On one hand, managers, and especially CEOs, are hired and paid to exercise their managerial discretion. On the other hand, within the agency theory approaches to corporate governance, managerial discretion is a source of moral hazard to be removed by incentives or monitoring. In this paper we...

Drawing on interviews with 40 FTSE100 CEOs we extend the interpretive literature on identity work to top level managers, bringing into play a different balance of autonomy and constraint from previous studies. Four core (but overlapping) identities are observed: the leader and strategist, the...

Informed by agency theory, the dominant theory and practice of CEO pay both exclude non-monetary incentives and treat money itself as pure exchange value. Drawing on the economics of non-monetary incentives and the sociology of money, we use qualitative evidence from UK FTSE100 CEOs, to...

Against a background of management literature which advocated cultural change to increase corporate competitive performance (such as Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence), John Hendry and Veronica Hope explore four components of the problem of bringing about cultural change to produce...

For most people involved in the strategic management field, teaching competitive strategy involves teaching Porter's model of generic strategies. Critics of the model have however exposed some severe limitations to its application. There are also some serious sources of confusion, both within...

One of the strongest and most sustained trends within business over the last ten years has been the trend towards outsourcing. With increased fervour and conviction, corporations have sought to reduce costs by contracting out services and activities traditionally provided in-house. The rationale...

The idea of process reengineering, or computer-aided process-focused industrial engineering, has taken a firm hold in today's companies, but the benefits of this approach have often been elusive and even when they have been achieved it is by no means clear that they will be sustainable. In this...