scholarly journals Blockchain Governance—A New Way of Organizing Collaborations?

Author(s):  
Fabrice Lumineau ◽  
Wenqian Wang ◽  
Oliver Schilke

The recent emergence of blockchains may be considered a critical turning point in organizing collaborations. We outline the historical background and the fundamental features of blockchains and present an analysis with a focus on their role as governance mechanisms. Specifically, we argue that blockchains offer a way to enforce agreements and achieve cooperation and coordination that is distinct from both traditional contractual and relational governance as well as from other information technology solutions. We also examine the scope of blockchains as efficient governance mechanisms and highlight the tacitness of the transaction as a key boundary condition. We then discuss how blockchain governance interacts with traditional governance mechanisms in both substitutive and complementary ways. We pay particular attention to blockchains’ social implications as well as their inherent challenges and limitations. Our analysis culminates in a research agenda that explores how blockchains may change the way to organize collaborations, including issues of what different types of blockchains may emerge, who is involved and impacted by blockchain governance, why actors may want blockchains, when and where blockchains can be more (versus less) effective, and how blockchains influence a number of important organizational outcomes.

Author(s):  
Steven Bernstein

This commentary discusses three challenges for the promising and ambitious research agenda outlined in the volume. First, it interrogates the volume’s attempts to differentiate political communities of legitimation, which may vary widely in composition, power, and relevance across institutions and geographies, with important implications not only for who matters, but also for what gets legitimated, and with what consequences. Second, it examines avenues to overcome possible trade-offs from gains in empirical tractability achieved through the volume’s focus on actor beliefs and strategies. One such trade-off is less attention to evolving norms and cultural factors that may underpin actors’ expectations about what legitimacy requires. Third, it addresses the challenge of theory building that can link legitimacy sources, (de)legitimation practices, audiences, and consequences of legitimacy across different types of institutions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Vincent K.L. Chang

Abstract The recent surge in public remembrance of the Second World War in China has been substantially undergirded by a centrally planned and systematically implemented discursive shift which has remained overlooked in the literature. This study examines the revised official narrative by drawing on three cases from China's school curriculum, museums and formal diplomacy. It finds that the once dominant trope of “national victimization” no longer represents the main thrust in the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rhetoric on the Second World War. Under Xi Jinping, this has been replaced by a self-assertive and aspirational narrative of “national victory” and “national greatness,” designed to enhance Beijing's legitimacy and advance its domestic and foreign policy objectives. By emphasizing national unity and CCP–KMT cooperation, the new narrative offers an inclusive and unifying interpretation of China's war effort in which the victory in 1945 has come to rival the 1949 revolution as the critical turning point towards “national rejuvenation.” The increasingly Sino-centric and centrally controlled narrative holds implicit warnings to those challenging Beijing's claim to greatness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 014920632110142
Author(s):  
Varkey Titus ◽  
Jonathan P. O’Brien ◽  
Jaya Dixit

Although organizational slack is a prominent construct in strategic management, it is often treated as an antecedent or enabler of other organizational outcomes, and thus our understanding of where slack comes from is underdeveloped. We draw on the behavioral theory of the firm to develop a better understanding about the antecedents of organizational slack. In so doing, we address a gap in the literature on the antecedents of slack by developing base models showing how and why performance feedback influences the three most common types of slack studied in the literature. Moreover, we contend that ownership is an important contingency that influences these relationships because different types of owners are motivated by different norms. Within a “communitarian” culture such as Japan, domestic owners generally have a multifaceted relationship with the firm and hence are motivated by norms of reciprocity and embeddedness, thereby allowing managers to adopt a stakeholder perspective. In contrast, foreign investors typically have only an arm’s-length relationship with the firm and are thus motivated by stock price, thereby putting “contractarian” pressures on managers to adopt a shareholder perspective. This domestic/foreign ownership distinction influences how resources are allocated and therefore the relationship between performance feedback and different types of slack in the firm. We further emphasize that these relationships will vary in accordance to where the slack resides: internal or external to the firm. We find general support for our hypotheses.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio Paolucci ◽  
Elena Pessot ◽  
Riccardo Ricci

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the effect of specific subsets of digital technologies and governance mechanisms (i.e. relational and contractual) on the efficiency of the automotive supply chain (SC).Design/methodology/approachBuilding on the Transaction Costs Economic (TCE) theory, and on the literatures on the governance and Digital Transformation of SCs, the research employs a multi-respondent survey on a sample of 101 Italian automotive suppliers. It analyses the interplay between investments in network and physical–digital interface technologies and buyer–supplier relationship governance models in a joint product development effort. The related effects on costs, from the automotive suppliers' perspective, are considered.FindingsThe results confirm the TCE assumptions on governance mechanisms being appropriate to enhance cost performance, but in particular show that digital technologies shape the governance of buyer–supplier relationships with different patterns. The features of synchronisation and accessibility, as ensured by network technologies, are found to strengthen the impact of contractual governance, while the adoption of physical–digital interface technologies, and their enhanced features of virtualisation and traceability, further enhance the impact of relational governance on the efficiency improvements of suppliers.Practical implicationsSC actors need to recognise the importance of long-term collaboration and superior coordination through investments in specific subsets of digital technologies, to ensure a higher product and production data codifiability, transparency and thus integration at both an intra- and an inter-firm level.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to have considered Digital Transformation in SCs from the suppliers' perspective and its implications on the efficiency of relationship governance with buyers.


Author(s):  
Kefeng Mao ◽  
Xi Chen ◽  
Kelan Zhu ◽  
Dong Hu ◽  
Yan Li

Using image processing technology to extract important information, such as isoline and weather system of the meteorological facsimile chart, is conducive to integration with other information, and has important practical value in navigation operations, marine weather forecasting, target recognition, and image retrieval. In meteorological facsimile charts, there are many types of medium-value lines, dense lines in some areas, superimposition and presence of multiple information, such as isolines and isoline characters, intersection of specific weather system symbols, etc. For different types of contours, numeric characters, weather system symbols and other object characteristics, the corresponding object extraction and recognition methods are proposed: Remove the latitude and longitude lines and coastline in the meteorological facsimile map by basemap matching; According to the position and shape features of the figure box, extract the meteorological fax figure box, separate and remove the different character tagging information; On the basis of identifying triangles and semicircles in weather symbols of the frontal system, the frontal symbols are extracted based on the circumscribed triangles and template matching. First the contour character on the fax image is expanded into a block connected region. Determine the position of the character information by judging the number of pixels in the connected region, and then use rotation and template matching to identify the numeric character. Using the meteorological facsimile maps of the US Meteorological Center and the Japan Meteorological Center for the main information extraction, experiments show that the method of this paper has a good effect on the complete and accurate symbol extraction of frontal weather systems, and reduces the computational complexity of contour detection, isoline extraction and numerical recognition. The methods can detect some information from weather charts properly and the error rate is very low.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Beall ◽  
Jennifer Wayman ◽  
Heidi D'Agostino ◽  
Angie Liang ◽  
Cara Perellis

AJS Review ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Adam J. Sacks

The controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt's reportage on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the subsequent book cannot be underestimated. For Arendt personally, the trial was the decisive event in the second half of her life and amounted to nothing less than a second exile. On the world stage, it marked not only a critical turning point in international consciousness of the Holocaust, but also both initiated and reflected a critical shift in intra-Jewish representations and expression. Arendt's book could in fact be considered as a master text for Judaic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. To mention two of many possible consequences, the controversy may be seen as a pivot point from which the culture of the public intellectuals of New York argued itself out of the spotlight, as well as a primary catalyst for two of the most significant works on the Holocaust penned by women: Lucy Davidowicz'sThe War against the Jews(1975) and Leni Yahil'sThe Holocaust(1987).


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