel methodology, leadership, and occupational stress. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology, and also serves on the editorial boards of Leadership Quarterly and Organizational Research Methods. His work has appeared in the Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Kristina A. Bourne is a doctoral candidate in Organization Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she also obtained a M.B.A. and a Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. Her academic interests include gender and organization as well as family-friendly policies and benefits. She is currently working on her dissertation in the area of women business owners, and on a collaborative research project focusing on part-time work arrangements.Gilad Chen is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from George Mason University. His research focuses on work motivation, teams, and leadership, with particular interests in modeling motivation and performance in work team contexts and the examination of multilevel organizational phenomena. His work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Human Performance, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Organizational Research Methods.Jae Uk Chun is a doctoral student in Organizational Behavior in the School of Management at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is also research assistant of the Center for Leadership Studies. His major research interests include leadership, group dynamics and group decision-making, and multiple levels of analysis issues.Vinit M. Desai is a doctoral student and researcher in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include organizational learning, sensemaking, and error cognition in high reliability organizations.Shelley D. Dionne is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University, and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Binghamton University. Her research interests include leadership and creativity, levels of analysis issues, and team development and training.Daniel G. Gallagher (Ph.D. – University of Illinois), is the CSX Corporation Professor of Management at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management, and Industrial Relations (Berkeley). His current research interests include the multi-disciplinary study of contingent employment and other forms of work outside of the traditional employer – employee relationship.David A. Hofmann (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is currently Associate Professor of Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include safety issues in organizations, multi-level analysis, organizational climate/culture and leadership, content specific citizenship behavior, and the proliferation of errors in organizations. In 1992, he was awarded the Yoder-Heneman Personnel Research award by the Society for Human Resource Management. His research appears in a number of journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process, and Personnel Psychology. He has also co-authored several book chapters, edited a book (Safety and Health in Organizations: A Multi-level Perspective), and presented papers/workshops at a number of professional conferences.James G. (Jerry) Hunt (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Management, Trinity Company Professor in Leadership and Director of the Institute for Leadership Research at Texas Tech University. He is the former editor of the Journal of Management and current Senior Editor of The Leadership Quarterly. He founded and edited the eight volume leadership symposia series, and has authored or edited some 200 book and journal publications. His current research interests include processual approaches to leadership and organizational phenomena and the philosophy of the science of management.Kimberly S. Jaussi is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership in the School of Management at Binghamton University and a fellow in the Center for Leadership Studies. She received her doctorate from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include unconventional leader behavior, creativity and leadership, identity issues in diverse groups, and organizational commitment.Lisa M. Jones is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.B.A. and M.A. from Brigham Young University. Her research interests include leadership, collective personality, and innovation implementation.Kyoungsu Kim is Associate Professor of Organization in the College of Business Administration, Chonnam National University. His major fields of interest are culture and leadership at multiple levels of analysis. His research focuses on charismatic leadership, organizational structure, roles, culture, and multiple levels of analysis.Barbara S. Lawrence is Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Dr. Lawrence’s current research examines organizational reference groups, the evolution of organizational norms, internal labor markets and their effects on employees’ expectations and implicit work contracts, and the impact of population age change on occupations.Craig C. Lundberg is the Blanchard Professor of Human Resource Management at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. He works with organizations facilitating organizational and personal development and publishes extensively (over 200 articles and chapters, five co-authored books). His current scholarship focuses on organizational change and culture, consultancy, alternative inquiry strategies, and sensemaking and emotions in work settings.Kenneth D. Mackenzie is the Edmund P. Learned Distinguished Professor in the School of Business at the University of Kansas. He is also the President of a pair of consulting companies which support and enrich his research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on various editorial boards and has published numerous books and articles. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He has spent his career trying to overcome the handicap of “excessive theoretical education.”Peter Madsen is a doctoral student at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. His thesis work examines the processes by which organizations attempt to learn from past failures and the organizational actions and characteristics that facilitate such learning. His other interests include organizational reliability, strategic management, the work-life interface, and ethics.John E. Mathieu is the Northeast Utilities and Ackerman Scholar Professor of Management at the University of Connecticut. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Old Dominion University in 1985. He has published over 50 articles and chapters on a variety of topics, mostly in the areas of micro- and meso-organizational behavior. He is a member of the Academy of Management, a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology, and the American Psychological Association. His current research interests include models of training effectiveness, team and multi-team processes, and cross-level models of organizational behavior.Sara Ann McComb is an Assistant Professor of Operations Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests include alternative work arrangements and project teams. Currently, she is examining mutually beneficial links between organizations and part-time workers, particularly in the service sector. She is also studying the way in which project teams share information, a project for which she was award the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award.Jone L. Pearce is Professor of Organization and Strategy in the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Irvine. She conducts research on workplace interpersonal processes, such as trust, and how these processes may be affected by political structures, economic conditions and organizational policies and practices. Her work has appeared in over seventy scholarly articles and her most recent book is Organization and Management in the Embrace of Government (Erlbaum, 2001). She is a Fellow of the Academy of Management and served as the Academy’s President in 2002–2003.Amy E. Randel is an Assistant Professor and the Coca-Cola Fellow in the Calloway School of Business & Accountancy at Wake Forest University. She received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests include identity in organizations, diverse group dynamics, group efficacy, cross-cultural management, and social capital.Richard Reeves-Ellington is currently Professor Emeritus in the School of Management at Binghamton University and an Associate Dean at Excelsior College. He taught at the American University in Bulgaria and Sofia University in Bulgaria as a Fulbright Senior Scholar. His fields of interest revolve around cross-cultural aspects of global organization, marketing, and business strategy. He also served on the Fulbright Selection Committee for SE Europe, the Muskie Foundation for students from the CIS, and the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. His initial 33-year career in the pharmaceutical industry included 19 years of living in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.Christine M. Riordan is a faculty member in the Department of Management and also the Director of the Institute for Leadership Advancement in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Chris’ current research, which includes the study of labor force and cross-cultural diversity, has been published in journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, and Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management.Karlene H. Roberts is a Professor of Business Administration at the Walter A. Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. She has been on the review boards of many major journals in her field. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and the Academy of Management. Her current research interests are in the design and management of organizations in which errors can have catastrophic outcomes. In this area she explores cross-level issues.Denise M. Rousseau is the H. J. Heinz II Professor of Organizational Behavior and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. An organizational psychologist, her research focuses on worker-employer relationships and multi-level processes in organizational change. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, and in 2003–2004, President of the Academy of Management.Melissa Woodard Barringer is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She obtained her Ph.D. in Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of total compensation and alternative work arrangements. She is currently studying part-time work in the service industry, and contingent work in the accounting and academic professions.

This paper aims to address the extant and arguable role of enterprise systems (ES) in relation to management accounting practices (MAPs) through an inclusion relative neglect account of business process management (BPM). This is also extended to draw out an analytical framework to advance our understanding of how BPM mediate ES-MAPs interplay.

A cross-sectional case study was adopted as a research strategy with which to collect data about the ES-BPM-MAPs interplay as a unit of analysis. The latter, in the first stage, was examined across (89) mini-case studies operating in the UK context through reports and documentations collected from cases’ websites, vendors and consultants of information systems. Drawn insights from cross-sectional analysis and contributions made by prior studies are blended together to inform the second stage that outlines an analytical framework for ES-BPM-MAPs interplay.

Different ES are mobilised to address different orientations of BPMs and being used for different managerial functions and purposes. Different patterns of ES-BPM-MAPs interplay are identified across (89) UK-case studies and the BPM is a fulcrum understanding. These patterns are centred around three key BPM including customer, logistics and control processes and all oriented by a continuum of an organisation intention focus on control, understanding and strategising. Both processes and orientations explain ES development and MAPs evolution processes. Standardisation, integration and intelligence are key characteristics sought through ES mobilisations. By complementary, information provision, analytics and simulation are three sophisticated ways of using MA information facilitated by ES characteristics.

Dynamic processes of MAPs change over time and are beyond the reach of this study. Such approach requires full access to case studies. BPM is fulcrum understanding of MAPs change and/or stability in relation to ES implementation including other components.

Findings and analytical framework could be used as a base for establishing the best approach in adopting ES to fully exploit the potential of future ES applications as well as to avoid organisations pitfalls of implementations. Organisations are advised to understand their existing business processes, characteristics of MA information would be achieved first upon which decision of ES components selection and implementation could be outlined.

The indirect interplay between ES and MAPs through business processes is rarely examined. By the inclusion of BPM and using cross-sectional case studies, this research contributes to the existing shortcomings of ES-MAPs interplay by broadening the picture and proposing an analytical framework. The latter advances our understanding by focusing on attributes of ES-BPM-MAPs upon which informal changes in-the use of MAPs are recognised.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and identify the activity systems that drive building information modelling (BIM) business value in asset management (AM). The utilisation of BIM has widened in scope, functionality, flexibility and interoperability to support the AM business process. However, research concerning BIM business value in AM has been inadequate despite its considerable potential and significance in the attainment of organisational objectives. The realisation of BIM business value requires a concerted effort by the asset owner to be able to determine and appraise the critical activities that drive business value in AM.

The study adopted a qualitative research approach based on a multi-case study strategy that aimed to identify the key business processes that drive BIM business value in AM. The study involved a three-stage research design using interviews and document analysis to facilitate a cross-case analysis from the perspective of the activity systems and dimensions of BIM governance.

The paper identified six critical activity systems that drive BIM business value for an asset owner: BIM strategy, contract management, lifecycle management, maintenance management, work-order management and value realisation management. The study found that the most developed activity system is the BIM strategy, and the least is value realisation management across all cases. Also, the paper points out that the most proficient BIM governance dimension is process, and the least is people across the three cases. The study noted that the ability of an asset owner to realise BIM business value has maturity undertones and that the asset owner could derive BIM business value, if the six activity systems are effectively executed and continuously improved to an advanced stage of maturity.

An original contribution of the study is the development of the understanding of asset owners in relation to the discovery of key activity systems that drive BIM business value in AM. Another significant contribution of this paper is the demonstration of a novel approach to evaluate organisational maturity of asset owners from the perspectives of the activity systems and BIM governance dimensions of people, process and technology.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.