Institutional Theory: Employing the Other Side of Rationality in Non-profit Organizations1

The non-profit sector has become increasingly important in diverse economic, political and social environments. It is not clear that we have effectively communicated, to colleagues, students and decision makers, theoretical developments useful for understanding and managing non-profit organizations. This paper discusses the potential implications of institutional theory to the management of one type of non-profit organization, the publicly supported non-profit organization with input-output relationships that are not well understood. We review institutional theory and discuss the implications of institutional theory to the management and evaluation of publicly supported non-profit organizations.     

Zwischen den Zeilen der Organisation

Between the lines of an organization. On postmodern thinking and its impact on organization theory and consultancyFollowing the discursive concept of postmodernism introduced by Jean-François Lyotard, this paper focuses on the impact of postmodern thinking (understood as a theory of difference) for organization theory and consultancy. Crucial for an application are basic organizational differences, like the relationship between formal and informal organization. By drawing on this difference this paper exemplifies that the main interest of postmodern thinking for our conceptual idea of organizations lies in a modified understanding and analysis of such fundamental organizational distinctions. Finally the implications of this postmodern understanding of organizations are outlined for the field of organization consultancy.     

Commodification, construction and compression: a review of time metaphors in organizational analysis

This paper offers a historical review of forms of temporal structuring and experience in the evolution of work organization. Initially, we review some key images of time and temporality to emerge from philosophy and social theory. In particular, we discuss images of temporal structuring reflected in the two key time metaphors, the line and the cycle. Secondly, we examine some of the main images of time to emerge from the history of work organization. While initially the focus is upon those linear time images that stem from the progressive commodification of the labour process, subsequently this analysis is qualified by time images that reflect the social construction of organizational culture. An examination of the homogeneous time-reckoning systems of Taylorism is complemented by examples of heterogeneous time-reckoning from anthropological and ethnographic studies. Finally, we discuss the postmodernist debate in the sociology of time. Much of the foregoing analysis having been devoted to issues of clock-time, this section sees discussion of what has been referred to as "instantaneous-time", whereby organizational practices are based on time-frames that lie beyond conscious human experience. This concept is associated with the complex shifts from Fordism to the flexible accumulation of "post-Fordism". Central to this debate is the notion of the time–space compression of physical processes and human experiences.     

11 The Effects of Governments on Management and Organization

Abstract

We review and integrate existing research from organization theory, strategy, organizational behavior, economics, sociology and political science on the effects of governments on organization and management, with a focus on how governing ideology and government capability influence independent organizations’ forms, strategies, and their participants’ behavior. When brought together these works suggest significant research opportunities in the fields of management and organization, as well as new perspectives on public policy challenges. Several avenues of potentially profitable empirical research include more attention to the influence of government on corporate strategies, more research on the strategies of pursuing corruption and government capture for competitive advantage, the role of government in fostering innovation and the growth of entrepreneurial organizations, and extra‐organizational contextual effects on managerial and employee organizational behavior. Possible public policy implications are illustrated with an application to the role of organizations in national wealth generation and dispersion.     

Colonel Urwick and “organization”

This paper examines Urwick's view that confusion of two meanings of the term “organization”, due to social scientists, has diverted attention from the study of organization structure and the task oriented nature of management. It is maintained that this view is not an adequate characterization of Organization Theory. The relationship between social science and management theory is examined, and the approaches are held to be symbiotic, not, as Urwick suggests, competitive.     

新权力范式对组织行为管理的影响及对策研究

当下一种由下而上聚集而成的具有开放性、共享性和分散性的新型权力范式已经逐步形成并涉及到社会生活的各个方面,从根本上改变着个体与组织、权威以及他人之间的关系,并对组织行为管理产生了深刻的影响,但学术界对这种新权力范式的基础性内容尚缺乏系统的整理。鉴于此,通过从权力的定义入手,基于对东西方古典政治哲学中权力概念的梳理,从不同维度对新旧权力范式进行了对比,分析总结了新型权力范式对组织行为管理在宏观和微观层面的影响,并针对具体情况提出了相应的管理对策与建议。     

供应链管理理论与方法

进入九十年代以来,供应链管理成为增强企业竞争力最重要方法之一。本文介绍了供应链管理的基本思想,说明了供应链管理产生的理论与现实背景,介绍了实施供应链管理的基本过程,分析了为辅助供应链管理的模型,并说明了供应链管理对我国企业管理的借鉴作用。     

Productivity planning: a central issue for Australian management

In the manufacturing industry, management strategy must include plans for direct study and improvement of productivity. While the author sees management as essentially amateur in nature, there are several principles which clarify the approach to productivity improvement. These are the Pareto and Zulu Principles; Learning Curve and Fundamental Change theory; Simplicity; and several principles of organization. These principles are discussed along with available techniques and interlocked into a productivity consulting philosophy of ‘Management by Principle’.     

The great reset of management and organization theory. A European perspective

In mid-2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced the Great Reset, an initiative launched to assert, describe, and shape the direction of an epochal transition brought about by the global coronavirus crisis. Rooted in a European tradition of social theory, this article aims to articulate the broader social context of this scenario and pinpoint its implications for management and organization theory. One of these implications is that our fields face a significant risk of co-performing rather than studying the looming “great transformation” from an economy-to a health-dominated society, thus merely replacing one reductionism with another. It follows that what is required are management and organization theories that analyze rather than ride the macro social trends that shape organizations and their environments. The article concludes that if crises are the golden moments of alternative mainstreams, then for those interested in alternatives to the emerging “new normality” the golden moment to develop the next alternative mainstream theories is now.     

Chaos and Transformation Theories: A Theoretical Analysis with Implications for Organization Theory and Public Management

Chaos and transformation theories have emerged as new currencies in social sciences in general and in systems design and management, and in futuristic studies in particular. This article analyzes chaos and transformation theories in historical and contemporary perspectives, their contributions to social science in general, and organization theory and public management in particular. The notions of chaos and order, change and continuity, and uncertainty and certainty are analyzed along with the growing realization of complexity and non-linear dynamic features of modern organizations and the hard reality of a constant necessity to acquire new knowledge and learn to manage organizations with flexibility and innovation. Finally, the article addresses some of the limitations of chaos theory and outlines a number of implications for organization theory and public management in the age of globalization.     

Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann as organization theorists

Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann are two authors who, not being management and organization scholars, have had a significant impact on MOS studies. Their works are even more appreciated in time, yet their influence has not crossed the Atlantic. The texts of the two authors, and the predecessor they evoke, demarcate a truly European development of management and organization theory.     

管理学百年回顾与展望——第4届“管理学在中国”学术研讨会述评

在第4届"管理学在中国"学术研讨会上,围绕"管理学:百年回眸与世纪展望"的大会主题,学者们重点针对以下2个话题进行了研讨:西方管理理论的发展回顾与展望、管理学在中国的发展回顾与展望。此外,通过专题论坛的形式,学者们还围绕以下4个方面的话题进行了专题研讨:管理哲学、领导研究、政府与非营利组织管理、商业组织管理。针对上述话题的研讨情况进行了综述和点评。     

Ideology in Management Studies

Ideology is a core and contested concept in the social sciences, but also long deployed in management research to highlight the political, embedded and/or obscuring nature of ideas. Indeed, many would argue that management itself is inherently ideological in legitimating or privileging managerial interests and concealing other groups and ways of organizing. In the first systematic review of how ideology has been conceptualized in management studies, this paper explores its diverse and changing meanings in order to develop and sustain the concept. It is based on a heuristic review of 175 articles and 41 books published between 1956 and 2018. Further developing categories used in the social sciences around its role, we found views of ideology as: (1) domination; (2) legitimation; (3) interpretation; (4) integration; and (5) normative logic. In addition, emerging perspectives were identified where ideology was (6) an object of critique or (7) fantasy structuring social reality. We describe, illustrate and evaluate these often internally diverse and interrelated perspectives, as well as comparing them with sometimes competing notions within the management field, such as discourse, culture and legitimation. We also bring together the different approaches and argue for a pluralist, but not infinitely flexible, approach to the concept. In doing so, we identify research agendas for ideology within management and organization studies.     

和谐管理理论及其应用思考

激烈的组织生存竞争、复杂的组织管理问题都要求管理理论给出应对不确定性的、综合的、整体的策略,和谐管理理论应运而生.首先,介绍和谐管理理论的基本思想,即它是针对多变环境下复杂管理问题的解决学,它以"和谐主题"作为管理分析的基本出发点,以人与物的互动以及人与系统的自治性和能动性为前提,围绕"和谐主题",以"和则"与"谐则"的耦合互动来应对管理问题,提高组织绩效.其次,阐明理论的定位并探讨了理论的范式特征,进而提出了一种和谐管理理论的应用操作模式.最后,说明了和谐管理理论的现实应用价值在于提供一种宏观层次、动态发展的全局视野;促进对组织整体基于生成论哲学的复杂性思维;为解释复杂的管理现象提供操作意义上的规范模式;为复杂管理问题的处理提供系统的方法论体系和整合工具.     

战略管理中的“现代”与“后现代”

本文在总结现代战略管理理论的基础上介绍了近年来在西方崭露头角的战略管理领域中的后现代思想,在这种总结和介绍中我们可以看到战略的后现代观点与现代的批判观点以及战略的正统派学说之间的关系,从而可以在一个更具反思性和批判性的层面上理解战略管理,为进一步的理论建树提供基础.     

3 Critical Management Studies

Abstract

Critical management studies (CMS) offers a range of alternatives to mainstream management theory with a view to radically transforming management practice. The common core is deep skepticism regarding the moral defensibility and the social and ecological sustainability of prevailing conceptions and forms of management and organization. CMS's motivating concern is neither the personal failures of individual managers nor the poor management of specific firms, but the social injustice and environmental destructiveness of the broader social and economic systems that these managers and firms serve and reproduce. This chapter reviews CMS's progress, main themes, theoretical and epistemological premises, and main projects; we also identify some problems and make some proposals. Our aim is to provide an accessible overview of a growing movement in management studies.     

The Visual Dimension in Organizing,Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas,Current Developments,and Promising Avenues

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Subsequently, we outline, in some detail, promising avenues for future research, and close with a reflection on the impact of visualization on scientific practice itself.     

Critical Theorist,Postmodernist and Social Constructionist Paradigms in Organizational Analysis: A Paradigmatic Review of Organizational Learning Literature

In an effort to clarify alternative approaches to organizational analysis, this paper is concerned to stimulate the debate on how an inquiry into organizational phenomena, in general, and organizational learning, in particular, can be accomplished. Encouraging attention to different aspects of various paradigmatic approaches, the paper focuses on critical theory, postmodernism and social constructionism and how these paradigms have contributed and can contribute to the research in the subject domain of organizational learning. To this end, a paradigmatic review of the literature on organizational learning is offered in this paper. Organizational learning, as the study of learning processes of, and within, organizations, has attracted significant attention in academe since the early 1980s. There is a plethora of studies on organizational learning, which offer rich material for a paradigmatic review. This study highlights the need for further development of the field from alternative paradigmatic perspectives, with a view to generating more insights into the multifaceted, complex and changing nature of learning in contemporary organizations.     

Dangerous Knowledge: The Political,Personal, and Epistemological Promise of Feminist Research in Management and Organization Studies

Feminism is a theoretical perspective and social movement that seeks to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, sexist inequality and oppression. Yet feminist research remains marginal in the most prestigious management and organization studies (MOS) journals, as defined by the Financial Times 50 (FT50) list. Based on a review of how feminism is framed in these journals (1990–2018), we identify three overlapping categories of how feminism is represented: (i) as a conceptual resource which is used to address specific topics; (ii) as an empirical category associated with the study of specific types of organization or organizing practice; and, rarely, (iii) as a methodology for producing knowledge. While feminist knowledge exists beyond these parameters, such as in the journal Gender, Work & Organization, we suggest that the relative absence of explicitly feminist scholarship in the most prestigious MOS journals reflects an epistemic oppression which arises from the threat that feminism presents to established ways of knowing. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, we use the ‘sweaty concept’ of dangerous knowledge to show how feminism positions knowledge as personal, introducing a radical form of researcher subjectivity which relies on the acknowledgment of uncertainty. We conclude by calling for the epistemic oppression of feminist scholarship to be recognized and redressed so the potential of feminism as a way of knowing about organizations and management can be realized. This, we argue, would enable feminist research praxis in MOS to develop as an alternative location of, in bell hooks' term, healing that challenges the main/malestream.     

Resurrecting organization without renouncing society: A response to Ahrne,Brunsson and Seidl

In a recent article in this journal, Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl (2016) suggest a definition of organization as a ‘decided social order’ composed of five elements (membership, rules, hierarchies, monitoring, and sanctions) which rest on decisions. ‘Partial organization’ uses only one or a few of these decidable elements while ‘complete organization’ uses them all. Such decided orders may also occur outside formal organizations, as the authors observe. Although we appreciate the idea of improving our understanding of organization(s) in modern society, we believe that Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl's suggestion jeopardizes the concept of organization by blurring its specific meaning. As the authors already draw on the work of Niklas Luhmann, we propose taking this exploration a step further and the potential of systems theory more seriously. Organizational analysis would then be able to retain a distinctive notion of formal organization on the one hand while benefiting from an encompassing theory of modern society on the other. With this extended conceptual framework, we would expect to gain a deeper understanding of how organizations implement and shape different societal realms as well as mediate between their particular logics, and, not least, how they are related to non-organizational social forms (e.g. families).