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.     

Violence,agrarian radicalism and electoral politics: Reflections on the Indian people's front

I am concerned here with the political responses of peasants on the social and economic margin and of agricultural labourers. The argument is that there is in India a vital and dynamic peasant activism happening at many levels of social and economic interest including among the rural poor. I want to understand these phenomena in Indian terms and in local terms, in other words, what is happening in the fields and villages where most Indians live. This raises the fundamental issue of the language or idiom in which agrarian politics, that is the politics of dissent, is expressed and the equally important question of who is listening and what is or is not being done in response. I develop these ideas around the experience of the Indian People's Front in the last decade, specifically in Bihar, while focussing on the arena of electoral politics which the IPF entered seriously in 1989.