Over twenty of the BPS faculty have active research projects with foreign universities or companies. This is an example of the resource base the School has developed that creates greater visibility and enhances the students' learning. For example, a number of BPS faculty run extensive seminars for the students in preparation for their trips to Korea, Japan, Mexico, and the C.I.S. The faculty then join the students on these trips, thus providing an excellent opportunity for informal, yet in-depth, learning.
While the emphasis in BPS is on globalization, technology and the management of change, as areas of interest, underpinning this is high quality research. Each individual faculty member continues the School's long-standing tradition of publishing in refereed journals. This year, despite the enormous effort spent in contributing to refocusing the School, the BPS group published numerous articles and books. Several of the books won prizes or awards and the flow of all this material does much to contribute to the School's academic standing.
One established activity, the International Center for the Research on Management of Technology (ICRMOT) initiated under the leadership of Tom Allen and led this year jointly by Ed Roberts and John Hauser (from the Marketing Group) manages to combine research in the traditional academic mode (over 110 working papers) with high visibility and impact on the business world. As businesses are an important client of the School, this center has been particularly significant as it has brought twelve major corporations (six whom are non-U.S.) into close and continuing contact with the School through seminars on campus, research sites for faculty and students and research presentations and discussion at company locations.
In the same spirit, the BPS group is playing a major part in a school-wide initiative (Inventing the 21st Century Organization) that is based on the premise that the turbulence in the business environment (social, economic, and political) is causing organizations to rethink what they should do and how they should do it. This will in turn lead to new organizational forms. The possibility of innovative ways of creating and producing useful work is given added emphasis by the continuing rapid evolution of all forms of Information Technology. The combination of all these forces portends exciting but wrenching changes in the business world as we have known it. A conference in the Spring of 1994 with four hundred attendees launched this collaborative research initiative and it is clear that the Sloan School and the BPS group can make major contributions to the clarification of the organizational options, this will be one of our major research objectives in the years ahead.
Tom Allen finished manuscripts on Cad Systems and Engineering Performance as well as studying the influence of supervisory promotion and network location on the careers in a dual-ladder setting.
Deborah Ancona studied the timing of team activities and team learning in top management teams.
Lotte Bailyn published a book: Breaking the Mold: Women, Men, and Time in the New Corporate World. She is finishing her project, based on this book and supported by the Ford Foundation, which shows that looking at work practices through a "work-family lens" can lead to workplace changes that benefit both the business and people's personal lives.
Ella Edmonson Bell 's research focuses on the management of race, gender and culture in organizational life. She is writing a book (with Dr. Stella Nkomo) Our Separate Ways: Journeys of Black and White Women Managers in Corporate America, to be published by Anchor Doubleday. Together they have completed a monograph, Barriers to Work Place Advancement Experienced by African-Americans, prepared for the Glass Ceiling Commission, U.S. Department of Labor. She has also published in various periodicals.
John Carroll has continued his research on managing and organizing for safety in nuclear power plants. He received a NSF grant to organize a 1996 conference on learning from event analysis in high-hazard industries.
Michael Cusumano has just finished a book titled Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People, and he also continues to do research on product development in the automobile industry.
Mauro Guillen published a book: Models of Management: Work, Authority and Organization in a Comparative Perspective.
Rebecca Henderson has examined radical innovation in several industries focusing particularly on the impact of rational drug discovery on the pharmaceutical industry.
Thomas Kochan published a number of papers on new strategies for human resource management with particular interests in understanding the mutual gains paradigm and national labor policy aimed at promoting mutual gains for workers, employers, and the economy. He also organized and hosted the 10th World Congress of the International Industrial Relations Association in his capacity as President of that professional organization.
Don Lessard continued research on corporate risk management and the competitive positioning of Asian financial centers, and commenced a new area of work on organizational complexity and the desirability of joint ventures and other interdependent business arrangements, especially in a multinational setting.
Richard Locke published his book on local politics and industrial change in Italy, (Remaking the Italians Economy) as well as his work on recent changes in the industrial relations practices of 11 OECD nations (Employment Relations in a Changing World Economy). He is writing up his research on the politics of German unification, ("The Dilemmas of Diffusion"), and has commenced work on a study of American unions in transition.
Robert McKersie (with Dick Walton and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld) published the study of Strategic Negotiations and commenced work on a CD ROM for use in negotiation courses.
Dan Nyhart developed a computer model to understand the approaches used by a large bank to internal negotiations.
Paul Osterman published The Mutual Gains Enterprise with Thomas Kochan, completed a manuscript on the impact of corporste restructuring on managerial careers, and continued his work on employee training policies and economic decelopment in collaboration with foundations, state, local and federal governments.
Michael Rappa has continued his interest in the role of scientists in emerging fields.
Janes Rebitzer has completed a series of papers on the incentive structures in professional service firms.
Mary Rowe from her perspective as ombudsperson has published a number of papers on diversity and related matters.
Maureen Scully has studied how inequality is both legitimated and contested in organizations, how employees perceive merit-based reward systems, how reward systems change during transitions to teamwork, how ethics programs in organizations ramify in unexpected ways, how employee groups use grassroots activism to redress inequalities, and how alternatives to individualistic, merit-based rewards should be created.
Marcie Tyre examined patterns of technological adaptation across a number of industries and countries; her sork examines how and why technological improvement tends to occur in discrete lumps or episodes, instead of following a more continuous pattern of improvement.
Jim Utterback, with Northeastern University colleague Marc Meyer, is completing a manuscript on his work on "Creating Business Value and Sustained Success in New Product Development."
John Van Maanen's teaching and research interests include: organization theory, occupational sociology, cultural processes in organizations, management of public and private institutions and organization behavior.
Eric Von Hippel researched the process of "learning by doing" and the function of "sticky" information in the problem-solving process. He applied his findings to the development of new marketing research methods.
Eleanor Westney has completed the first phase (questionnaire survey) of a research project on the global management of R&D, conducted in cooperation with the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), and is beginning the second phase, which consists of interviews with a subset of the respondents to the questionnaire survey. She has also organized a group of colleagues in the Asian business field in a workshop on the evolution of Asian business systems. She is one of five Sloan faculty members who have produced a new textbook based on the revised Masters core course on organizational processes; it is being published this fall by Southwestern Press.
Joanne Yates ontinued work on the evolution of information systems and technologies in firms.
Nick Ziegler concluded his study of public institutions and their impact on technological innovation in France and Germany, while beginning work on alternative mechanisms of corporate governance in transition economies.
MIT Reports to the President 1994-95