Subversion, Power and Hierarchy in Organisations and Society


Book Description

Subversion, Power and Hierarchy in Organisations and Society: Carnivalesque Leadership explores a leadership strategy that dates back centuries but has become so normalised that it can be invisible as a strategy. Extrapolating Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival and its potential for communal freedom and subversive challenge to existing hierarchies, this book identifies components of the carnivalesque, considers why and how they have impact and then maps the application of Carnivalesque Leadership to a series of case studies. Exploratory in nature, these diverse case studies focus on the historic evolution of carnivals in Trinidad and Notting Hill, the safety-valve mechanisms ubiquitous in the education sector, the standardisation of control and release within the corporate sector and the dynamic tension between protest, challenge and fun in Pride events. Readers will benefit from an increased awareness of a strategised Carnivalesque Leadership model and a greater understanding of the potential not only for the safety-valve release of pressure in society and in organisations but also for longer-term change through exposure to alternatives to the official norm.




Leadership Enrichment and Development


Book Description

This book shares the LEAD (Leadership Enrichment and Development) method, a framework for supporting and facilitating leadership identity development for women in higher education. Guided by feminist group processes and relational learning, the chapters in this volume illustrate the impacts of self- and peer mentorship on the authors. Part lived experience, part reflection on scholarship on women’s leadership development, this book has implications for those in leadership development settings across professional sectors and career trajectories, offering strategies, implications, and insights for those developing or seeking to learn about peer mentoring programming for women faculty. Women faculty, leadership development coaches, faculty development leaders, directors of centers for teaching excellence, program leaders focused on girls’ and women’s leader development, and students and scholars interested in women’s leadership development in higher education will find this volume of interest. While LEAD’s context is higher education, the volume offers valuable application to other professional settings where women work, lead, and thrive.




The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community


Book Description

A superb introduction to the prospect of opening our idea of the working class to include non-waged workers, specifically women who work in the home. A simple idea with profound revolutionary consequences. If the workers of the world are not all in the factory, and are not all men, where does that leave us?




The Politics of Subversion


Book Description

In this important book, Antonio Negri develops the key ideas that were to form the basis for the highly influential analyses of new forms of power and social struggle presented in Empire and Multitude. He shows how new technology and the break-up of the traditional factory have created new social subjects whose value is no longer tied to their skill. The spread of communication networks and the globalization of production mean that capitalism has become totalized - but not, Negri stresses, monolithic. On the contrary, the possibilities for subversion have correspondingly increased. Going beyond classical Marxism, he shows how old solidarities must be reformulated and new alliances created. The struggles which marked the political end of the twentieth century are now being repeated in a new historical conjuncture, giving rise to new forms of transnational solidarity that can challenge dominant global powers. This new paperback edition, which includes a new Preface by the author, is an excellent introduction to the work of one of the most influential political thinkers writing today and will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the new forms of conflict and struggle that will shape the world in the twenty-first century.




The Structuring of Organizations


Book Description

Synthesizes the empirical literature on organizationalstructuring to answer the question of how organizations structure themselves --how they resolve needed coordination and division of labor. Organizationalstructuring is defined as the sum total of the ways in which an organizationdivides and coordinates its labor into distinct tasks. Further analysis of theresearch literature is neededin order to builda conceptualframework that will fill in the significant gap left by not connecting adescription of structure to its context: how an organization actuallyfunctions. The results of the synthesis are five basic configurations (the SimpleStructure, the Machine Bureaucracy, the Professional Bureaucracy, theDivisionalized Form, and the Adhocracy) that serve as the fundamental elementsof structure in an organization. Five basic parts of the contemporaryorganization (the operating core, the strategic apex, the middle line, thetechnostructure, and the support staff), and five theories of how it functions(i.e., as a system characterized by formal authority, regulated flows, informalcommunication, work constellations, and ad hoc decision processes) aretheorized. Organizations function in complex and varying ways, due to differing flows -including flows of authority, work material, information, and decisionprocesses. These flows depend on the age, size, and environment of theorganization; additionally, technology plays a key role because of itsimportance in structuring the operating core. Finally, design parameters aredescribed - based on the above five basic parts and five theories - that areused as a means of coordination and division of labor in designingorganizational structures, in order to establish stable patterns of behavior.(CJC).




Organizing America


Book Description

American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century? Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits. Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations. Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant, and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical genre.




The Feminist Subversion of the Economy


Book Description

What does a dignified life--transforming gendered labor divisions and a racialized, exploitative, feminized care economy--look like and how can we collectively build it.







Reinventing Hierarchy and Bureaucracy


Book Description

This volume brings together leading scholars in the field of organisation studies to reflect on the universal phenomena of hierarchy (vertical organisation of tasks) and bureaucracy (rule-bound execution of tasks), resulting in a colourful kaleidoscope of thought-provoking, critical and refreshingly non-mainstream analysis.