Say you're a multinational with operations spread around various countries. You need to know where you can perform your operations most economically and efficiently, and you also need to factor the corporation tax you pay in different countries.
...continue readingI was told to prepare a presentation to be delivered in my interview. This was the brief :
"Define a contemporary curriculum for fashion buying and merchandising".
Some people can't even eat the food, let alone get to grips with the lingo!
Having lived as something of an expat for over a decade (although I was officially "local hire" so never got the perks that were customary in overseas packages), from seeing serious cultural gaffs by guest managers more times than I imagined was even possible, and after hearing hundreds of stories of allegedly competent bosses crashing and burning on foreign soil, I decided to look to the literature for understanding.
...continue readingAccording to Good (1988) and Gulati (1995), trust is the product of the repeated meeting of actors. This claim jeopardizes (or perhaps merely complicates) the distinction between bond and bridge. After how many meetings does a bridge become a bond? And does the transformation entail loss, increase, or maintenance of the bridge’s resources? That a connection cannot be definable as simultaneously bridge and bond seems improbable, if trust – the elemental contribution of social capital – is the product of repetitious interaction alone, regardless of interaction quality.
...continue readingBurt (1992) argued that networks benefit from having structural hole-spanning members. Diverse resources can flow through such actors into the network. The presence of structural hole-spanning members can therefore offset the hazards of network insularity.
Two closed networks (or clusters) exist, A and B. No members of either population interact. A structural hole (the blue floor area) separates them from each other and from any other networks.
The following diagrams depict “Brokers” and “bonds” or “boundary spanners” (Burt 1992).
This diagram conveys the binary classification of connection types proposed by Putnam.
The following diagram is an "egocentric sociogram". It depictsJames Dyson's bond and bridge network.
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