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The relationship between industry structure, aggregate R&D activity, and the pace and quality of the resulting innovation process is currently the subject of a lively debate across NATO in general and even more so among its European members. This paper tackles this issue from a standpoint belonging to the tradition of industrial economics, adapting it to the specific context of the defence sector. This is done with a view to stressing the need of increasing the degree of concentration in order to increase standardization and interoperability of defence systems and facilitate the exploitation of scale economies. In the traditional jargon of industrial organization theory, this amounts to vindicating the Schumpeterian view according to which increasing concentration (eventually all the way up to pure monopoly) monotonically fosters innovation incentives, while mitigating effort duplications affecting large and long-lasting R&D projects. One additional implication, equally relevant, is that the concentration process can indeed be facilitated, in the short to medium term, by systematically resorting to the creation of research joint ventures and/or R&D cartels so as to boost spillover effects and reduce excess investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the mobilizational plane of Spain's Podemos party's populist proposal to transform popular outrage into political power. Drawing on thirty-four semi-structured interviews with current and former party members, it sheds light on how and why a group of formerly horizontalist activists decided to rely on a charismatic figure as both a symbol and a strong leader. This decision is explained in relation to the Laclau-inspired theoretical reflections on leadership and representation of Íñigo Errejón, Podemos' chief theorist in the early stages and intellectual author of the party's first organizational model. This paper also follows the evolution of Errejón and his circle as they move from advocating the need for strong leadership to blaming themselves for 'failing' to erect effective counterweights to centralized and personalized power. We see that they attribute this failure to their lack of a proper theory of organization, which, in turn, is tied to their belief that a charismatic leader could make up for the lack of well-developed organizational structures and lead Podemos to power before the 'populist moment' passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When in 2015–2016, several hundred thousand new asylum-seekers arrived in Germany, this put local administrations to a test. In contrast to scholars who identified a "crisis of the administration" or a situation of "state failure", this article argues that the events in some cases served as a motor for administrative change. Drawing on the sociology of organizations, the paper shows that this period is better understood as a time of fundamental uncertainty rather than a crisis of the administration, and that the local state proved capable of dealing with uncertainty. In line with theories of organizations and based on qualitative interview data collected in three German cities, the paper identifies two ideal-typical strategies for reducing uncertainty – externalization or change through imitation. The text demonstrates how two of the three municipalities moved towards change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a follow-up of [R.J.: Foundations of compositional model theory. IJGS, 40(2011): 623–678], where basic properties of compositional models, as one of the approaches to multidimensional probability distributions representation and processing, were introduced. In fact, it is an algebraic alternative to graphical models, which does not use graphs to represent conditional independence statements. Here, these statements are encoded in a sequence of distributions to which an operator of composition – the key element of this theory – is applied in order to assemble a multidimensional model from its low-dimensional parts. In this paper, we show a way to read conditional independence relations, and to solve related topics, above all the so-called equivalence problem, i.e. the problem of recognizing whether two different structures induce the same system of conditional independence relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a typology of boundaries faced by public police organizations. Following trends in police organization structure and developments in organization theory, the paper focuses on the work-unit level as the locus of organizational boundary activity. Treating boundaries as sites of negotiation that arise when overlap occurs between units inter- and intra-organizationally, the paper focuses on operational aspects of public policing in creating typological categories. The typology elaborates three boundary types: scarcity, proximity, and technical/systemic. These can each be subdivided into two further categories: physical and virtual. Using examples from recent fieldwork in British Columbia's Lower Mainland District, the paper provides examples of each boundary type and suggests common strategies for boundary negotiation. In using the typology to understand public police as organizations within a complex web of similarly organized actors, the paper emphasizes the particular importance of informal and personal contact networks for comprehending boundary activity in public police work. The implications of this finding for the challenges of twenty-first century-policing are explored, and a future research agenda is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings to light stories of Heather Höpfl. Its purpose is to show how Heather was and is present for us. We also illustrate Professor Dr Heather Höpfl’s contribution to organization theory, specifically her discourse of the maternal organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plurality of process outputs is a genericity of Nature. In this paper, Natural Law receives a new mathematical formulation founded on two axioms: ‘Everything is a set.’ and ‘Every process is aset-valuedmapping.’ I present a brief introduction to the algebraic theory of set-valued mappings, which culminates in two particular morphisms: the metabolism bundle and the imminence mapping. These are relations defined on the collection of processes of a natural system, and serve to characterize material entailment and functional entailment. Generalized metabolism is material entailment of (by-)products, and generalized repair is functional entailment of (side-)effects. Metabolism–Repair networks, hence equipped with set-valued processors, expand their role from models of biological entities to generic models of all natural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]