The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 in Europe posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the capacity to act as collective. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making in our study: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers may make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through their interplay.

Rethinking the sharing economy: The nature and organization of sharing in the 2015 refugee crisis. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4 (3). pp. 314-335.

Scholars have emphasized the potential of self-regulation, realized through 'codes of good governance', to improve gender diversity on boards. Yet, unconvinced of the effectiveness of this self-regulation, many regulators have implemented mandatory quota laws. Our study sheds light on this dilemma. Seeking to broaden our conceptual knowledge of how such 'codes' work in the specific case of gender diversity on boards, we ask: Under which conditions is self-regulation via voluntary principles of good governance effective? Expanding recent institutional-theory perspectives from the literature of women on boards, we show that, in the case of Austria, self-regulation via code recommendations is ineffective unless supported by additional forces. The primary reason for this, we argue, is that nominators do not expect benefits from gender-diverse boards. Furthermore, non-compliant companies face little pressure to change due to the small number of companies that have already adopted respective code recommendations. We identify two potential alternatives to boost the effectiveness of voluntary self-regulation for gender-diverse boards: First, the introduction of concrete targets for female representation and the public monitoring of fulfillment; and, second, the establishment of a credible threat that mandatory quotas will be imposed if diversity goals are not achieved. Drawing on longitudinal data from 2006 to 2016 on listed and state-owned companies in Austria, we give an empirical account of the conditions that assure effective self-regulation. Arguing that codes suffer from what we call 'opportunity bias', we conclude that political goals (such as gender equality) based on ethical rather than instrumental considerations are unlikely to be effectively implemented solely by codes of good governance.

While the de-politicization of public sector management was a core objective of past reform initiatives, more recent debates urge the state to act as a strong principal when it comes to public sector unity and policy coherenceand consequently make a case for reinvigorating links between the political and managerial sphere. Using data from Austrian public sector organizations, we test and confirm the causal relationship of political connectedness of board members and executive compensation. Differentiating between value-based and interest-based in-groups, we suggest that only value-based political connectedness has the potential to restore patronage as a control instrument and governance tool. Self-interested and reward-driven patronage, on the other hand, indicated by a strong association of political connectedness and executive pay, refers to the type of politicization that previous public sector reforms promised to abolish.

Under far-reaching reforms, many cities have delegated core tasks previously delivered by their administrations to independent organisations that they formally own, e.g. municipal companies, or supervise, e.g. municipal trust funds. The coordination of these (as we call them) ‘domestic’ city organisations has proven challenging. Extant literature argues that such coordination is achieved through a mix of various hierarchical, market and network mechanisms. Yet it is unclear how these modes are combined. Addressing this gap, we ask: How do governance modes interact in the hybrid coordination of domestic city organisations? Analysing the case of Vienna, where 100 domestic organisations employ about 60,000 people, we find that while cultural mechanisms, rooted in the network mode, are predominant, they unfold in the shadow of latent structural mechanisms, which are associated with hierarchy and market. In the background, structural mechanisms keep cultural coordination effective, while cultural mechanisms allow structural coordination to remain (generally) hidden. This study aims to contribute to the literature on the governance of public organisations by exploring the relationship between governance modes as well as furthering urban governance studies by applying insights from studies on the coordination of public organisations to the city context.