FROM BUYER TO INTEGRATOR: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SUPPLY‐CHAIN MANAGER IN THE VERTICALLY DISINTEGRATING FIRM

Using case study data, we describe how a large personal computer manufacturer changed its supply‐chain management strategy after outsourcing the majority of its design and manufacturing activities to a network of focused suppliers. To cope with this new structure, the firm created highly skilled generalists, “supply‐chain integrators,” who coordinate product development, marketing, production, and logistics from product concept to delivery across firm boundaries. We particularly focus on the skill‐set that characterizes these integrators. Finally, we use the case evidence, combined with previous theory, to suggest a specific program of research into coordinating product development across disaggregated supply chains.     

Organization Learning Disorders: Conceptual Model and Intervention Hypotheses

This paper presents a conceptual model thatproposes how organization learning disorders influenceorganization performance. The model suggests thatorganization knowledge mediates the relationship between learning disorders and performance. Specificorganization learning disorders are identified for eachof the four phases of organization learning: discovery,invention, production, and generalization. The effect of learning disorders on organizationknowledge is explored, and intervention hypotheses fortreating the disorders are presented.     

Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the Control-Resistance-Identity Triangle

In this article, the author explores the natureof contemporary organizational controls, the extent towhich they can be said to colonize employeesubjectivity, and the types of resistance which theygenerate. Labor process, psychoanalytic, critical theory,and Foucauldian perspectives are juxtaposed and a numberof similarities and divergences are noted. It is arguedthat many of these perspectives prematurely lament the end of employee recalcitrance andexaggerate the magnitude and totality of organizationalcontrols, generating over-managed and overcontrolledimages of individuals, organizations, and societies. It is proposed that a rapprochement ofpsychoanalytic and labor theory approaches can lead toan appreciation of unmanaged and unmanageable terrainsin organizations, in which human agency may berediscovered, neither as a class-conscious proletariat nor asa transcendental subject, but as a struggling, feeling,thinking, suffering subject, one capable of obeying anddisobeying, controlling and being controlled, losing control and escaping control, definingand redefining control for itself and forothers.     

“Come, Join Our Family”: Discipline and Integration in Corporate Organizational Culture

This article critically examines primaryprocesses and effects of the so-called neworganizational culture that is organized on theprinciples and practices of Total Quality Management(and its variations) and increasingly practiced incorporate organizations in the 1990s. The paperspecifically analyzes the effects of the organizationalcultural practices of family and"team" on the employee and discusses their role incorporate discipline, integration, and control. Data aredrawn from field research conducted in a largemultinational corporation and the analyses andinterpretive propositions are informed by a critical socialpsychoanalytic perspective. The paper disputes theconventional view that the practices of the "newculture" and its purported reform of thehierarchical, specialized, conflict-ridden workplaces oftraditional industrial organizationsempower employees and providemeaningful relationships in the workplace.It is argued, on the contrary, that these new designer culturalpractices serve as processes of regulation, discipline,and control of employee subject selves.