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Record W2108906455 · doi:10.1177/1476127006069427

The power of numbers in strategizing

2006· article· en· W2108906455 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueStrategic Organization · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicManagement and Organizational Studies
Canadian institutionsHEC MontréalUniversité de Montréal
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLegitimacyCompetence (human resources)Transparency (behavior)Objectivity (philosophy)Public relationsStandardizationSociologyBusinessLaw and economicsPolitical scienceLawEpistemologyEconomicsManagementPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article draws on a detailed case study of a complex decision process in a public healthcare system to consider the role and potential power of numbers in strategizing. Because of their association with precision and accuracy, numbers may seem at first sight to be unlikely tools for decision making in contexts characterized by ambiguous goals and diffuse authority.Yet in the case described in this article, managers successfully mobilized a system of numbers to make an extremely controversial strategic decision.The empirical study examines in depth the micro-practices and processes by which the objectivity and legitimacy of a transparently contestable system of numbers were socially constructed in a public forum. By developing a system whose results mapped on to dominant values and interests, by displaying transparency, consistency and competence in defence of the system, and by organizing the decision process in a way that disempowered adversaries, the pro tagonists in the case were able to infuse a difficult decision with positive value. It is concluded that the power of numbers lies in their ability to fill the strategic void created by pluralism.Though contested, numbers can under certain conditions come to acquire and provide authority in organizations where power is diffuse.This is most likely when the number systems enable the reconciliation of diverse values and interests, when they are embedded in shared systems of meaning, and when they are coupled with and activated by particular micro-practices that support the legitimacy of their promoters as disinterested advocates for the collective good.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.519
Threshold uncertainty score0.301

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.193
Teacher spread0.184 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it