How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the commercialization of new technologies? We suggest that the effect of movement activism is conditioned by the internal polity and therefore varies across organizations. This article examines how the anti-genetic movement in Germany during the 1980s affected six domestic pharmaceutical firms’ commercialization of biotechnol...

This paper studies middlemen—or “critical nodes”—that intermediate flows in a directed network. The contestability of a node is introduced as a network topological concept of competitiveness meaning that an intermediary’s role in the brokering of flows in the network can be substituted by a group of other nodes. We establish the equivalence of uncontested intermediaries and middlemen. The notio...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a qualitative study of software engineers’ perception of dress code, career, organizations, and of managers. Design/methodology/approach – The software engineers interviewed work in three European and two US companies. The research is based on ethnographic data, gathered in two longitudinal studies during the period 2001-2006. The...