Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Tectonic shifts and the new economic landscape -- Part I: THE CORPORATE CENTURY IN AMERICA -- 1: Corporations in America and around the world -- 2: How the corporation conquered America -- 3: Taming the corporation -- 4: The postwar era of corporate dominance -- Part II: WHY THE AMERICAN CORPORATION IS DISAPPEARING -- 5: Shareholders get the upper hand -- 6: Nikefication and the rise of the virtual corporation -- 7: The public corporation becomes obsolete -- 8: The last gasp of the IPO market -- Part III: CONSEQUENCES OF CORPORATE COLLAPSE -- 9: The disappearing social safety net -- 10: Rising inequality -- 11: Declining upward mobility -- 12: Silver linings -- Part IV: NOW WHAT? -- 13: Possible postcorporate futures -- 14: Navigating a postcorporate economy -- Resources -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z -- About the Author.

"Changing Your Company from the Inside Out offers you the tools you need to champion initiatives that are meaningful to you, socially responsible, and align with your company's mission and strategy. Drawing on the lessons of dynamic social movements-from the Civil Rights Movement to the Arab Spring-and the real-world successes of corporate intrapreneurs, Davis and White present concrete strategies and tactics for effecting meaningful change in companies. This is an indispensable and practical guide for anyone seeking to create a sustainable venture within an existing enterprise"--

Social science has distinct advantages and challenges when it comes to communicating its findings to the public. Its topics are often highly accessible to the general public, yet its findings may be counterintuitive and politically contentious. Conveying recent changes in the organization of the American economy provides an illustration of the difficulties and opportunities for engaging the public. The declining number of public corporations in the United States is associated with a shrinking middle class, lower opportunities for upward mobility, and a fraying social safety net, with important implications for individuals and public policy. Attempting to convey this set of findings to a broad public has demonstrated that some strategies and communication channels work better than others, and that some online media are particularly effective.

Organizational research is guided by standards of what journals will publish and what gets rewarded in scholarly careers. This system can promote novelty rather than truth and impact rather than coherence. The advent of big data, combined with our current system of scholarly career incentives, is likely to yield a high volume of novel papers with sophisticated econometrics and no obvious prospect of cumulative knowledge development. Moreover, changes in the world of organizations are not being met with changes in how and for whom organizational research is done. It is time for a dialogue on who and what organizational research is for and how that should shape our practice.

The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to "impact gamesmanship" that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It's time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals.

Shareholder-owned corporations were the central pillars of the US economy in the twentieth century. Due to the success of the shareholder value movement and the widespread "Nikefication" of production, however, public corporations have become less concentrated, less integrated, less interconnected at the top, shorter-lived, and less prevalent since the turn of the twenty-first century, and there is reason to expect that their significance will continue to dwindle. We are left with both pathologies (heightened inequality, lower mobility, and a fragmented social safety net) and new technologies suitable for being repurposed in more democratic forms. Local solutions for producing, distributing, and sharing can provide functional alternatives to corporations for both production and employment; what is needed is the social organization to match the tools that we already have, or will have shortly. The time for democratic local economic forms prophesied by generations of activists may finally be at hand.

Corporate governance describes the structures, processes, and institutions within and around organizations that allocate power and resource control among participants. Law and economics scholars have developed a view of the public corporation as a nexus-of-contracts whose structure is driven by the requirements of financial markets, and thus features of the corporation and its surrounding institutions are theorized in terms of their function in directing corporations toward share price as a criterion of value. Working from this base, more recent research has studied historical and cross-national variation in governance institutions, producing highly varied interpretations of their sources and function. Sociological work, particularly within organization theory, has critiqued this functionalist view and provided alternative interpretations based on networks, power, and culture. The most promising contemporary work seeks to analyze governance in terms of the dynamics of institutions—where they originate, how they operate, how they change, and how they spread beyond their original purposes.

"Shareholder value" was the sacred mantra of American business in the 1990s. But creating shareholder value can be a fickle undertaking and corporate executives often followed the lead of their colleagues. The result was a contagion of questionable business practices that resulted in the creation of a corporate bubble—and its implosion.