In Search of Autonomy: Dancing With Rules

Purpose: Autonomy in organisations cannot exist without rules nor relationships. Yet, previous research tends to elicit understandings of autonomy as freedom from external constraints to enact free individual will. And there are numerous positive effects related to autonomy at work. But research has not kept pace with modern-day organisations that are highly flexible and dynamic. Current understandings of autonomy are static. Autonomy is mainly regarded as something individuals possess, more or less constricted by rules. Our purpose is to contribute a more flexible and practice-oriented concept of autonomy to answer the research question: How is autonomy developed and practiced in relation to formal rules in high-risk organisations?Design: To investigate autonomy as a dynamic and flexible concept, we draw on two case studies comprised of a total of 52 interviews and more than 10 h of observation. The cases include a factory and a hospital unit.Findings: We suggest, based on the data, that autonomy is a relational phenomenon. We suggest four different autonomy-rule dynamics: Passive, loyal, self-promoting, and co-generative learning.Research Implications: Regarding autonomy as relational rather than individual contributes to our understanding of organisations as always in the making. In this, we emphasise the interactive element of autonomy.Practical Implications: Practitioners and managers may use our suggestions to work with autonomy in a different way, spurring creativity and improvisation by constructively using rules.Originality: Little research has paid attention to the concept of autonomy (despite its importance), and arguably, a trend in the available research concerns a commodification of the phenomenon, primarily aligning autonomy with (degrees of) negative freedom and individual decision making. We unpack the concept with attention to interaction – what we have called dancing with rules.

Cranial and Spinal Metastasis of a Nonfunctioning Pituitary Adenoma: Report of a Case

Pituitary carcinoma is a rare disease with surgical, radiotherapeutic, and chemotherapeutic treatment options. We present the case of a female patient diagnosed with a nonfunctioning pituitary adenoma who underwent several surgical procedures, radiations, and chemotherapeutic treatments with various substances. Sixteen years after the first diagnosis, a cranial and spinal metastatic spread of the tumor occurred. We opted for an individual therapy based on anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, the recommended off-label treatment with a somatostatin analog substance was never given due to bureaucratic delays. This case report is about the challenging aspects of individual decision-making in rare neurosurgical diseases.

If you've earned it, you deserve it: ultimatums, with Lego

The ultimatum and dictator games were developed to help identify the fundamental motivators of human behavior, typically by asking participants to share windfall endowments with other persons. In the ultimatum game, a common observation is that proposers offer, and responders refuse to accept, a much larger share of the endowment than is predicted by rational choice theory. However, in the real world, windfalls are rare: money is usually earned. I report here a small study aimed at testing how participants react to an ultimatum game after they have earned their endowments by either building a Lego model or spending some time sorting out screws by their length. I find that the shares that proposers offer and responders accept are significantly lower than that typically observed with windfall money, an observation that is intensified when the task undertaken to earn the endowment is generally less enjoyable and thus perhaps more effortful (i.e., screw sorting compared to Lego building). I suggest, therefore, that considerations of effort-based desert are often important drivers behind individual decision-making, and that laboratory experiments, if intended to inform public policy design and implementation, ought to mirror the broad characteristics of the realities that people face.

Collective Phronesis in Business Ethics Education and Managerial Practice: A Neo-Aristotelian Analysis

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of various discourses relevant to developing a construct of collective phronesis, from a (neo)-Aristotelian perspective, with implications for professional practice in general and business practice and business ethics education in particular. Despite the proliferation of interest in practical wisdom within business ethics and more general areas of both psychology and philosophy, the focus has remained mostly on the construct at the level of individual decision-making, as in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. However, he also made intriguing remarks about phronesis at the collective level in his Politics: remarks that have mostly eluded elaboration. The aim of this article is practical and revisionary, rather than exegetical and deferential, with respect to Aristotle. Nevertheless, just as most of the literature on individual phronesis draws on Aristotle’s exposition in the Nicomachean Ethics, the obvious first port of call for an analysis of collective phronesis is to explore the resources handed down to us by Aristotle himself. The lion’s share of this article is, therefore, devoted to making sense of Aristotle’s somewhat unsystematic remarks and the lessons we can draw from them about collective managerial phronesis and business ethics education.

Opinion Diversity and the Resilience of Cooperation in Dynamical Networks

Across various scenarios, individuals cooperate with others to contribute towards a shared goal and ensure self-preservation. In game theory, the act of cooperation is considered as an individual producing some form of benefit to be utilised by others, under the expectation others will return the favour. In several scenarios, individuals make use of their own information to aid with their decision about who to connect and cooperate with. However, the choice of cooperation can be taken advantage of by opportunistic defectors, which can lead to significant disruption. This paper investigates how the diversity of opinion can contribute to the structure and mechanics of a dynamical network model and to the resilience of cooperation, by utilising a computational model where individuals make use of both public and private information to implement their decision. Our results show that increasing diversity leads to more stable, less connected and less prosperous networks coupled to more frequent, but shallower information cascades. Our work generally shows that the outcome of the conflict between cooperators and cheaters strongly depends on the interplay between population structure, individual decision making and individual opinions.

Governing Life and the Economy

When comparing both GDP loss and mortality across countries, it appears that countries that have managed to save more lives during the Covid-19 pandemic have also managed to save their economies better. What accounts for these stark differences in country performances? In this article, we argue that a salient feature of economic and health performance is the degree of trust populations have in their governments. We set up a heuristic analytical framework that models this relation, under particular assumptions about what drives government and individual behavior, in order to better understand the mechanisms that may be at work. We identify three key roles that trust in government may play in enforcing social distancing policies, conveying credible information for individual decision-making, and shaping government attitudes towards risk. We argue that these implications are consistent with the empirical evidence. We also discuss the relevance of other forms of trust, namely, interpersonal trust and trust in science.

Editors’ Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law

This introductory chapter provides an overview of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Health Law. Why compare health laws? Situated at the interfaces between human rights, dignity, autonomy, and solidarity, and between multinational business activity, state regulation, and the most private of individual decision-making, health law is perhaps unique in its capacity to provoke a range of responses to how law should constrain and facilitate human activity. Scholars, legislators, and judges grappling with critical questions—such as how to finance healthcare, how to regulate the pharmaceutical industry, and how to protect against threats to public health that can quickly cross national borders—can learn from the successes and failures of the different approaches taken in different countries. The chapter then outlines the scope of the Handbook, which brings together the existing and emerging body of research in health law, with a key focus on the United States–European comparative perspective.