Knowledge that Transforms

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to examine the development of a Corporate Management Unit in a north-western local authority. The research tool is social analysis and it is proposed to arrive at some conclusion concerning the contribution of social analysis to organization development. The research was undertaken in the early summer of 1974 when a total of fifteen unstructured person to person interviews were completed from a sum of fifteen respondents.

The concept of market structure is at the heart of economic theory. Yet the construct has been largely neglected in marketing. Part of the reason is that it has never been effectively operationalized. In examining the implications of market structure empirical researchers have tended to use single indices for an essentially multidimensional construct. Here we show how markets can be classified objectively using the three key dimensions of structure: market concentration, product differentiation and barriers to entry. The methodology proposed should provide a more reliable base for research into strategic and competitive implications of marketing structure. The purpose of this paper is to develop an operational measure of market structure. The concept of market structure is important both in marketing and economics. Yet empirical work has produced disappointing results.1Both economists and managers have stressed the need for new definitions and measures if useful generalizations are to be developed and the concept is to provide a valuable basis for government regulation over market competition.

In Part I of this paper,2it was suggested that a concern for the social responsibilities of large business enterprises had received far less explicit attention in Britain than it has in the United States. In the latter it has preoccupied corporate managers, business critics, scholars, trade unionists and the general public for more than a generation. My analysis of the reasons for the comparatively lower degree of British concern with the social role of business enterprise stressed the importance of the following seven factors: There exists in Britain (relative to the United States) greater reliance on publicly owned enterprises about which the public policy debate concerning the social role of business institutions has been focused. British acceptance of corporate size and market dominance is greater than in the United States. A long-standing governmental involvement in economy and society has characterized Britain's political economy. A pre-emption of societal leadership functions by non-business élites has occurred in Britain. The impact of Britain's social structure has produced an informal Clite consensus regarding a limited social role for business. There is a British tradition of according privacy to business and other social institutions. There is a lesser degree of‘professionalism’ in management practice–both in terms of substance and style–in Britain when compared with the United States.

While I have great sympathy for the views put forward in the paper by Macdonald and Kam (2007), I feel that their picture of current publication practices in management studies is just a little too bleak. It relies rather too much on extreme examples, old references and publication in other disciplines. However there are two key related themes in the paper that certainly deserve further attention. Firstly, the virtuous/vicious circles in journal publication that, on the one hand, guarantee quality and on the other can lead to stagnation in a discipline, and secondly, the role that reviewing plays in these processes. While I agree that their deeply unserious Tinkerbell solution maintains the nursery metaphor, it makes no serious effort to offer any alternative solutions to the problems they have identified. I want to argue that academic journal publication can usefully be analysed as a market system based upon exchanges, through which value is created and distributed through processes of evaluation. Further complexity is created since this primary market is also embedded in the commercial journal publication market and strongly linked to the academic labour market. However as a result of changes in technology and, increasingly, in the attitudes of academic communities, alternative market forms involving open publishing and open peer review become possible. In what follows the nature of this market will be described, new options suggested and their viability assessed. Reviewing a paper essentially involves a process of evaluation. But since all markets involve evaluation it is worthwhile describing its role in exchange processes before discussing the role of evaluation in journal publication markets. Markets exist because they offer mechanisms for exchange of value between buyers and sellers. In principle such exchanges result in increased satisfaction for both parties. However each party needs to place a value on the outcomes of an exchange in order to decide whether to proceed. For even quite mundane exchanges the processes of evaluation will be complex and boundedly rational. Individual buyers make their own decision though they can be heavily influenced by others, especially where the buyer is not the consumer (e.g. parents and children). In many kinds of consumer markets external evaluations become very important. As individuals we rely on our social networks; family, friends and acquaintances. But, increasingly, professional evaluators are becoming influential. These include, for example, commercial advisors, consumer associations and critics as well as governments, the media and other institutions (Kwon and Easton, 2006). Most recently, through the medium of the internet, consumers are beginning to turn to fellow consumers for their reviews of, for example, hotels and travel (Trip Advisor), books (Amazon), movies (Movie Review Query Engine) and restaurants (restaurants.com). One of the most powerful groups of external influences on buyers is the prospective seller. Sellers seek to persuade potential buyers to buy using media such as advertising, sales promotion and personal selling as well as targeting their product offering to appropriate customers and building a brand or corporate image. However sellers also need to evaluate the exchange. Where there is the possibility of negotiating, as in many business to business situations, the seller may decide that the terms of trade are not attractive enough to proceed with a sale. In reseller to customer markets, resellers have to judge how their customers will evaluate the products and services they are in turn buying from sellers, especially in relation to aspects of the offering that are difficult for customers to evaluate (e.g. organic food, long term reliability etc). In summary, acts of evaluation suffuse market systems in complex and dynamic ways. They also play a central role in journal publication markets. Academic publication markets comprise consumers, buyers, journals, suppliers and publishers interacting in rather complex and diverse ways. Individual academics, less often students or practitioners, are consumers of journals and they are, in theory, buying new knowledge. Of course the knowledge may not be particularly new but the fact that it has been re-presented is also knowledge in itself. Crucially its value will depend on its relationship to what is already known which will, in turn, vary from individual to individual. Especially valuable are new ideas or combinations of ideas which did not exist before or knowledge that presents original empirical, or confirms existing, knowledge. The nature of knowledge is also crucially dependent upon how it is stored and processed by the individual and shared with others. Knowledge represents capital and is almost never destroyed, i.e. consumed, but is rather replaced, adapted, complemented or ignored. It will, in general, depreciate over time, though like some objects (e.g. antique furniture) it will sometimes become fashionable again when resurrected, especially when combined with new knowledge. Higher education institutions or, more specifically, their libraries, are buyers of journals, not, generally, individual academics. However academics are more or less influential in the library buying process since they are the final consumers. Given fixed or even diminishing library budgets the battle to continue subscriptions or start new ones has become fierce. More recently, the situation has become more complex as publishers offer bulk deals for access to groups of their journals and content aggregators provide access to vast numbers of journals online, bought as a package. As a result access to greater numbers of journals has become, in general, easier for consumers and they are becoming accustomed to the increased availability and therefore more resistance to having their new found freedom curtailed in any way. A journal is essentially a reseller of knowledge in a publication market. At the heart of any journal is the editorial process which makes choices among sellers (potential authors), adds value by virtue of an evaluation and moderation process, and resells. However in market terms there are two crucial, and often related, issues concerning the link between the reseller and consumers. The first involves judgements of quality in terms of the absolute worth of a paper as judged by those with editorial and review power. The second is concerned with topics that their consumers think are relevant to them. The success of a journal depends to some extent on how well the tension between these two issues is resolved. What is clear is that the editors' word is final and the review and judgement processes are not usually transparent to the consumer. A journal publication market in a particular field is made even more multifarious because the boundaries of such fields tend to be unclear. A journal in a particular area competes with other journals for both authors and buyers, and hence customers. In the former case authors can submit a paper, albeit tailored differently, to other journals in the same field. Journals also vary in their scope, some being more specialized than others. It could be argued that more general journals are better placed strategically since they can draw on a wider group of authors and consumers. Competition among journals for both authors and customers is therefore somewhat complex. In practice, for journals of any standing there will be far fewer suppliers, and even potential suppliers (competent authors), than there will be consumers (academics who read the papers). The market positioning of resellers depends upon their reputation based heavily upon their historic output. This is, in turn, influenced by their general policies, editors, reviewers, publishers and the availability of suitable papers in their field. And as Clark and Wright (2007) point out, reputations can change relatively quickly. In academic journal markets suppliers are authors who wish to have their papers published. What they are offering is new knowledge of, hopefully, high quality which, they anticipate, will be valued by a journal's customers and, of course the reseller without which the exchange cannot take place. What value do suppliers extract from this exchange? They won't in general be paid directly for their product. Instead the intrinsic rewards will be a mixture of esteem, status, a belief in the importance of knowledge creation but crucially scholarly reputation which has other more tangible, employment enhancing, rewards. They wish to sell through resellers which have the greatest power to provide them with these benefits. There are more sellers, and certainly more potential sellers, in these markets than can be accommodated by the system. Publishers also play a crucial role in journal markets but their ownership characteristics differ which, in turn, leads to differences in their market behaviours. For-profit publishers are commercial organizations, may publish in a variety of different forms and media and even be part of a corporation that has other business interests. They generally own the journals they publish, appoint editors and decide on overall policy. While publishers' powers are constrained by the academic community they still have the ability to shape the journals they own. Since the success of a journal is largely down to its content and publishers are not well attuned to the nuances of the academic fields their journals cover, their scope for day to day involvement is generally limited. However by refusing to launch journals that they believe will not be profitable, or will cannibalize the sales of their existing titles, publishers can create barriers to entry to the current publishing system and help ossify the state of the market. Ownership of journals is heavily skewed and is becoming even more so. ‘Elsevier, the largest journal publisher, now claims to have the third largest Internet revenues, behind only AOL–Time Warner and Amazon’ (Edlin and Rubinfeld, 2004). It also had an estimated 22.9 per cent of the Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) journal market in 2001 (Edlin and Rubinfeld, 2004). 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This power is to some extent by the of journals Clark and Wright (2007) point the of journals change over among the academics concerned and the entry of new journals and academics the for example as a result of the of new of There is also the that, in among the is to be just as in the of buyers and consumers as a market. 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The tension‐reduction model that links workplace stress to alcohol use and problems has received mixed support in previous investigations. Following recommendations that this model include moderated mediated relationships ( Frone, 1999 ) using more specific forms of workplace stress, we examine the impact of gender ratio, generalized workplace abuse, and stereotype threat in an effort to predict alcohol use and problems particularly for managerial women. A total of 1410 (57 per cent response rate) employees completed a survey containing items on job stress, escapist reasons for drinking, and alcohol consumption and problems, and SEM analyses were conducted separately for managerial and non‐managerial men and women. Results revealed that: (a) these three workplace stressors were differentially related to general workplace stress for the four groups; and (b) the contributions of the three stressors and of general work stress to the alcohol‐related variables varied by group.

This study assesses the prevalence of workplace bullying in a sample of US workers, using a standardized measure of workplace bullying (Negative Acts Questionnaire, NAQ), and compares the current study's prevalence rates with those from other bullying and aggression studies. The article opens by defining bullying as a persistent, enduring form of abuse at work and contrasting it with other negative workplace actions and interactions. Through a review of the current literature, we propose and test hypotheses regarding bullying prevalence and dynamics relative to a sample of US workers. After discussing research methods, we report on the rates of bullying in a US sample, compare these to similar studies, and analyse the negative acts that might lead to perceptions of being bullied. Based upon past conceptualizations, as well as research that suggests bullying is a phenomenon that occurs in gradations, we introduce and provide statistical evidence for the construct and impact of bullying degree. Finally, the study explores the impact of bullying on persons who witnessed but did not directly experience bullying in their jobs.