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Many organizations and their members devote extensive resources to promoting themselves and being known to others. However, not all organizations want or need their identity to be recognized and not all organizational members want to have their membership or affiliation known by at least certain audiences. As we consider secret societies, anonymous support programs, hate groups, terrorist cells, covert military units, organized crime, gangs, parts of the underground economy, front organizations, stigmatized businesses, and even certain hidden enterprises tucked away in quiet office parks, we have to question what we think we know about the identity goals of organizations and their members. This book offers a framework for thinking about how a wide range of organizations and their members communicate their identity to relevant audiences. Considering the degree to which organizations strategically make themselves visible, the extent to which members express their identification with the organization, and whether the relevant audience is more mass/public or local, we can describe various “regions” in which these collectives reside-ranging from transparent and shaded to more shadowed and dark. Importantly, organizations operating in these spaces differ in how they and their members communicate identity to others. The perspective offered here helps draw attention to more shaded, shadowed, and dark collectives as important organizations in the contemporary landscape.

This book describes the results of a six-year ethnographic research project on Wikipedia. It explains how Wikipedia's theoretically ahierarchical system may increase Wikipedians’ perception of inequality in practice and how hierarchy is enacted through community elections. Although Wikipedia is sometimes portrayed as collaborative and peaceful, it often breaks into conflicts and disputes. The book describes how the gradual increase in editing participation determines its attractiveness, addictiveness, and, ultimately, its level of conflict. The seemingly chaotic organization of cooperation on Wikipedia is actually susceptible to tight control through observation of all behaviors, the participants’ structured discourse, and procedures. Nonetheless, organizational control, so strict in other aspects, is more lenient on Wikipedia than in other types of organizations in terms of credential checks, as a result of a transformation of interpersonal trust and of trust in procedures. The lack of recognition of real-world credentials and formal authority helps sustain the Wikipedia community, by both allowing for alternative authority-building patterns and negating the real-world knowledge structures. The book studies the internal composition of the Wikimedia movement and describes how it is influenced by increasing professionalization. Finally, it reviews the evolution of Jimmy Wales's leadership of Wikipedia and explains how open-collaboration communities require congruence in terms of their organizational leadership model (authoritative or egalitarian) and the exercise of leadership power (direct and interventionist or general and visionary).

The anthrax attacks of 2001 provoked deep concern and urgency among U.S. security elites regarding bioterrorism. Coming after 9/11 and followed by the successive menace of West Nile virus, SARS, avian influenza, and most recently Ebola these events prompted the federal government to pursue an aggressive new biodefense agenda. Even given the purported menace of bio-catastrophe, however, the new federal risk management plans stirred controversy. Community at Risk provides a comparative view of that controversy as it ensued in three communities where universities sought to host and manage National Biocontainment Laboratories (NBL) on behalf of the federal government. NBLs are a cornerstone of federal biodefense plans; they are ultrasecure laboratories where research on the most dangerous diseases can be conducted and microbiological and biomedical applications can be rapidly developed and deployed. By comparing community responses, the book highlights the role that local civic political dynamics play in defining what is at stake and perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable risk. It explains the civic politics of risk as rooted in locally shared governance conventions, politicized relations, and resonant virtues that clustered in each community context as a prevailing civics and discourse. In one community, the prevailing civics and discourse helped to ease locals toward acceptance, while in the other two communities, they helped to intensify skepticism and risk dispute. Through comparative analysis, the book shows why societal attempts to manage risk require greater attention to the local level where public understanding is often forged and political engagement arises and unfolds.

This book describes how commercial ventures in creative industries have cultural impact. Since royal patronage of arts ended, firms in the creative industries, working within the market mechanism, have been responsible for the production and distribution of the cultural goods—art, books, films, fashion, and music—that enrich our lives. This book counters the popular perception that this marriage of art and business is a necessary evil, proposing instead that entrepreneurs who introduce radically new cultural works to the market must bring about a change in society’s beliefs about what is appropriate and valuable to encourage consumption of these goods. In so doing, these pioneer entrepreneurs change minds, not just lives; the seeds of cultural change are embedded in the world of commerce. Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, integrated with field research on pioneer firms (like Chanel and the Sundance Institute) and new market categories (like modern art and high fashion in India), the author develops conceptual frameworks that explain the structure and functioning of creative industries. Through a systematic exposition of the roles and functions of the players in this space—creators, producers, and intermediaries—the book proposes a new way to understand the relationship among markets, entrepreneurship, and culture. Khaire also discusses challenges inherent in being entrepreneurial in the creative industries, paying special attention to the implications of digitalization and globalization, and suggests prescriptive directions for individuals and firms wishing to balance pecuniary motivations with cultural convictions in this rapidly changing world.

This book explores a mostly untapped resource on college campuses—the leadership potential of staff and faculty at all levels—and contributes to the growing tradition of giving voice to grassroots leaders, offering a unique contribution by honing in on leadership in educational settings. In an increasingly corporatized environment, grassroots leadership can provide a balance to the prestige and revenue-seeking impulses of campus leaders, act as a conscience for institutional operations with greater integrity, create changes related to the teaching and learning core, build greater equity, improve relationships among campus stakeholders, and enhance the student experience. The text documents the stories of grassroots leaders, including the motivation and background of these “bottom up” beacons, the tactics and strategies they use, the obstacles they overcome, and the ways they navigate power and join with formal authority. This investigation also showcases how grassroots leaders in institutional settings, particularly more marginalized groups, can face significant backlash. While we like to believe that organizations are civil and humane, the stories in this book demonstrate a dark side with which we must reckon. The book ends with a discussion of the future of leadership on college campuses, examining the possibilities for shared and collaborative forms of leadership and governance.

Evaluation—whether called by this name, quality assurance, audit, accreditation, or others—is an important social activity. Any public or private organization that “lives in public” must now evaluate its activities, be evaluated by others, or evaluate others. What are the origins of this wave of evaluation? And, what worthwhile results emerge from it? This book argues that if we want to understand many of the norms, values, and expectations that we, sometimes unknowingly, bring to evaluation, we should explore how evaluation is demanded, formatted, and shaped by the two great principles of social order: “organization” and “society.” With this understanding, we can more conscientiously participate in evaluation processes; better position ourselves to understand many of the mysteries, tensions, and paradoxes in evaluation; and most effectively use evaluation. After exploring the sociology and organization of evaluation in this landmark work, the book concludes by discussing issues that are critical for the future of evaluation—as a discipline and a societal norm.

Mobilizing people to pursue action that “gets new things done” depends critically on the effective orchestration of social networks and knowledge sharing. This orchestration is vital to the pursuit of innovation, especially in a world increasingly reliant on collaborative projects that assemble actors with diverse interests, abilities, and knowledge. This book offers a framework—the BKAP innovation model—for conceptualizing how social networks and knowledge sharing combine to influence success for innovation in general, but especially where innovation is not tied to preexisting routines, as in the case of projects where, for example, an entrepreneur launches a new innovation or venture. The BKAP innovation model asserts that innovators exercise brokerage activity (“B”) and knowledge articulation (“KA”) within networks to mobilize action either in support of routine innovation (e.g., new product development) or, increasingly, in support of nonroutine innovation, that is, creative projects (“P”). Brokerage activity employs a combination of three strategic orientations: (1) conduit (or knowledge transfer); (2) tertius gaudens (or bridging while maintaining separation); and (3) tertius iungens (or connecting people, departments, and companies together). Alongside brokering in networks, innovators orchestrate knowledge through knowledge articulation to increase understanding and enlist innovation support. The BKAP model is applied to organizational innovation and other areas as diverse as artistic movements, entrepreneurship, and collective action.

This book is motivated by the simple hope that the cloud of the global financial crisis may yet have a silver lining—that political leaders, economists, and management scholars might seize this opportunity to reflect critically on the assumptions, practices, and infrastructures that have precipitated the crisis and to imagine and create new forms of organization that sustainably enhance the well-being of global stakeholders. The chapters suggest that aesthetic management, high reliability and crisis management, and sustainability science have much to contribute to the resolution of the collapse that we have witnessed, and to providing enduring lessons for how to structure the institutions of the future. This book devotes a section to each of these areas, offering full-length chapters which explore key issues in depth, as well as shorter commentaries that focus on practical considerations. The chapters progress from micro-level issues that pertain to individuals and teams who act creatively; to the meso-level issues that pertain to the structures, practices, and processes; to the macro-level issues that pertain to the interdependent, ecological systems. Together, the chapters emphasize the importance of developing holistic responses to the financial crisis. The result is a volume that casts new light on traditional economic and managerial theories and policies and provides fresh ideas to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

This book addresses the changing role and responsibilities of large multinational corporations (MNCs) in the global political economy. This cross- and inter-disciplinary work makes innovative connections between current debates and streams of thought, bringing together global justice, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Conceiving of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from this unique perspective, the author takes readers well beyond the limitations of conventional notions, which tend to focus on either beneficence or pure charity. While the call for MNCs' involvement in the solution of global problems has become stronger in recent times, few specifics have been laid down regarding how to hold those institutions accountable in the global arena. This text attempts to work out the normative basis underlying the responsibilities of MNCs—thereby filling a crucial void in the literature and marking a milestone in the CSR debate.

High-reliability management of critical infrastructures-the safe and continued provision of electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, transportation, and water-is a social imperative. Loss of service in interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) after hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tsunamis and their delayed large-scale recovery have turned these events into catastrophes. Reliability and Risk reveals a neglected management dimension and provides a new framework for understanding interconnected infrastructures, their potential for cascading failure, and how to improve their reliability and reduce risk of system failure. The book answers two questions: How are modern interconnected infrastructures managed and regulated for reliability? How can policy makers, analysts, managers, and citizenry better promote reliability in interconnected systems whose failures can scarcely be imagined? The current consensus is that the answers lie in better design, technology, and regulation, but the book argues that these have inevitable shortfalls and that it is dangerous to stop there. The framework developed in Reliability and Risk draws from first-of-its-kind research at the infrastructure crossroads of California, the California Delta, in the San Francisco Bay region. The book demonstrates that infrastructure reliability in an interconnected world must be managed by system professionals in real time.

Some rather remarkable changes took place in North American business schools between 1945 and 1970, altering the character of these institutions, the possibilities for their future, and the terms of discourse about them. This period represents a minor revolution, during which business schools are reported to have become more academic, more analytic, and more quantitative. This book considers these changes and explores their roots. It traces the origins of this quiet revolution and shows how it shaped discussions about management education, leading to a shift that weakened the place of business cases and experiential knowledge and strengthened support for a concept of professionalism that applied to management. The text considers how the rhetoric of change was organized around three core questions: Should business schools concern themselves primarily with experiential knowledge or with academic knowledge? What vision of managers and management should be reflected by business schools? How should managerial education connect its teaching to some version of reality?