Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson

A Smart City Is a Collaborative Community: Lessons from Smart Aarhus

Initiatives to redesign cities so that they are smarter and more sustainable are increasing worldwide. A smart city can be understood as a community in which citizens, business firms, knowledge institutions, and municipal agencies collaborate with one another to achieve systems integration and efficiency, citizen engagement, and a continually improving quality of life. This article presents an organizational framework for such collaboration and employs it to analyze Smart Aarhus, the smart-city initiative of Aarhus, Denmark. Based on the experiences of Smart Aarhus to date, it offers a set of lessons that can benefit the designers, leaders, and policymakers of other smart-city initiatives.

Theoretical Perspectives on the Internationalization of Firms

The purpose of this article is to build a coherent framework of the four main theories relating to the internationalization of firms, in order to facilitate better business teaching and research. Yet, theories of the internationalization of firms are broad and rest on different underlying assumptions. With the purpose of clarifying the potential for integration of partial theories and fragments in a more logically connected theoretical area, this article offers a meta‐theoretical overview of four perspectives within international business economics: Research and its related background, basic assumptions, study area, and implications of the theories in the internationalization of the firm.

The Structural Properties of Sustainable, Continuous Change Achieving Reliability Through Flexibility

Recent studies show that the relationship between structure and inertia in changing environments may be more complex than previously held and that the theoretical logics tying inertia with flexibility and efficiency remain incomplete. Using a computational model, this article aims to clarify this relationship by exploring what structural properties enable continuous change in inertia-generating organizations and what their performance consequences are in dynamic environments. The article has three main findings: First, employing managers who anticipate change is not enough to generate continuous change; it is also necessary to raise both the rate of responsiveness and desired performance. Second, continuous change increases average organizational performance and reduces its variation. Third, organizations’ capacity for continuous change is counterintuitively limited by the organizations’ capacity to build inertia. These are important insights, because they suggest that with the right design, organizations may be both more flexible and reliable than commonly believed.

The effect of virtuality on the functioning of centralized versus decentralized structures--an information processing perspective

Does virtuality in organizations require centralization or decentralization? We specify the coordination and information processing requirements for virtual organizing in order to examine how these requirements are met by centralized and decentralized structural designs, respectively. We use the agent based SimVision computational discrete event simulation model as our experimental platform to develop concise and comparable measures of the information processing needs of virtual organizing, and how these are met by the information processing capabilities of the centralized and decentralized structures. Contrary to conventional wisdom, that the centralized form is more effective in virtual settings than the decentralized form.

Embedding Virtuality into Organization Design Theory: Virtuality and Its Information Processing Consequences

What is virtuality in organizational design? In this chapter we argue for the importance of understanding the nature and effect of the characteristics of virtual organizations, rather than simply focusing on how these characteristics are different from co-located organizations. Through a review of literature relating to virtual organizations we identify two different dimensions: locational and relational differentiation, which capture the nature of virtual organizations well. We anchor theoretically these dimensions to organization design and information processing theory. This enables us to identify their effects and consequences for coordination in information processing terms. We thereby not only integrate theory of virtual organization into extant theory of organization design but, more importantly, also demonstrate how increasing virtuality essentially imposes an information processing dilemma for organizations: Locational differentiation reduces the information processing capacity, while relational differentiation increases the information processing requirements. We discuss the managerial as well as the theoretical implications of these findings.

On Cooperative Behavior in Distributed Teams: The Influence of Organizational Design, Media Richness, Social Interaction, and Interaction Adaptation

Self-interest vs. cooperation is a fundamental dilemma in animal behavior as well as in human and organizational behavior. In organizations, how to get people to cooperate despite or in conjunction with their self-interest is fundamental to the achievement of a common goal. While both organizational designs and social interactions have been found to further cooperation in organizations, some of the literature has received contradictory support, just as very little research, if any, has examined their joint effects in distributed organizations, where communication is usually achieved via different communication media. This paper reviews the extant literature and offers a set of hypotheses to integrate current theories and explanations. Further, it discusses how future research should examine the joint effects of media, incentives, and social interactions.

The influence of geographical and clinical factors on decisions to use surgical mesh in operations for pelvic organ prolapse

Background: Surgical mesh can reinforce damaged biological structures in operations for genital organ prolapse. The first mesh products were cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002...