How can an international organization be made adaptable? Having been designed to fulfil a specific mandate, international organizations should disappear from the world stage once .the initial ...conditions that led to their establishment no longer exist: their constituents (governments or activists) will not support them when their mandate becomes obsolete or their added value is reduced. Nonetheless, they survive external shocks, resource traps, and even the growing indifference of their founding fathers. The explanation lies in their successful resistance to constituents’ control; counter-intuitive adaptation to external change; unplanned expansion through mandate enlargement; and a snowballing albeit unintentional trend to build up networks. Overall, the relative success of international organizations can be measured as a global balance between performance and resilience, exploitation and exploration, autonomy and cooperation. To reach that balanced stage they must be altogether dualistic (coupling the technical with the political); adaptive (converting slack into innovation); organic and ambidextrous (setting new challenges while pursuing current activity). Since they combine components that come from local, national, regional and transnational recipes for survival and performance, they are complex hybrids made up of public agencies, private firms, third sector associations, and expert, activist, or lobbying interest groups.
This article uses the concept of style to rethink sustainable entrepreneurship. Our point of departure is the conceptual distinction between organization as style made durable and entrepreneurship as ...the disruption of style. We show that style is not simply an aesthetic category, but rather what ties different social practices together. While organization makes the connections between social practices durable, entrepreneurship disrupts such patterns. We further elucidate how organization and entrepreneurship are two intermingled processes – those of durability and disruption – that together enable the creation of new styles. In order to conceptualize this creative process, we explore how play can create disharmonies within the organization, but we also maintain that any new practice will remain marginal without a collective assemblage capable of adopting it. On this basis, we argue that sustainable entrepreneurship consists of making an environmentally friendly and socially conscious style durable, but also of disrupting such a style. In order to illustrate our argument, we use the example of the sustainable smartphone producer Fairphone. In conclusion, we argue that the concept of style may strengthen the dialogue between entrepreneurship studies and organization studies.
The number of communities affected by disasters has been rising. As a result, non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) that attend community post‐disaster reconstruction are often unable to deliver all ...requirements and have to develop cooperative approaches. However, this collaboration can cause problems because of the complex environments, the fight for limited resources and uncoordinated management, all of which result in poor service delivery to the communities, adding to their woes. From extensive field research and case studies conducted in the post‐Wenchuan earthquake‐stricken communities, this paper introduces an integrated collaboration framework for community post‐disaster reconstruction with the focus on three types of NGOs: international, government organised and civil. The proposed collaboration framework examines the three interrelated components of organisational structure, operational processes and reconstruction goals/implementation areas. Of great significance in better promoting collaborative participation between NGOs are the crucial concepts of participatory reconstruction, double‐layer collaborative networks, and circular review and revision.
Self-Organised Schools De Toni, Alberto F; De Marchi, Stefano
2022, 2023, 20220829
eBook
Open access
Self-Organised Schools: Educational Leadership and Innovative Learning Environments describes the results of the research we carried out at fourteen Italian schools that highlight how there is a ...positive correlation between the capabilities of school self-organization and the innovativeness of learning environments: in other words, the more self-organized schools are, the more innovative learning environments are. The results of this work are part of the strand of research of bottom-up emergency and self-organization, an extremely fruitful trend as shown by Sugata Mitra, the founder of the Self-Organized Learning Environments, according to whom, "education is a self-organized system where learning is an emerging phenomenon". This book gives new insights on self-organization studies, and most of all, to the idea that change - organizational and educational innovation - sparks from the bottom. This book is aimed specifically at school principals of all levels, scholastic reformers, educational scholars, organisation and management consultants who want to innovate learning and management of learning. These actors will benefit drawing useful examples from more than thirty different learning environments worldwide, fourteen examples of schools that self-organize, two frameworks - and two ready-to-use questionnaires - measuring the innovativeness of a learning environment, and the capability of a school to self-organize. Self-organization is the most fascinating future of innovative principals
International commissions, academics, practitioners, and the media have long been critical of the UN’s development efforts as disjointed and not fit for purpose; yet the organization has been an ...essential contributor to progress and peacebuilding. This handbook explores the activities of the UN development system (UNDS), the largest operational pillar of the organization and arguably the arena in which its ideational endeavors have made the biggest contribution to thinking and standards. Contributions focus on the role of the UNDS in sustainable social, economic, and environmental development, describing how the UNDS interacts with the other major functions of the UN system, and how it performs operationally in the context of the new 2030 development agenda focused on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The volume is divided into three sections: Realizing the SDGs: opportunities and challenges;Resources, partnerships, and management; andImagining the future of the UN in development.Comprised of chapters by knowledgeable and authoritative UN experts, this book provides cutting-edge and up-to-date research on the strengths and weaknesses of the UNDS, with each chapter focusing on different operational and ideational aspects.
How do influential social ideas contribute to global governance? This book takes an original approach to international relations by looking at the way social ideas help to portray the world in a ...particular way. Jonathan Joseph begins by analysing the role of important concepts such as globalisation, global civil society, social capital, networks and risk; then examines the role these concepts play in the discourse of international organisations. Using the concept of governmentality, he argues that contemporary social theories help justify contemporary forms of governance. By comparing organisations like the EU and the World Bank, Joseph investigates the extent to which these ideas are influential in theory and in practice.
Organizations are dynamic, hierarchically structured entities. Such dynamism is reflected in the emergence of significant events at every organizational level. Despite this fact, there has been ...relatively little discussion about how events become meaningful and come to impact organizations across space and time. We address this gap by developing event system theory, which suggests that events become salient when they are novel, disruptive, and critical (reflecting an event's strength). Importantly, events can originate at any hierarchical level and their effects can remain within that level or travel up or down throughout the organization, changing or creating new behaviors, features, and events. This impact can extend over time as events vary in duration and timing or as event strength evolves. Event system theory provides a needed shift in focus for organizational theory and research by developing specific propositions articulating the interplay among event strength and the spatial and temporal processes through which events come to influence organizations.
This book argues that investor risk in emerging markets hinges on the company a country keeps. When a country signs on to an economic agreement with states that are widely known to be stable, it ...looks less risky. Conversely, when a country joins a group with more unstable members, it looks more risky. Investors use the company a country keeps as a heuristic in evaluating that country's willingness to honor its sovereign debt obligations. This has important implications for the study of international cooperation as well as of sovereign risk and credibility at the domestic level.
As the preeminent international development agency for the past sixty years, the World Bank has attracted equal amounts of criticism and praise. Critics are especially quick to decry the World Bank's ...hypocrisy--the pervasive gaps between the organization's talk, decisions, and actions. In the wake of the Paul Wolfowitz leadership scandal in May 2006, perceptions of hypocrisy have exacted a heavy toll on the Bank's authority and fueled strong demands for wide-scale reform. Yet what exactly does the hypocrisy of the World Bank look like, and what or who causes it? InHypocrisy Trap, Catherine Weaver explores how the characteristics of change in a complex international organization make hypocrisy difficult to resolve, especially after its exposure becomes a critical threat to the organization's legitimacy and survival.
Using a rich sociological model and several years of field research, Weaver delves into the political and cultural worlds within and outside of the Bank to uncover the tensions that incite and perpetuate organized hypocrisy. She examines the sources and dynamics of hypocrisy in the critical cases of the Bank's governance and anticorruption agenda, and its recent Strategic Compact reorganization. The first book to unravel the puzzle of organized hypocrisy in relation to reform at the World Bank,Hypocrisy Trapultimately enriches our understanding of culture, behavior, and change in international organizations.
This book is an introduction to the study of international organizations in the field of International Relations directed toward students in the discipline. It looks at the different ways in which ...IOs are studied and then applies these different modes of study to a variety of specific case studies.
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