The present study investigates how chief executive officers in the Canadian telecommunications industry acquire and use information about the external business environment, an information seeking activity known as environmental scanning. Data were collected by a nationwide questionnaire survey and several focused interviews. Of the 113 CEOs in the study population, 67 returned completed questionnaires, thus giving a response rate of 59 percent. Personal interviews were then conducted with eight of the respondents. The chief executives collectively perceive the Technological, Customer, and Competition environmental sectors to have the greatest Perceived Strategic Uncertainty – these sectors were perceived to be the most strategic, variable and complex. For each environmental sector, the Amount of Scanning of the sector is positively correlated with the Perceived Strategic Uncertainty of that sector. Generally, the chief executives use multiple, complementary sources in environmental scanning. Personal sources such as customers and subordinate staff are very important in both scanning and decision making, and they are used more frequently than impersonal sources. Nonetheless, impersonal sources such as publications and reports are also frequently used in scanning. In decision making, environmental information from internal sources is used more frequently than that from external sources. For many of the information sources, the frequency of source use is

k, community and domesticity have moved from hierarchically arranged, densely knit, bounded groups to social networks. In networked societies: boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive. People maneuver through multiple communities, no longer bounded by locality. Organizations form complex networks of alliances and exchanges, often in transient virtual or networked organizations (Bar & Simard, 2001). Workers --especially professionals, technical workers, and managers -- report to multiple peers and superiors. Work relations spill over their nominal work group's boundaries, and may even connect them to outside organizations. In virtual and networked organizations, management by network has people reporting to shifting sets of supervisors, peers, and even nominal subordinates (Wellman, 2001). How people learn is becoming part of this paradigm shift. There has been some mov

access to the managers we spoke to and surveyed, and the managers themselves who so generously gave us their time and thoughts about these issues. We would also like to thank Jennifer Aaker, Sally Blount, Kathy Eisenhardt, Pam Haunschild, Robert Sutton, Michael Morris, Lara Tiedens, George Wu, the associate editors, and the anonymous reviewers who gave us so many helpful comments on drafts of this paper. 2 This paper compares how managers value knowledge from internal and external sources. Although many theories account for favoritism toward insiders, we find that preferences for knowledge obtained from outsiders are also prevalent. Two complementary case studies and survey data from managers demonstrate the phenomenon of valuing external knowledge more highly than internal knowledge and reveal some mechanisms through which this process occurs. We found evidence that the preference for outsider knowledge is the result of managerial responses to 1) the contrasting status implications of learning from internal versus external competitors, and 2) the availability or scarcity of knowledge—internal knowledge is more readily available and hence subject to greater scrutiny, while external knowledge is more scarce, which makes it appear more special and unique. We conclude by considering some consequences of external knowledge preference for organizational functioning. 3 1.

Economic and Social Research Council, and the Japan Foundation. I am grateful to the interviewees at the three automakers and suppliers who gave generously of their time. I also What factors facilitate and constrain the development and replication of organizational capabilities at suppliers? This question is addressed in a comparison of historical case studies at Toyota, Nissan and Honda in Japan. First, as expected, replication difficulty is overcome by enabling companies to share the process of accumulating tacit knowledge. Second, the interdependence in the hierarchy of routines, that constitute organizational capabilities, has led companies to broaden the scope of supplier development. Third, this broadening challenges suppliers to accept buyer companies ’ intervention in internal investment decisions, requiring a certain type of corporate governance. It is argued that the boundary of a capability-based organization may go beyond legally distinct units of financial control when firms are subjected to a cumulative process of capability enhancement.

Information systems (IS) development approaches are considered with particular reference to information requirements analysis. The majority can be classified as adopting a unitary, objective perspective. This fails to fully recognise the interpretative, inter-subjective nature of information and the importance of informal as well as formal data processing systems. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on tools and methods for systems development by providing a contrasting perspective on information requirements analysis as a process which is socially mediated. A framework is developed which places information requirements in the context strategic IS development. This features social communication networks centrally in this process and raises implications for practice in IS development. 1. Background There has been considerable emphasis in the literature on information systems (IS) development on using structured approaches as a means of identifying information requirements for systems development. An assumption underpinning such approaches is that formal, Information Technology-based data processing systems are the medium through which information requirements can be best met (c.f. Avison and Fitzgerald, [1]. This is so, despite the fact that authors in the IS field [2] and in the field of organization theory [3] have long emphasised the significance of the informal, political and interpretative aspects of information. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of automated tools in IS development by providing a contrasting perspective on information requirements analysis as being socially mediated and thereby requiring awareness of the socio-political aspects of the IS development process and associated techniques. The paper argues that such a perspective might usefully complement the more formal, automated tools and

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at Boston University, ETH Zürich,

* The authors have contributed equally to the paper Manuscript under review-- please do not distribute without author’s permission 1 Understanding Boundary-Spanning in Knowledge Work:

Organizing depends on the integration of specialized knowledge that lies distributed across individuals. There are benefits from specialization, and, yet, the integration of knowledge across boundaries is critical for organizational vitality. How do organizations benefit from knowledge that lies in different domains without having to transfer knowledge? This paper describes results of two exploratory ethnographic studies of knowledge integration in industrial research organizations. It introduces a knowledge integration mechanism- ‘thinking along ’ – that has not received much attention by researchers before. Thinking along is a mechanism that allows for knowledge integration without the need for transfer. As a consequence, benefits of specialization obtain even as knowledge from one domain informs knowledge from another. The paper describes how researchers use thinking along to integrate knowledge within and across boundaries. It concludes with implications for knowledge management and future research.

In this paper we compare the average performance of one class of low-discrepancy quasi-Monte Carlo sequences for global optimization. Weiner measure is assumed as the probability prior on all optimized functions. We show how to construct van der Corput sequences and we prove their consistency. Numerical experimentation shows that the van der Corput sequence in base 2 has a better average performance.