Decentralized Organization Research Articles

Formalizing the Informal: Adopting a Formal Culture-Fit Measurement System in the Employee-Selection Process

ABSTRACTMany organizations rely on formal management control systems that align employee values with organizational values (i.e., culture fit) to shape organizational culture. Using proprietary data from a highly decentralized organization, I examine employee-performance consequences of adopting a formal culture-fit measurement system in employee selection. I exploit the staggered feature of the adoption of the system and find that employees selected with the system perform significantly better than those without the system. However, the performance consequences of adopting the culture-fit measurement system exhibit significant variation, depending on (1) alignment of existing local culture and organizational values and (2) noise in the measurement of culture fit due to applicants’ gaming behavior. Taken together, this study implies that the adoption of a formal culture-fit measurement system can potentially alleviate difficulties in instilling organizational values and highlights the conditions under which such a system can be more effective in facilitating the diffusion of organizational culture.

Data Ecosystem for Industrial Product- Service Systems (IPS2) Based on a Decentralized Data Architecture

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPS2) confront design organizations with new challenges. One of those is the need for co-designing products with services, and their underlying service provider and supplier networks including the business models driving their cooperation for value delivery to the end users. In this context, data collected about all the organizations involved in IPS2 design and delivery are becoming increasingly valuable assets for both, the design as well as the continuous improvement, adaptation, and optimization of IPS2. In today's company IT infrastructures, data is typically managed in centralized data warehouses or data lakes. In order to cope with the dynamic nature of IPS2 design and operation, agile de-centralized data organizations would be appropriate. Qualitative statements about the feasibility of some decentralized architectures realized with data mesh principles are given from practical use cases. This work focuses on a decentralized data architecture to enabling IPS2 design and operation. Therefore, this work investigates the related challenges from centralized databases and proposes a decentralized concept solution tackling the requirements data privacy, data traceability, data accountability and data usability for the use case of a Mobility as a Service (MaaS) data ecosystem. For this purpose, compared to existing use cases, modern technology solutions such as blockchain technology and smart contracts are integrated in the concept.

Scandiatransplant acceptable mismatch program—10 years with an effective strategy for transplanting highly sensitized patients

In March 2009, the Scandiatransplant acceptable mismatch program (STAMP) was introduced as a strategy toward improving kidney allocation to highly sensitized patients. Patients with a transplantability score ≤ 2% are potential candidates for the program. Samples are analyzed and acceptable antigens (HLA-A, B, C, DRB1, DRB3/4/5, DQB1, DQA1, DPB1, DPA1) are defined by the local tissue typing laboratory and finally evaluated by a steering committee. In the matching algorithm, patients have the highest priority when the donor's antigens are all among the recipient's own or acceptable HLA antigens. In the period from 2009 to 2020, we have transplanted 278 highly sensitized kidney patients through the program. The graft survival of the STAMP patients was compared with 9002 deceased donor kidney-transplanted patients, transplanted in the same time period. The 10-year graft survival was 73.4% (95% CI: 60.3-90.0) for STAMP and 82.9% (95% CI: 81.6-84.3) for the reference group. (p= .2). In conclusion, the 10-year allograft survival demonstrates that the STAMP allocation algorithm is immunological safe. The program is continuously monitored and evaluated, and the introduction of matching for all HLA loci is a huge improvement to the program and demonstrate technical adaptability as well as clinical flexibility in a de-centralized organization.

Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins

Reviewed by: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins Susan Schulten (bio) Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West. By Cameron Blevins. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 232. Cloth, $34.95.) The U.S. Post has drawn far less attention than other federal agencies in the settlement of the West, particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the General Land Office, and the U.S. military. Yet, in Paper Trails, Cameron Blevins argues that the postal network was essential to the conquest and settlement of this vast and geographically diverse region. By facilitating communication through a loose yet responsive network, the U.S. Post provided "the underlying spatial circuitry of western expansion" (3). Blevins describes the U.S. Post from the 1860s through the early twentieth century as "big, expansive, fast moving, and unstable" (5). This statement captures his nuanced and original thesis. The Post Office Department operated as a highly decentralized organization that relied on "agents" at the local level to convey letters, newspapers, and later money across the country. Blevins argues that its tenuous, unstable nature was precisely what enabled post offices and postal services to appear swiftly alongside new communities—such as mining towns—but also to contract just as quickly when those towns disappeared, as was so common across the West. To capture this dynamic, he terms the postal system in this era a "gossamer network." Blevins uses this observation to rethink the operation of state power. The temporary and flexible agency model enabled the postal network to keep up with the extraordinary pace and reach of western colonization in the late nineteenth century. It might be tempting to see the decentralized and privatized nature of postal operations as a limitation or disadvantage, particularly given our long-standing assumptions about bureaucracy and administrative power. But Blevins argues that the early western postal system was effective not in spite of its institutional weaknesses but because of them. In other words, it was "the absence of so many traditional hallmarks of bureaucratic strength that made the gossamer network such a crucial part of the American state's efforts to incorporate the western United States" (13). By the early twentieth century, he writes, this peculiarly unstable yet flexible style of federal power helped to "transform the western United States from a sprawling and remote territory over which the state had only a tenuous hold into an integrated region occupied by American settlers, industry, and government" (158). Blevins relies on several different types of sources and analysis to make his case. Students of the digital humanities will appreciate his ability to [End Page 417] extract meaningful patterns from an enormous data set that identified thousands of post offices in the second half of the nineteenth century. He asks two questions of this data: Where were post offices established, and when? He successfully maps two-thirds of these 166,000 post offices and, through careful accounting for error and missing information, helps to randomize what cannot be firmly established. With this aggregate data, he is able to see that post offices were constantly being established but also closed across the American West. This dynamic of simultaneous expansion and contraction sets the West apart from the rest of the country. Abundant maps in the study help guide the reader through this western dynamic of boom and bust, but readers will be even more intrigued by the extensive companion website to the book (www.gossamernetwork.com). In a site that is intuitive and thoughtful, Blevins and his colleagues show in real time how the postal network followed—and sometimes anticipated—the rapid dispossession of Native lands in the West. By aggregating and analyzing the location of postal networks, Blevins shows what would otherwise be invisible to historians of the West, answering critics of digital history as confirming what we already know. But Blevins is not strictly engaged with quantitative data. At one end, he relies on individual stories of western migrants whose geographically expansive lives were made possible by the postal network. By facilitating the movement of white Americans into the West, the postal network advanced the conquest of...

Emerging Technologies and the Transformation of Exchange Trading Platforms

The authors examine technology’s current and future influence on trading and the structure of markets. Order processing speeds and new algorithmic tools have driven market volumes up well beyond projections. At the same time, some high-profile technology developments have failed, and legacy practices based on dealer intermediation and telephone trading have proven resilient. Looking to the future of exchanges, we examine today’s pressures for changes. We propose that three emerging technologies will create new market structures and disrupt market providers and incumbent firms that offer market data and posttrade services to market participants: (1) algorithmic trust technology, (2) formative artificial intelligence, and (3) autonomous decentralized organizations (DAOs) and their associated webs of smart contracts that could perform financial markets functions.

문재인 정부의 자치분권정책 평가와 향후 과제

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Moon Jae-in government's policy for autonomy and decentralization and to suggest future tasks. The evaluation of the autonomy and decentralization policy will be from the inauguration of the Moon Jae-in government until the end of December 2021. The 6 strategic 33 tasks (133 unit tasks) in the 『Comprehensive Plan for Autonomy and Decentralization』 were targeted, and the evaluation method was mainly conducted by the Presidential Committee on Autonomy and Decentralization, which is the secondary data, using the "check and evaluation results of the implementation of the autonomous decentralization implementation plan" for three years (2020-2021). Based on the implications of the results of the Moon Jae-in administration’s policy evaluation on autonomy and decentralization, as the tasks for autonomous and decentralization to be pursued in the future, decentralization-type constitutional amendment, reconstruction and strengthening of the decentralization promotion system, self-governing administration, organization, and legislative power strengthening, self-governing financial power reinforcement, special local administration reorganization of institutions, strengthening of authority and responsibility of local councils, vitalization of resident participation, and improvement of local elections and education autonomy system. were suggested.

Rethinking Public Administration and the Importance of Urban Marketing

This article analyses the role of urban marketing in the governance of local governments in Ecuador in line with the Organic Code for Regional, Autonomous and Decentralized Organization (COOTAD). The governance debate demonstrates the potential that local governments may have to assume the competence to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). It also highlights the importance of urban marketing in the construction of Ecuador’s branding or of Ecuador’s image and its economic positioning in the regional and international sphere. The paper arrives at the conclusion that local government is coordinating commercial and institutional agendas to ensure economic, socio-political and technological development in Ecuador.

Some Reflections on the Nature of Decentralized (Autonomous) Organizations

Some Reflections on the Nature of Decentralized (Autonomous) Organizations

Status and powers of village, settlement, city mayors in the system of local self-government of Ukraine

Since the establishment of the institution of village, settlement and city mayors in the system of local self-government of Ukraine,the legal status of these persons has not changed significantly. This indicates that the constitutional model of local self-government,headed by a village, town, city mayor, mainly satisfied society’s demand for stable local self-government. Today, when gradually as aresult of the reform of decentralization and administrative-territorial organization Ukraine has become a country of united territorialcommunities with significant powers locally, the issue of improving local self-government, finding its optimal model and the balanceof powers between key components of its system is gaining momentum relevance.Since the adoption of the Constitution, the system of local self-government of Ukraine has included territorial communities,which carry out local self-government in the manner prescribed by law, both directly and through local governments: village, town, citycouncils and their executive bodies. In the Law of Ukraine “On Local Self-Government in Ukraine” this list was supplemented by themain official of the territorial community – village, settlement, city mayor, who in the system of local self-government was given a“third” place between village, settlement, city council and executive bodies of village, settlement, city council. However, whether suchan intermediate position is occupied by the village, settlement, city mayor in the system of local self-government of Ukraine? After all,village, settlement, and city councils, which include deputies of local councils, as representative bodies of local self-government, areendowed by law with significant exclusive powers. Also, the executive bodies of local self-government are endowed by law with theirown (self-governing) powers and the powers delegated by the state to the bodies of executive power. The village, settlement, city mayordoes not have all these powers. To find an answer to this question by studying the status and powers of the chief official of the territorialcommunity used a system of checks and balances, which is embodied in local government of Ukraine in the principle of distribution ofpowers between representative local governments (councils), village, town, city and executive bodies of local self-government (exe -cutive committees, departments, administrations and other executive bodies created by councils).

Formation of local self-government bodies of Ukraine in soviet times

oday, as a result of the reform of decentralization and administrative-territorial organization, actually a new administrative-territorialunit is being established in Ukraine – a united community. But the basis and at the same time the reason for the joint of communitieswere first of all the most numerous local and at the same time the smallest administrative-territorial units in Ukraine – villagecouncils, inherited by Ukraine since Soviet times.Historically, the state and municipal system of modern Ukraine did not arise by itself, but was built on the “foundation” of theSoviet era, because Ukraine as an independent state is the successor of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), which, in turn –the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR), founded 100 years ago – in 1919. The smallest local authority in Soviet times and afterthe declaration of independence in Ukraine was the village council, which for a hundred years of its existence evolved from a componentof the mechanism of state governance at places to the basic level of local self-government.The article presents the result of historical and legal study of the establishment and development of the structural organization oflocal administrative bodies in Ukraine during the Soviet era on the example of village councils, their legal status, structure, main powersand tasks done by these bodies and the status of their members and officials. Village councils became the basic bodies of local managementof Soviet Ukraine and its smallest administrative-territorial units. On the basis of the organization of the activities of Sovietvillage councils with certain evolutionary changes, local self-governing bodies – village councils of independent Ukraine – still functiontoday. Investigation of formation and development of these bodies in the Soviet period of the history of the state and law of Ukrainedeserves the attention of legal science, including in the current reform of decentralization and administrative-territorial organization.

Decentralized Organizational Theory: Distributed Trust and Blockchain

Over the past decade, distributed trust technologies such as blockchain have grown in prominence. Yet organizational theory has not adequately addressed the decentralization enabled by such technologies. While a select number of published works have advanced knowledge of theoretical implications of blockchain, as a field, we have just started to scratch the surface of this fundamental shift. Recognizing this potential, this symposium aims to showcase the latest research on blockchain-enabled decentralized organizing that has clear implications for organizational and management research and adds to the repertoire of perspectives and existing theory impacted by distributed trust. In doing so, we seek to contribute to the emerging body of research connecting blockchain to broader organizational and management theories and help inform less technologically focused scholars on the implications of this rising technology on their own theoretical work. Blockchain and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Literature Review and Research Agenda Presenter: Carlos Santana; U. of Deusto Presenter: Laura Albareda; LUT U., School of Business and Management Decentralized and Centralized Organizing Collide in the Field of Blockchain and Healthcare Presenter: Chang Lu; U. of Alberta The Rise of Decentralized Organizations and Cyborg Management Presenter: Ying-Ying Hsieh; Imperial College Business School Presenter: Jean-philippe Vergne; Ivey Business School Crowd-Funding: Early-Stage Venture Resource Acquisition from Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Presenter: Alex Michael Murray; U. of Oregon

The mediating role of decentralization between strategy and performance

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the mediating role of decentralization in the relationship between a firm’s strategy and its performance in the context of an advanced economy where the chief corporate strategy is differentiation.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses data collected by an online survey targeting a stratified sample of 1,238 private firms operating in Denmark. The empirical analysis was carried out by estimating a structural equation model.FindingsThe key finding was that a decentralized organization (DO) can act as a mediator between a firm’s differentiation strategy and its performance. A multi-group analysis revealed that the mediating impact of decentralizing was affected by contingency factors such as firm size, strategic clarity, degrees of business environment risk and industry competition. Thus, a DO can be said to play a more important role in larger firms, in firms with less strategic clarity, and in companies with multiple plants.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the study offers empirical evidence from a relatively large and representative sample of firms, the specificity of the context should be noted. In particular, firms in Denmark, while facing strong competition, do not compete with low costs. Clearly, studies of the mediating role of decentralization in low-cost strategy environments would be an important next step.Practical implicationsSeveral implications of the findings for organizational design and creation of beneficial conditions for strategy implementations are discussed.Originality/valueThe novel contribution of the study lies in the focus on decentralization as a mediator in the strategy–performance relationship. While previous research has shown that strategy is related to decentralization, and that decentralization is associated with higher performance, an empirical analysis of the relationship between the factors in the strategy-decentralization-performance path had not previously been undertaken.

Factors Affecting Organizational Design: A Study on the Selected Dimensions in the Bangladeshi Context

This paper explores variations in organization design due to factors like industry type, organization size, maturity, technology intensity and strategic focus. Data was collected through a questionnaire survey and Key Informant Interviews (KII). No single factor was found to have a significant impact on all dimensions. Bigger organizations were found to have relatively decentralized information management system and service organizations had decentralized control mechanism and two-way communication practices. Organizations with relatively greater technology focus tended to use decentralized decision making, control mechanism and information management practices.

Determinants of Successful Implementation of Early Childhood Development Education by County Governments in Kenya; Implementing Partners Perspective

The purpose of this study was to assess the determinants of successful implementation of Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE) by County Governments in Kenya from the implementing partners’ perspective. This study was guided by the following specific objectives: to determine the influence of the capacities of the County Government staff on the implementation of early childhood development education by County Governments in Kenya, to determine the how management of early childhood development education affects its implementation by County Governments in Kenya, to assess how availability of physical facilities affect the implementation of early childhood development education by County Governments in Kenya and to examine how policies affect the implementation of early childhood development education by County Governments in Kenya. Decentralization theory and organization learning theory were used to explain the relationship between the study variables. Descriptive research design was used in the study. The population for the study was implementing partners working with County Governments in Kenya to support ECDE. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the respondents to participate in the study. A total of 100 respondents were targeted from the 10 organizations studied out of which 70 participated giving a response rate of 70%. Questionnaire was used as instrument for data collection. Both qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques were used to analyze the data. The study found that the implementation of ECDE by County governments in Kenya was generally successful from the implementing partners’ perspective and indicated by 56.8%. It is also worth noting that beside the general success, there were myriads of challenges facing the implementation of the program by county governments. Findings from regression analysis showed that the coefficient of determination indicated that 63.5% of the variations on the implementation of ECDE by county governments can be explained by staff capacity, management of ECDE, availability of physical facilities and ECDE policies. The remaining 36.5% can be explained by other variables not included in the study. R square and adjusted R is above average an implication that an above average variation can be explained by the model. The study recommended that county governments should allocate more funds for the renovation and construction of more ECDE centres, allocate adequate funds for the implementation of ECDE and that they should organize consistent in-service training for ECDE teachers and at the same time employ more ECDE staff to cater for the large number of children in ECDE centres..

Knowledge as the Key Indicator Toward Enhancing Organizational Value in Developing Countries

All countries in South Eastern Europe (SEE), in particular countries emerged from ex-Yugoslavia, are going through the transition process for many years. Switching from one economy to another, from closed and centralized to open and free market economy, has forced many companies to change their working and operating culture, especially the communication culture. Hence, the entire economy has started to learn new rules of the global market, new working culture, and they needed to understand, launch and to execute them, especially undeveloped countries such as Kosovo. Having this in mind, not only the organizations needed to change, but the most important was that individuals within those countries needed to change their working and communication culture. This study highlights the importance and explores the contributions of the importance of knowledge within the organization and the role of resources and information toward developing and enhancing new organizational value. Additionally, as the market is becoming more open for new entries, highly decentralized organizations are operating across a broader range of countries, without tending to centralize their operation to a single location. Hence, this has minimized the importance of a geographic area (as well as the home region) and is no longer treated as a priority to be the primary base for any (or all) functional area of global organizations. Many functions that are part of every organization, such as its resources and access to the needed information, are seen as the most important and crucial source of knowledge. As revealed by the study, many tools are developed for creating new added organizational value.

DISASTER MANAGEMENT COLLABORATION IN TURKEY: ASSESSING PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES OF HYBRID NETWORK GOVERNANCE

AbstractManaging disasters generally demands multiorganizational collaboration and collaborative skills. In Turkey, observed shortcomings in disaster management collaboration prompted a reorganization of the disaster management system that led to the emergence of a centralized hybrid network. The network governance literature generally heralds decentralized organization and shared network governance, which facilitate collaboration by maximizing trust and legitimacy and minimizing power imbalances. Through the use of 24 semi‐structured interviews, this article's objective is to assess the applicability of prior theoretical assumptions regarding interorganizational collaboration in a political‐administrative context different from that in which they were originally developed. The study contributes to the theoretical discussion about how political‐administrative system attributes might influence interorganizational disaster management collaboration. The results suggest that ‘tailor‐fitting’ interorganizational network designs to the political‐administrative culture can be beneficial for collaborative disaster management. Furthermore, results suggest that more effort should be devoted to examining cases where actors manage to overcome barriers to collaboration despite challenging institutional and political‐administrative landscapes.

Systemic innovation in a decentralized organizational setting: Towards value chain orchestration

Is systemic innovation compatible with a decentralized “virtual” organization? The current literature clearly suggests that it is not, pointing out that systemic innovation – innovation requiring coordinated adjustments throughout an entire product system – demands vertical integration, and that a decentralized “virtual” organization is the “wrong choice” (Chesbrough and Teece, 1996:65). I present a theoretical framework and empirical data that suggest otherwise. In a process I call value chain orchestration, I how a highly decentralized organization implements systemic innovation via a mechanism which involves extensive alliance and networking activities, linking the value chains of a wide set of dispersed actors to the value chain of the focal company. With this, I also illuminate the consequences of alliance and network activities, an area where researchers have long called for further studies. In sum, this study illuminates the operating mechanisms which enable systemic innovation via highly a flexible, decentralized organizational structure and illustrates the financial consequences of these intense alliance and networking activities.

ROBERT MASON. The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan.

Robert Mason's new book is an important contribution to a burgeoning literature on the modern history of the Republican Party. Like Michael Bowen, Vincent Cannato, Donald Critchlow, Geoffrey Kabaservice, and Timothy Thurber, Mason is especially interested in the tension between strongly conservative Republicans and more moderately conservative ones, and how that rift complicated the GOP's efforts to recover after the economic and electoral disasters of the Hoover presidency. There are, of course, different ways of going about analyzing those issues. Bowen focused on the competition between the Dewey and Taft forces from the late 1930s through the early 1950s, Cannato on travails of liberal Republicanism as exemplified by John V. Lindsay, Critchlow and Kabaservice on the rise of the New Right, and Thurber on splits within the GOP over the civil rights issue. Mason breaks new ground by covering a longer time period (from the late 1920s through the late 1980s) and by focusing on the GOP as a national political organization. Mason's analysis is strengthened by his sophisticated understanding that the national GOP was in fact a very decentralized organization, more a collection of state parties and other party-related entities than a truly unified institution.

Challenges and Implemented Solutions for the Oral Cleft Prevention Trial in Brazil

The Oral Cleft Prevention Program (OCPP) is a double-blind, randomized, two-arm multi-site clinical trial designed to assess the effect of periconceptional daily folic acid supplementation (4.0 mg vs. 0.4 mg) on the recurrence of cleft lip, with or without cleft palate, among women with elevated risk. Conducted in seven sites in Brazil, the OCPP randomized 2,510 women in the trial (1,257 to the 4.0 mg group, and 1,253 to the 0.4 mg group). A Data Coordinating Center (DCC), located in the United States, is responsible for the trial's statistical design and analysis, data collection system, data management and storage, activity coordination, data quality control, and site training. DCCs of international trials, such as the OCPP, face unique implementation challenges due to de-centralized organization. The objective of this paper is to describe these challenges and to present the innovative solutions developed to address them.

The potential and precariousness of partnership: the case of the Kaiser Permanente labor management partnership

In 1997, the Kaiser Foundation Health Care and Hospitals, the Permanente Medical Federation, and a coalition of unions signed a national agreement creating one of the most ambitious labor management partnerships in U.S. history, initially covering some 58,000 employees. Based on field research and archival data, this paper analyzes the first eight years of this partnership in light of three strategic challenges—initiating, governing, and sustaining partnership—and the organizational challenge of partnership in a highly decentralized organization.