Promising Practice
Improved management practice has been identified as a key enhanced productivity and performance as well as to sustained innovation. A considerable inventory of promising practices has been collected in the private and public sector of the UK. Some of that inventory is well founded upon evidence from rigorous research; other work is less well grounded. The potential value of this inventory is not realised because in part research is not reaching practising managers in ways that lead most effectively to adaptation and therefore changes in practice but also in part because we do not understand enough about the specific conditions which either facilitate or disable the adoption of specific practices. With the involvement of those seeking to identify adapt and effect change we at AIM Research try to encourage wider appreciation and adaptation of what has been learned. View our outputs below to find out more.
Promising Practices Projects:
Gerard Hodgkinson and Gerry Johnson - A Survey of Strategy Workshop
This was a joint research project led by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson in collaboration with Professor Gerry Johnson, Richard Whittington and Dr Mirela Schwarz, in association with the Chartered Management Institute.
Chris Huxham - Collaborative Advantage
Managing partnerships, alliances and other forms of inter-organizational collaborative arrangements is now a major aspect of most managerial jobs so the ability to do so effectively has become a seriously important managerial skill.
Chris Huxham - Collaboration in the Context of Industrial Clusters
This project is at a very early stage. We will be examining leadership and process learning in optronic clusters in the UK and Germany.
George Yip - Corporate Governance Effects on Global Strategy
Multinational companies (MNCs) vary in both their use of global strategy and in the systems of corporate governance in which they operate. Differences in national corporate governance systems will influence the behaviour of corporate actors, which in turn explains the ability of MNCs to achieve global integration.
Chris Voss - Development and Adaptation of Promising Practice
The broad set of research questions developed in collaboration with the AIM team are: What is a promising practice? How do practices emerge? What are practices adopted? What is success? What practices can/should lead to success? What is transferable?
Chris Voss - Experienced Based Services
This is a broad study of a new field 'experience economy' and the emergence of promising practices associated with it. The agenda has developed as the study progresses. The first focus is the nature of experience-based services with particular focus on emerging models of destinations, measurement of experience outcomes, and evaluation of experience investments.
This project addresses the shortage of research into how strategy is developed and shaped within and across organizational levels. The project examines the role of the cognitive competencies of Middle and Senior Managers' in strategizing at the individual and team levels.
This project extends 'Exploring Cognitive Capabilities in Action I' by exploring the impact of the operating environment on sensemaking processes of senior management teams within the same organization.
George Yip - Global Customer-Supplier Management
The project concerns how multinational companies should manage relationships with their multinational customers and suppliers. In particular should they manage these relationships on a country-by-country basis or on a global basis (Global Customer-Supplier Management or GCSM)?
Chris Huxham - Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations
The handbook, which will be published by Oxford University Press, is intended as a seminal piece, bringing together contributions from an international set of authors writing from the many disciplines through which IOR is researched. The Handbook has three major sections focusing on Manifestations of IORs, Theories and Disciplines, and IOR themes.
Chris Huxham - Learning and Collaboration
Learning is a focal issue in many inter-organizational collaborations in both public and private sector settings. It is also central to practice adoption and innovation through alliances and networks. This project is concerned with developing an understanding of approaches to learning in such contexts, with particular reference to the planned or emergent possibilities for collaborative advantage which might thereby result.
Gerry Johnson - Micro Perspectives on Strategic Development and Decision-Making
There has always been an interest by some strategy scholars in the activities of managers as they relate to the development of strategy. In this, several strands of research have started to.
One is concerned with what strategists actually do - with strategizing. The second is the gap highlighted by resource based theorists: the need to understand the activities that underpin the distinctive competences bestowing competitive advantage on organisations.
Chris Voss - Next Generation Practices and Tools
This project is a link with the EPSRC community and is seeking to bring AIM inputs into a project started at the Cambridge Innovation Manufacturing Research centre. There are three sets of issues within benchmarking. First, content; most of today's practices are based on 1980's or 1990's knowledge.
Gerard Hodgkinson and Gerry Johnson - Strategy Workshops
Amongst other projects, Professor Gerry Johnson is involved in studying a common but under researched organizational phenomenon - strategy workshops or away days and the role they play in strategy development in organizations. These are episodes of organizational practice that bring together the use of common strategy tools within the political context of group interaction that has been a concern of much strategy process research.
Chris Huxham - Storying Practice: Adaptation and Adoption
This project partly parallels the 'role of stories' project but is specifically concerned with storying in relation to collaboration practice. It is focusing on two aspects of the role of stories. Firstly, their role in relation to collaboration practice transfer, and secondly the use of stories, as a forms of sources of data for building practice relevant theory about collaboration.
Lynda Gratton - The Cooperative Advantage: Building the Critical Organizational Capability
The era of internal competition is dead. In a world where value must be created through innovation, where ubiquitous communication technology has levelled the playing field, where resources are coupled flexibly as needed, cooperation becomes the most critical organization capability.
Lynda Gratton - The Nature of Cooperation
Cooperation is a crucial building block for innovation and productivity. In this project we undertake a literature review and begin to build a theory of cooperation.
Chris Huxham - The Role of Stories of Practice in the Adoption of Promising Practice
This work is concerned with the presentations about their experiences of successful practice that managers (both high profile 'circuit speakers' and unknown 'experience sharers') are often asked to make to other managers. The research is concerned with understanding how such presentations are constructed and whether and how they are effective in transferring useful practice.
Chris Huxham - The Theory and Practice of Collaborative Advantage
Managing partnerships, alliances and other forms of inter-organizational collaborative arrangements is now a major aspect of most managerial jobs so the ability to do so effectively has become a seriously important managerial skill.
Our anaylsis places organizational learning, centre stage, arguing that there is an urgent need for new work to investigate with much greater rigour the efficacy of frameworks, tools and techniques that purport to foster strategic learning, and we call for the development of empirical work to further understanding of the interactive role played by a variety of psychological and contextual factors in the successful adaptation of these procedures.
Chris Huxham - Tradition in Inter-Organizational Collaboration
Tradition is most often alluded to in connection with culture, but often in rather unproblematized terms. Whereas culture has been shown to be a source of challenge to management practice in interorganizational collaboration, tradition has not been investigated.
Basic demographic data and relevant psychological data concerning work locus of control and work centrally have also been gathered to investigate the possible moderating impact of these theoretically important factors on the way in which individuals internalize their worlds.
Chris Huxham - Understanding Success in Collaboration
This project is concerned with exploring how those engaged in collaborative initiatives conceive the nature of success. This is an important contributor to understanding issues in the transfer of collaboration practice.
Nic Beech - The Enactment of Management Practice
The research will explore the realities of managing in the creative industries from different stakeholder perspectives. Managing is conceived as a series of activities with the aim of producing a performance in organizational and artistic terms.
The mainstream literature on management practices tends to focus on the bright side: “best practice”, “promising practice” and “world class techniques” that lead to positive organisational outcomes. However, management practices will inevitably produce a dark side: secondary outcomes that are unexpected and potentially harmful to organisations and society.
Katy Mason - Making Markets: The Practice of Business Models
To be internationally competitive, organisations develop competitive strategies for existing and new markets. One way that organisations are achieving this is through the development of new business models. Business models are used to structure business networks, transactions, money making and knowledge sharing activities, as well as to define and select markets to serve.
Joe O'Mahoney - Exploring the Role of Management Consultancies in Innovating Management Practices
The creation and dissemination of new management practices has been shown to be central to improving productivity and economic growth by enhancing business efficiency. Often depicted as the R&D wing of innovative management practice, the management consulting industry has been central to the co-creation of innovations such as BPR, TQM, eBusiness and outsourcing and embedding them in client organisations.
Management practices are accepted recipes, methods or techniques used to achieve organizational goals. Much previous research has focused on practice adoption, i.e. the emulation of practices that already exist. However, when environments change rapidly, 'best practices' often do not exist and organizations have to create new practices.
Zoe Radnor - Conditions of Readiness to Support Sustainability of Lean in Public Services
My research experience to date has led me to question from an Operations Management perspective the content and design of Lean as its use is being transferred from a manufacturing to a public sector environment. In particular, the research over the past few years has led to questioning if organisations have viewed themselves as being ready to engage with Lean or, have merely implemented the concept as a response to policy through the use of some of the tools and techniques.
Jennifer Whyte - Management Practices in Project-Based Design Environments
This AIM Fellowship looks at management practices in project-based environments. The UK government is investing in major infrastructure projects and programmes. These include the £45 billion Building Schools for the Future Programme, £16 billion CrossRail and £9 billion London 2012 Olympics.
Paula Jarzabkowski -Adopting Promising Strategizing Practices
The second project addresses policy concerns over the relevance of management education. Policy reports indicate that little is known of how, or indeed, whether, managers use the theoretical tools that they learn in management education.
Julia Balogun - Promising Practices, Strategic Change
This research project has adopted this persepctive to extend prior work on strategic change, transformation and renewal. The project has primarily focussed on two major longitudinal, real-time empirical case studies of strategic change.
For further information relating to the Promising Practice Projects, please contact aim@wbs.ac.uk
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