The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play ...games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? "Lindens"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
Jeffrey Greene is a Senior Advisor at Fortuna Advisors, a management consulting firm focused on strategic decision making, resource allocation, and culture transformation. In this article, he ...discusses the importance of culture in driving positive business outcomes.
In countries where the management is not dominated by the established orthodoxy of European and North American theories, principles and practices, it is possible to use alternative concepts with less ...ponderous resistance. Most of the researchers who follow the established orthodoxy either: (a) take it for granted that the corporate cultures are preconditioned by or reflect their country cultures, and therefore they begin their research with a study of country cultures, and then proceed to interpret corporate cultures in terms of country cultures; or (b) infer the country cultures from an aggregate of corporate cultures. In both cases they intentionally or unintentionally stereotype corporate cultures as well as country cultures. A corollary to this homogenistic reasoning is : (c) to assume that all individuals are saturated with the country culture, and therefore if a firm wants to deviate from the country culture, it must force the employees to change, and this change must be made from top-down.
We examine how corporate culture influences firm behavior. Prior research suggests a link between individual religiosity and risk aversion. We find that this relationship also influences ...organizational behavior. Firms located in counties with higher levels of religiosity display lower degrees of risk exposure, as measured by variances in equity returns or returns on assets. They exhibit a lower investment rate and less growth, but generate a more positive market reaction, when they announce new investments. Finally, chief executive officers are more likely to join a firm with a similar religious environment as in their previous firm when they switch employers.
This is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of
nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star,
Shamu the killer whale-as well as performing dolphins, pettable
...sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds-the park
represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and
concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis
analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it:
the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the
privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of
advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an
engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and
animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account
of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch,
succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature
around customers' worries and concerns about the environment,
family relations, and education. While Davis shows the many ways
that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and
landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the
contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive
public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights
activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public
relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's
vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing
Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of
contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an
intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment
in shaping public understandings of the environment and
environmental problems.
Abstract
We create a culture dictionary using one of the latest machine learning techniques—the word embedding model—and 209,480 earnings call transcripts. We score the five corporate cultural values ...of innovation, integrity, quality, respect, and teamwork for 62,664 firm-year observations over the period 2001–2018. We show that an innovative culture is broader than the usual measures of corporate innovation – R&D expenses and the number of patents. Moreover, we show that corporate culture correlates with business outcomes, including operational efficiency, risk-taking, earnings management, executive compensation design, firm value, and deal making, and that the culture-performance link is more pronounced in bad times. Finally, we present suggestive evidence that corporate culture is shaped by major corporate events, such as mergers and acquisitions.
Este trabajo estudia la cultura organizacional (CO) como motor para impulsar la innovación social corporativa (ISC) en las empresas. Con una metodología basada en la revisión sistemática de la ...literatura, la principal contribución académica es el diseño de un marco teórico que permite dilucidar qué tipo de CO es la más adecuada para albergar la ISC, así como una propuesta original de factores clave para promover dicha cultura. Esta propuesta pretende también ser una guía para directivos y profesionales a fin de implantar culturas organizacionales proclives a la innovación social en sus empresas.
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