The department for which I serve as Head, the Department of Strategic Management and Globalization (SMG) at the Copenhagen Business School, has set up a new research blog, where we plan to report on our cooler recent publications. SMG is doing increasingly well in the publication dimension, at least for a very small Euro-department at a state business school, with publications/acceptances in the last few months in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science (mult.), and the Journal of International Business Studies (mult.), and we want to advertise these successes a bit. Also, SMG has a Facebook page.  Please visit it — and “like” it.

At O&M we’ve long prided ourselves on being one of the top academic group strategy blogs. We believed this with great confidence, mainly because we were the only academic group strategy blog. Other blogs deal with strategic issues — Dick Rumelt’s blog, Knowledge Problem, Managerial Econ, Digitopoly, and of course the Good Twin, among others — but the Herfindahl index for academic group strategy blogs has been pretty close to 1.0.

We’re happy now to introduce a new entrant, strategyprofs.net, brainchild of Freek Vermeulen, Karim Lakhani, Mike Ryall, Russ Coff, Steve Postrel, and Teppo Felin. The first posts are already up, and the discussion is extremely interesting. Welcome to the blogosphere, Strategy Profs!

• Experiential Knowledge, by Alexandre Padilla
• Economic Policy Review, by a group of Harvard MBA students
• A Financial Economist’s Ramblings, by Wayne Marr

• Urban and Regional Studies, by Pedro Marquez
• Beerkens’ Blog, by Eric Beerkens
• Estzer’s Blog, by Eszter Hargittai
• Terminal Degree, by a funny music professor

Back in grad school I was regularly hectored by a fellow student about joining the Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE), our local collective-bargaining association. Despite his attempt to stigmatize me as a free rider, I never joined. I didn’t think I agreed with the organizations goals, and I was sure I didn’t want to be associated with AGSE’s parent organization, the United Auto Workers (go figure). One year there was even a strike, which I found silly (I scabbed).

This semester I’m getting repeated invitations to join the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Again, I hesitate. Of course, as an American university professor, I’m happy to see more power, prestige, and perquisites go to American university professors (OK, specifically, to me). But the AAUP has a strange agenda. Its mission includes not only protecting academic freedom and defending the role of the university in public life, but also preserving shared governance. Having spent many years in university settings, I’m convinced that shared governance is grossly inefficient, at least most of the time. There can be benefits, of course, to offset these costs, as is the case with worker-owned cooperatives and other non-standard forms of organization. But one searches the AAUP’s website in vain for any analysis or evidence on shared governance. What are the benefits and costs, relative to other feasible organizational forms? Why should professors defend this peculiar institution?

I’m not aware of many studies by organizational economists or management scholars on shared governance in higher education. Scott Masten has a nice paper [ungated version] showing that shared governance is more common in large, full-service research universities and less common in liberal-arts colleges and church-affiliated schools. Scott argues that shared governance is an effective means of enforcing commitments between administrators and faculty members and among faculty members themselves when actions are outcomes are hard to specify by contract. Given that most organizational scholars work in universities, and that university professors are inveterate navel-gazers, I’d expect many more such papers. Which ones am I missing?

Check it out. I have dropped the quasi-blog feature of the old version (I hadn’t maintained it for almost a year anyway), so now I can concentrate on O&M and this one. I will soon upload talks and work in progress.

More links for O&M readers to enjoy. (Celebrity readers, you too!)

• B o G, U + S, Eric Beerkens’s blog on globalization, universities, and social science
• Signum sine tinnitu by Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist with attitude (see, e.g., his top ten lies of entrepreneurs and top ten lies of venture capitalists)
• Edge Perspectives by consultant and author John Hagel
• Truth on the Market, by a group of business law professors
• Vic Fleischer’s Taxing Blog, for corporate tax law wonks (you know who you are)
• And, courtesy of Mario Sundar, here the top 10 corporate blogs and top 10 CEO blogs.

Besides the links in the right-hand-side column below, O&M readers may find the following of interest:

• Work Matters by Bob Sutton, Co-Director of Stanford University’s Center for Work, Technology, and Organization
• Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog by, you guessed it, a group of marketing professors
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, for the research-methods geek in all of us
• Businesspundit, a general-interest site