In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that perspective. The focus of attention is on the tradeoff between costly information acquisition and costless ...

Disaster management information systems for international humanitarian relief are developed in contexts involving local, national and inter-governmental organizations together with local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While the multi-organizational nature of disaster response is known to create challenges for information systems development, to date, less attention has...

The study of bureaucracy is the analysis of how administrative agencies function as organizations within a governmental system. The study includes interinstitutional relationships with democratic institutions such as chief executives, legislatures, or the judiciary as well as intrainstitu-tional activities concerned with explaining the organizational structure and behavior of administrative age...

One outgrowth of Milgram's (1974) research is the study of public opinion about obedience norms. Extending Kelman and Hamilton's (1989) research on crimes of obedience in the military, this article explores crimes of obedience and crimes of conformity in the workplace. Random samples of the residents of Washington, DC, Moscow, Russia, and Tokyo, Japan were pre.^ented four vignettes about organi...

One assumption in the Shapley–Shubik power index is that there is no interaction nor influence among the voting members. This paper will apply the command structure of Shapley (1994) to model members’ interaction relations by simple games. An equilibrium authority distribution is then formulated by the power-in/power-out mechanism. It turns out to have much similarity to the invariant measure o...

Security poses a major challenge in ad hoc networks today due to the lack of fixed or organizational infrastructure. This paper proposes a modification to the existing “fully distributed certificate authority” scheme for ad hoc networks. In the proposed modification, redundancy is introduced by allocating more than one share to each node in order to increase the probability of creating the cert...

Effective emergency preparedness and response requires leadership that can accomplish perceptive coordination and communication amongst diverse agencies and sectors. Nevertheless, operating within their specified scope of authority, preparedness leaders in characteristic bureaucratic fashion often serve to bolster the profile and import of their own organization, thereby creating a silo effect ...

IN MULTI-ESTABLISHMENT FIRMS: THE LOCUS OF I.T. SYSTEMS PURCHASING AUTHORITY By Kristina Steffenson McElheran* thSeptember 17, 2009 Abstract This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of the allocation of authority in multi-establishment firms. Specifically, it investigates how tradeoffs between adaptation and coordination may influence the allocation of decision rights over information ...

Many writers argue that economic organization will be strongly transformed in the emerging knowledge economy. Thus, authority relations will wither, or at least undergo significant changes; legal and ownership-based definitions of the boundaries of firms will become irrelevant; and there will be very few or no constraints on the set of feasible combinations of coordination mechanisms, as manife...

We analyze a key problem in organization theory and design, namely the potential tension between authority (i.e., the power to make decisions which guide the decisions of another person) and the discretion of employees (i.e., the ability of an agent to control resources including his own human capital). The problem is rooted in the fact that in organizations, decisions rights are always loaned ...