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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]

Public facilities management (PFM) is currently moving from being an institution driven by ad-hoc practices to now introducing long-term and strategic practices. During this institutional change, human actors engage in institutional work to create new practices. However, old practices seem to be maintained within PFM to a large extend. Why? Data were collected through case studies in two public facilities management organizations, an interview study in eight organizations from the institution of PFM and a workshop with representatives from the institutional field of PFM. Findings show how the changing institutional setting for the institution of PFM produce negative emotions. To manage these, human actors engage in institutional work and here they employ artefacts as means to drive change. These artefacts functioned in various ways to reduce negative feelings by inducing a sense of safety (as soft blankets), by enabling the avoidance of dealing with 'the truth' (as shields) and by offering hope (as a vision of perfect future). Thereby, they did not take part in creating change, as much as they took part in maintaining current practices. The unintended consequences of the usage of artefacts, explain why practices are maintained during institutional change for PFM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Guest Editors b Dirk Deichmann (Erasmus University) Gino Cattani (New York University) Simone Ferriani (University of Bologna & City, University of London) ddeichmann@rsm.nl; gcattani@stern.nyu.edu; simone.ferriani@unibo.it By definition, novelty does not fit well-established categories. The novelty-attention problem reflects a puzzling tension: the type of novelty that demands more attention to be recognized also deflects audiences' attention away (Trapido, [13]). [Extracted from the article]

Embedding its own branches in private enterprises is the governance strategy that the Communist Party of China (CPC) controls the grassroots society. This study proposes a framework by incorporating the socioemotional wealth theory into neo-institutionalism to explain how are family businesses involved in the organizational network of the CPC. Findings reveal that there is an organizational isomorphism that the coverage of party organizations expanded from non-family businesses to family businesses. Furthermore, family businesses are not likely to establish party organizations when coercive pressures are low. However, this resistance strategy sharply disappears when coercive pressures are high, and joining state-backed industry associations and mimicking others' practice both are also positive factors motivating family businesses to establish party organizations, which means that the coercive, normative and mimetic mechanisms jointly shape the organizational isomorphism. This study contributes to the literature of neo-institutionalism and sheds new light on the state-society relationship in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the relationship between volunteering and socio-economic status, suggesting that the insights provided by social organization theory can contribute to explanations of low levels of volunteering in areas exhibiting high levels of deprivation. The piece aims to provide a complementary framework to work alongside existing theories of inequalities in voluntary action, to reach towards an account which elucidates the role of structural factors in affecting the likelihood of volunteering in deprived areas. The article illustrates value of such an approach through an account of ethnographic research in a deprived neighbourhood in England, suggesting that by paying close attention to the configurations of social life in such areas it is possible to shed new light on the relationship between deprivation and volunteering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization theory and organizational institutionalism have moved toward a more generative understanding of agency to better account for the relation between the microfoundations and macrofoundations of institutions. Central to such an understanding is an overlooked construct: intentionality, defined as actors' consciousness directed at or about something, the content of which is actors' intended meaning. Intentionality and intended meaning have three dimensions: prior intentionality, intentionality in action, and posterior intentionality. I propose that intentionality and collective intentionality mediate between macro-level structures and micro-level actions. This model allows for a more fluid conception of intended meaning before, during, and after an action, and thus facilitates a more fine-grained understanding of (1) how the macro is instantiated in the micro and how the micro transforms into the macro, (2) multiple pathways of institutional maintenance and change, and (3) the complexity of decoupling at both the micro and the macro levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational sociologists argue that informal and formal rules within workplaces function to increase employee productivity and effectiveness, but can also have negative emotional consequences. Feeling rules, which are the emotional norms that regulate interpersonal interactions within the workplace are not applied equally; white women and professionals of color are expected to display deference in the face of emotionally-charged experiences at work, while their counterparts are given more flexibility in how they could display anger or annoyance. Scholars note that feeling rules work to reproduce extant gendered and racial hierarchies when expectations regarding worker productivity, effectiveness and outcomes are restricted on the basis of social identities. Analyzing sixteen semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ Center staff, we demonstrate the feeling rules are organized around employees' ability to (1) (re)produce trauma in themselves during training sessions and (2) minimize students' and their own anger throughout the workday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking an organizational sociology approach, the study of French pesticide regulation highlights the role of the unexpected effects of secrecies in organized ignorance. It demonstrates that the main regulator, the French food safety agency (ANSES), as well as the users of pesticides, the farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to conceal information about their real practices. These subcultures support each other tacitly: the opacity created by farmers around their practices stifle knowledge production and reporting on their exposure to pesticides. Consequently, the risk standards are never called into question, which ensures that the French food safety agency maintains its scientific reputation. In turn, the fact that official standardization of risk is never challenged, impedes the reinforcement of pesticide regulations that would otherwise hamper day-to-day crop management. This tacit agreement between these combined subcultures maintains the illusion that the regulatory science used for risk management could control a broad spectrum of hazards, when in fact it has only a limited or even outdated knowledge of them. This deepens the definitions of organized ignorance. It demonstrates that non-knowledge production results not only from the complex mix of political, scientific and regulatory frameworks surrounding official expertise as STS researches tend to show, but also from more widespread and less perceptible sociological mechanism such as tacit understanding. Unexpected effects of intentional actions also count as much as willful actions in strategic ignorance production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant proportion of academic spin-offs (ASOs) are founded by entrepreneurial teams (ETs). Yet little is known about how these ETs are formed or the role of technology transfer offices (TTOs) in this formation process. This article examines whether and how TTOs affect the formation of academic spin-off entrepreneurial teams (ASO-ETs). To this end, we study in detail the formation of seven ETs behind life-science ASOs developed in one region in Norway. Our findings show that ASO-ETs followed different paths of formation, partly mirroring the organization of the TTOs. We further identify four different roles played by TTOs, two direct and two indirect, that shape the formation of these ETs. Based on organization imprinting theory, we contribute to the team entrepreneurship literature by developing a new framework showing how TTOs imprint the formation of ETs in ASO settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organization is traditionally assumed as the principal context of work. This assumption no longer holds in post-industrial and post-bureaucratic settings. Conducting meetings from home while juggling household responsibilities can be characterized as a form of organizing, but such contexts is not well accommodated by organizational perspectives. In such contexts, the organization plays a varying and often limited role. To accommodate this decomposition and re-composition of how work is organized, the present study develops a conceptual framework centered on the work situation. Building on Goffman's account of social situations (1966, 1974), the analysis draws an explicit distinction between the context of work as a series of potential frames and the work situation as an enacted framework for gestalting the specific work at hand. On this view, the organization as a formal setting or social assembly is just one of many frames that influence what actors do at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the formalisation of support structures for refugee students at German higher education organisations. After the refugee influx in 2015 and 2016, early support for refugees was characterised by often voluntary, informal, spontaneous activities by pioneers. Subsequently, the situation changed as higher education organisations adjusted to the new challenge and restructured their way of dealing with study-interested refugees. Based on 18 interviews with heads of international offices and with the holders of so-called first contact positions for refugees at eight German higher education organisations, we investigate – drawing on organisation sociology – these organisational responses to (prospective) refugee students. In a second step, we focus on the first contact positions as the smallest organisational units in this field of action and describe their tasks, their placement in the hierarchy, and the procedures for staffing. Our analysis shows that in response to the growing number of refugee applicants and the availability of external funding, support structures for refugees were formalised by creating and/or expanding existing organisational structures, including the establishment of first contacts as specific boundary positions and of new internal and external communication channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles within the issue, including articles on the efforts of independent Basotho traders and cooperatives in Lesotho to promote their political and economic interests, the struggle of small producers in relation to state and private interests, and the transformation of workplace culture by factory workers in Mozambique.

On some current approaches, deontology is the foundation of social reality. But we do not yet have an account of the kinds of deontic structures in play. One way to approach a taxonomy of deontic kinds is to understand the ways in which they bind to an agent. There are three ways of binding deontic powers to any agent. The first two emerge from a distinction between those rights and duties forced upon an agent versus those that the agent voluntarily accepts. Within the category of voluntarily accepted deontics, however, there is an interesting subtype which, rather than being a composite of deontics assembled by sources external to the agent, is instead assembled and bound by the agent to herself. There are, then, three categories of deontic binding: imposed, voluntary, and self-bound (autogenic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regarding the relationship between CEO power and firm risk, contradictory views can be deduced from managerial power theory and organization theory. This study tries to reconcile these contradictions by delving into the differences in the types of CEO power. Using a sample of Chinese listed companies, we find that the formal power CEOs derive from ownership has a positive relationship with firm risk, but CEOs' informal power that originates from expertise is negatively associated with firm risk. Furthermore, CSR is verified as a mediator in the relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While literature on US voter trade policy preferences has an established diversity of theories and methods, academic and popular approaches to US organizational trade policy advocacy are underdeveloped. The dominant methodologies in economics conceptualize stakeholder group policy preferences as a continuum from free trade to protectionism. In contrast, this study builds on literature that assumes that organizations have both economic and ideological motivations. I examine China's effects on US stakeholder group advocacy and intergroup relations (e.g. multinational business associations, domestic manufacturing groups, and labor unions). I use interviews with organizational leaders and content analysis of documents from US stakeholders in manufacturing and services sectors. I argue that US-China issues reshaped organizational advocacy by expanding and evolving ideological interests. As groups increasingly advocate on the basis of their ideological interests, their discrete economic interests are a shrinking share of the content of trade politics, including traditional protectionism. Rather than simply advocating their microeconomic interests, US stakeholder groups organize around their competing ideologies for the future of US-China integration—free trade, strategic trade, and fair trade. China issues led new organizational agreements and disagreements along those ideological lines, which preceded policy outcomes reflective of the convergences and divergences of their goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]