Public Policy

"When Kurt Lewin referred to “good” theory he meant that it should provide two outcomes, a theory with propositions that can be tested, and guidelines and/or an innovative practice that can be employed by practitioners to improve desired outcomes predicted by the theory. The development of such theories and methods requires applied field research, or as Lewin argues action science (Argyris, Putnam, & Smith, 1985). The latter, the main focus of this article, requires academics to adopt the role of scholar-consultants. Their role is to work collaboratively with practitioners to solve problems and/or introduce an innovative practice from which they learn by researching the response to and effectiveness of the intervention."

Existing rational actor theories of political behavior generally view antigovernment violence as a means by which individuals or groups achieve political goals, but they have problems explaining the extent to which violence is actually employed by small, militarily weak underground groups. Bringing in organizational factors allows us to maintain assumptions of rationality and still explain violence which does not directly advance the political objectives of antigovernment actors. Using an agency framework, the article shows that within dispersed underground organizations strategies of violence solve a number of problems of internal control for leaders. It also shows that extensive use of violence generates asset specificity and adverse selection phenomena that make it difficult to revoke violence as a strategy.

Abstract:
This paper suggests that despite the current renaissance of interest in organizational power and politics, organization theory neglects individual political behavior within organizations. The need for a concern for individual political behavior is explored, and three key dimensions of political behavior are suggested: internal-external, vertical-lateral, and legitimate-illegitimate. A typology based on these dimensions is proposed, and predictions about the different types of political behavior are offered.

Conference Abstract: In the last two decades, organizations have experienced a period of major changes in their markets and operations. International competition has caused many organizations to face an increasingly turbulent and hostile environment. Customers have become more demanding, competition has become more intense and sophisticated, and the pace of technological change has accelerated. Therefore, there is no doubt that organizations should respond as a whole when faced with challenges of business and consistence of internal assembly is generated by culture. Organizational performance plays a significant role as the accelerator for the development and compettiveness of an organizaton in the context in which it has to deal with developments from external environment In this sense, the present study aims to explore in terms of literature study, the association between culture and organizational performance. Therefore, the incursion in the literature, as outlined in this article, is conducted in three stages: (1) addressing the concept of organizational culture, (2) addressing the concept of organizational performance and (3) demonstration of the existence of a link between organizational culture and performance. Regarding research methods used, the present study is based on a qualitative approach, which included the collection of documents and text in order to investigate the concepts studied.

Brief Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation reflects on the construction of money as a way of informing management theory and, hopefully, will motivate scholars to render management theory and its associated practices more transparent and coherent. Management theory is less a discipline than an amalgam of social scientific insights about managerial (and more broadly, organizational) activities. In constructing this body of theory, the various contributors have been relatively unreflective about the sources of their insight. Did it derive from an economic approach, and if so, from which tradition; or did it derive from one of the other social sciences? As a result, contemporary management theory often mixes incomplete or incompatible presumptions. The dissertation is intended to disentangle these combinations by using the construct of "money," a varying concept depending on which of the social science disciplines one draws on.