The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community

In this chapter, we update stakeholder salience research using the new lens of stakeholder work: the purposive processes of organization aimed at being aware of, identifying, understanding, prioritizing, and engaging stakeholders Specifically, we focus on stakeholder prioritization work — primarily as represented by the stakeholder salience model — and discuss contributions, shortcomings, and possibilities for this literature We suggest that future research focus on stakeholder inclusivity, the complexity of prioritization work within intra-corporate markets, the integration of stakeholder prioritization with other forms of stakeholder work, and the development of managerial tools for multiobjective decision making within the strategic management context

Stakeholder Prioritization Work: The Role of Stakeholder Salience in Stakeholder Research

In this paper, we argue that the spiritual identity of members of a family business can positively or negatively impact the salience of stakeholders to the complex coalition of decision-makers that comprises managers in that business. Utilizing stakeholder salience theory and role theory, we examine the complex theoretical relationships among spiritual identity, stakeholder attributes, and family business stakeholder salience. This examination reveals the multidimensionality of workplace spirituality and the need for finer-grained distinctions in stakeholder attributes, to better represent the complexities inherent in a family business context. This article develops four propositions, through which we offer the following contributions to the literature on family business workplace spirituality: (1) new analysis frameworks for future use, (2) prototypical descriptions of stakeholder types and representative vignettes for making finer-grained distinctions, (3) multidimensional implications for exploring the...

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Spiritual identity, stakeholder attributes, and family business workplace spirituality stakeholder salience

Managers in ethnic businesses are confronted with ethical dilemmas when taking action based on ethnic ties; and often as a result, they increase the already vulnerable positions of these businesses and their stakeholders. Many of these dilemmas concern the capital that is generated (or the lack of it) through variations in the use of ethnic stakeholder social ties. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a stakeholder-based model of social capital formation, mediated by various forms of ethnic ties, to explore the duality of ethnicity: it can aid and hinder an ethnic business. Drawing upon the social capital/economic development, stakeholder salience, ethnic businesses literatures, and (to some extent) on social identity theory, we develop a cyclical model of relationships among ethnic business stakeholder attributes (ethnic kinship-based power, ethnic-moral legitimacy, and ethnic-critical urgency) and social capital, as mediated by three-way (triadic) Simmelian bonding and bridging ties, which then, in turn, affects the ethnic stakeholder attributes. We argue that the development of bridging yet strong ties through this cyclical process is relevant for the improvement of the positions of ethnic businesses in terms of both economic success and social responsibility. Specifically, we suggest that, given the duality of ethnicity in business, managers can prioritize stakeholder relationships based upon how these stakeholder ties affect social capital.

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The Vulnerability and Strength Duality in Ethnic Business: A Model of Stakeholder Salience and Social Capital

STAKEHOLDER IDENTIFICATION AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN THE VALUE CREATING SYSTEM OF STAKEHOLDER WORK In this chapter we address the importance of stakeholder identification work in value creation. It has been argued that a firm’s creation of value for stakeholders is at the heart of stakeholder theory. Freeman et al. (2010) argue that “to successfully create, trade, and sustain value, a business must engage its stakeholders” (p. 282, emphasis added). But how does one identify the stakeholders that need to be engaged? Here we introduce the idea of stakeholder work (Lee, 2015) as a comprehensive system of value creation, to explain how stakeholder identification work links to value creation through stakeholder engagement.

Stakeholder Identification and Its Importance in the Value Creating System of Stakeholder Work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine an entrepreneur’s attempt to gain legitimacy and change institutions in a multiple institutions setting. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a qualitative case study to track an entrepreneur’s efforts to create a new financial instrument and get it accepted and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Findings – The authors introduce the concept of institutional judo, analogous to the martial art where a fighter uses his opponent’s forces against him. While institutional theory has focussed on how institutional pressures force actors to conform, the term judo refers to an actor using institutional pressures to their advantage in changing those very institutions. Research limitations/implications – This qualitative research involves a single case study, but is most suited to revealing extensions of theory and subtle processes. Practical implications – The approach allowed the authors to provide a nuanced look at the actual change efforts by an...

Jae Hwan Lee

Papers

Stakeholder Prioritization Work: The Role of Stakeholder Salience in Stakeholder Research

Spiritual identity, stakeholder attributes, and family business workplace spirituality stakeholder salience

The Vulnerability and Strength Duality in Ethnic Business: A Model of Stakeholder Salience and Social Capital

Stakeholder Identification and Its Importance in the Value Creating System of Stakeholder Work

Institutional judo: how entrepreneurs use institutional forces to create change