Suchergebnisse

Doing successful organizational research is difficult. Doing the same in difficult circumstances proves worthy of discussion. This short paper illustrates the reali ties experienced by a management researcher while doing doctoral field work in Sri Lanka. Everyday life in Sri Lanka means the routine experience of dangerous, difficult and challenging circumstances. Here we seek to provide an insight into how best to manage the worst circumstances. Future researchers undertaking research not only in Sri Lanka, but also elsewhere in South Asia, and in places in the world where there is a state of insecurity, might benefit from this research experience. One source of insecurity derives directly from the state of emergency that has gripped Sri Lanka ever since the Tamil Tigers began their campaign of terror, designed to try and induce the state to allow them a separate homeland in the north and east of the island. The other source of insecurity flows from respondent per ceptions of research as 'strange', in itself. Each is a source of ontological insecu rity : the one leads to conditions that make it more difficult to be a researcher, while the other leads to conditions that make it more difficult for others to know what being a researcher means.

A link can be made between Weber's work on 'The sociological categories of economic action', a neglected resource for the sociology of organizations, and Karpik's concern with 'logics of action', or 'modes of rationality'. One dominant form of rationality, based on short-term calculation, is substantively irrational in its contribution to manufacturing decline in Western countries. Both authors contribute to a notion of formal rationality in decision-making routines in the enterprise, a rationality that in practice systematically skews and obfuscates the substantive issues of manufacturing strategy. Modern professional managers, themselves the products of developmental trends in contemporary capitalism, assert the priorities of an increasingly refined and operationalized formal rationality. In a democratic industrial development organized labour may enter the stage as the bearers of the antithesis, substantive rationality in the interests of industrial progress. This is the desirable political development in the interests of both economic welfare and economic democratization.

The critical current in organization analysis has not only called into question the conservative assumptions of more orthodox organization theory, but also the purely cosmetic nature of what often passes for worklife reform. However, it has chosen to mount these attacks from essentialist starting points - the 'division of labour' and 'bureaucracy' - which circumscribe its theoretical critique of organizations in capitalist society. Consequently, it is difficult to couple critical organization theory to a political project which generates a confrontation with capitalism based on criteria of socio-economic re-organization, in which mutually dependent criteria of democracy and efficiency are operative. By default, it ends up endorsing functionalist fatalism.

Electronic textiles (e-textiles) have played a significant role in computational audio ranging from wearable interfaces for creative expression to more utilitarian purposes such as acoustic monitoring for military applications. This article looks at e-textiles within computational audio from three perspectives: the historical developments of the field; the core enabling technologies; and the primary application areas. It closes with a discussion of what role e-textiles may play in future computational audio systems.

AbstractResearchers have extensively studied how large firms and SMEs use business and political ties to obtain tangible and intangible resources in transition economies. However, how SMEs establish these ties in the context of power-imbalanced dependence by using unethical and illegal "strategic practice" such as bribery remains underexplored. Furthermore, how SMEs deploy strategies to mitigate such risky actions in the process of resource acquisition is also given limited attention in the literature. Lack of exploration of these issues leaves significant gaps in our understanding of how SMEs are able to initiate and operate their ties for survival and growth despite enormous institutional constraints. We analyze the negative and positive effects of power dependence on business resource acquisition via regression analysis using survey data drawn from 232 Chinese SMEs. The findings indicate that power-imbalanced dependence among SMEs is associated with their use of bribery to establish political ties with officials for access to resources. The moderating effect of power-mutual dependence on this relationship is also examined. Theoretical significance and managerial implications of these findings for SMEs in transition economies are discussed.