José Luis Alvarez

Haute Couture and Prêt-à-Porter: The Popular Press and the Diffusion of Management Practices

The transformation of management practices has recently become the object of many theoretical and empirical works. While most of these works focus mainly on universities, business schools and consulting firms, our paper aims at investigating the still largely unexplored role of the popular press in the production and legitimation of management ideas and practices. Based on the content analysis of the articles on human resource management published in the last decade in leading newspapers and magazines in Italy, we argue that popular press is the arena where the legitimacy of management ideas and practices is produced. We also suggest that the dynamics of management practice legitimation in Italy, described in this paper, is representative of similar processes occurring in other European countries.

Journeys to the Self: Using Movie Directors in the Classroom.

This article suggests that temporary (project based) filmmaking organizations, and film directors as their leaders, lend themselves to examining a plethora of leadership issues, from social sources of power to competencies in network organizations. It advances for classroom discussion and teaching the cases of Almodóvar and Coppola as examples of idiosyncratic filmmakers in a “subsidy-trapped,” craft like European cinema versus a gross and agent-driven Hollywood studio system. The article concludes with a discussion of the journey metaphor as a unique opportunity to look at the philosophical problem of the meaning of life and the achievement of consistency and continuity in one’s trajectory.

Changing the C-suite: new chief officer roles as strategic responses to institutional complexity: Topics and Issues from European Research

The focus of the chapter by Silviya Svejenova and JosA© Luis Alvarez is on the proliferation of top management positions, the so-called ‘C-Suite’ in business firms. In a neo-institutional vein, the increase in the number of such positions is linked to the broader institutional environments in which business firms are embedded. However, according to the authors the above linkage does not automatically trigger a ‘taken-for-granted’ response by which new chief officer roles come into organizational life. Instead, such roles are actively constructed by strategically operating organizations in response to the institutional complexity that is increasingly characterized by competing and at times conflicting logics.

Sharing Executive Power: Contingencies of corporate power structures

The executive who must work with the human materials around him must also work with the human materials in himself. Glover and Hower, 1963, p. 4 We believe that socio-psychological attitudes of chief executive officers and general managers are a critical contingency in organizational design and strategy that has not been developed sufficiently in previous studies. Lewin and Stephens, 1994, p. 183 I n the introduction we presented some examples of duos, trios, and other constellations at the governance level of corporations. These examples reveal combinations of role separation, role-sharing, and role integration that differ from the standard solo occupancy of corporate governance positions. They also challenge the common assumption held in corporate governance regulations and codes of best practices that affective and trust-based interpersonal relationships among top executives are to be viewed with suspicion. How then we do account for the abundance of small numbers at the top? If a structure is not congruent with the main contingencies in its internal and external environments, performance results will be less than optimal or unsatisfactory, and will, perhaps, even lead to failure. This is a fundamental tenet of the contingency theory of organizational design. A second fundamental assumption of contingency theory, based on the principle of equifinality (Katz and Kahn, 1978; Gresov and Drazin, 1997), is that any organization can reach the same final state (e.g. a sufficient or satisfactory level of adaptation to the environment) by a variety of paths or, in this case, by different structures.