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This paper offers a new insight into how organizations engage with external complexity. It applies a political action perspective that draws attention to the hitherto neglected question of how the relative power organizational leaders enjoy within their environments is significant for the actions they can take on behalf of their organizations when faced with external complexity. It identifies cognitive and relational complexity as two dimensions of the environment with which organizations have to engage. It proposes three modes whereby organizations may engage with environmental complexity that are conditioned by an organization's power within its environment. It also considers the intention associated with each mode, as well as the implications of these modes of engagement for how an organization can learn about its environment and for the use of rationality and intuition in its strategic decision-making. The closing discussion considers how this analysis integrates complexity and political action perspectives in a way that contributes to theoretical development and provides the basis for a dynamic political co-evolutionary approach.

This article develops a firm-level analysis of how the quality of employment relations following acquisition by private equity firms (PEFs) is contingent upon the strategic intent of those firms and the post-acquisition organizational choices they make. The efficiency gains that PEFs seek in acquired companies are expected to encourage restructuring towards a minimalist organization. However, the form such an organization takes is seen to depend on whether PEF strategy is oriented primarily towards extracting short-term value from acquired assets rather than towards renewing and developing those assets. Contrasts in the process of restructuring and in organizational form associated with these two strategies will have different implications for the quality of employment relations. The way in which PEFs restructure the companies or units they acquire is the key intervening factor between the strategic intent of PEFs and impact they have on the quality of employment relations.

The governance of companies, other than very small ones, operates through a double agency relationship. The first agency relationship is that between owners or stakeholders, on the one hand, and corporate management, on the other. The second agency relationship is that between corporate management and the employees of a firm, including middle managers, who execute its plans and policies. This second relationship has been largely ignored in discussions of corporate governance, yet its effectiveness is essential for achieving a firm's objectives. If employees have limited trust in their companies, the ability of corporate managers to have their intentions executed will be impaired. There is considerable evidence that such trust is today at a low ebb. This paper suggests policies that may help to repair employee trust and in so doing strengthen corporate governance. Its underlying theme is that greater attention to the trust that employees have in managers would help to achieve a long overdue realignment of corporate governance theory and policy.

Highlighting the under-researched interrelationship between workplace humour and resistance, this paper examines employee opposition in a Brazilian telecommunications company. Much of the literature on corporate culture and humour has emphasized the way that 'having fun' can facilitate production. Functionalist in perspective, such studies treat organizational joking both as a means by which employees can 'let off steam' and as a flexible tool for man agers in reinforcing corporate culture. Questioning the universality of this 'safety-valve' theory of humour, our empirical analysis suggests that humour may be a relatively effective means of expressing employee dissatisfaction especially where more overt forms of resistance might provoke managerial reprisals.

O artigo propõe a análise dos padrões estéticos de telejornalistas de sete emissoras de TV aberta do Brasil, por meio de um levantamento realizado com inspiração cartográfica, que buscou observar características como raça, tipo físico, tipo de cabelo, idade e sexo. O objetivo principal é problematizar o território da mídia televisiva brasileira a partir de um panorama crítico dos corpos que "vendem notícias" e analisar a importância da diversidade e da representatividade nos telejornais. Por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica e do mapeamento realizado, os achados indicam que – apesar das mudanças no telejornalismo brasileiro, principalmente na última década – os padrões estéticos e a aparência física dos jornalistas de TV ainda são marcados por características eurocêntricas, além de uma ausência de diferentes tipos físicos, especialmente na apresentação dos telejornais.

The main aim of this essay is to present a set of reflections on Gilberto Freyre, highlighting his ideas on national identity and Latin Americanness. What connections may we establish between his work Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves] (1933) and various issues which remain relevant to the current Latin American political debate? First, we locate Freyre's thoughts within the Latin American debate on issues around national identity. We then move on to proposing several theoretical reflections and methodologies that we consider key to the debate on the theme of our work, namely: Gilberto Freyre's political thought and his strategies for Brazil; the author's studies abroad (in the US and in Europe) and the epistemological repercussions in Casa-Grande & Senzala; Freyre's own brand of romantic conservatism and Brazilian politics; and the relations between ethos and pathos in the implicit political pact in Freyre's work. Finally, we provide a summary of Freyre's debate on Americanness (at the onset of the 1940s) and his political agenda for Latin America.

The following article discusses various aspects of the trade of illicit psychoactive substances based on an analysis of reports obtained in semi-structured interviews with perpetrators of these practices and residents in the Greater Vitória region and the city of Piúma, both in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo. By interviewing individuals condemned for drug trafficking, who found themselves at the time of the interviews serving time in an open scheme after a certain period of imprisonment, it was observed that they tended to return to such behavior for the same reasons that lead any young person to become involved in formal activities for generating income, which were, however, not available to this group. We discuss the disproportionality of the State's current treatment method and the problem of the trade of illicit substances, whose format has also adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, expanding to encompass the delivery model.

Proceedings of the 2000 Winter Simulation Conference J. A. Joines, R. R. Barton, K. Kang, and P. A. Fishwick, eds. ; The Argentine Air Force and the Brazilian Navy recently added the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk aircraft to their military services. Each country maintains its own limited repair facility and spare parts inventory. Major repair work (depot-level maintenance) must be sent to the manufacturers in the United States, and the long repair cycle times adversely affect military readiness. It is critical to implement an effective spare parts management system to compensate for such long repair cycle times. We developed a simulation model to study the impact of consolidating aviation component spare parts inventory management and reducing transportation cycle times. Our results indicate that both countries will greatly benefit if they collaborate on the inventory management of their A-4 fleet maintenance. Their benefits will be significantly increased if they change the sea transportation mode to air transportation for transporting avionic components back and forth to the United States for repair.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of political instability at the local level on foreign firms in China. Building on the literature on political embeddedness and business power, the authors propose a theoretical framework to explain how political turnover can affect foreign firms' performance and how they respond to such challenges by leveraging their power bases.


Design/methodology/approach
To test the hypotheses, the authors apply fixed effects regression to an unbalanced panel data set comprising 13,360 foreign firms from 1998 to 2013 and the political replacement that involved changes in provincial governors.


Findings
The findings confirm that political turnover incidents have a negative impact on the performance of foreign firms in China. However, the authors also found that this negative relationship is weaker for firms that can choose various types of power sources. Specifically, the study reveals that foreign firms with large firm size, government ownership and a strong foreign direct investment community are better qualified to mitigate the negative effects of political instability.


Originality/value
This study contributes to the literature by developing the understanding of how political uncertainties and risks affect the performance of foreign firms in China and the importance of firms' power in counterbalancing these effects. The research provides valuable insights into how multinational corporations can exploit their power to manage the effects of local political turnover, which has practical implications for the strategy and management of foreign firms operating in China.

Values are a central dimension of human social life, they are core to a person's self-concept and identity and drive individual actions towards both personal enhancement and social transformation. At a social level, values govern how individuals relate to others and shape the organization of societies being, therefore, powerful guidelines to face new societal challenges like inclusion/exclusion issues, social justice or cultural diversity. Research with adults in this field has demonstrated that human values are powerful predictors of a wide range of behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. However, research with children is still very recent and has mostly focused on adolescents and older children, probably due to concerns about young children's capabilities to produce reliable information and discourse. In the same way, children's voices regarding political issues have been frequently dismissed even when children's right to participate fully in political and cultural life is specifically recognized in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Therefore, giving voice to children is ultimately a matter of respecting their rights. To address this gap we introduce in this presentation a project that seeks to respond to this need by mapping the basic human values (e.g. Schwartz, 1992) of children and young adolescents (6 to 14 years) and its associations with the representations of justice and attitudes towards different social groups. Also, we intend to propose further directions to incorporate values and children's views in education policies and decision-making. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion