Mirror,Mirror on the Wall: Another Look through the Looking Glass Self

Abstract

We used an information-processing perspective and the reported work activities of practicing nurses to examine the relationships among task complexity, human capital endowments and patterns of networking. In addition, we also examined the impact of all of these factors on nurses' perceptions of influence over hospital policies and procedures. Measures of task complexity, including task instability and decision-making autonomy, were found to be positively related to intraunit and interunit networking, respectively. Contrary to prediction, education and experience were found to be negatively associated with all forms of organizational networking. Our analyses also indicated that decision-making autonomy and intraunit networking were positively related to nurses' perceptions of influence in the organization.     

Tuning-In 1 to Organizational Song as Aesthetic Discourse

In this article, the author explores organizational songs, referring to songs that are created by members of an organization as an expression of organizational culture. More specifically, the author is concerned with organizational songs as an expression of organizational culture, versus the better-known occupational songs that act as an expression of occupational culture. First, the study differentiates the genre of work songs (defined by the occupation of 'laborer') to discern organizational songs (defined by the occupation of "manager"). Second, this exploration reveals a musical expression of organizations; a musical expression that also serves as a form of organizational communication or organizational discourse--specifically an aesthetic communication or aesthetic discourse. A significance for organizational studies is asserted, as the study identifies organizational songs as expressive strategies: song as a form of organizational action and an attempt at organizational intervention; song as an organization's attempt to construct its own history and autobiography; and song as a means of celebrating the identity of organizational leaders and organizational values. The approach is to provide a comprehensive literature review followed by case vignettes of organizational songs.     

Understanding microfascism: reading Deleuze and Guattari alongside management guru texts

ABSTRACT

The ‘management guru’ text has long been a source of interest for academic audiences. In this tradition, this paper argues that the content and underpinning ideology of the guru guide hold important insights for organizational scholars interested in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (and vice versa). Specifically, this paper will demonstrate that a close reading of entrepreneur and guru, Tim Ferriss’s, Tools of Titans, can provide meaningful exegesis and development of the concept of ‘microfascism’ presented by Deleuze and Guattari across their shared and independent corpuses. Building upon extant organization studies literature, this paper will endeavour to contribute to the commentary on the management guru by suggesting that the desire for fascism, power, conformity, and rule-following of which Deleuze and Guattari speak offers a productive way of understanding the success of the management guru and the broader allure of the management advice industry.     

Crafting Organization

The recent shift in attention away from organization studies as science has allowed for consideration of new ways of thinking about both organization and organizing and has led to several recent attempts to 'bring down' organizational theorizing. In this paper, we extend calls for organization to be represented as a creative process by considering organization as craft. Organizational craft, we argue, is attractive, accessible, malleable, reproducible, and marketable. It is also a tangible way of considering organization studies with irreverence. We draw on the hierarchy of distinctions among fine art, decorative art, and craft to suggest that understanding the organization of craft assists in complicating our understanding of marginality. We illustrate our argument by drawing on the case of a contemporary Australian craftworks and marketplace known initially as the Meat Market Craft Centre ('MMCC') and then, until its recent closure, as Metro! Stella Minahan was a board member and then the Chief Executive Officer of the Metro! Craft Centre     

New ways of working (NWW): work space and cultural change in virtualizing organizations

ABSTRACT

This study offers a grounded theory of ‘new ways of working’ (NWW), an organizational design concept of Dutch origin with a global relevance. NWW concern business solutions for flexible workspaces enabled by digital network technologies. Theoretically, NWW are analysed with reference to Lefebvre’s theory on the ‘production of space’ and are defined along three dimensions: the spatiotemporal ‘flexibilization’ of work practices, the ‘virtualization’ of the technologically pre-defined organization, and the ‘interfacialization’ of meaning making in the lifeworld of workers. Empirically, NWW are explored in a case study of an insurance company which in 2007 radically implemented NWW. The case study consists of a longitudinal – before and after implementation – research based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted in 2007 and 2010. The article contributes with a conceptual framework for the analysis and management of NWW, and highlights contradictions and ambiguities in the implementation and appropriation of this innovative organizational design.     

Agencies,normative personalities and the Viable Systems Model

Abstract

Modelling the organization to enable purposeful analysis and diagnosis of its ills is often problematic. Beer's use of the Viable Systems Model (VSM) and its development as a methodology for analysis and diagnosis of organizational pathologies has been successful in exploring this, but viewing the organization as a personality provides additions control perspectives that are distinct from those identified by Beer. In this article the notion of normative personality is defined in terms of socio-cognitive processes operating through trait controls, and the resulting model is then related to the VSM.     

Complexity,technology and the future of transformative politics

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the ‘open space’ idea remains the key source of strength for the World Social Forum as a tool for transformative, liberatory politics. We suggest that this space can be seen as inhabited by two political identities formed on the basis of what we call the conventional left narrative on the one hand and the civilizational narrative on the other. We propose that WSF can continue to fulfil its mission well by serving as a forum where political and social activists and intellectuals can meet and learn from each other to overcome their current weaknesses. Key to such overcoming, we suggest, is that technology and complexity are politicized – a task which may be difficult but the avoidance of which may be irresponsible.     

Transformation Management and Cultural Diversity Training Through Employee Assistance Programs

ABSTRACT

This article explores motivation of black managers in two different settings. A study was conducted to explore the hypothesis that perception of organizational environment will influence both motivation and locus of control. Tt was further hypothesized that black managers working in a white management dominated organization will have a less positive perception of the organizational environment in comparison with their counterparts working in a black management dominated organization. It was hoped that such a study will help influence the focus of black advancement programs from an individual perspective to a more dynamic person-environment transactions focus. The results confirmed the hypothesis to a significant extent. This article suggests an intervention that utilizes EAP expertise in helping organizations to create and manage diversity for competitive advantage.     

Organizational resilience and employee work-role performance after a crisis situation: exploring the effects of organizational resilience on internal crisis communication

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to explore the positive outcomes of organizational resilience to see how resilient employees can support an organization by adapting to and initiating changes during the recovery process following a crisis. This study focuses on organizational resilience generated by employees, as a resilient system, through their psychological ability and positive communication behaviors. Resilient employees can help their organization bounce back to normal functioning following a crisis. A nationwide survey (N = 830) was conducted among full-time employees in the U.S. to examine the positive effect of organizational resilience on employee work-role performance. The results indicate that organizational resilience was positively and significantly associated with: employees’ intentions for proficiency, adaptivity and proactivity of organizational members, thus contributing to organizational effectiveness after a crisis situation.     

Data-Mining Client Concerns in Adolescent Mental Health Services

Summary

Via a practice-based research collaboration, clinicians, supervisors, and managers in an urban adolescent mental health program studied previously collected intake information concerning adolescent risk exposures, behaviors, worries, and self-assessed coping. In addition, desire to talk with a mental health counselor about specific risks and worries was systematically analyzed with the aim of generating practice insights into the clinical challenge of engaging urban adolescents in mental health services. Though provided with research consultation, practitioners were full participants in all aspects of the researchprocess. This organizational development process placed strains on the participants and organization, but many benefits were derived from it. One significant benefit was that mining the expressed concerns of clients gave participants a powerful vehicle for reshaping services. The organization came to see its clients as more than mere service recipients, resulting in a recommitment to Youth Development principles and a renewed effort to increase direct client participation in organizational life.     

Management in/as Comic Relief: Queer Theory and Gender Performativity in The Office

Our discussion here focuses on gender performativity — the evocation of gender through stylized modes of interaction and the recitation of particular cultural norms — in the BBC comedy series The Office. We suggest that The Office can be read as a cultural text that brings sedimented ways of thinking about and enacting gender into relief, a technique that effectively ‘queers’ management and organization as gendered phenomena. In doing so, we argue that not only does The Office parody the ways in which management is configured according to the terms of what Judith Butler has described as the ‘heterosexual matrix’, but that it also represents a parodic critique of the gendered ways in which this configuration is enacted in everyday organizational encounters. We also suggest that, in addition to its capacity to be read as a parody of gender performativity, The Office reflects queer theory's concern, particularly as the latter has been articulated in Butler's writing, to reveal something of the pathos inherent in the desire for recognition that underpins the hegemonic performance of gender. In this respect, our reading of The Office emphasizes that, as a popular cultural text, it throws into (comic) relief the extent to which the desire for recognition underpins the organizational performance and management of gender in accordance with the terms of the heterosexual matrix.     

Power play: the use of space to control and signify power in the workplace

ABSTRACT

The findings of this article emerge from an eight-month study examining career identity practices amongst a select group of fitness professionals in the U.K. We examine how the inter-relationship between physical and social space can denote how power is acquired, displayed, and used by individuals interacting in a shared space. The findings show that power is signified through spatial practices as individuals negotiate through triadic space, creating an identity of space and place for both trainer and client that identifies power, and signifies who has power. Fitness professionals with high levels of symbolic power are able to subvert organizational spatial norms to better serve themselves and their clients, while those with lower levels of symbolic power are forced to, or choose to, negotiate or abdicate space to others. These findings are relevant to a wide range of occupations where self-employment and contract workers interact in shared space.     

‘Would you prefer not to?’ Resetting/resistance across literature,culture, and organizations

ABSTRACT

In this paper we put the concepts of reset, aprosdoketon and minor gesture to work in the context of organizational narratives. In particular we engage with two iconic characters of the genre of organizational fiction, Don Draper in the context of Mad Men TV series and the copyist, who is the main character of Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville. Through a series of textual and performative writings we explore the possibility of setting and resetting organizational narratives/genre. Moreover, we explore what happens when fictional characters from a TV series and a novel (Bartleby and Don Draper) meet us – three scholars working in an array of different fields (literary, methodology, education and organization studies) and how this meeting and interaction shapes our understandings of work, culture, and organizations.     

Chapter 16: Integration of Occupational Health Services in the Federal Sector

Abstract

Federal Occupational Health (FOH) is a federal sector model of the integration and collaboration of occupational health (OH) programs that includes on-site health clinics, and environmental health as well as EAP, work-life, and wellness/fitness programs. This article reviews several aspects of integration at various levels of this public health organization.

The broad objectives of occupational health programs are to promote, support, and provide a healthy and productive, highly functioning workforce to the employer. FOH staff has special expertise and knowledge related to federal procedures, regulations and agency culture, as well as the OH disciplines. With its mission to provide occupational health services to federal agencies and federal employees, FOH has the unique opportunity to provide integrated OH services, thereby providing a more comprehensive approach to the occupational health care of the individual employee, as well as a more comprehensive approach to the health and productivity efforts of the federal agencies.

Although we have made strides and engage in continuing efforts to promote integrated programs and care, a number of additional program enhancements are in discussion and/or in process. FOH is a unique entity and the largest provider of comprehensive OH services within the federal government. It has achieved some notable success with the integration of its services across various levels of the organization with different federal organizations. Efforts have been particularly successful in bringing a coordinated response to various crises and emergency situations. With increasing knowledge and data on the benefits of integration, FOH is working to reduce both internal and external organizational barriers to bring integration of services to their maximum potential.     

Chapter 12: Wells Fargo's Employee Assistance Consulting Model

Abstract

Wells Fargo and Company's Employee Assistance Consulting (EAC) is an established and successful internal corporate-based EAP that delivers organizationally congruent services to a diversified financial services company with 80+ businesses and over 146,000 team members. While some elements of traditional EAPs are evident in the services provided by this entity, EAC also provides highly specialized and customized consultations to its corporate partners, business group customers and employees. Using a highly integrated service model that aligns closely with the specific strategy and operations of each Wells Fargo business, EAC is an invited guest at many of the company's most influential tables. EAC collaboratively partners with senior and line management, Human Resources, the Employment Law Department, Disability Management (called WorkAbility at Wells Fargo) and Risk Management, Corporate Benefits, Corporate Security, Learning and Development, and others to provide leadership and organizational influence on such wide ranging issues as threat assessment and management, business incident management, workplace trauma, health and productivity, and organizational and employee effectiveness. This article describes proven methods and strategies for maximizing organizational influence and positioning EAP consultants as effective business partners.     

History,Culture and Organization Studies

Research by Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) showed that the publication of Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982) coincided with culture becoming a popular and acceptable topic for organization theorists. This helped establish the dominance of a conception of culture that proffered an instrumental view of the relation between managerial practice and management knowledge, Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988) suggested. They saw this as a relatively recent occurrence. While we do not deny the possibility of the instrumental relation as depicted in Barley, Meyer and Gash (1988), we do not concur with their judgement that the study of culture is a relatively novel interruption of previously more academic concerns. On the contrary, we suggest that, while the relationship between practice and knowledge is borne out by a genealogical analysis of culture, the time period for such analysis should be drawn both more widely and more deeply to be an adequate test of Barley, Meyer and Gash's (1988) hypotheses. We argue that the relationship postulated in the hypothesis supported by their research - that academic research on culture has increasingly been prejudiced by instrumental concerns that developed in the lead up to, and in the wake of, the 'excellence' studies - defies social science traditions. We show this by enlarging the canvass of culture. The purposeful use of organizational culture as a management tool returns culture to those origins revealed by genealogical analysis that uncovers its etymology and sociology.     

Teaching Successful Community Practice in Social Work

ABSTRACT

This article identifies and addresses a severe problem in the management of community practice projects of students in their second and third year in the Undergraduate Social Work program at the University of Haifa School of Social Work; namely, the current binary evaluation method based on total success or failure of the project.

Using a systems approach, this study creates a framework by which to ensure effective and positive outcomes for community practice projects carried out by undergraduate social work students (Freund, Arkin & Saltman, 1999). This framework is unique in that it draws on knowledge gained from organizational and community theories, as well as instructional theories for teaching social work practice.

The proposed framework includes three components that describe the factors necessary to help transform the student's learning experience: the organization's characteristics, the student's resources, and the evaluative measures.

This inter-conceptual approach enhances the ability of the instructor, the student, and the organization to build an appropriate organizational foundation for students operating communal programs. The underlying assumption is that an integrative approach promotes a better understanding of the components essential for building and evaluating social plans conducted by social work students.     

Speed Limits: Out of Time in Organization Studies

A screaming comes across the sky. Others glare with a vacant intensity. Solaris studies at the very same time that the world appears to be becoming one vast recording studio. Our cameras are in the process of dissolution and decay. This paper hurtles headlong into the Green Burning Car that is the crash of organization studies today. On the cusp of a promised new mode of study in organizational analysis we write on speed, attracting found objects, jump cuts, wierd juxtapositions, and chance encounters in a ‘pataphysical’ dérive. As an exercise in sympathetic magic, or orgiastic ritual, we are able to exorcise here a number of ghosts in organization theory. Speed limits provide an occasion for shame: shame for its bombast and juvenility, its masculinity and narcissism; the end(s) of organization studies intrudes as event, a sacrifice for dreams of what might come.     

Shaping Street-Children Organizations Across the Americas

Abstract

Covenant House, a non-governmental, social action organization assisting homeless children in the United States is compared and contrasted with its Latin American counterpart organization, Casa Alianza, which services street-living and street-working children throughout Mexico and Central America. Although Covenant House and Casa Alianza share a common mission: to protect children and guarantee their rights through promoting social justice, clear differences in organizational structure, program philosophy, intervention techniques and client characteristics are evident ltural contexts within which both organizations are embedded reveals how surrounding macrofactors can influence and uniquely shape social action organizations in their efforts to develop and deliver systematic and indigenous responses to the homeless, street-children population throughout the Americas.     

Manipulating surface and producing ‘effortless’ elegance – analysing the social organization of glamour

ABSTRACT

This article explores the social organization of glamour in a specific affective economy. Glamour, a phenomenon often viewed as frivolous and feminine, has been relatively under-explored within organization studies, and, although there have been some relative theoretical engagements, there are few empirical studies on how glamour is produced ‘in the field’. Here, I draw upon ethnographic material to analyse three ways in which glamour is produced within the particular setting of a fashion show – through the clothing collection, throughout the frontstage and backstage spaces stimulating glamour, and finally, through individuals embodying glamour. This article develops glamour as an organizational phenomenon. Specifically, the social organization of glamour, always in flux, is contingent on situated improvisation, manipulative acts and interactions among multiple agents. Finally, the overlooked subject of glamour is of interest in regards to the sociology of organizations more generally, since much of contemporary capitalism relies on its production.