Suchergebnisse

AbstractResearch has focused on episodic crises (e.g., fire extinguished), with regard to causality, management, and recovery. But some crises (e.g., illegal migration) are continuous, with no clear conclusion, and the nature and timing of the recovery phase are indeterminate. To explore the challenges facing leaders in a continuous crisis, we turn to 'extreme fiction' – a radically imaginative narrative of possible accidents, crises and disasters. The television series The Walking Dead is an example of a continuous crisis. This is also a novel crisis, which means that crisis management routines, protocols, and standard operating procedures may not apply, and the value of past experience may be limited. Our analysis offers a novel perspective on the nature of the crisis leadership role, by showing how a continuous crisis generates three paradoxical leadership agendas: managing the crisis (which includes unmanageable elements), managing conflict (while initiating and participating in conflict), and managing values (which may have to be temporarily abandoned). Our findings also demonstrate how contextual properties shape the leadership role in a continuous crisis.

The field of organizational research displays three trends: widening boundaries, a multiparadigmatic profile, and methodological inventiveness. Choice of research methods, shaped by aims, epistemological concerns, and norms of practice, is thus also influenced by organizational, historical, political, ethical, evidential, and personal factors, typically treated as problems to be overcome. This article argues that those factors constitute a system of inevitable influences and that this contextualization of methods choice has three implications. First, it is difficult to argue that methods choice depends exclusively on links to research aims; choice involves a more complex, interdependent set of considerations. Second, it is difficult to view method as merely a technique for snapping reality into focus; choices of method frame the data windows through which phenomena are observed, influencing interpretative schemas and theoretical development. Third, research competence thus involves addressing coherently the organizational, historical, political, ethical, evidential, and personal factors relevant to an investigation.

Corporate narratives concerning technological change are often constructed around a linear event sequence that presents the organization in a positive light to internal and external observers. These narratives often sanitize the change process, and present data from which commentators can formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to implement new technology. In contrast, this article draws on processual-contextual theoretical perspectives to argue that technological change is a more complex political process represented by multiple versions of events which compete with each other for dominance as definitive change accounts. It also calls for an analysis of narratives over time (before, during and after change) in seeking to demonstrate the analytical significance of identifying and unpacking the multiple interpretive frameworks that are utilized in organizational struggles over technology and change at work. These struggles draw attention to the ways in which power is exercised through the construction and management of compelling stories that shape change. It is the contribution of these stories (competing narratives) to understanding the political process of technological change, that is the focus of this article.

Analyzing film narrative to reveal embedded theory, this article suggestsa novel approach to the use of feature movies in management education. Two films are analyzed from this perspective. Contact presents a narrative of organization politics, arguing that integrity can damage an individual's career. Elizabeth offers a leadership narrative, arguing that ruthlessness is necessary to maintain a power base. This perspective is valuable for exploring the untidy, complex, and often controversial dynamics of organizational processes, demonstrating how outcomes are shaped, not by the interaction of independent and dependent variables, but by sequences of events in particular contexts.

This paper explores the "lived experience" of organizational politics from the standpoint of the change agent. While political behavior appears inevitably to accompany organizational change, the literature of change management seems to adopt an ambivalent approach to this area. The literature of organizational politics, on the other hand, identifies power bases, and offers prescriptive lists of "power tactics" without explaining how these are deployed in the context of driving, shaping, influencing, or implementing change. How do change agents become engaged in political activity, what forms does this take, and can these actions withstand public scrutiny? This paper is based on qualitative, idiographic accounts drawn from five interviews from a pilot study designed to develop a research methodology for advancing understanding of the shaping role of political behavior in organizational change. The case illustrations presented suggest that political behavior is an accepted rather than an objectionable dimension of the change agency role; that change agents are drawn into political behavior by a combination of organizational and interpersonal factors; that political behavior can serve organizational goals (such as protection of a change agenda) as well as personal career objectives; and that while specific actions may appear unacceptable when considered in isolation, political behavior is potentially defensible in context. The definition of "political" here is the one used by respondents. This constructivist perspective reveals interpretations inconsistent with negative definitions, emphasizing the illegitimate and self-serving character of political behavior, which tend to dominate the literature.

Organizational change is a multi-authored process in which respondent and research narratives have causal as well as documentary and explanatory properties, shaping reputations and seeking to colour the nature and direction of future actions. We argue that academic case study narratives are too readily excluded from analysis and regarded as unproblematic solutions to logistical questions of data analysis. However, intervention narratives typically rely on respondent accounts that exhibit inconsistencies and are attributable to personal sense making, impression management, and political agendas. By drawing on processual and narrative approaches, we show how coherent narratives of change are achieved despite such inconsistencies through the related processes of audiencing and discoursing, and that research producers and consumers must therefore be 'genre aware'.

The paper examines the impact and possible unintended side effects of the privately sponsored Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) media campaign to reduce illicit drug abuse. The paper describes the history, goals, organization, production processes, and process and outcome evaluations of the PDFA advertising campaign. It also reviews major criticisms that have been leveled at the PDFA campaign, including its dissemination of false information, the narrow scope of its message, a number of unintended iatrogenic side-effects, potential conflicts of interest arising from the sources of its funding, and the agenda-setting function of the PDFA campaign in defining which drugs are dangerous and how the attendant problems should be addressed.

The major concern in this paper is to examine the effect of computer numerical control on skill. The findings from research in three companies demonstrate that in the engineering industry, technical change can have both positive and negative effects on the utilisation of skill, and thus on levels of skill in the industry. The experience of technical change, whether positive or negative, is shared among groups of workers. Technical change potentially poses a threat to turners' skill and so they will defend those common interests in the face of that change.

This review sets extreme jobs in the context of the institutional, occupational, organizational and individual drivers of long hours and work intensification and identifies the consequences for gender equality, human sustainability and long-term productivity. We suggest that extreme jobs derive not from the 'nature' of managerial and professional work but from working practices and occupational discourses which have developed to suit the gendered norms of 'ideal workers'. These practices and discourses encourage long hours rather than working-hours choices. Extreme jobs extend the gendered division of labour and increase the separation of work and non-work spheres; they are a structure of gender inequality. This review suggests that future research should seek to identify alternative but business-neutral working practices which contest the extreme 'nature' of managerial and professional work, measure the social value of non-work activities and deepen our understanding of the personal and social significance of non-work identities other than motherhood, and disentangle situational motivation, work passion and workaholism as motives for devoting long hours to work so that impacts on well-being and productivity can be more clearly understood.

AbstractThe exact expression is derived for the average stationary cost of a (Q,R) inventory system with lost sales, unit Poisson demands, Erlang‐distributed lead times, fixed order cost, fixed cost per unit lost sale, linear holding cost per unit time, and a maximum of one order outstanding. Explicit expressions for the state probabilities and a fast method of calculating them are obtained for the case of Q greater than R. Exponential lead times are analyzed as a special case. A simple cyclic coordinate search procedure is used to locate the minimum cost policy. Examples of the effect of lead time variability on costs are given.

Preface -- Groundwork : understanding and diagnosing change -- Managing change : stories and paradoxes -- Images of change management -- Why change? : contemporary drivers and pressures -- What to change? : a diagnostic approach -- Implementation : the substance and process of change -- What changes (and what doesn?t)? : current concerns and developments -- Learning objectives -- Vision and the direction of change -- Change communication strategies -- Resistance to change -- Organization development and sense-making approaches -- Change management, processual, and contingency approaches -- Running threads : sustainability, and the effective change manager -- Sustaining change versus initiative decay -- The effective change manager : what does it take? -- Index