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Geopolitical shifts, increasing demands for accountability, and growing competition have been driving the need for change within the transnational nongovernmental organization (TNGO) sector. Additionally, TNGOs have been embracing more transformative strategies aimed at the root causes, not just the symptoms, of societal problems. As the world has changed and TNGOs’ ambitions have expanded, the roles of TNGOs have begun to shift and their work has become more complex. To remain effective, legitimate, and relevant in the future necessitates organizational changes and investments in new capabilities. However, many organizations have been slow to adapt. As a result, for many TNGOs’ the rhetoric of sustainable impact and transformative change has far outpaced the reality of their limited abilities to deliver on their promises. This book frankly explores why this gap between rhetoric and reality exists and what TNGOs can do individually and collectively to close it. In short, TNGOs need to change the fundamental conditions under which they themselves operate by bringing their own “forms and norms” into better alignment with their contemporary ambitions and strategies. This book offers accessible future-oriented analyses and lessons-learned to assist readers in formulating and implementing organizational changes to adapt TNGOs for the future. The book draws upon a variety of disciplines and perspectives, including hundreds of interviews with TNGO leaders, firsthand involvement in major organizational change processes in leading TNGOs, and numerous workshops, training institutes, consultancies, and research projects.

The cross-cultural management literature is still dominated by the quantitative approach to cultures which made the research field popular in the early 1980’s. While the hegemony of this approach was being consolidated, a French research group, Gestion & Société, led by Philippe d’Iribarne, was conducting alternative research. Over the past thirty years, the team has carried out investigations in over fifty countries, collecting data from a large sample of companies concerned with making the most of the cultures with which they were dealing. This book provides an overview of the lessons learnt from thirty years of empirical research and of the refinements of a new theoretical approach to national cultures which challenges the mainstream ones. It introduces an interpretative approach to culture considered as a filter through which people understand reality and give it meaning. Throughout the world, employees confer different meanings on the daily situations arising from companies’ operations such as being subject to the authority of a manager, responding to requests from a client, or having one’s work monitored. All interactions within organizational contexts are underpinned by social relations which make sense in different cultural universes of meaning. Drawing upon this interpretative perspective, the book covers the main management issues: leadership, procedures implementation and control, decision-making, industrial relations, customer relations, ethics and corporate social responsibility, interpersonal and corporate communication, multicultural teams, and international transfers of management practices. Finally, the book provides methodological guidelines to enable researchers and practitioners to engage in this alternative approach.

This timely book provides a thorough analysis of contemporary youth employment entry route schemes in the U.K.Drawing on a Post-Foucauldian approach, the book providesa critical interrogation of the policy contexts governing a range of youth employment training schemes in four diverse regional economies within England and Scotland, including employability training, enterprise training, internships and volunteering. Supplemented with new ethnographic case study research conducted by the authors, the book’s chaptersexplore each training scheme in turn through the eyes of regional policy makers, trainers, work experience providers and young people. The authors demonstrate how neoliberal beliefs and practices, such as individualisation, responsibilisation, flexibility and resilience to risk are thoroughly implicated in youth employment policy and training practice. The book also makes obvious how the constraints faced by, and opportunities permitted to, different young people are shaped by the broad and complex interplay of national and regional historical events, economic processes and social structures.These function not only to reproduce but often to further retrench social inequalities, positions of liminality and vulnerability to risk for young people trying to get in and get on in good quality work across the different regional economies of the U.K.

For nearly three decades, English has been the lingua franca of cross-border business, yet studies on global language strategies have been scarce. Providing a rare behind-the-scenes look at the high-tech giant Rakuten in the five years following its English mandate, this book explores how language shapes the ways in which employees in global organizations communicate and negotiate linguistic and cultural differences. Drawing on 650 interviews conducted across Rakuten's locations around the world, the book argues that an organization's lingua franca is the catalyst by which all employees become some kind of “expat”—detached from their native tongue or culture. Demonstrating that language can serve as the conduit for an unfamiliar culture, often in unexpected ways, the book uncovers how all organizations might integrate language effectively to tap into the promise of globalization.

Institutions and ownership play a central role in the transformation and development of the beer market and the brewing industry. Institutions set the external environment of the brewery through both formal requirements and informal acceptance of these companies’ operations by the public, whereas the owners and their managers adapt to these external challenges but also follow their own agenda in setting up strategies for innovation, marketing, takeovers, etc. The 13 chapters in this book cover changes in a range of institutions, such as excise tax, zoning regulation, trade liberalization, consumers’ habits and tastes for beer and sales regulation of alcohol. The responses from the breweries has included a craft beer revolution with a surge in demand for special flowered hops, a globalization strategy from the macrobreweries, outsourcing by contract brewing and knowledge exchange for small-sized breweries, etc. The book consists of two parts. The first includes chapters primarily focusing on institutions, whereas the chapters in the second part take mainly an ownership perspective. The book’s contribution lies primarily in an analysis of the link between institutions and governance, pointing to how the most successful breweries have adapted to the external changes in institutions in the brewery sector.

This book traces the 200-year history of Norges Bank, which was established in 1816 with a dual purpose: to bring order and stability to the chaotic monetary system following the Napoleonic wars and provide Norway with a bank. The present Norges Bank is a modern well-functioning central bank, with strong likenesses to similar institutions in other countries. This book is particularly concerned with the relations between the bank and the political institutions. The bank’s role has been shaped and reshaped by perceptions of what kind of financial services Norway needed, how economic policy was coordinated, and how discretionary power was distributed between the elected bodies, the executive branch, and underlying institutions with a defined mandate. The central aim of this book is to trace and explain these changes over the past two centuries. It is also, to some extent, a contribution to the relatively broad literature on the history of national central banks.

Expectations are high regarding the potential benefits of public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure development in poor countries. The development community, led by the G20, the United Nations, and others, expects PPPs to help with “transformational” megaprojects as well as efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But PPPs have been widely used only since the 1990s. The discussion of PPPs is still dominated by best-practice guidance, academic studies that focus on developed countries, or ideological criticism. Meanwhile, practitioners have quietly accumulated a large body of empirical evidence on PPP performance. The purpose of this book is to summarize and consolidate what this critical mass of evidence-based research says about PPPs in low-income countries (LICs) and thereby develop a more realistic perspective on the practical value of these mechanisms. The focus of the book is on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), home to most of the world’s poorest countries, although insights from other regions and more affluent developing countries are also included. Case studies of many of the best-known PPPs in Africa are used to illustrate these findings. This book demonstrates that PPPs have not met expectations in poor countries, and are only sustainable if many of the original defining characteristics of PPPs are changed. PPPs do have a small but meaningful role to play, but only if expectations remain modest and projects are subject to transparent evaluation and competition. Experiments with PPP mechanisms underway in some countries suggest ways in which PPPs may be evolving to better realize benefits in poor countries.

This book provides a tools-based approach to strategic management. The central framework rests on three pillars that constitute the essence of strategy: to diagnose, to decide, and to deliver. Within this framework a suite of strategic management tools is offered, which include both the classics and the more nascent frameworks used to strategize. The first part of the book offers a brief introduction to the essentials of strategic management and unpacks the “3D” framework of strategy. The second part of the book revolves around explaining the purpose, underlying theory, core idea, depiction, process, value created, and risks and limitations of each tool. Hands-on advice is emphasized. The book also offers case illustrations that offer concrete examples of how the tools can be applied. The concluding chapter summarizes the key insights on a high level and offers concluding thoughts on how the tools can be combined.

This book presents the symbolic management perspective as a comprehensive, behavioral theory of corporate governance. It describes a pervasive pattern of symbolic decoupling, or separation between appearances and reality, at each level of the governance system. The processes of governance are less efficient or effective than they appear, at every level: from interpersonal relations within organizations, such as relations between chief executive officers and directors and between top managers and lower-level employees, between firm leaders and external stakeholders, and between communities of leaders and groups of constituents. There is even a separation between appearances and reality at the level of the governance system. Symbolic management comprises the agentic practices by which decoupling is maintained at different levels of the system, including internal and external communications by firm leaders that conform to prevailing cultural values. The symbolic management perspective not only provides an integrative, behavioral alternative to economic theories of governance such as agency theory, but it subsumes economic theory. Agency theory is reconceived as a historically contingent, institutional logic, or a set of cultural values, assumptions, and prescriptions that became taken for granted among key stakeholders for a period of time. We reveal a gradual shift in institutional logics of governance, away from the traditional agency logic, and toward an alternative “neo-corporate” logic that reinterprets agency prescriptions and drops fundamental economic assumptions of agency theory. Our theory and research ultimately demonstrate how the symbolic management activities of firm leaders have contributed to this historical shift in prevailing logics of governance.

Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system does not depend solely on how it is structured—organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, this book considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, the book explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have models reshaped financial markets? How have models altered moral behavior in organizations? The book takes readers behind the scenes in a bank unit that, within its firm, is widely perceived to be “a class act,” and it considers how this trading room unit might serve as a blueprint solution for the ills of Wall Street's unsustainable culture. It demonstrates that the integration of traders across desks reduces the danger of blind spots created by models. Warning against the risk of moral disengagement posed by the use of models, the book also contends that such disengagement could be avoided by instituting moral norms and social relations. The book profiles what an effective, responsible trading room can and should look like.

The social sciences are becoming datafied. The questions that have been considered the domain of sociologists, now are answered by data scientists, operating on large datasets, and breaking with the methodological tradition for better or worse. The traditional social sciences, such as sociology or anthropology, are thus under the double threat of becoming marginalized or even irrelevant; both because of the new methods of research, which require more computational skills, and because of the increasing competition from the corporate world, which gains an additional advantage based on data access. However, sociologists and anthropologists still have some important assets, too. Unlike data scientists, they have a long history of doing qualitative research. The more quantified datasets we have, the more difficult it is to interpret them without adding layers of qualitative interpretation. Big Data needs Thick Data. This book presents the available arsenal of new tools for studying the society quantitatively, but also show the new methods of analysis from the qualitative side and encourages their combination. In shows that Big Data can and should be supplemented and interpreted through thick data, as well as cultural analysis, in a novel approach of Thick Big Data.The book is critically important for students and researchers in the social sciences to understand the possibilities of digital analysis, both in the quantitative and qualitative area, and successfully build mixed-methods approaches.

This book brings about insights and key concepts from the field of transnational migration studies to bear upon the field of organization studies. It expands upon multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism, and historical global conjuncturesas relevant transnational concepts for studying people and difference in novel ways including agentic, reflexive mobile subjectivities as the new subjects of diversity research that emerge in a ‘post-identitarian’ world. Specifically, the book offers transmigrant, hybrid, and cosmopolitan subjectivities as new the subjects of diversity research. Beyond new subjectivities, mobility ontology requires rethinking the epistemology of multiculturalism, examining inequalities, and redirecting the methodologies adopted to attend to difference. In expanding on these, the book offers new frameworks for the study of people on-the-move and organizations through a mobility ontology that foregrounds movement as the natural order of the social world. It also calls into question the ways existing research paradigms and approaches have potentially replicated the creation of boundaries and borders through implicit assumptions about difference, race/ethnicity and belonging. By shifting the ontological premise upon which the field of organization studies rests, this book provides novel ways of theorizing difference, people and work beyond static epistemologies guiding much of the field.