Capitalism is intimately bound up with technology. Societies change through advances in technology, and technology sets the boundaries for what is possible within work organisations and social institutions. Debates about the direction of capitalism emerge periodically following the introduction and uptake of new technologies (Harcourt, 2014). The most recent candidate for generating discussion about the future of capitalism is digital technology, which includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, and the internet of things (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014). Digital technology has been placed at the heart of ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ (Schwab, 2017). The capacity for these technologies to alter how organisations and employees work together and with it, capitalism itself, has generated a burgeoning and disparate literature. Two broad competing narratives have emerged. First, some scholars have predicted an intensification and entrenchment of capitalism. Scholars in the labour process tradition (e.g., Kellogg et al., 2020; Thompson & Briken, 2017) have highlighted how key elements of digital technology have shifted far greater control towards the employer in the employment relationship, leading to increasing exploitation of certain groups of workers and less influence and ownership by individuals. For example, digital technology can provide, through the use of monitors or tags or sensors, the ability to track employees and bring heightened predictability and control of employees, bringing about what has been terms variously as “datafication of employment” (O'Neil, 2016), or the “digitalisation of the worker” (Warhurst & Hunt, 2019). The complexity of new technology can also entail that employees become passive users of it, rather than being active in its development and roll out, leading to their deskilling (Bader & Kaiser, 2019; Russell, 2012). A second theme is that digital technology has led to a “tipping point” in capitalism (Thompson, 2019). There are two distinct aspects to this. The first concerns the possibility for new technology to reshape traditional ways of working. For example, research on “cognitive capitalism” (Hardt & Negri, 2001) has argued that technological innovation will dramatically drive down the costs of production, and knowledge will spread widely, to such an extent that capitalism will no longer be an effective economic approach, and a new social order of collaborative networks will develop, which will be characterised by greater democracy and emancipation. The second tipping point is “post-work”. New technology raises the possibilities of greater automation and with it the likelihood of increasing unemployment. As unemployment increases, this will have a strong negative effect on consumption by individuals. Given the foundational nature of consumption for capitalism, this turn would mark a “crisis” for capitalism (Hughes & Southern, 2019). Common to both themes is a recognition that the traditional social contract is changing. The social contract is an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, Traditional social contracts have been characterised as a set of relations between the state, capital, and labour (Fisher, 2010). Until now, for most jurisdictions, the social contract has been negotiated to provide a large workforce of full-time employees, relatively secure jobs, wage growth in line with productivity, and shared risk taking between employer and employee, (Manyika et al., 2020). However, the rise of digital technology has gone hand-in-hand with the increasing globalisation of major organisations making for a greater mobility of capital and a lessening of state and labour influence (Weil, 2017). Recent movements such as “conscious capitalism” (Mackay & Sisodia, 2014), and the “purposeful organisation” (Mayer, 2018) have been influential, and the concept of “inclusive capitalism” has been advocated by the Bank of England (2018). Within these initiatives is an implicit imperative to treat workers as more than economic assets but as social beings. There is a turn towards looking at the future of capitalism not merely from an economic point of view but also an ethical one. The central principle of such approaches in the notion of “reciprocal obligation”, rather than pure economic growth, as the basis for a cooperative world, sustainable society. In this article, we draw on these ideas and draw out implications for the social contract from the increasing use of digital technology. We look first at the particular consequences of digital technology for the employment relationship. We then turn to the consequences for capitalism and identify three particular narratives: in entrenching of capitalism, amendments to capitalism, and post-capitalism. Our aim is to focus on current uses of digital technology and changes that are already present in the workplace and rely on empirical evidence rather than develop speculative ideas about large-scale economic and social change. We conclude with some reflection on ethics and trust. Within capitalist society, technology is a mechanism intended to increase the generation of capital primarily through increasing automation and more rapid execution and delivery of products and services (Smith, 2019; Thompson & O'Doherty, 2013). For Marx, technology and society are the two forces of social production, with technology providing the force of production and society providing social relations (Marx, 1847/1955; 1978). This perspective highlights the embedded nature of technology within the capitalist process, rather than technology being a neutral, rational mechanism that is somehow apolitical. (Fisher, 2010). Schumpeter (1942) identified technology as a principal means of creative destruction. Creative destruction, which Schumpeter (1942) considered ‘the essential fact about capitalism’, refers to the waves of innovation on both products and processes that disrupt and replace existing practices. Both Marx and Schumpeter believed that capitalism could not be sustained. For Marx, capitalism will reach a crisis brought about by overaccumulation, a crisis characterised by intensified exploitation of workers, a large increase in routine work, and the dramatic fall in the costs of production. A new social order, based on collaborative social principles, would be the inevitable result. For Schumpeter, there is a limit ultimately to total output and creative destruction will be unable to break through this. This will lead to a stagnation of the market and the end of capitalism (Yun, 2015). Both Marx and Schumpeter argue for the emancipatory significance of the dissolution of capitalism and the promise of a new social order (Adler, 1990, 2001). More recently, other economists have highlighted the transformational capacities of new technology. For example, Rifkin (2011) and Piketty (2014) both predicted the decline of the labour force, rising inequalities between elite skilled workers and the vast majority who will be unemployed, and a completely changed working week. Their solution is a newsocial contract, with the development of a networked society based on mutual cooperation and not run-on capitalist lines. Calls for the social contract to be recalibrated have emerged in response to the increasing pervasiveness of digital technology. The notion of the social contract has a long history, rooted in classic liberal philosophical tradition, including notably Hobbes (2012/1651), Kant (1999/1797), Locke (1987/1689), and Rousseau (1973/1762), and more recently in the work of contractarians such as Nozick (1974), Rawls (1971), and Scanlon (1998). Thought there is significant variation between forms of social contract in the literature, a common thread is that the social contract is viewed as a necessary mechanism to establish fairness of outcomes and social cohesion within a population. In economic versions of social contracts, the nation state is at the heart of any social contract (McCandless et al., 2018). Social contracts establish the set of reciprocal obligations between the state and other key constituencies (Muggah et al., 2012), primary among them are capital and labour. “Fordist society was characterized by a strong social compact between capital and labour within the framework of a strong state. Capital made concessions to labour in the form of high wages, job security, and high levels of employment; labour conceded to capital's needs by curbing its most militant demands for a radical social revolution, and providing capital with labour power for production and consumption power to purchase increasing volumes of products. The state gained political legitimacy from both groups by transforming itself into an interventionist, Keynesian, welfare state, which protected capitalism from both internal failures and an external overthrow and at the same time provided a buffer zone between labour and the possibly harsh realities of markets (by providing social services and installing various security schemes), hence further embedding markets in society” (Fisher, 2010: 233). “Underlying every economic system is a social contract setting people's norms, values, and beliefs, thereby determining how people are expected to behave within the economy, what their reciprocal obligations are, and how the economy is to be run. Many market economies around the world—in both advanced and emerging countries—rest on a materialistic social contract that is increasingly failing to address basic needs of many citizens” (Snower, 2019: 1). It is important to recognise that, for many scholars, the delineation of sharp boundaries between industrial or innovation eras is crude and unreflective of widespread variations between countries, industries and fails to account for strong continuities across eras (Thompson, 2019). Nevertheless, there does seem to be truth in the perspective that there was cohesiveness between key economic actors within national or regional boundaries in the post WW2 era (Thompson, 2003). The effect of digital technology on the social contract has been a major shift in risk taking away from capital towards labour. For example, the McKinsey Global Institute states that: “individuals have had to assume greater responsibility for their economic outcomes. While many have benefited from this evolution, for a significant number of individuals the changes are spurring uncertainty, pessimism, and a general loss of trust in institutions” (Manyika et al., 2020: 1). A number of suggestions has been put forward to restructure the social contract. Most focus on the need to induce greater reciprocity and social collaborations, and not simply economic growth and prosperity. They also include methods to reduce growing inequalities of economic and social power. In the next section, we outline some of the core consequences of digital technology for the employment relationship. In this section, we examine certain emergent aspects of digital technology which make them highly consequential for the social contract. More specifically, we distinguish four aspects: flexibility and precarity, work intensification, autonomy, and human values. Traditional models of the employment relationship have focused on the flexible firm (Atkinson, 1984) which highlights two broad structural approaches: the core and the periphery. Employees in the core group experience high trust and high commitment relationships with the firm, with permanent jobs and good career prospects, and who are expected to be functionally flexible (Wilkinson et al., 2012). Those in the periphery have instrumental arm's length relationships with the firm, with less job security and are often working on a temporary or a contracting basis. They provide the organisation with flexibility, regarding both the number of workers the organisation needs at any one time, and also in the number of hours worked by each individual worker. The flexible firm is designed to respond to changing circumstances through the flexing of the periphery by use of contractual work that is short-term in nature. Recent research has shown that with increasing use of digital technology, companies are relying ever more heavily on a contractor model of employment (Kessler, 2018). A major part of this has been the development of the “gig economy” (Calo & Rosenblat, 2017). (Kuhn, 2016; Manyika et al., 2016). Digital technology has been a major catalyst for this trend, as can be seen in the following definition: “The gig economy involves the exchange of labour for money between individuals or companies via digital platforms that actively facilitate matching between providers and customers, on a short-term and payment by task basis.” (Lepanjuuri et al., 2018). According to this study, roughly 4.4% of workers (approximately 2.8 million people), were employed in the gig economy between February 2017 and February 2018. Most recent figures show the growth of the gig economy in the UK has risen to an estimated 7.25 million people, about 22% of the total UK workforce (ONS, 2023). Gray and Suri (2019) saw the recent rise of gig work as the start of a process which will in due course dismantle traditional models of employment altogether. In some ways, they see this as worrying, because of the way that this type of work can render workers invisible, both to employers and to customers—leading Gray and Suri to talk about “ghost work”. The issues they identify are rather that, first, workers can be treated as interchangeable commodities by the companies that hire them through digital platforms. They have little opportunity to get information or instructions for tasks, and can be arbitrarily denied payment or have their accounts closed for reasons outside their control, with no route for appeal or reinstatement. Second, workers are physically isolated from each other, and the lack of a physical workplace may reduce the potential for employees to collectively organise to press for better conditions or more involvement. Research on Silicon Valley organisations have shown them becoming increasingly reliant on flexible forms, particularly outsourcing (Weil, 2017). The experience of gig workers here is that they see themselves as having little control of their work, and have “few of the specialized skills that are supposed to characterize independent contractor relationships,” (Visceli & Gutelis, 2019: 802). Ravelle’s (2019) research on the experience of gig workers across four platform-based organisations showed the high precarity of the workers and other dangers, such as greater possibilities of health and safety breaches, and the deleterious effects of clients' rating systems on their well-being. Though the gig economy has dominated discussions about how the social contract may be changing, with much debate about “Uberisation” and related issues (Faraj & Pachidi, 2020), it is worth remembering that a large percentage of gig workers are full time employees who are doing other work to supplement their income. The Office of National Statistics in the UK highlights that 48% of gig workers have permanent jobs and looking to earn extra money. Precarity is widespread across a range of occupations and practices, not just those on pure gig or zero hours arrangements. A recent RSA report claimed that one person in seven people on permanent contracts experience chronic precariousness, including such key aspects as low job security, harsh or unfair treatment, and low pay (Wallace-Stephens, 2018: 8). Though some of this precarity may not be directly attributable to the introduction of new technology (for example, bad management and unscrupulous practices also figure, among other things), a number of studies have shown that the rise of digital technology increases the sense that workers' jobs are under threat (Hannif et al., 2014). Recent research (e.g., Brione, 2017; CIPD, 2013; Green et al., 2018; Moore, 2019) highlights that the mental demands of people's work are greater than they used to be. Digital technology has led to an intensification of work, partly simply due to increased productivity—new tools and apps may enable the worker to get more done in a day than they did before. New work is also created by digital technology, as it gathers complex and detailed data which previously were not available, and now need to be analysed and understood. In addition, the same technology can have complex effects on existing work, which may be different for different types of workers in the same organisation. Equally, workers doing the same job, who are similarly practically affected by technological change, may have different attitudes and psychological responses. Hence, for some people, dealing with new technology at work has created significant mental health problems and is eroding their ability to work productively. Tarafdar et al. (2011) note that paradoxically, while women report finding digital technologies more difficult to use, and men are more likely than women to choose to use technology, it is men who suffer most from technostress—perhaps because their greater technology use can create the conditions for overwhelm. There is also a generational effect, again a paradoxical one: surprisingly, older professionals experience less technostress than younger ones. Despite younger employees being “digital natives”, it appears that older people in the study were better at handling stress generally, and also had more years of tenure and greater seniority in the organisation, making the environment more familiar to them, and meaning they probably had more agency over their use of information technology. Work intensification is also heightened by the rise of constant connectivity. Employees who are given devices that track location and time, and in some cases keystrokes and time away from desks ensure that employers always maintain “distant control” (Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, 2017). This form of surveillance also can result in workers “internalising” the performance standards and control ideology of management, thereby pushing themselves to work harder (Kellogg et al., 2020). One of the often-cited benefits of digital technology is its ability to provide more autonomy for workers. A canonical definition of employee autonomy is “the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence and discretion in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out”, (Hackman & Oldham, 1975: 162). Autonomy has long been considered important for increasing motivation, for example, it is a central piece in the job characteristics model (Hackman & Oldham, 1975) and in intrinsic motivation conceptualisations, such as the importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose (Pink, 2018). Autonomy is also a key element in ensuring employee well-being (Johansson & Aronsson, 1991; Kahn & Byosiere, 1994). Under digital technology, workers “can spend less time on routine and repetitive tasks and focus on more meaningful information responsiveness, working autonomously and connecting with outside professionals to access information” (Gardner et al., 2003). The introduction of digital technology has also been viewed as a force to reduce hierarchy and centralisation that is prevalent in traditional organisational structures and so may dismantle power structures that hamper autonomy and increase alienation (Fisher, 2010). However, digital technology may also reduce autonomy. Digital technology, as mentioned earlier, can increase the datafication of employment and in particular increase the scrutiny and monitoring of employees. Some have labelled this phenomenon ‘digital Taylorism’, with digital technology providing the means to schedule, evaluate and recommendation course of action for employees in their day-to-day tasks. Such reductions in autonomy may not be just located within routine operational tasks but may extend also to discretionary, higher skilled tasks (Thompson, 2019). Kellogg et al. (2020) highlighted two key mechanisms within the workplace that limit autonomy: algorithmic recommending and algorithmic restricting. In the former, algorithms recommend choices to workers based on the preferences of the algorithm, informed by the identification of patterns in data. The latter approach shows algorithms restricting the amount of information given to workers to influence behaviour. Reducing autonomy has a negative impact on employee motivation. For example, Brione (2017) includes a case study of the Siemens factory where new software was being introduced to solve complex work scheduling problems. This was increasing production efficiency and flexibility, and reducing waste, as well as freeing management to deal with other issues. However, it also reduced worker autonomy because workers on the factory floor no longer had discretion about how to organise their production lines. Some workers were happy to be relieved of this responsibility, while others felt they were being deskilled and that their jobs were less interesting. So far, we have talked about how workers may experience digital technology and its implementation. But technology is also a human creation and shows the imprint of its designers and developers (Johnson, 2015; Martin et al., 2019). The World Economic Forum has stated that: “technologies reflect the interests, behaviours, and desires of their creators, and shape how the people using them can realize their potential, identities, relationships, and goals” (Philbeck et al., 2018: 3). Technology, as we mentioned earlier, is value-laden, and its design is infused with assumptions and judgements of designers about the use of the technology and the effects it will have in the world (Akrich, 1992; Martin et al., 2019). Further, designers of technology make choices about the levels of scrutability, transparency, and explainability that the technology has (Ananny, 2016; Friedman et al., 2002). A recent study of developers (Miller & Coldicutt, 2019) found that developers are very positive about the benefits of technology to society (81% claiming it is so), but fully 28% had been through a situation in the workplace where decisions on technology were made, they believed would have a detrimental effect on society. In our own research (Stiles et al., 2022), we have conducted 24 people with developers within the UK, working across a variety of organisations, including start-ups, corporations, and consulting firms. The aim of the interviews was to gain in-depth understanding of the work of the developers and how they made sense of their work and the demands placed upon them. As developers talked about their framing of the process of AI design and implementation, we heard their accounts of how they balanced tensions and dealt with novel situations and faced tight pressures to make decisions. In the workplace, the demands of the task and business pressures for quality and speed ensure that developers have pragmatic technical issues front of mind, and the importance of seeing the financial implication of the product. However, it was clear that developers also used an ethical frame which resulted in different decision processes and outcomes. For example, one developer said: “Once you have ‘baked-in’ the assumptions it is difficult to change and if you release a product, it may potentially impact on millions of people…” What was really interesting was that traditionally, when examining ethical frames, the assumption is that individuals' respond to ethical issues borrowing directly from traditional philosophical ethics, such as virtues and utilitarian reasoning. But the context of developers is characterised by equivocality and uncertainty, which may involve the existence of several different, simultaneous interpretations. We found that developers continually navigated the tension between pragmatic and ethical frames. As developers engaged with the particularities of a situation, they were making deliberate technical judgements but also, they considered the implications of their choices on people potentially affected by those judgements. Because of the complexity of their work, and the difficulty often in seeing quite what the consequences might be, it was clear that developers do no always use deliberative judgement to assess situations. The idea that there might be a clear sense of “moral rightness” or rational acceptability of a judgement may be elusive in such a fast-moving environment. This uncertainty can make developers reluctant ethicists. When we see the two major issues developers mentioned—fairness and consequences—we noted the open-ended nature of these judgements and the lack of clear measures with which to make deliberations more concrete. We saw developers grappling with these issues and asking ethical questions about their practice and trying to integrate the tentative solutions that emerged into the design and implementation of their work. We examine certain consequences of digital technology for the employment relationship and how this may influence the nature of capitalism. More specifically, we distinguish three consequential aspects: the entrenchment of capitalism, the amendment of capitalism, and alternatives to capitalism. At first sight, it seems as if intensification, precarity, and loss of autonomy are increasing, which may have the effect of entrenching traditional forms of capitalism. The balance between employer and worker seems to have shifted strongly towards the employer, entailing greater control over workers and increasing inequalities (Mason, 2015a). The rise of digital technology has been most conspicuous in the emergence of platform organisations such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Uber. The concentration of economic power within these organisations has led to a new label of “platform capitalism”. The rise of such major organisations has taken the appearance of hyper capitalism, or “info-monopolies” (Mason, 2015b). “Has created a unique fusion of economic, political and social power. As numerous net critics, often former insiders, have noted, web based quasi-monopolies, ironically, utilise and then monetise users' social networks within enclosed eco-systems. Commons-based peer production initiatives such as Wikipedia are, unfortunately, not remotely typical of the sector, let alone the capitalist economy.” Digital technology has also underpinned the rise of financialisaton. Financialisation has been called the central dynamic in contemporary capitalist political economy (Thompson, 2013; Van der Swan, 2014). Financialisaton has been defined as “the increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international level,” (Epstein, 2001:1). In addition to the rise of financial institutions in the economy, non-financial organisations have also become more involved in using financial instruments and interaction s as a way to deliver profitability. This may indicate a shift from relying purely on production capitalism to embrace finance capitalism. As Krippner (2005: 181) argues, there is a “pattern of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.” This shift to the dominance of capital market financial systems away from bank-based financial systems, is enabled by digital technologies, and also has consequences for the social contract. For example, Thompson (2003) develops a “disconnected capitalist theory” (DCT), highlighting “a growing divergence and dysfunctionality between employer objectives in the work and employment spheres.” (2003: 360). Financialisaton encourages an organisational imperative to utilise assets that will deliver maximum shareholder value. There is an increasing move towards reducing the major costs of the organisation in the form of workers' salaries and investments in skills, internal labour markets, and job security. (Thompson, 2019). This thesis suggests that organisations will increase control over the workforce and in so doing will enact repeated changes to the organisation and ramp up the precariousness of the workers' relationship with their jobs and managers. Finally, in examining the potential of capitalism to absorb the disruptive nature of digital technologies, it is important to remember that capitalism is “not just digital and informational capitalism, but at the same time financial capitalism, hyper-industrial, fossil fuel capitalism, mobilities capitalism etc’ (Fuchs, 2016: 232). The endurance of these forms of capitalism would also need to be considered in any assessment of the nature of capitalism. To mitigate the possibilities of increasing tensions between capital and labour, a number of themes in the literature suggest ways in which capitalism may adapt to the digital environment and readjust the social contract. We look at these from two perspectives: the organisational level and at policy level. At the organisation level, a possible way forward is for employers to consider workers as active recipients of, or consumers of, technology so that they focus on what skills and dispositions employees already bring to work, and on what they need to do their work better. For example, Brione (2017) showed the introduction of iPads to district nurses at an NHS Trust. An earlier trial with laptops had been stopped, as feedback from the nurses was that the laptops were too heavy to carry around with them on visits. This experience informed the trial of the much lighter iPads, and nurses were consulted about the change before, during and after the deployment. While there were some downsides to the iPads, most notably the reduced time to interact with colleagues (see above), the nurses also acknowledged many benefits, including reduced time spent

We develop an understanding of discontinuous technology adoption by examining how employees cognitively and emotionally frame the transition between existing and new technologies. Framing is important since discontinuous technologies by their very nature deviate from prevailing logics and mindsets, but we know little about how employees both cognitively and emotionally frame transitions, particularly in competence-destroying contexts. We use an in-depth case study of a major technology company to look at the micro-processes of framing. We highlight a number of core pathways and mechanisms through which frame flexibility is enacted, primarily by leaders empowering self-managing teams, and the use of improvisation and creativity in managing the transition process. We contribute more generally to research on technological discontinuities by developing a process model of employee reframing of the transition between existing and new technologies.

Ever since the first automation provided by the introduction of the Strowger telephone exchange in the late 19th century, networks have been increasingly automated. Fast forward to 2022, and the challenge facing network providers is scaling up this level of automation considering massive increases in complexity, new levels of agility to operate services, and rising demand from customers within the modern telecommunications ecosystem. This article describes a significant new industry-academia partnership to address these challenges: Next Generation Converged Digital Infrastructure (NG-CDI) is creating a vision for the building and operation of a future-proof network infrastructure and its autonomic management. In this article, we highlight three exemplar activities within the NG-CDI research program that illustrate the benefits of taking a highly collaborative interdisciplinary approach and show how academia and industry working closely together have delivered a range of direct and positive impacts on business.

Boards of directors are at the apex of organisational decision-making and so are central in ensuring effective corporate governance. But boards are under increasing scrutiny due to the continuing prevalence of scandals and failures. Boards have been viewed as set up to fail because the demands placed upon them cannot effectively be delivered. In this Element, I examine this tension and look at the board as a working group, one which has an input, a process and an output. Through looking at the board as a group, the dynamics of how boards, and the potential for effective and ineffective operation, are highlighted. I conclude with outlining how the future of board dynamics may evolve.

Measurement is a fundamental activity of science, but if we fail to make allowances for imponderables then we are simply generating data which may not, necessarily, tell us anything about the world. This chapter examines some of the philosophical underpinnings of Behavioral Operational Research by addressing three different levels of assumption. The first level is about the state of the world—what is actually out there. The second is about our ability to apprehend this—how we can actually know things and the limitations of the tools we have for investigating the world. The third level concerns knowledge and how we know things. This may seem abstract and esoteric, but it has fundamental implications for Operational Research. The philosophical assumptions underpinning the measurement of customer service, for example, may lead to very different conclusions about how customer service should be managed. It is only by exploring the philosophical underpinnings of our measurement that we can ensure that we measure things properly.

This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.

In this paper we develop a new typology connecting strategic human resource management (SHRM) to different models of firm-level corporate governance. By asking questions concerning ownership and control issues in the corporate governance literature and drawing on institutional logics, we build a typological framework that identifies four firm-level archetypes of corporate governance systems. Two archetypes represent dominant logic types (shareholder value, communitarian stakeholder), while the other two represent hybrid organizations (enlightened shareholder value, employee-ownership). Using these archetypes, we theorize the implications of different governance structures for SHRM and the challenges they pose. We conclude by discussing a novel solution to many of these challenges based on the corporate sustainability literature, and, in so doing, provide new directions for SHRM research to tackle key challenges facing organizations and the management of people.

This paper seeks to extend the literature on how change occurs in organizational routines by examining the link between routines and schemata and showing the cognitive and motivational factors involved. Using an in-depth analysis of a Japanese multinational, we develop an account of how a newly-implemented centralized performance management routine is interpreted by managers at two subsidiaries. We show how different performances of subroutines emerge into a new ostensive pattern of a routine, and how the cognitive and motivational aspects of individual agency are manifested in this process and how they affect the espoused organizational schema.

AbstractCorporate governance focuses on the way organizations are run and is therefore fundamental to understanding of effectiveness and probity. Corporate governance can be viewed through two broad lenses; first, a national lens, which includes the systems of ownership and regulation within countries, and second, an organisational lens, looking at the arrangements made by companies in terms of boards, incentives, and relationships with stakeholders. Progress in governance has been dominated by reform to regulation and structures but attention to strengthening relationships within and outside the boardroom is also essential.

This article examines the issue of deference within peer-level relationships. Traditionally deference has been viewed through hierarchical relationships; in this study we examine peer-level relationships by drawing on a sample of non-executive directors, an elite group that seeks to make contributions and engage executive directors within single-tier boards. Findings indicate that non-executives engage in a variety of positive deferential behaviors, which allow non-executive directors to establish membership credentials, to balance questioning and support of the executives, and also to bring a licence for non-executive directors to address difficult issues within the board.

This chapter includes extra insights into how the board works. It shows that the most relevant board decisions are made in the context of certain committees and not in the board setting. It then studies the three main board committees—nomination, compensation, and audit—and assesses the available research on the key aspects of their composition. It shows that there is a positive relationship between the expertise and independence of board committees and key effectiveness measures, although process research determines that there are tensions which committees face.

This paper examines how a firm can manage the decision-making and cannibalization processes when a new and an existing business model need to be run in parallel. We present an in-depth longitudinal case study of a major bank in the US corporate bond trading market that launched a disruptive business model and ran it alongside its existing well-established and successful business model. The study shows how the firm conducting a staged decision making process that balanced procedural rationality and political expediency facilitates and helped resolve the paradoxes involved in running conflicting business models. We contribute to the decision making literature by showing how the mechanisms for balancing procedural rationality and politics facilitated the management of the decision-making and cannibalization processes and so enable existing and disruptive business models to run in parallel. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Corporate governance has become a core topic in management research and business practice with the potential to exercise a major influence on how strategic human resource management (SHRM) is practiced. Yet SHRM has been relatively silent on the issues that corporate governance addresses, namely the generation, protection and distribution of wealth, and the role company boards and senior executives play in these processes. By categorizing the extant corporate governance literature into four core models relating to questions of rights, interests and accountabilities, this review paper develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing how different corporate governance theories shape SHRM systems and, by implication, how SHRM can shape corporate governance. In so doing, we provide clearer directions for research for SHRM academics and guidance for senior HR practitioners that will allow them to connect more directly with some of the key issues currently facing the role of corporations in society

Considerable attention has focused on how multinational corporations (MNCs) deal with the simultaneous pressures of globalization and localization when it comes to human resource management (HRM). HR function activities in this process, however, have received less focus. The study presented here identifies configurations of the corporate HR function based on international HRM (IHRM) structures, exploring how issues of interdependency shape corporate HR roles. The study is based on 248 interviews in 16 MNCs based in 19 countries. The findings are applied to develop a contextually based framework outlining the main corporate HR function configurations in MNCs, including new insights into methods of IHRM practice design. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Global firms often struggle to replicate practices among their culturally and geographically dispersed subsidiaries. Part of the reason for this is that certain practices, including human resource management (HRM) practices, are complex and context specific. In this study, we develop a framework to help identify how firms might overcome challenges of practice replication through alignment of information systems, application processes, and people. We find that managerial alignment of formal processes and systems, along with informal alignment of people (shared objectives), improve the capability of a multinational corporation (MNC) to replicate human resource practices across subsidiaries. We also discuss managerial implications. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.