Enterprise Logic Research Articles

From Dust to Buzz: Reconfiguring space for organization-creation

In this paper, we examine the relationship between space and entrepreneurship, understood as organization-creation, by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s spatial theorizing. Building on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Start-Up Incubator, we focus on the ongoing material, discursive and affective reconfiguration of space to promote entrepreneurial ‘buzz’. We show how emancipatory promises (smoothings) are entangled with a logic of enterprise (striations), and how this ambiguity is enacted (folds) as organization-creation emerges spatially. This allows us to problematize the distinction often made between entrepreneurial spaces of emancipation and managerial spaces of control and to consider how they may co-constitute each other through subtle twists and turns. We conclude by discussing this multiplicity and ambiguity with regard to the politics of entrepreneurial spaces.

‘Money Probably Has Something to Do with My Life’: Discourse and Materiality in the Working Lives of Start-Up Entrepreneurs

This article contributes to an understanding of work-intensive entrepreneurial lives as part of analysing the intensification of work in society. It offers an empirical extension of Foucauldian analyses, which attribute commitment to work to the influence of neoliberal enterprise discourse while often neglecting the material conditions of entrepreneurial work. The article draws on moderate constructionism and materialist discourse analysis to offer an account that pays attention to discourse and material realities. This ethnographic study shows how participants evoked norms of enterprise discourse to explain their commitment to work. However, they also understood these norms to be fundamentally shaped by their material conditions. The major contribution of the article is to show that the interpenetration of discursive norms with the investment logic of enterprise tends to displace boundaries between work and personal life and shift temporal arrangements of work from work–life ‘balance’ to prospects of free time in the imagined future.

Want a Horse to Run but not Eat? Conflict Objectives and Policy Dilemmas in China’s Medical Reform

Medical reform is not only closely related to the interests of the public, but it also reflects the interdependence of government, the market, and society. Within a country’s medical reform coexists the “big objective” of the government and the “small objective” of the governance object. Their interactions will affect the policy stream and the policy window. If the “big objective” is compatible with the “small objective”, then the “real policy window” will open. If the two are in conflict, they will grind together, enlarging the discretion of the governance object. The result will be the opening of an “illusory policy window” that will slow the policy reform or even hinder it. The multiple reforms of the Chinese medical industry are the result of the four competitive governance logics coexisting in public hospital governance. The first two-the country’s logic (public welfare dominant) and bureaucratic logic (executive order-led) -have shaped the “big objective” of public welfare. Enterprise logic (market-oriented) and the logic of professional organizations (led by experts) have shaped the “small objective” of effective operation. The conflict and balance between “big objective” and “small objective” have seriously affected the process of Chinese social policy reform.

Addressing Systemic Racial Injustice in the United States from the War on Poverty to Social Enterprise to Black Lives Matter

Despite the many years of reform since the Civil Rights movement, racial justice in the United States has remained elusive because of the endemic nature of racism and anti-Blackness at all levels of American society, including the structures of the welfare state. Using a critical race theory approach, this article examines the evolution of structural social policies from the Great Society of the 1960s to the devolved entrepreneurialism of neoliberalism at the turn of the millennium. If the large-scale social programs of the American welfare state were seen as the only entity with sufficient capacity to collectively change structural racism in the Great Society, neoliberalism brought an austere decentralized vision of social policy that sought to roll back collective security in favor of individual responsibility and risk. Social enterprise emerged in the 1990s as a highly touted method to achieve social justice on the grassroots level amidst the rise of neoliberal ideologies that hollowed out many of the core programs of the American social welfare state. Many extolled the value of social enterprise as a rigorous way to apply efficient business methods to social welfare without taking into account the history of Black enterprise. The neoliberal logic of social enterprise ultimately deters systemic thinking because it focuses on individual abilities and uplift, rather than institutional and structural change. The article ends by reflecting on how the radical imagination of social movements like Black Lives Matter might contribute to achieving racial justice in the United States by re-envisioning collective welfare.

Design and Implementation of a Simplified CodeIgniter Framework for Commercial Vehicles Ticket Reservation System

With traditional strategies to design websites comes with many obstacles, many limitations, time-consuming and other relative errors. Subject to this reason, new technology like MVC pattern frameworks was discovered through some organizations to address such problems. The task of manual schedule and verification of travellers' booked tickets is laborious, time-consuming and the accuracy of the manual booking system is in question. Therefore, it was a mind set of computerizing these activities. These studies present the design and implementation of a website using CodeIgniter Framework for Commercial Vehicle Ticket Reservation System. The load test functional behavior and measurement of performance was determined. The final result proved that the development was standardized and the non-commercial enterprise logic relationship of the e-transport system was automatically processed. These include Commuter companies, travellers, Human resources management activities and booking activities, thus helping transporters to efficiently handle their road transport business and other related activities.

Transition to a new electronic health record and pediatric medication safety: lessons learned in pediatrics within a large academic health system.

While the electronic health record (EHR) has become a standard of care, pediatric patients pose a unique set of risks in adult-oriented systems. We describe medication safety and implementation challenges and solutions in the pediatric population of a large academic center transitioning its EHR to Epic. Examination of the roll-out of a new EHR in a mixed neonatal, pediatric and adult tertiary care center with staggered implementation. We followed the voluntarily reported medication error rate for the neonatal and pediatric subsets and specifically monitored the first 3 months after the roll-out of the new EHR. Data was reviewed and compiled by theme. After implementation, there was a 5-fold increase in the overall number of medication safety reports; by the third month the rate of reported medication errors had returned to baseline. The majority of reports were near misses. Three major safety themes arose: (1) enterprise logic in rounding of doses and dosing volumes; (2) ordering clinician seeing a concentration and product when ordering medications; and (3) the need for standardized dosing units through age contexts created issues with continuous infusions and pump library safeguards. Future research and work need to be focused on standards and guidelines on implementing an EHR that encompasses all age contexts.

The Invisible Hand

Harvey Cox views the free market as its own autonomous religion, a bewildering system of codes and myths that steers the behaviors of its adherents. In his recent book, The Market as God, Harvey Cox sets out to demonstrate that this religion is as comprehensive as any major faith. How we got from John Winthrop to Joel Osteen is the subject of Chris Lehmann’s new book, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream. Lehmann is interested in how the commuitarian spirit of mainline Protestantism was eventually tarnished by the logic of private enterprise.

Enterprise logic vs product logic: the development of GE’s computer product line

The following article focuses on corporate strategies at General Electric (GE) and how corporate-level interventions impacted the market performance of the firm’s general purpose commercial mainframe product set in the period 1960–1968. We show that in periods of both divisional independent planning and corporate-level planning strategic governance, central decisions interfered in the execution of GE’s product strategy. GE’s institutional ‘enterprise logic’ negatively impacted the ‘product logic’ of its computer product line leading to a weakened position in the market for these systems.

Three conceptualizations of hybrid management in hospitals

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to bring the discussion on the relationship between management and medicine a step forward by focussing on: first, how the notion of hybrid and hybridity has been used in the literature on healthcare management. Second, the authors have mapped the alternative ways that the concept have been used in order to conceptualize a more specific set of possible combinations of managerial and professional roles in healthcare management. Hybrid management is a topic that ought to be important for training, communication among researchers and for identifying areas of future research: in management, in healthcare reforms, in sociology of professions and in theory of organizations.Design/methodology/approach– The authors provide a systematic literature review in order to map the various conceptualizations of hybrid management. The authors have searched for “hybrid leadership,” “hybrid management” combined with hospitals and health care in a whole range of journals, identified in Google scholar, Academic Search Premier, Academic Research Library and Sage Publication. The authors have also used already existing literature reviews. The search has resulted in more than 60 articles and book titles that have been classified according to whether they make a fit with three alternative ways of conceptualizing hybrid management. The authors are aware that they might have missed some relevant literature but the literature included is quite comprehensive.Findings– In the literature the authors have found three conceptualizations of management. The clinical manager who combines professional self-governance with a general management logic. The commercialized manager who combines professional self-governance with an enterprise logic. The neo-bureaucratic manager who combines self-governance with a neo-bureaucratic logic.Originality/value– In most analyses of hybridity in management and organization the notion of hybrid has been used in a rather superficial way. By mapping the various uses of hybrid in the literature and suggest how a professional logic may be combined with a set of alternative logics of management the authors provide a platform for developing the concept of hybrid management into a more useful tool for analyses of changes in healthcare management.

Inversions of service-dominant logic

Value creation, both its nature and scope, can be better and more accurately understood by inverting six characteristics of goods-dominant logic, or what is also known as “old enterprise logic” or “neoclassical economics,” into a service-dominant-informed perspective. These six inversions include (1) entrepreneurship and the view that value creation is an unfolding, emergent process seen as superordinate to management, (2) effectual processes understood as primary in relation to predictive processes and better for informing actors about the interactive, resource-integrating, collaborate nature of value creation, (3) marketing being fundamental to value creation and taking primacy over manufacturing, (4) innovation as more fundamental to, and descriptive of, value creation than invention, (5) a focus on effectiveness as captured by value in use and value in context for beneficial actors taking precedence over efficiency, which is inherently a firm-centric lens, and finally (6) the the predominant reliance on heuristics rather than rational, calculative decision making.

Marketing in the Flourishing Society Megatrend

“New science” has profound implications for business. Industrial capitalism can no longer power prosperity. The mass society worldview is giving way to individualisation. The “standard enterprise logic” is challenged. Marketing has operated as an attention technology for sellers competing to capture customers. However, in an intention economy buyers are a scarce commodity, and it is intentions that drive production for specific needs. Change in marketing is overdue. Despite increased social disharmony and the mounting evidence of looming environmental disasters, progress is stagnant, often negative, as marketing exacerbates the problem by misallocating negative value goods. The commonality in the contemporary crises of financial meltdown, human-made climate change, economic inequality, distrust of government, and the social corrosion of consumerism is the moral limits of markets in civic society. Sustainable living provides the higher purpose of marketing: well-being and human flourishing. Sustainability is a socio-cultural, inherently ethical, respectful, intellectual construct for a life of careful and equitable resource use within limits and inter-dependencies. It is not the antithesis of competitive business, indeed business can flourish by competing on, and being rewarded for, the accomplishment of enduringly valuable outcomes. Sustainability is a transcendent societal “mega”-megatrend.

Toward More Operational Dynamic Capabilities Concept: Possible Contribution of the Dynamic Enterprise Construct

The main purpose of the research is to provide some new cognition toward more operational dynamic capabilityconcept based on the enterprise’s life cycle concept and a dynamic enterprise construct. The logic of tendynamic enterprise’s characteristics is followed and propositions are developed. These propositions areproviding basis for development of empirical testing as well as indicating conditions for building and sustainingenterprise’s dynamics. An integral and holistic governance and management approach is of crucial importancefor implementing enterprise’s major orientation toward “dynamics”. This orientation should be incorporated ingoals and objectives at all hierarchical levels of management process; that is in enterprise’s vision, mission, andstrategies as well as in operative goals and objectives of an enterprise.

Charities and ICTs: Can IS-enabled Innovation in Business Critical Activities Be Delivered?

This article looks at the ways in which a number of charities are leading the United Kingdom’s ‘Third Sector’ in their use of ICT/IS capabilities to deliver innovations in a range of business critical activities. It shows that new ICT/IS capabilities afforded opportunities within different types of charities to deliver change. In the older charities established in the ‘pre-Internet’ era, these shifts tend to work with and reflect the existing ‘enterprise logic’ or established ‘ways of doing’. In the younger ‘Net generation’ organisations, the shifts tend to be more fluid in nature, enabling the delivery of new ways of doing and denoting the more flexible model of organisation upon which they were founded. Our research also shows that, in all of the charities, information and data capture and interrogation are intensifying.

Empresa colonial, ontologia e violência

A história, a economia, a lógica e a filosofia da empresa colonial continuam presentes no capitalismo do século XXI, esmagando as comunidades rurais. O poder de decisão está apenas nas mãos do capital transnacional, que se considera o portador do espírito do desenvolvimento global, diante do qual nada é e nada pode ter vida. Impõe a decisão radical de fazer seus megaprojetos e organiza o território como seu. É preciso substituir este destino manifesto do ser excludente e hegemônico pelo reconhecimento do Outro como diferente e fazer justiça aos até agora esmagados, com um regime que defenda seus direitos e com alternativas econômicas que os incluam.

Enterprise logic: explaining corporate attention to stakeholders from the ‘inside‐out’

AbstractWhy are some firms more effective than others at addressing stakeholder concerns? Conventional stakeholder theories focus on variables in the external environment and cannot adequately explain variance across firms operating in the same context. Our matched‐pair study of eight global corporations goes inside the firm and investigates the role of managerial cognition on corporate attention to stakeholders. We find that top management's conceptualization of the firm's relationship with society—which we name enterprise logic—prompts distinct foci of attention and potentially constrains how well a single firm can simultaneously attend to multiple stakeholders. These findings highlight the value of an ‘inside‐out’ perspective, centered on managerial cognition, in explaining why some firms address stakeholder concerns more effectively than their peers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Enterprise logic and small firms: a model of authentic entrepreneurial leadership

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to draw on emerging ideas related to the concept of entrepreneurial leadership which emphasises a “distributed” model synonymous with terms which indicate that authority is decentralised (“shared”, “team”, “democratic”, “representative” and “dispersed”).Design/methodology/approachA model of authentic entrepreneurial leadership was developed based on a review of the literature. Eight small manufacturing companies were selected to empirically examine, via interviews, the extent to which authentic entrepreneurial leadership was adopted by owner‐managers.FindingsInterviews with owner‐managers indicated that they did in fact rely on an approach to leadership which emphasised the role of employees as genuine stakeholders in the business. This finding can be related to the concept of what Dovey and Fenech, describe as “enterprise logic” which the authors link to the emergence of knowledge‐based capitalism. Owner‐managers were keen to involve their employees in development of the businesses through the development of new products and new services.Practical implicationsThis study confirms earlier work which points out the importance of entrepreneurs adopting an authentic approach to leadership. Authentic leadership means that employees are encouraged to develop their individual strengths and owner‐managers adopt an ethical approach to their dealings with all stakeholders.Originality/valueThe paper develops a model of entrepreneurial leadership which sets out the links to organizational innovation. The empirical study provides clear evidence of links between this approach to management and higher levels of innovation within small firms.

Try to Make Compromise the Enterprise's Logic with Engineer's Ethics

Try to Make Compromise the Enterprise's Logic with Engineer's Ethics

Towards a theory of synchronous technological assimilation: The case of Korea's Internet economy

While traditional theories of economic development and the dynamics of late industrialization explain Korea's phenomenal transformation into a major industrial power in only three decades, they fall short of explaining the timing of its ascent to the world's top technological hub, measured in terms of universal broadband installation and Internet usage, i.e., its leadership position in the Internet-centric economy. Moreover, Korea's socio-cultural factors, acknowledged to have enhanced learning and individual motivation as an integral part of Korea's economic transformation, are not sufficient by themselves in explaining Korea's ability to leapfrog over their American, Japanese, and European counterparts. In a departure from stage-of-growth and late industrialization theories, we introduce three synchronous conditions to account for Korea's leapfrogging dynamics: (1) the application of new technologies, (2) the emerging new pattern of individual consumption, and (3) a supporting logic of enterprise that links these two conditions. In adapting these conditions to the case of Korea, we argue that the first two can apply to any generic technological environment, but that the logic of enterprise is inextricably linked to unique Korean cultural values and institutions. In doing so, we hope to unpack the linkage between technological learning, advancement, and national culture.

The Role of Enterprise Logic in the Failure of Organizations to Learn and Transform

Profound change in the global business environment is foregrounding the need for new competitive strategies in organizations. The realization that success in the era of knowledge capitalism depends upon the creative productivity of knowledge workers is focusing attention on the forms of intangible capital that underpin creativity, learning and innovation as sources of competitive advantage. In this article we argue that many organizations are failing to execute mission-critical change because their leaders fail to comprehend how such change is inhibited by the `enterprise logic' of the organization. Through the case of an Australian financial services company, we show that embedded within the functional hierarchical structure of most large organizations is the strategic intention of managerial control, and we argue for the envisioning and development of a form of enterprise logic that is predicated on new structural forms that encompass the principles of co-ownership and lateral power relations.

Centro Sociale Leoncavallo

In this article we analyse the bottom-up response to the lack of social and cultural services in a post-industrial area of Milan (Italy) as a revealing experience of social innovation. Leoncavallo, a self-managed and Leftist social, cultural and political centre established in 1975, represents a peculiar approach to the management of collective services in a participative and informal way, based on the principle of autogestione (self-management). Through an interesting process of `flexible institutionalization', this collective agent has been able to survive the post-1968 era, evolving nowadays into an important political actor in the national and international scenes. From an organizational point of view, the analysis shows how social innovation processes (Moulaert et al., 1990) are strongly related to the social enterprise logic and to the spatial dimension (at different scales): both the management of sense-making processes and the `enactment' of physical spaces (frames) by the activists and by the users of Leoncavallo provide the opportunity to combine the economic, political and social dimensions. This leads in the direction of a `glocal' development, focused on human needs and potentialities as fields for the building of an active citizenship.