WHAT IS A “GOOD” SOCIAL NETWORK FOR POLICY IMPLEMENTATION? THE FLOW OF KNOW‐HOW FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

This study concerns how intraorganizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know‐how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of intraorganizational coordination for an organization's capacity for change. The first emphasizes the importance of distributing know‐how evenly to potential recipient subgroups. The second emphasizes the importance of restricting know‐how to flow from high know‐how subgroups. We test our hypotheses with longitudinal network data in 21 schools, finding stronger support for the second hypothesis than the first. Our findings can help managers cultivate know‐how flows to contribute to organizational change.     

Regulating for media pluralism and the pitfalls of standortpolitik: the reregulation of German broadcasting ownership rules

Germany has witnessed a veritable television boom over the last ten years. However, the plethora of new private channels masks an underlying duopoly, a concentration of media power that has not been prevented by an elaborate system of regulation. This article maps these developments, particularly the Lander competition for investment, the structural power of the media industry, and the emergence of a media policy ‘Grand Coalition’ between SPD North Rhine‐Westphalia and CSU Bavaria. It assesses the Federal Constitutional Court's role and highlights the public broadcasters’ crucial function to act as a pluralistic counterbalance in the dual public/private broadcasting system.     

Of white whale and countrymen in the eighteenth‐century Maratha Deccan. extended class relations,rights, and the problem of rural autonomy under the old regime 1

The problem is simply stated, but resists solution. We begin with the classical historiographic images of Old Regime societies of South Asia and suggest that beneath the surface of abstract formulations for and against these images, unrecognised difficulties of assumption and method allow them to persist in the contemporary imagination. This not only hampers understanding of historic societies, taken individually, but prevents proper assessment of their comparative significance on an international plane. The relationship between these images of discontinuity and similar sociological images of European peasantry is not coincidental. The errors of the latter are demonstrable through an abundant historiography; the burden of this essay is directed towards a solution to the former. We provide an empirically‐based structural study of social relationships in the countryside of Maharashtra in the 150 years preceding European occupation: a) to begin the accumulation of examples that contradict the received images; b) to provide an analysis of one Old Regime society for its own comparative sake. By examining the social distribution of certain types of right and of access to control of land, we demonstrate the existence of powerful forms of social dominance transcending the frontiers of the village, and strongly influencing the organisation of social, economic and political life in the countryside. Whilst we focus on a specific structural problem (namely, the conception of social totality and its internal ordering), the conclusion and footnotes permit the actual dynamism of the forms of relationship studied to emerge in incipient statement on social change under the old order.?