Suchergebnisse

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to determine what motivates junior lawyers to join a "Top 5" law firm, to understand their job and career expectations and whether or not these are being met during their employment in the firm.Design/methodology/approachA survey was delivered to 300 lawyers, out of which 144 valid responses were collected. For the analysis, responses were clustered to identify emerging themes. Interviews were also conducted with randomly selected junior lawyers to clarify emerging topics and deepen understanding of the issues raised.FindingsKey motives for young lawyers to join a law firm were money and improved career options. These expectations were generally met. However, once working, these lawyers were disappointed by a lack of interaction with and appreciation from partners, high pressure to bill more, long working hours and poor work/life balance, a lack of interesting work, and a lack of international secondments.Research limitations/implicationsThe research reported in this paper is based on a case study of one of the top five law firms in the world, which is considered to be a leader in many areas of law practice. It cannot be assumed to be representative of the culture, policies and practices of many other firms operating in this sector.Practical implicationsThe findings have been used within the case study organisation to improve junior lawyer motivation and could also be used by comparable organisations to improve the retention of junior lawyers.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this paper is the insight gained into the job and career motivations and expectations of junior lawyers. Additional insight is gained by exploring expectations prior to joining the firm and which of these could be fulfilled and which were disappointed during employment with the firm.

Abstract
This paper looks at a current management consultant‐driven fashion for using graphical techniques to communicate strategic direction within larger organizations. Recent literature shows that many strategic change programmes fail through poor or miscommunication of the organization's strategic objectives, suggesting there is a need in the marketplace for new communication techniques.
This research evaluates the use of one graphical technique within three organizations to explore how it is being used and what the benefits of using this technique are. These new graphical techniques are felt to be more effective than traditional strategy communication techniques and our research suggests that this is because they consider both the communication medium and the content and presentation of the information in the strategic message.
In particular, these techniques use pictures or graphics with embedded metaphors to communicate clearer strategic messages, they encourage dialogue and inclusiveness from all employees within the process, they show connectivity of information, they facilitate the ability to remember the strategy and they are novel.
Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

PurposeThis article aims to explore and define the implications of the predominant divide in law firms between fee earners, i.e. lawyers contributing to law firm revenue, and support staff, i.e. employees in back office functions not directly contributing to revenue. To identify steps to improve retention rates among support staff.Design/methodology/approachA survey was delivered to support staff across four law firms among the top ten UK law firms, out of which 154 valid responses were collected. For the analysis, responses were clustered to identify emerging themes. Additional interviews were also conducted with the aim to clarify emerging themes and deepen understanding of the issues raised.Findings"You are either a fee earner or a fee burner" sums up the prevailing attitude support staff experiences in law firms. Throughout the responses – regardless of topic – the divide kept resurfacing again and again. In order to retain and motivate talented support staff, law firms will need to revisit their management of support staff and rethink the management of attitude towards them.Research limitationsLaw firms are just one professional services sector under increasing competitive pressure, other professional service firms with similar structures, such as consulting or accounting firms have not been included in this research.Practical implicationsWhile support staff ensures the delivery of business critical services in law firms, they are often seen as a disposable cost rather than a business relevant part of the organisation, which leads to frustration and low working morale. Several measures are suggested in this paper to address the management of support staff.Originality/valueThis paper addresses an important gap in our knowledge of law firms and legal profession more generally: The work and working conditions of non‐fee earning staff.

Effective supply chain integration, and the tight co-ordination it creates, is an essential pre-requisite for successful supply chain management. Decision-Making for Supply Chain Integration is a practical reference on recent research in the area of supply chain integration focusing on distributed decision-making problems. Recent applications of various decision-making tools for integrating supply chains are covered including chapters focusing on: Supplier selection, pricing strategy and inventory decisions in multi-level supply chains, RFID-enabled distributed decision-making, Operational risk issues and time-critical decision-making for sensitive logistics nodes, Modelling end to end processes to improve supply chain integration, and Integrated systems to improve service delivery and optimize resource use. Decision-Making for Supply Chain Integration provides an insight into the tools and methodologies of this field with support from real-life case studies demonstrating successful application of various decision-making techniques. By covering such a range of topics in this way, Decision-Making for Supply Chain Integration is a useful reference for researchers looking to develop their knowledge or find potential new avenues of research.

This paper examines how firm characteristics and local anti‐corruption effort moderate the influence of political connections on enterprises' private R&D investment using data from 2,587 Chinese A‐share listed enterprises. Our results show that the local anti‐corruption institutional environment significantly moderates the strong relationship between political connections and enterprises' private R&D investment. Firm characteristics (i.e., firm size and firm age) also show a moderating effect on the relationship between political connection and enterprises' private R&D investment; larger and older enterprises are more likely to have innovative resources and business cooperation partners, and thus are able to reduce their degree of reliance on political connections and government funding. The results of our study suggest the importance of having a transparent and fair institutional environment for enterprise innovation activities.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to progress operations management theory and practice by organising contributions to knowledge production, in industrial sustainability, from disparate researcher communities. It addresses the principal question "What scholarly dialogues can be explicated in the emerging research field of industrial sustainability?" and sub-questions: what are the descriptive characteristics of the evidence base? and what thematic lines of scientific inquiry underpin the body of knowledge?


Design/methodology/approach
Using an evidenced-based approach, a systematic review (SR) of 574 articles from 62 peer-reviewed scientific journals associated with industrial sustainability is conducted.


Findings
This paper distinguishes three prevailing dialogues in the field of industrial sustainability, and uses Kuhn's theory of paradigms to propose its pre-paradigmatic scientific status. The three dialogues: "productivity and innovation", "corporate citizenship" and "economic resilience" are conjectured to privilege efficiency strategies as a mode of incremental reductionism. Industrial sustainability espouses the grand vision of a generative, restorative and net positive economy, and calls for a future research trajectory to address institutional and systemic issues regarding scaling-up and transition, through transformative strategies.


Research limitations/implications
The review is limited by the nature of the inquiries addressed in the literatures by specific researcher communities between 1992 and 2014.


Originality/value
This study performs the first SR in the field of industrial sustainability, synthesises prevailing scholarly dialogues and provides an evaluation of the scientific status of the field.

This conceptual paper traces the origins and progress of Open Science and proposes its generative coupling to Open Innovation in the contemporary socio-political context; where universities are re-imaging their civic missions in the face of anti-establishment populist politics. This setting is one of changing knowledge production regimes and institutional pressures that create contradictions identifiable through the prism of the series of scientific norms conceptualised by Robert K. Merton. This paper privileges a sociological perspective to proffer scientific knowledge production as a societally embedded process, which is well illustrated by scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Science in Society fields. In doing so, it identifies the co-evolution, co-existence and co-production of Open Science with Open Innovation; and notes how it shares the attributes of other recent diagnoses of changing knowledge production regimes; in particular Mode 2, post-normal science and the Quadruple Helix. It also argues that Open Science can be coupled with Open Innovation to catalyse positive societal change, but that the rise of a populist post-truth era opposed to objectivity, expertise and technocratic political solutions gives the demand for openness and participation a different complexion. Merton's norms provide a useful lens to observe recent shifts in the delivery of science, knowledge and innovation in society towards more inclusive, ethical and sustainable outcomes; and expose the limited reflection on how the appropriation and exploitation of open scientific knowledge encounters industrial R&D and Open Innovation.

This conceptual paper traces the origins and progress of Open Science and proposes its generative coupling to Open Innovation in the contemporary socio-political context; where universities are re-imaging their civic missions in the face of anti-establishment populist politics. This setting is one of changing knowledge production regimes and institutional pressures that create contradictions identifiable through the prism of the series of scientific norms conceptualised by Robert K. Merton. This paper privileges a sociological perspective to proffer scientific knowledge production as a societally embedded process, which is well illustrated by scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Science in Society fields. In doing so, it identifies the co-evolution, co-existence and co-production of Open Science with Open Innovation; and notes how it shares the attributes of other recent diagnoses of changing knowledge production regimes; in particular Mode 2, post-normal science and the Quadruple Helix. It also argues that Open Science can be coupled with Open Innovation to catalyse positive societal change, but that the rise of a populist post-truth era opposed to objectivity, expertise and technocratic political solutions gives the demand for openness and participation a different complexion. Merton's norms provide a useful lens to observe recent shifts in the delivery of science, knowledge and innovation in society towards more inclusive, ethical and sustainable outcomes; and expose the limited reflection on how the appropriation and exploitation of open scientific knowledge encounters industrial R&D and Open Innovation.

This conceptual paper traces the origins and progress of Open Science and proposes its generative coupling to Open Innovation in the contemporary socio‐political context; where universities are re‐imaging their civic missions in the face of anti‐establishment populist politics. This setting is one of changing knowledge production regimes and institutional pressures that create contradictions identifiable through the prism of the series of scientific norms conceptualised by Robert K. Merton. This paper privileges a sociological perspective to proffer scientific knowledge production as a societally embedded process, which is well illustrated by scholarship in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Science in Society fields. In doing so, it identifies the co‐evolution, co‐existence and co‐production of Open Science with Open Innovation; and notes how it shares the attributes of other recent diagnoses of changing knowledge production regimes; in particular Mode 2, post‐normal science and the Quadruple Helix. It also argues that Open Science can be coupled with Open Innovation to catalyse positive societal change, but that the rise of a populist post‐truth era opposed to objectivity, expertise and technocratic political solutions gives the demand for openness and participation a different complexion. Merton's norms provide a useful lens to observe recent shifts in the delivery of science, knowledge and innovation in society towards more inclusive, ethical and sustainable outcomes; and expose the limited reflection on how the appropriation and exploitation of open scientific knowledge encounters industrial R&D and Open Innovation.