Editorial

Abstract

EditorialFrom this very first edition of 2008 onwards the Brazilian Administration Review will be published four times a year. As a quarterly journal the editions will encompass at least twenty articles every year and there will be issues for January-March, April-June, July-September and October-December.In this first issue of the BAR as a quarterly journal, five articles are made available to our readers and collaborators. In the first article, Dirk Michael Boehe looks at developing and testing a model which is based on transaction cost reasoning and which attempts to explain how and why different governance forms can be combined in order to reap efficiency gains in off-shoring. To follow, Sergio Lazzarini offers a theory to explain the formation of multilateral alliances based on both the resource profile and the structure of existing interfirm networks and provide an initial test of that theory in the context of the global airline industry, using data from 75 global airlines and their alliances. In the third text, Flavio Carvalho de Vasconcelos, Isabella Gouveia de Vasconcelos and João Marcelo Crubellate predict the relationship between stress-inducing practices, individual responses and performance to be recursively explained which implies that control of stress in organizations is as complex as the level of stress in society: it will depend on the control of stress levels coming from society putting an end to any management aspirations to use stress as a managing mechanism and for inducing behavior. In the fourth article, Sandro Cabral and Paulo Azevedo build a comparative analysis of two case studies of similar correctional facilities, one public and the other outsourced to a private company under the supervision of civil servants (hybrid governance structure), both located in the same region of Brazil, finding that the privately operated facility has achieved better performance indicators (in terms of number of escapes, riots, deaths, assistance to inmates, etc.) than the public facility. In the fifth and final text, Christine Mclean and Rafael Alcadipani challenge some assumptions associated with Critical Management Studies (CMS), based on insights originating from the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), reviewing some key CMS ideas associated with this perspective ontology to argue that what usually CMS tends to take as an explanation is exactly what has to be explained.We hope you all find these articles interesting and enjoy this quarterly edition. Clóvis L. Machado-da-Silva Chief Editor