http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/1785/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/40100/ 2013-04-25T00:00:00Z The distributed nature of organizational knowledge makes that knowledge sharing an important factor for unlocking its potential value. In practice, however, people may have different motivations for not sharing knowledge with colleagues, which in part may be due to the relational context. In this paper, we adopt Fiske’s Relational Model Theory to investigate relational dynamics in knowledge sharing behavior. Our objective is to gain insight into how relational model conflicts affect knowledge sharing in organizations. A series of experiments have been conducted, in which the consequences of relational model conflicts for the willingness to share knowledge are evaluated. Each experiment contained four scenarios reflecting different relational models. Participants were faced with different scenarios reflecting particular relational models, and a fictitious other colleague who behaved according to a conflicting relational model. Our analysis shows that the recognition of relational model conflicts strongly depends on the relational models involved. The extent of recognition seems to be related with the nature of the exchange relationships involved in the conflict. For instance, the relational model conflict was more acutely felt by a communal sharing participant facing a market pricing colleague, than by the same participant dealing with an authority ranking response. Likewise, we find that the impact of relational model conflicts on the willingness to share knowledge depends on the relational models involved. Specifically, it appears that market pricing responses have a negative influence on participants’ willingness to share, while communal sharing responses generally have positive effects. Our research serves as a starting point for other studies aiming at a deeper understanding of the dynamics of knowledge sharing behavior of employees and for solving conflicts at work. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37775/ 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Purpose – This paper aims to provide insights into the evolution of the concept of interdisciplinarity in management science and management education. Design/methodology/approach – A range of recently published (1993-2002) works, which aim to provide practical advice rather than theoretical books on pedagogy or educational administration, are critiqued to aid the individual make the transition into academia. The sources are sorted into sections: finding an academic job, general advice, teaching, research and publishing, tenure and organizations. Findings – The paper finds that in the evolution of management education and management science interdisciplinarity took different forms: synoptic and instrumental. Both forms resulted from different knowledge strategies of competing and cooperating disciplines. It concludes that in The Netherlands instrumental versions of interdisciplinarity in management research and education prevailed. Research limitations/implications – The paper studies the evolution of interdisciplinarity in management education and management science in the Dutch higher education context. It assumes that the pattern of evolution differs from country to country. Practical implications – Interdisciplinarity is a complex concept. This study provides practical insights into the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration. Originality/value – Much has been written about interdisciplinarity in science and education. However there is hardly any empirical and historical research on this topic. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19461/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Purpose – This paper aims to provide an alternative explanation for the rise of modern management schools at the turn of the twentieth century. It is to be argued that these schools were not just responses of the higher education system to the demand of industrializing companies for a new class of professional managers, like Chandler suggests. Design/methodology/approach – The historical-actor approach is applied to explain the rise of academic management schools, prior to the Second World War. Data were collected from the archives of different management schools and professional organizations of the engineers and accountants. Findings – To legitimize their position in the higher education system, abstraction appeared to be the dominant strategy of the professions. By abstraction they could distinguish themselves from the lay public and other professional groups in the domain of management. At the moment the new professions had a foot in the higher education system the engineers and the accountants contested for the new management domain. Abstraction appeared also the successful strategy of the accountants to distinguish themselves from the engineers and to establish a sound base for the development of the Dutch variant of business economics. Research limitations/implications – The paper presents a full account of the Dutch situation but the findings cannot be generalized to other countries. More comparative research is needed. The rise of management schools is mostly explained as an educational response to an economic demand. Practical implications – The history of the Dutch business schools may provide researchers and administrators of universities insight into the dynamics of disciplines and into setting up professional schools. Originality/value – This research is based on original documents from the archives of schools and professional organizations. The main contribution of the paper is that it shows how emancipatory and social status motives mediated between the demand and supply side. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21963/ 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z In this paper we explore the relational dimension of knowledge sharing behavior by proposing a comprehensive theoretical framework for studying knowledge sharing in organizations. This theoretical framework originates from Relational Models Theory (RMT). The RMT distinguishes four relational models: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing. We conducted two case studies and investigated how people use different relational models for their knowledge sharing activities. Based on case studies of a governmental organization and an industrial research group, we describe how the relational context guides knowledge sharing behavior. We show that the willingness to share knowledge is rooted in different relational models and that people only share knowledge when they share similar relational models. Furthermore, effective knowledge sharing takes place when incentive systems and knowledge management systems are appropriated to the relational model in use. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/16935/ 2009-11-01T00:00:00Z In this paper we build a multi-theoretical and multi-level framework for analyzing Global Crisis Networks (GCN). These information-centric, heterarchically structured networks are instantiated in response to major disasters with global impact. The instantiation of GCN is conceived as a problem of collective action. Its success depends on multi-level preparedness, and network orchestration and participation. With this framework we analyze the SARS outbreak in 2002 and its successful containment in 2003. We analyze two individual country cases, Canada and China and discuss the role of the network orchestrator, the World Health Organizations. The paper concludes with implications for research and practice. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/10537/ 2007-09-19T00:00:00Z Management research and education are often characterized as being interdisciplinary. However, most discussions on what interdisciplinarity in management studies means have bogged down in ideological fixations. In this paper we alternatively take a historical perspective and analyze the evolution of the interdisciplinarity concept in management studies during the last decades in the Netherlands. We distinguish between two opposite versions of interdisciplinarity: a synoptic (conceptual) and an instrumental (pragmatic) one. Both versions resulted from different knowledge strategies (boundary-work) of competing and cooperating disciplines. We conclude that in the Netherlands instrumental versions of interdisciplinarity in management research and education prevailed. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6769/ 2005-07-13T00:00:00Z Research on the relationship between Information Technology (IT) and organizations emphasizes the complexity of adaptation processes and the potential of drifting. Drifting means that an organization encounters unexpected circumstances that show the incompleteness and possible failure of an initial technological design without organizations having yet feasible alternatives. This conceptual and empirical paper investigates the origins and nature of drifting, and strategies for dealing with drift. Three strategies have been proposed to deal with drifting: control, incremental, and drift containment. We explore the third option that seems most realistic and relevant from an organizational point of view. We empirically investigated how drift containment could be accomplished in practice in a multi-site ERP implementation project. Our results suggest three phases of dealing with drift. Organizations must first recognize when drifting occurs. Next, they must develop a dual focus. On one hand, they must differentiate between a project’s overarching objectives (which remain relatively stable). On the other hand, they attend to and resolve their operational drifting experience. The dual focus thus means that while organizations stay focused on their objectives, they address the causes of drifting. During the final phase, lessons learnt during drifting resolution must be shared and applied to accelerate accomplishment of project objectives. Implications for research and practice are elaborated. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/6559/ 2005-06-01T00:00:00Z Developments in the management education environment present business schools with several challenges. Among these, perhaps the most important to address relates to a mission-critical resource for business schools: faculty retention. In this paper, we position and examine this problem within the context of business schools. We present the results of a research project on faculty retention that was conducted in 2003-2004 among European business school faculty and deans. The results identify the most important factors for faculty retention and suggest that there are perception gaps between faculty and deans on these factors that could lead to distorted decision-making and suboptimal resource allocation. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/1906/ 2005-03-08T00:00:00Z This article addresses the emergence of networks of practice and the role of knowledge sharing via knowledge portals. Its focus is on factors that stimulate the successful emergence of networks of practice. Literature on knowledge management and communities of practice suggest the preexistence of shared knowledge or a shared believe system as a condition sine qua non for the networks of practice to emerge. We challenge this assumption and argue and demonstrate that common knowledge and believe systems are rather a result of knowledge sharing instead of a pre-condition. The central question is how a knowledge portal facilitates the diffusion of knowledge among rather loosely coupled and often disconnected innovation projects. Research is carried out in the agricultural industry in the Netherlands. In this industry there is a need to change from a product-oriented to a problemoriented innovation structure. The set up of a platform and knowledge portal around agro-logistics – crossing different product-oriented production clusters – was therefore a logical result. It gave the opportunity to analyze what the impact of a knowledge portal is in a situation that people and projects come from different organizations that do not know each other. Do they start to share knowledge and what are the conditions? With regard to the case study of the knowledge portal in the agricultural industry we conclude that a knowledge portal will have an impact on how projects are sharing knowledge and on the emergence of a network of practice. The results show that preconditions for the emergence of a network of practice are sense of urgency and fragmented awareness. These results also indicate the important role of a knowledge broker. The developed knowledge portal seems to lead to overcoming structural holes and a closer cognitive distance among the projects. However, we did not find a direct effect of the knowledge portal on sharing tacit knowledge. In the initial phase of a network of practice the knowledge exchange seems to focus on general, non-project specific and explicit knowledge. There was also no direct effect of the knowledge portal on the reciprocity of knowledge exchange among the projects. However, knowledge was shared between the project level and the platform and public level. Conclusions and directions for future research are formulated. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/1817/ 2004-12-03T00:00:00Z In this paper we provide an alternative explanation for the rise of modern management schools at the turn of the 20th century. We argue that these schools were not just responses of the higher education system to the demand of industrializing companies for a new class of professional managers, like Chandler suggests. Based on our historical research we found that the struggle for emancipation of the new professions (engineers and accountants) was the main driver for the founding of these schools. Management schools were viewed as the main vehicles to raise the social status of these new professions. To legitimize their position in the higher education system, abstraction appeared to be the dominant strategy of the professions. By abstraction they could distinguish themselves from the lay public and other professional groups in the domain of management. At the moment the new professions had a foot in the higher education system the engineers and the accountants contested for the new management domain. Abstraction appeared also the successful strategy of the accountants to distinguish themselves from the engineers and to establish a sound base for the development of the Dutch variant of business economics. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/1782/ 2004-10-27T00:00:00Z Community membership has changed over the last decades. Most people participate in different communities simultaneously in order to satisfy different individual interests. This network individualism might threaten the sustainability of modern communities, like communities of practice (CoPs). In this paper we discuss the consequences of this notion for membership in a community. The unit of analysis in this paper is not a ‘stand-alone’ community of practice but the multiple included individual as a node of various networks. This multiple inclusion is deemed to be important for the knowledge sharing between different CoPs. Taking this idea into account our analyses reveals the need to redefine the concept of ‘legitimacy’ in a community. Our underlying assumption is that broadening legitimacies facilitates multiple inclusion of an individual and, in this way, supports the sustainability of a community of practice. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/179/ 2002-03-08T00:00:00Z This paper explores how different models of sociality can contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of knowledge sharing within different organizational settings. It is asserted that the dynamics of knowledge sharing is organized according to a mix of four relational models distinguished by the relation models theory (Fiske, 1991). It is described how each of these models (communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching and market pricing) have their own implications for understanding and supporting the knowledge sharing process. What model of social relations is in use, is influenced by cultural implementation rules, the kind of activity with its division of labor and the characteristics of knowledge being shared and technologies being used. By knowing according to what relational model(s) knowledge is being shared, one can better understand and consequently better facilitate the organizational and technical conditions for sharing knowledge (and vice versa).