Suchergebnisse

This article explores different conceptions of 'enterprise' and seeks to indicate the extent to which they are non-reducible. Its main focus is on one particular conception of enterprise that has underpinned a powerful critique of public sector organizations and which has been translated into a variety of specific organizational strategies for restructuring or modernizing the public services. This conception, it is argued, is very different from that informing much of the prescriptive and descriptive literature on entrepreneurship within management studies, for instance. The article also attempts to question the opposition between 'bureaucracy' and 'enterprise' that frames this self-styled 'entrepreneurial' approach to organizational reform. This epochal 'bureaucracy/enterprise' dualism, it is argued, is best viewed as a rhetorical move in a political polemic, but one with real effects.

The paper focuses upon a particular discourse of organizational 'change' as it has appeared in a specific context—the contemporary field of public administration—and seeks to explore its role as a rhetorical device in reshaping the identity of public service. It does so first by seeking to indicate the epochalist bent of much theorizing about contemporary economic and organizational change—in both its academic and its more managerial manifestations. Second, it seeks to show how a particular discourse of organizational change mobilizes support for attempts to 're-invent' or 'modernize' the public administration as an institution of government. Finally, it seeks to offer a few words in support of the seemingly unfashionable art of 'piecemeal reform' or ' organizational casuistry'.

This paper problematizes a particular story of organizational transformation currently circulating within organization studies. In this story a chain of equivalences emerges in which the vicissitudes of contemporary 'environmental change' make certain forms of organizational conduct redundant while at the same time bringing novel forms into being. The old and the new can even be named. The former is represented by the hierarchicallyordered bureaucracy-often described as the epitome of 'modern' organization-and the latter by the entrepreneurial corporation-often imagined as typifying 'postmodern' organization. According to proponents of this story the ascendance of the new entrepreneurialism is a cause for celebration as it offers hopeful ways of living with difference and promoting pluralism in contrast to the bureaucratic practice of excluding or nullifying difference and suppressing pluralism. The paper sets out to challenge this 'just so' story of organizational transformation by indicating that under certain circumstances and in certain domains it is bureaucratic norms of organizational conduct that protect and enhance pluralism. Instead of agreeing with the representation of the impersonal, procedural and hierarchical character of bureaucracy as a symptom of moral deficiency, the paper argues that the bureau be assessed in its own right as a crucial ethical andpolitical resource of liberal democratic regimes. In so doing the paper seeks to restore to the bureau some of the ethical and political gravity imputed to it by Max Weber.

This book seeks to contribute to the goal of reviving Organization Theory as a practical science of organizing and rehabilitating its core object - formal organization - through a re-examination and re-assessment of the outlook, comportment and attitude animating its classical antecedents

This volume contributes to the goal of reviving organisation theory as a practical science of organising and rehabilitating its core object - formal organisation - through a re-examination and re-assessment of the outlook, comportment and attitude animating its classical antecedents