Web Of Rules Research Articles

The Metascience of the Academy of Management: Supporting the Global Manager

This is a theory and evidence-based exploration of the emerging Academy of Management metascience as an historical, international organization and social institution. Informed by industrial relations method for inquiry into the “web of rules” governing organizations and insight-based critical realism, I describe two parameters for situating research within the 26 divisions and interest groups (DIGs). First, there developed a horizontal research parameter between organizations and markets. The second vertical parameter ranges between individual and societal level analytics, such as between individual educational predictors for academic success to macro level societal studies. This parameter enables a criterion-predictor empirical modelling approach that appears to be a newly emergent feature of the Academy’s metascience. My exploration first clarifies these parameters. The Academy founding principles are then reviewed, along with a content analysis of Academy journal editor retrospectives. These trace a decades long privileging of quantitative, quasi-experimental design policy favoring statistical modelling. A convenience sample of business statistics texts indicates that the quasi-experimental design vocabulary of dependent – independent style psychological modelling is the dominant methods language available in current training texts. The criterion-predictor alternative for qualitative or quantitative inquiry described is wholly overlooked, although it offers an engaged epistemology for strategizing value-informed outcomes. From predictors of student academic success, to spirituality or religious assessments of workplace authenticity, to goals associated with diversity and change management and sustainability criteria like the triple-bottom line (TBL), this exploratory study captures key methods elements about the Academy’s dynamic, emerging metascience, enabling further dialogue to advance its historical, global mission.

The co-evolution of technology and employment relations: Institutions, innovation and change

This paper presents a theoretical model for understanding the co-evolution process between technologies and employment relations institutions. We have named this framework the Evolutionary Industrial Relations System (e-IRS) after both the original concept of an Industrial Relations System (IRS) by Dunlop and the evolutionary theory. The basic ideas of Dunlop's IRS are maintained: actors interacting in contexts, mediated by a shared ideology, to set up a web of rules that regulate employment relations. However, to surpass some of its main limitations, this model is substantially modified according to the evolutionary contributions about: firm behaviour, innovation and institutions. Innovation is seen as the main drive of change in employment relations institutions. The outcome of this process is unique for each country, because any change in employment regulation has to be negotiated between its respective firms, workers and government.

Towards a new web of rules

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review “institutional experimentation” for protecting workers in response to the contraction of the standard employment relationship and the corresponding rise of “non-standard” forms of paid work.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on the existing research and knowledge base of the authors as well as a thorough review of the extant literature relating to: non-standard employment contracts; sources of labour supply engaging in non-standard work; exogenous pressures on the employment relationship; intermediaries that separate the management from the control of labour; and entities that subvert the employment relationship.FindingsPost-war industrial relations scholars characterised the traditional regulatory model of collective bargaining and the standard employment contract as a “web of rules”. As work relations have become more market mediated, new institutional arrangements have developed to govern these relations and regulate the terms of engagement. The paper argues that these are indicative of an emergent “patchwork of rules” which are instructive for scholars, policymakers, workers’ representatives and employers seeking solutions to the contraction of the traditional regulatory model.Research limitations/implicationsWhile the review of the institutional experimentation is potentially instructive for developing solutions to gaps in labour regulation, a drawback of this approach is that there are limits to the realisation of policy transfer. Some of the initiatives discussed in the paper may be more effective than others for protecting workers on non-standard contracts, but further research is necessary to test their effectiveness including in different contexts.Social implicationsThe findings indicate that a task ahead for the representatives of government, labour and business is to determine how to adapt the emergent patchwork of rules to protect workers from the new vulnerabilities created by, for example, employer extraction and exploitation of their individual bio data, social media data and, not far off, their personal genome sequence.Originality/valueThe paper addresses calls to examine the “institutional intersections” that have informed the changing ways that work is conducted and regulated. These intersections transcend international, national, sectoral and local units of analysis, as well as supply chains, fissured organisational dynamics, intermediaries and online platforms. The analysis also encompasses the broad range of stakeholders including businesses, labour and community groups, nongovernmental organisations and online communities that have influenced changing institutional approaches to employment protection.

Can corporations contribute directly to society or only through regulated behaviour?

This paper explores the mechanisms by which corporations can contribute to society. It examines the roles of regulation and the autonomous contributions of corporations. The roles of incentives to managers to ‘do good’ and of corporate culture to foster social responsibility are considered. The investigation finds that modern corporations are bound by a web of rules and signals that both constrain and support action towards social goals. These include not only formal regulation, but also signals from consumers, compliance with standards, employee expectations, supplier demands, and pressures from civil society. Rules and signals vary by place and time and corporate social responsibility practices must evolve with these pressures from stakeholders.

Labour Arbitration as Translation: The Transformation of Canadian Labour Arbitration in the Twentieth Century from a Semi-Autonomous Institution of the Shop to an Institution of the State

This paper offers a legal pluralist description of the transformation of Canadian labour arbitration over the second half of the twentieth century from an institution of the workplace to an institution of the state. Industrial employment and contractual relations are often described as creating a ‘law of the shop’, or as developing a ‘web of rules’ to govern interactions. These rules are a mix of state law, negotiated norms between employers and employee representatives, amongst workers themselves, and a host of other social and economic forces operating to organize relations at both the industrial and workplace level. Labour arbitrators, appointed and paid for by the parties to interpret collective bargaining agreements, historically expert in the dynamics of the workplace, and concerned with the long term relationships of the parties, have traditionally acted as translators of sorts. Labour arbitration sat at the intersection of the ‘law of the shop’ and the law of the state. Arbitrators acted to translate and mediate between the overarching principles of state law and the terms negotiated by the workplace parties, seeking to use the language and concepts of each so as to protect the system of private contracting from unwanted judicial interference. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, the increasing number of individual statutory rights regime (particularly human rights law) and the expanded scope of arbitral jurisdiction, has served to legalize this previously informal institution, and to effectively pull it into the service of the state’s law.

Hard Rules and Soft Constraints: regulating conflict of interest in China

The initial paragraphs of this article outline the broad themes of this special section, drawing attention to changing perceptions and definitions of corruption and to corruption prevention practices in Greater China. The remainder of the article focuses on a particular theme: the relationship between conflicts of interest and corruption in both theoretical terms and in its application in mainland China. Conflicts of interest are conceptualized as the incompatibility between the public interest associated with official duties and interests derived from the private domain. Such conflicts do not always necessarily lead to corruption and may be distinguished from it. By examining the way in which they are regulated in China, we argue that although an intricate web of rules has been established, regulations alone cannot guarantee ethically sound behaviour if there is no supportive value framework of like-minded civil servants. Rules require interpretation and if this discretion means that civil servants choose to follow an administrative culture and personal values that conflict with the regulations, they will have little effect. Hard rules may mean soft constraints.

Medical Necessity

Medical necessity is a legal, not medical, term. Depending on the stakeholder's point of view, it may seem less about human need and dispensing medical care and more about a web of rules, rulings, regulations, and manuals, especially for Medicare patients, who use the lion's share of rehabilitation services. In other words, the term medical necessity seems, to some stakeholders, to refer more to what determines payment by Medicare instead of what should be done to determine optimal patient health. Such a perspective on medical necessity has major implications, considering that Medicare pays for most of the rehabilitation treatment in some 1200 inpatient rehabilitation facilities and that its policies determine which patients qualify for admission to an inpatient rehabilitation facility. Medicare's medical necessity policies are often described by inpatient rehabilitation facility administrators and physiatrists as complicated and unfair, as well as being demeaning to the standing of physicians. Ask some physiatrists about their patients meeting Medicare guidelines for medical necessity, and they might bark, "Medical necessity?! That's what I was taught to know!"

A Portrait of War, a Grammar of Peace: Goethe, Laukhard, and the Campaign of 1792

ABSTRACTWhen Prussia and Austria invaded France in 1792 in an attempt to defeat the revolutionary army, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) accompanied his sovereign Carl August on the campaign. Almost thirty years later, Goethe recorded his version of the defeat and catastrophic retreat of the allied forces. Goethe's account embraces the perspective of a privileged observer, who enjoys the relative comfort afforded by his social class. In contrast, the memoirs of Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1757–1822), a failed academic turned common soldier, who also participated in the campaign, are written from the vantage point of the experienced grunt. While Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich (1822) is often considered a minor accomplishment in a major oeuvre, Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich, which forms part of his autobiography Leben und Schicksale von ihm selbst beschrieben (1796), has received little scholarly attention.1 In spite of these different valuations, both Laukhard's and Goethe's texts have been subject to severe criticism. Laukhard's Begebenheiten has been disparaged because of its failure to turn experience into art, while Goethe's account was condemned for its failure to represent war truthfully. Clearly, Goethe's and Laukhard's texts are different in style, structure, and ideology, and yet there is one fundamental premise on which they agree. Both Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich and Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich are radically opposed to the concept of war as a sublime experience that many of their contemporaries endorsed and advocated. Laukhard's text offers a scathing critique of aristocratic abuse of power and deconstructs the notion of war as sublime through a focus on ‘the body in pain’ (Scarry). Goethe's text, on the other hand, which has often been accused of an uncritical stance towards the war, rejects the notion of war as a creative and ennobling force. Instead, Goethe traces war's destructive effect on the web of rules and habits that govern the peaceful working of society. Laukhardt records the horrors of war, Goethe seeks to delineate a grammar of peace amidst the terror of war.2

Weaving the Mesh: Finding Remedies in Cyberspace

This paper will categorise cyberspace as a microcosm of Darwinistic evolution, tracing the organic growth that has resulted in the increasingly tangled web of rules that today stretches throughout the on-line world. This evolution has produced a complementarity and interdependence between private and state regulation in a manner that will probably long affect current and future trends in the governance of cyberspace. The paper concludes that, while rule systems will continue to converge, the driving force will remain the perennial search to provide remedies to the needs of clients. The latter drive for real-time remedies for real problems will probably produce workable rule-systems faster because they are pushed by the needs of millions of customers operating within the context of on-line market economics. This is in direct contrast to the development of formal rules for Internet governance by states. Lawyers need practical solutions for their clients and this paper identifies a number of private international law problems that will increasingly dominate public law issues in cyberlaw.

Clinical governance and primary care in the English National Health Service: Some issues of organization and rules

New Labour's concept of 'clinical governance' is an essentially bureaucratic strategy in that it places great emphasis on controlling the behaviour of NHS clinical professionals via a web of rules, including clinical guidelines and National Service Frameworks, supported by new external agencies such as NICE and CHI. In the context of primary medical care, however the classic organizational means for implementing such rules, the bureaucratic hierarchy, is largely absent. Despite the current development of new forms of primary care organization (PCGs, PCTs and PMS Pilots) which display some hierarchical characteristics, these remain highly attenuated and a priori unfitted to implement bureaucratic rules. This paper explores the validity of such doubts through three sources of evidence: research into 'total fundholding' (many of whose characteristics are shared by the new organizational forms), contemporary Internet user group discussions between GPs in PCGs, and some pilot interviews of GPs in a northern PCG. The latter two data sources are not presented as representative, but rather to highlight the apparent lack of fit between central components of New Labour health policy and the need for empirical research on the topic.

Oh, Reason Not the Need: Rights and Other Imperfect Alternatives for those without Voice

Oh, Reason Not the Need: Rights and Other Imperfect Alternatives for those without Voice

Culture and the law in Islam.

Rather than living in a homogeneous world, Muslim women participate in vastly different cultures. The Women Living Under Muslim Law (WLUML) Network was set up to unite women in Muslim countries across the world and to stimulate them to analyze and reconceptualize the nature of their situation in order to formulate strategies for change. In Muslim countries, the law provides a web of rules which shape every aspect of women's lives. Because these laws have been presented as "Islamic," traditional human rights groups have been loathe to criticize them for fear of trampling religious rights. The WLUML started the "Women and the Law" project, therefore, to chart and conduct action-oriented research in law in 26 countries. This project is based on the conviction that the key to women gaining the power to control their destinies will lie in their ability to master the law that shapes their lives. This project should lay the foundation for the vindication of the human rights of Muslim women.