First Look

Publications

The Adventures of an IT Leader

Abstract

Becoming an effective IT manager presents a host of challenges—from anticipating emerging technology to managing relationships with vendors, employees, and other managers. Ultimately, a good IT manager must be a strong business leader, not just a technical specialist. By inviting you to "walk in the shoes" of an IT leader, this book will help you better understand the role of IT in your organization and navigate your own career with greater confidence. Accompany Jim Barton as he struggles through a challenging first year as the IT director of IVK Corporation, handling (and fumbling) situations that, although fictional, are based on true events. You can read this engaging narrative from beginning to end, like a regular book, or treat it as a series of cases. You can also skip around and use the book to satisfy your most pressing needs. For example, need to learn about crisis management and security? Read chapters 10-12. Or formulate your own responses to a CIO's management obstacles by reading the authors' recurring "Reflection" questions. You'll turn to this book again and again-thumbing through to reference critical chapters when you face troubling IT-related issues in your own career.

Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases (8th ed.)

Abstract

The ^8th edition of Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases is written for students and managers who desire an overview of contemporary information systems technology management. This new edition examines how information technology enables organizations to conduct business in radically different and more effective ways. The authors' objective is to provide readers with a better understanding of the influence of twenty-first century technologies on business decisions. The 8th edition discusses today's challenges from the point of view of the executives who are grappling with them. This text is comprised of an extensive collection of Harvard Business School cases devoted to information technology.

Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization

Abstract

The present research identifies an anomaly in sociocognitive development, whereby younger children (8 and 9 years) outperform their older counterparts (10 and 11 years) in a basic categorization task in which the acknowledgment of racial difference facilitates performance. Though older children exhibit superior performance on a race-neutral version of the task, their tendency to avoid acknowledging race hinders objective success when race is a relevant category. That these findings emerge in late childhood, in a pattern counter to the normal developmental trajectory of increased cognitive expertise in categorization, suggests that this anomaly indicates the onset of a critical transition in human social development.

Not Just a Pretty Face: The Economic Drivers Behind the Arts in Business Movement

Abstract

Interest in the uses and effects of art and methods of art making in businesses of all kinds is on the rise. This is no passing fad but the result of two seismic shifts moving the business world. These shifts will influence how companies, especially those based in developed economies, compete. To survive, companies and their managers will adapt. As some are now beginning to realize, an important part of that adaptation will require a new understanding of art and art making, a sophisticated appreciation of, and a feel for, aesthetic principles.

Knowledge Work, Craft Work, and Calling

Abstract

Social critics have often complained that industrial revolution management transfers control of a job away from workers, encourages human exploitation in pursuit of cost minimization, and alienates workers from their labor. But the arrangements of work that have been so criticized have continued to change. The work of a UNIX systems lab technician in the 21^st century differs extravagantly from the work of a factory worker 100, or even 20, years earlier. In this paper, we argue that technological transformations now underway create the potential for work structures more favorable to workers. Using a theoretical model that relates work to its determinants, and to consequent management implications, we demonstrate that future work might have a worker-centered structure resembling that of pre-industrial craft work.

Artistic Methods and Business Disorganization

Abstract

The idea that artists' work can usefully inform business practice has gained support in recent years. Managers have long described some business activities as "more art than science," but usually they've meant by this that they don't understand the activity and can't do it reliably themselves. In this view, artistic methods and art-like activities are personal and intuitive, even magical, not yet sufficiently analyzed, routinized, or rationalized to be trustworthy. Authors such as Adler (2006), however, note that an increasing number of companies are abandoning the notion that art practice within business signifies a problem; they've embraced artistic processes in approaches to strategic and day-to-day management, leadership, and team work. Management researchers, too, have drawn practical lessons from artistic methods in design (Bolland and Collopy, 2004), music (Hackman, 2002; Zander and Zander, 1998), theatre (Austin and Devin, 2003), and other areas. Scholars have also proposed art principles and art-based philosophies as organizing bases for business firms (Guillet de Monthoux, 2004) and as conceptual lenses through which we can more completely understand organizations (Strati, 1999). In this article, we survey, discuss, and critique this development in management research.

Innovation Processes and Closure

Abstract

In this paper we examine the concept of "closure" in relation to the innovation process. We suggest that managers need a richer and more encompassing framework than what presently exists for navigating, coaching, and managing the innovation process, particularly in relation to "closure." Closure is a point of convergence that happens once or repeatedly in productive activity; it signifies an important shift from open to closed, from undetermined to determined, from undefined to defined. We describe two basic forms of closure in the innovation process: forced closure and crystallization. We consider also situations in which products are "never finished," as when a software product oscillates between degrees of defined-ness and undefined-ness, adapting to changing business conditions in an ongoing process. The emergence of important examples of never finished products is our primary reason for reconsidering the idea of closure; we therefore seek a framework that will also encompass this characteristic of productive activity. Our data consist of action research and interviews with managers and artists involved in innovation and processes of creation, and our intention is to explore the following questions: How do business innovators know when to keep things open and when to allow closure to happen or even force it? In comparison, how do artists know when they are done? Could artists' ways help us understand the innovation process and the concept of closure better? What kind of knowledge, experience, methods, or signals can help innovators manage closure? What strategies are available? Helpful? Effective?

Managing Differences

Abstract

Reflections on what the example of Specialisterne, a company that employs people with autism for their particular talents in the exacting but repetitive tasks involved in software testing, might teach us about leveraging human assets, in all their diversity, in an innovation economy.

Care Platforms: A Basic Building Block for Care Delivery

Abstract

Without significant operational reform within the nation's health care delivery organizations, new financing models, payment systems, or structures are unlikely to realize their promise. Adapting insights from high-performing companies in other high-risk, high-cost, science- and technology-based industries, we propose the "care platform" as an organizing framework for internal operations in diversified provider organizations to increase the quality, reliability, and efficiency of care delivery. A care platform organizes "care production" around similar work, rather than organs or specialties; integrates standard and custom care processes; and surrounds them with specifically configured information and business systems. Such organizational designs imply new roles for physicians.

The Price Is (Almost) Right

Abstract

Most previous research tests market efficiency using average abnormal trading profits on dynamic trading strategies and typically rejects the joint hypothesis of market efficiency and an asset-pricing model. In contrast, we adopt the perspective of a buy-and-hold investor and examine stock price levels. For such an investor, the level of price is more relevant than the short-horizon expected return, and betas of cash-flow fundamentals are more important than high-frequency stock return betas. Our cross-sectional tests suggest that there exist specifications in which differences in relative price levels of individual stocks can be largely explained by their fundamental betas.

The Evidence Does Not Speak for Itself: Expert Witnesses and the Organization of DNA-Typing Companies

Abstract

During the past 15 years, new biotechnology companies have promoted DNA typing as a sophisticated criminal and paternity identification technique. Private testing laboratories produce results that link individuals with crime scenes and fathers to their children. Special problems of trust have arisen, because the domain of scientific practice termed 'DNA typing' emerged in a commercial context, and its results serve as the basis for expert witness testimony in contentious courtroom settings. Firms accordingly had to develop their own rules for legitimating truth-claims and standardizing and regulating laboratory practices. I argue here that the primary commodity crafted by DNA-typing companies—the courtroom credibility of DNA prints—required an intertwining of scientific authority, corporate practices, and the persona of the expert witness. This paper describes an actor-network coming into being and shows how credible institutions, organizations that manufacture integrity as their main sellable product, adopted a vertically integrated structure in order to control the production of DNA evidence from the laboratory to the courtroom.

The Gordon Research Conferences as Scientific Infrastructure

Abstract

Conferences serve as a crucial part of scientific infrastructure by offering participants the opportunity to announce novel findings, discuss research methods, and take part in a variety of networking activities. Presenting papers and learning about unpublished new work is vital for a scientist to stay current in their discipline. Yet conferences have drawn minimal attention from historians and sociologists of science, whose analysis of scientific infrastructure has instead focused on formal scientific communication through journal articles and online forums, the formation of new disciplines and subfields, and shifting funding structures for academic and industrial labs. This article focuses on the Gordon Research Conferences (GRC) as a case study of the significance of conferences to the scientific enterprise. We argue that GRC's growth is a product of internal and external factors: conferences stimulate intensive discussion and real-time peer review, new topics are chosen through a review process oriented to frontier areas of science, and the GRC format fosters intimacy among participants even as the overall size of the scientific enterprise expands. More generally, we seek to make visible the otherwise hidden role of conferences within scientific infrastructure.

The Decentering of the Global Firm

Abstract

This paper describes recent changes in the relationship between firms and nation states. Firms are typically linked to the nation in which they began and are considered to have fixed national identities. While firms have reallocated various activities around the world in response to value creation opportunities, they have largely retained their national identities, and their headquarter activities remained bundled in their home countries. This characterization is increasingly tenuous. Firms are redefining their homes by unbundling their headquarters functions and reallocating them opportunistically across nations. A firm's legal home, its financial home and its homes for managerial talent no longer need to be colocated and, consequently, the idea of firms as national actors rooted in their home countries is rapidly becoming outdated. The implications for policy makers and researchers are outlined.

Download the paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1279535

Diversification of Chinese Companies: An International Comparison

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic comparison of the level of business diversification in China and eight other large economies for the 2001-2005 period. The reasons why publicly listed Chinese firms are more diversified than companies elsewhere are investigated.

Agriculture as a Source of Fuel: Prospects and Impacts, 2007 to 2017

Abstract

No abstract is available at this time.

Download the paper: http://www.mda.state.mi.us/renewablefuels/documents/AgforFuel.pdf

Media Markets and Localism: Does Local News en Español Boost Hispanic Voter Turnout?

Abstract

Since the dawn of broadcasting, and especially in the past decade, Americans have turned their attention from local to more distant sources of news and entertainment. While the integration of media markets will raise the private welfare of many consumers, critics of a globalized information and entertainment industry claim that transnational media undermine civic engagement, transforming locally engaged citizens into viewers consuming programming from distant sources. In response to such concerns, many regulatory agencies, including the Federal Communication Commission in the United States, curtail the integration of media markets to promote "localism." To find the right balance between the private benefits of integrated markets and the public value of civic engagement, evidence on the size of the positive spillovers from local media is needed. To date, such evidence is scant. In this paper, we exploit the rapid growth of Hispanic communities in the United States to test whether the presence of local television news affects local civic behavior. Spanish-language local television news programming was available in 25 U.S. metro areas in 2002, up from only 14 areas in 1994. Our estimates indicate that Hispanic voter turnout increased by 5 to 10 percentage points, relative to non-Hispanic voter turnout, in markets where local Spanish-language television news became available. We conclude that the tradeoff between integrated media markets and civic engagement is real. The results of this study provide a basis for the continued pursuit of regulatory policies that promote localism.

Fairness in Extended Dictator-Game Experiments

Abstract

We test the robustness of behavior in dictator games by offering allocators the choice to play an unattractive lottery. With this lottery option, mean transfers from allocators to recipients substantially decline, partly because many allocators now keep the entire endowment for themselves (without playing the lottery). In our standard dictator game, the median transfer amounts to 41% of the dictators' endowment. Once the lottery option is present, the median transfer falls to zero. Introducing an additional unattractive choice thus leads subjects to violate the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP).

Friend or Foe? Cooperation and Learning in High-Stakes Games

Abstract

Why do people frequently cooperate in defiance of their immediate incentives? One recent explanation is that individuals are conditionally cooperative: They prefer to cooperate with cooperative persons but would rather punish those who are not. As an explanation of behavior in one-shot settings, such preferences require individuals to be able to discern their opponents' preferences prior to play. Using data from two seasons of a television game show, we provide evidence about how individuals implement conditionally cooperative preferences. We show that (1) contestants forgo large sums of money to be cooperative; (2) players cooperate at heightened levels when their opponents are predictably cooperative; and (3) players whose observable characteristics predict less cooperation fare worse (monetarily) over time, as opponents avoid cooperating with them.