After briefly explaining why social capital (civil society) is important to democracy, Putnam devotes the bulk of this chapter to demonstrating social capital’s decline in the United States across the last quarter century. (See Putnam 1995 for a similar but more detailed argument.) While he acknowledges that the significance of a few countertrends is difficult to assess without further study, Putnam concludes that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States. He offers some possible explanations for this erosion and concludes by outlining the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.

/pdf/bowling-alone-america-s-declining-social-capital-cqbzoi2a0n.pdf

“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

The morality of transformational leadership has been sharply questioned, particularly by libertarians, “grass roots” theorists, and organizational development consultants. This paper argues that to be truly transformational, leadership must be grounded in moral foundations. The four components of authentic transformational leadership (idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration) are contrasted with their counterfeits in dissembling pseudo -transformational leadership on the basis of (1) the moral character of the leaders and their concerns for self and others; (2) the ethical values embedded in the leaders' vision, articulation, and program, which followers can embrace or reject; and (3) the morality of the processes of social ethical choices and action in which the leaders and followers engage and collectively pursue. The literature on transformational leadership is linked to the long-standing literature on virtue and moral character, as exemplified by Socratic and Confucian typologies. It is related as well to the major themes of the modern Western ethical agenda: liberty, utility, and distributive justice Deception, sophistry, and pretense are examined alongside issues of transcendence, agency, trust, striving for congruence in values, cooperative action, power, persuasion, and corporate governance to establish the strategic and moral foundations of authentic transformational leadership.

/pdf/ethics-character-and-authentic-transformational-leadership-1jcc07fyjv.pdf

Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior

This paper is an effort to review and organize the now vast literature on inter firm networks, with the aim of assessing the important current forms of net work, the organizational mechanisms supporting them, and the main variables that have been shown to influence network emergence and shape. These results are achieved through a literature review encompassing a number of approaches across the social sciences. The paper can therefore be used as a typological state-of-art on inter-firm networks, and as a basis for developing hypotheses of relationship between network antecedents and forms.

Inter-firm Networks: Antecedents, Mechanisms and Forms

Recombinant property is a form of organizational hedging in which actors respond to uncertainty by deversifying assets, redefining and recombining resources. It is an attempt to hold resources that can be justified by more than one legitimating principle. Property tansformation in postsocialist Hungary involves the decentralized reorganization of assets and the centralized management of liabilities. Together they blur the boundaries of public and private, the boundaries of enterprises, and the boundedness of justificatory principles. Enterprise-level field research, data on the ownership structure of Hungary's 220 largest enterprises and banks, and an examination of the government's recent debt consolidation programs suggest the emergence of a distinctively East European capitalism that will differ as much from West European capitalism as do contemporary East Asian variants.

/pdf/recombinant-property-in-east-european-capitalism-22cewqdbxp.pdf

Recombinant Property in East European Capitalism

This article examines the influence of Anthony Giddens on recent work in management studies, especially the contribution of his structurationist pers- pective to understanding managerial agency. A citation analysis and discussion of prominent exponents such as Ranson et al. (1980), Andrew Pettigrew and Hugh Willmott, concludes that Giddens' influence is substantial but lopsided. Giddens' concern for the intersection and tension between different social systems has been particularly neglected. Drawing on the insights of current 'institutionalist' studies of societal influences on organizations, the article builds a structurationist account of managerial agency that is founded on the contradictions within and between different social systems. The article ends by considering the implications of this structurationist account for current concerns with managerial leadership, organizational symbolism and strategic choice.

Monica Cartner

Papers

Capitalism in contrasting cultures

The Network Structures of East Asian Economies

Centrifugal Versus Centripetal Growth Processes: Contrasting Ideal Types for Conceptualizing the Developmental Patterns of Chinese and Japanese Firms

‘Post-Confucianism’, Social Democracy and Economic Culture

7. Beyond Bureaucracy: Towards a Comparative Analysis of Forms of Economic Resource Coordination and Control