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Strategic Commentary: Thought leaders share their views on the HR profession and its direction for the future. Robert “Jake” Jacobs offers five simple questions to help you gauge how strategic you really are ‐ and what to do if your score is disappointing.

The selection of an appropriate enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution remains a complicated task. Since the fundamental role of an ERP solution is to support corporate operations, a key consideration is its alignment with the process requirements of the firm. This work is an investigation into the impact that this alignment has on perceived operational performance. Data are collected using a survey administered to representatives of the machine manufacturing industry. The findings suggest that the alignment of ERP solutions with operational needs is crucial to perceived ability to deliver orders on time and to general satisfaction with the ERP solution.

Despite the breadth of knowledge on self and identity formation across the study of organizations, the field of organizational development and change has limited research on the construction of professional identity. Much has been written to describe the “self-concepts” of those practicing and researching in the field, but there have been no investigations that have explored how these “self-concepts” form. In addition, although women have contributed to defining the “self” in the field, men have held the dominant perspective on the subject. Thus, in this chapter, we address a disparity in the research by exploring the construction of professional identity in the field of organizational development and change, and we give voice to the renowned women who helped to build the field. Using the profiles of 17 American women included in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, we perform a narrative analysis based upon the concepts and models prevalent in the literature on identity formation. By disentangling professional identity formation of the notable women in the field, we can begin to see the nuance and particularities involved in its construction and gain deeper understandings about effective ways to prepare individuals to work in and advance the field.

American choral music of the present day reflects the variety of styles found in vocal and instrumental music throughout the Western world during the twentieth century. However, the majority of choral music is more conservative in form and tonality than is instrumental music, due probably to the heritage of American choral music. Approximately the first two hundred years of choral singing in America were based on religious texts and simple tunes. Choral music in America did not “flower” until the nineteenth century, when composers began to write in a variety of styles, using secular as well as sacred texts.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a dominant role in the international business (IB) literature. Traditionally, by far the majority of IB studies deal with issues at the micro level of the individual MNE, or at the meso level of a sample of individual MNEs in industries. This paper focuses on the impact of MNE behavior through foreign direct investment (FDI) on a country’s international trade, and vice versa. In so doing, this study responds to a recent plea for more macro‐level studies in IB into the effect of MNE behavior on the macroeconomic performance of countries as a whole, particularly developing and emerging economies. In the current study, we focus on the largest developing or emerging economy of all: China. Applying sophisticated econometric techniques, we unravel the causality and direction of FDI‐trade linkages for the Chinese economy in the 1980‐2003 period.

States that for our organizations to flourish, they need to engage the intelligence, creativity and energy of the whole workforce and involve all stakeholders. One way of doing this is to use whole system approaches to planning and implementing change and what have come to be known as large group methods. This article, the second of two parts, describes two further well‐tried methods: real time strategic change and search conferences. It also compares the four methods outlined in the two articles and draws conclusions.

To explore the edges of literature, one must look at contemporary literary reviews and journals. The themes and styles of writing in these reviews and journals reveal new ideas and trends in the literary community. These edges are often rough and not polished, they may present more extreme points of view or they may introduce new subjects. The latest issue of Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, exemplifies this. The theme of the Winter 1993–94 issue is “Borderlands,” edited by Russell Banks and Chase Twichell. In his introduction, Banks says: “But as Doris Lessing says ‘Things change at the edges,’ and insofar as I myself want things to change, and I do, for this world as presently constituted is intolerable, then my ongoing affection for work written ‘on the edge’ is political. I am still sufficiently optimistic to believe that if enough decent people see how bad things are on the borders, they will begin to change things there…The stories and narratives (include) white voices, black voices, male and female, with narrators speaking African‐American English, Hispanic‐American English, and Anglo‐American English, talking high church and low, downtown and up‐: these are the voices that daily surround us; and because they come to us, not from some dreamed‐of center where no one in America lives anymore, but from the inescapable borderlands, they speak for us all.” Chase Twichell reflects in her introduction on what she looked for in deciding what literature to select for this issue. “In terms of the task of editing, this means I now look hard at poems that carry the flags of outrage and grief, even if their surfaces are ‘rough.’ In fact, I've come to value highly some kinds of roughness because I believe they carry their cargos more honestly, in fact more precisely, by refusing to try to smooth unsmoothable edges.” These thoughts fascinated me and seemed to express the new directions and new ways of looking at literature. Many of the contemporary literary reviews and journals attempt to do just this.

This paper aims to provide an introduction to how worker co-operatives and other organisations based on principles of the participatory economy have been adopted in a range of international contexts as a vehicle for transforming places with a strong aspiration to address location-specific social challenges.

Through a presentation of four narrative cases, the paper exemplifies international experiences of co-operative approaches to place-making. It critically reflects on the philosophical and strategic underpinnings of the projects implemented in Rochdale, Preston, Bologna, Rome and Cincinnati.

The practical experiences of a number of local projects of place-making involving co-operatives are conceptualised. The research has identified the importance of institutional, organisational and legal constraints for transformative cooperative-based place-making initiatives. It shows a strong relevance of the place’s historic legacy and communal governance for the choice of place-making approaches.

Further investigation is needed to establish whether co-operatives have the same driving force potential in terms of local regeneration and community wealth building place-making in non-Western contexts and less developed locations.

The paper highlights cases that incorporate place-making practices involving the co-operative organisation and municipal participation and considers their transferability potential.

The paper advances an important conversation relevant to researchers, educators, co-operators, politicians and local officials on diverse contemporary approaches in towns and cities that seek to reshape and regenerate local socio-economic fabric by engaging tradition, principles and organisation models developed within the co-operative movement.