Editorial

• Date: 01 June 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/cjas.1386
• Published date: 01 June 2016

Editorial

CJAS is a business journal. It is guided by business the-

ory. Much of the material we have published over the past

f‌ive years on business seem to focus on wealth creation ei-

ther directly or indirectly. I had mentioned in one of my ed-

itorials that wealth is created through value. Management

theory, regardless of its format, stresses value extraction as

its core element. Here I am unpacking the process by which

business creates wealth. Wealth is created by creating value.

Leadership provides the inspiration and direction—the orga-

nizational vision for the future. Management extracts value

from the resources that the organization has—material, so-

cial, cultural, intellectual, and economic—by combining

them in innovative ways to ensure competitive advantage

in the marketplace. Administration introduces order to the

process so that it results in performance and productivity.

In a sense, leadership is concerned with effectiveness, man-

agement with eff‌iciency, and administration with order.

CJAS is most interested in the interplay of leadership, man-

agement, and administration from which wealth is created.

Such interplay is manifested in many ways, one of which

is the scholarship we pursue in our publications.

In my management development workshops I tell my

trainees that if something in their portfolio of tasks can be

routinized it should be, and they should furthermore develop

a policy to address any recurrences with a simple application

of a rule. This should be relegated to the realm of pro-

grammed decision making. To the extent possible, they

should engage in tasks that call for managerial discretion.

That is when they do justice to their training and earn their

managerial keep. That is how one introduces eff‌iciency to

the process of wealth creation.

In this sense, management is concerned with order but

not necessarily of the law-and-order variety. It is more of a

meta-concern. It may mean dismantling an existing order

and ushering in a new order more suited to dealing with

the changing context. Even deliberate disorder is part of

their tool kit. The manager controls its use and can deter-

mine its extent. In meeting the managerial mandate, a man-

ager has to deal with the uncertainty that is embedded in

the environment surrounding the organization and confront

the unpredictability of events. Managers, by the very nature

of their job, face an entropic world. They have to create or-

der out of chaos and communicate it to the people they man-

age so that they can get on with the business of creating

wealth. In essence, managers see order as their weapon and

negentropy their strategy. They need all the energy, intellect,

and time to deal with the challenges that the environment

throws at them. That is why I tell my management trainees

to delegate what is certain and predictable to the realm of ad-

ministration and engage in only those activities that require

managerial intelligence.

In this issue we focus on technology and human re-

sources management and the papers included focus on

the tools managers may have access to as a means of mit-

igating entropy. The f‌irst three papers are part of a special

section on eHRM. The f‌irst paper explores how eHRM

helps evidence-based decision making in talent manage-

ment. At a broader level it shows how digitization changes

management practice and how management practice in

turn changes management theory. The next paper dis-

cusses how social media can be integrated into eHRM

and offers a social participation framework to facilitate

such integration. It also provides best practice examples.

The third paper deals with the adoption of eHRM in the

subsidiaries of MNCs in Indonesia, and suggests that the

attitude toward eHRM at headquarters and the resources

made available for that purpose largely inf‌luence such

adoption. The next two papers, while not part of the spe-

cial section, nicely complement the issue. The fourth paper

focuses on the acceptance and use of technology. Using

meta-analytic evidence it shows how social inf‌luence links

to effort expectancy, which in turn shapes performance ex-

pectancies resulting in behavioural intentions to accept and

use information technology. The last paper addresses

outsourcing HRM functions in the manufacturing sector

in Malaysia and provides some probity on who outsources

what functions of HRM and why.

Our role as management scholars is to create order out

of chaos. This issue is another step in that direction.

Until next time,

Vishwanath Baba

Editor-in-Chief

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences

Revue canadienne des sciences de l’administration

33: 87 (2016)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/CJAS.1386

Can J Adm Sci

33(2), 87 (2016)Copyright © 2016 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 87