Pacey Foster

The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology:

In this paper, we review and analyze the emerging network paradigm in organizational research. We begin with a conventional review of recent research organized around recognized research streams. Next, we analyze this research, developing a set of dimensions along which network studies vary, including direction of causality, levels of analysis, explanatory goals, and explanatory mechanisms. We use the latter two dimensions to construct a 2-by-2 table cross-classifying studies of network consequences into four canonical types: structural social capital, social access to resources, contagion, and environmental shaping. We note the rise in popularity of studies with a greater sense of agency than was traditional in network research.

Using Student-Centered Cases in the Classroom An Action Inquiry Approach to Leadership Development

This article addresses the concern that business schools are not adequately developing the practical leadership skills that are required in the real world of management. The article begins by discussing the limitations of traditional case methods for teaching behavioral skills. This approach is contrasted with an alternative case method drawn from action inquiry (AI) that uses ongoing student cases to develop more effective leadership behaviors. The student-centered case approach is distinguished from traditional case teaching by tracing an important similarity between AI and Socratic pedagogy. A leadership workshop for evening MBAs that uses AI pedagogy to help students improve their leadership behaviors at work and in the class is also described. The article concludes with a discussion of the significant benefits and challenges associated with helping students develop new leadership behaviors.

The Rise of Hollywood East: Regional Film Offices as Intermediaries in Film and Television Production Clusters

Foster P., Manning S. and Terkla D. The rise of Hollywood East: regional film offices as intermediaries in film and television production clusters, Regional Studies. Prior research on project-based organizing in creative industries has emphasized the importance of regionally embedded institutions, creative networks and intermediaries in the development of regional project ecologies. Recently, film and television production in the United States has expanded beyond traditional clusters in Hollywood and New York to new locations in the United States, Canada and overseas, raising important questions about the dynamics of increasingly mobile creative project networks. Using data on the Massachusetts film and television industry between 1998 and 2010, it is argued that regional film offices play an increasingly important role as network intermediaries in connecting mobile creative professionals and project entrepreneurs from outside a cluster with labour pools, service providers and production locations inside a cluster on a project-by-project basis.

Mobile Project Networks: Regional Dynamics in the U.S. Film and Television Industry

Labor mobility and flexible employment practices have been recognized as central constructs in research on creative industries. However, despite the increasing mobility of creative work, flexible employment practices have received much more attention than the geographic mobility of creative projects and workers. This article addresses this gap by studying regional network dynamics in the evolution of the film industry in Massachusetts between 2000 and 2010. The author shows that the geographic distribution and specific types of labor and nonwage spending in the Massachusetts film industry varied over time as a function of the regional project mix and policies designed to lure highly mobile projects to the region.

Tales of the tape: cassette culture, community radio, and the birth of rap music in Boston

Recent scholarship on peer-oriented production and participatory culture tends to emphasize how the digital turn, especially the Internet and the advent of the so-called ‘social web’, has enabled new forms of bottom-up, networked creative production, much of which takes place outside of the commercial media. While remarkable examples of collaboration and democratized cultural production abound in the online era, a longer view situates such practices in histories of media culture where other convergences of production and distribution technologies enabled peer-level exchanges of various sorts and scales. This essay contributes to this project by examining the emergence of a local rap scene in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid-late 1980s via the most accessible ‘mass’ media of the day: the compact cassette and community radio.

Project-Based Industries and Craft-Like Production: Structure, Location, and Performance

This paper examines structural properties, location dynamics, and economic performance of project-based industries and craft-like production from a historical perspective, based on the empirical cases of film production in Massachusetts and fashion design and production in New York City. Our comprehensive analysis has important implications for regional economic development, labor market policies and firm strategies.