| Mission |
The Institute for Management Research (IMR) houses all the programmed research of the Nijmegen School of Management (NSM - Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen) of Radboud University Nijmegen. The IMR is an academic centre of expertise on the structure and performance of public and private organizations and institutions that rule, govern, or manage purposive action and interaction. All research activities of the IMR aim to contribute to the understanding and improvement of the effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy of the organizational and management arrangements through which we as humans try to structure and govern the complexity of present day social systems that are upheld to produce specified goods or goals vis-à-vis the environments in which they operate. The Institute houses specialists in various domains related to political science, public administration, geography, planning and environmental science, applied economics and business science. The expertise of these specialists covers much of the complexities and performance of present-day companies and political and governmental institutions. IMR explicitly strives to combine and integrate the theoretical perspectives from the different disciplines in its aim to provide richer understanding of international, societal and organizational phenomena, their complexity and their interrelatedness. Adopting a broad and integrated perspective will allow IMR to distinguish itself from those competing research institutes that offer more traditional and narrow approaches, and thereby to become and remain a visible player in the international research arena. |
| Addition |
The multidisciplinary composition of the IMR makes it possible to analyse such structures from a number of theoretical perspectives, such as the managerial, the economic, the geographic and the political. IMR aims to combine and integrate these theoretical perspectives in an attempt to provide a richer understanding of international, societal and organizational phenomena, their complexity and their interrelatedness. That broad, integrated perspective distinguishes IMR from competing research institutes that offer more traditional and narrow approaches, and it has helped it become a strong player in the international research arena. The IMR research agenda is built on three research themes: Distributional Conflicts in a Globalizing World: Consequences for State-Market-Civil Society Arrangements (DisCon) seeks to describe and explain the extent to which globalization, in all its forms, generates new conflicts, or reinvigorates old conflicts, within and across societies. Such conflicts may be of a material or immaterial nature. It also investigates the conditions under which such conflicts can be remedied. In particular, it focuses on the changing intermediary role of governmental and civil society actors. In addition, it seeks to evaluate such phenomena from a normative perspective. Responsible Organization (ResOrg) focuses on how organizations could and should be designed, organized and managed from the perspective of multiple value creation for multiple stakeholders - now and in the future. The Shaping and Changing of Places and Spaces (SCAPES) programme studies a variety of themes, such as transnational territorial cooperation, strategic spatial planning, the role of spatial borders, regional governance in Western and non-Western countries, transport and spatial development, water management, environmental policy and governance, and land policy and location development. |
