Variations in Organization Science


Book Description

If he were an assistant professor today, what work would social science giant Donald T. Campbell be doing in the field of organization science? Joel A. C. Baum and Bill McKelvey explore this question in Variations in Organization Science. This volume reveals and celebrates Campbell's many contributions to the field by presenting new variations that stem directly from his work. Rather than analyzing Campbell's work, chapter authors pursue additional implications and further applications of his perspective to organization science - some of which Campbell himself might have pursued if he were starting out as an assistant professor in 1999.




Global Themes and Local Variations in Organization and Management


Book Description

Global Themes and Local Variations in Organization and Management: Perspectives on Glocalization offers a broad exposition of the relations between the global and the local with regard to organizational and managerial ideas, practices, and forms. This edited volume forges ahead to capture the complexity of modern management and organization that results from the processes of glocalization. Universality is among the core underlying principles of the management of organizations, as well as of organization and management science itself. Yet, reality reveals enormous variation across social and cultural contexts. For instance, multinational corporations must adjust their management practices to adhere to national regulation and local standards; manufacturers and service providers routinely tailor their products to suit the local preferences of consumers; and non-profit organizations amend their advocacy agenda to appeal to local sentiments. The work assembled here goes beyond merely describing such patterns of variation and adaptation in organization and management; research and commentary engage directly with the tensions between homogeneity and heterogeneity, convergence and divergence, global and local. With contributions from leading scholars in the field of comparative organization studies, this collection offers a substantive contribution to the investigation of organization and management, as well as providing a valuable resource for students of organization studies, international business, and sociology.




Talking about Organization Science


Book Description

Written by outstanding scholars, the themes of this book cover a wide range of issues at the heart of the study of organizations. These include debates over the role of economics in strategic management research and the now classic exchanges between Jeff Pfeffer and John Van Maanen over the direction of organization science studies; discourses that describe, analyze and critique ways to represent and understand organizations, including a re-appraisal of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan's seminal work on sociological paradigms of organizational analysis and views on (organizational) culture expressed by several leading writers on the topic: It includes dialogues on some quite radical or unusual "takes" on organizational life: the role of the tempered radical, working inside the organization for fundamental change; the dilemmas facing individuals' publishing qualitative research in mainstream journals; the implications of adopting a spiritual lens to the study of organizations; and a discussion of ways to better bridge the gap between academic thinking and business practice.




Organizational Science Abroad


Book Description

Organizing consists of making other people work. We do this by manip ulating symbols: words, exhortations, memos, charts, signs of status. We expect these symbols to have the desired effects on the people con cerned. The success of our organizing activities depends on whether the others do attach to our symbols the meanings we expect them to. Whether or not they do so is a function of what I have sometimes called "the programs in their minds" -their learned ways of thinking, feeling, and reacting-in short, a function of their culture. The assumption that organizations could be culture-free is naive and myopic; it is based on a misunderstanding of the very act of organizing. Certainly, few people who have ever worked abroad will make this assumption. The dependence of organizations on their people's mental pro grams does not mean, of course, that we do not find many similarities across organizations. Some characteristics of human mental program ming are universal; others are shared by most people in a continent, a country, a region, an industry, a scientific discipline, or even a gender.




Studying Differences Between Organizations


Book Description

Presents a comparative analysis as a means to explain and describe organizational heterogeneity, at varying levels and contexts. This title consists of two sections: an introductory essay section and a section that focuses on specific theoretical, methodological and empirical topics.




Organizational Routines


Book Description

One of the major challenges facing organization studies has been for a long time to develop an operational content to the notion of routines . This book offers important advances in this direction, both conceptually and through illuminating case studies. Giovanni Dosi, Sant Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy This book showcases advanced empirical research that applies the concept of organizational routines to understanding organizations and how they change and evolve. The contributions gathered in the book cover qualitative, quantitative, and archival methods for empirical research applying the concept of organizational routines. Specific issues highlighted include the use of event-sequence methods in the analysis of organizational routines, the impact of standard operating procedures on recurrent behaviour patterns, and the stability, resilience, and change of organizational routines. The book thus provides an overview of different empirical methods applied to study organizational routines, and of their prerequisites, analytical power, and contribution. This comprehensive book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of organization theory, strategy, and organization behaviour. Researchers in organization, management and economic science, organizational change and evolutionary theories will also find this book invaluable.




Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation


Book Description

In a world of organizations that are in constant change scholars have long sought to understand and explain how they change. This book introduces research methods that are specifically designed to support the development and evaluation of organizational process theories. The authors are a group of highly regarded experts who have been doing collaborative research on change and development for many years.




The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation


Book Description

Organizational change and innovation are central and enduring issues in management theory and practice. Dramatic changes in population demographics, technology, competitive survival, and social, economic, and environmental health and sustainability concerns means the need to understand how organizations repond to these shifts through change and innovation has never been greater. Why and what organizations change is generally well known; how organizations change is therefore the central focus of this Handbook. It focuses on processes of change — or the sequence of events in which organizational characteristics and activities change and develop over time — and the factors that influence these processes, with the organization as the central unit of analysis. Across the diverse and wide-ranging contributions, three central questions evolve: what is the nature of change and process?; what are the key concepts and models for understanding organization change and innovation?; and how should we study change and innovation? This Handbook presents critical evolving scholarship from leading experts across a range of disciplines, and explores its implications for future research and practice.




A New History of Management


Book Description

This book argues that if we are to think differently about management, we must first rewrite management history.




Resource Redeployment and Corporate Strategy


Book Description

This volume examines the differences between resource sharing and resource redeployment, and the subsequent effects on firm value creation and industry evolution.