Organization Studies

This book provides a series of inter-disciplinary perspectives on how capitalism and national capitalisms are changing in the twenty-first century. It aims to bring perspectives on how the international economic order is changing as a result of the rise of emerging economies countries, the increasing influence of regional organizations such as the EU, NAFTA etc. and new forms of private and public international regulation together with analyses of how states are adapting their economic policies and processes and what the consequences of these are for adaptations for different societies. In turn, it links these changes to how firms are developing new strategies for organizing global value chains and applying scientific knowledge to the commercialization of products. The book contextualizes these processes in a world where financial markets have become increasingly uncertain and crisis prone at the same time as demands from different social groups for new forms of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility are emerging. It draws on examples from Europe, North and Latin America as well as Asia in order to illustrate the complex ways in which different forms of national capitalism are adapting and changing their institutions. The book builds on earlier comparative accounts of how institutions, firms, and markets co-devolve to analyze current changes in these relationships and suggest likely developments in them, and in this way move the frontiers of research forward to a global and inter-disciplinary perspective on twenty-first century capitalism and capitalisms.

Organizations performing non-routine, innovative, often knowledge-intensive tasks, for example, professional partnerships need a rather flat, collegial, and non-bureaucratic structure. This book examines cooperation among partners in a US corporate law firm and provides a grounded theory of collective action among rival peers, or collegiality. Members (partners and associates) are portrayed as independent entrepreneurs who build social niches in their organization and cultivate status competition among themselves. This behaviour allows them to fulfil their commitment to an extremely constraining partnership agreement and generates informal social mechanisms (bounded solidarity, lateral control, oligarchic regulation) that help a flat organization govern itself: maintain individual performance, even for tenured partners; capitalize knowledge and control quality; monitor and sanction opportunistic free-riding; solve the ‘too many chefs’ problem; balance the powers of rainmakers and schedulers; and integrate the firm in spite of many centrifugal forces. These mechanisms and the solutions they provide are examined using a broadly-conceived structural approach combining theory-driven network analysis, ethnography of task forces performing knowledge-intensive work, and analysis of management and internal politics in the firm. The author presents a theory of the collegial organization that generalizes its results to all kinds of partnerships.

After twenty-five years of preparation, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva, is finally running its intensive scientific experiments into high-energy particle physics. These experiments, which have so captured the public's imagination, take the world of physics to a new energy level — the terascale — at which elementary particles are accelerated to one millionth of a percent of the speed of light and made to smash into each other with a combined energy of around fourteen trillion electron-volts. What new world opens up at the terascale? No one really knows, but the confident expectation is that radically new phenomena will come into view. The kind of Big Science being pursued at CERN, however, is becoming ever more uncertain and costly. Do the anticipated benefits justify the efforts and the costs? This book aims to give a broad organizational and strategic understanding of the nature of Big Science by analyzing one of the major experiments that uses the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS Collaboration. It examines such issues as: the flow of ‘interlaced’ knowledge between specialist teams; the intra- and inter-organizational dynamics of Big Science; the new knowledge capital being created for the workings of the experiment by individual researchers, suppliers, and e-science and ICTs; the leadership implications of a collaboration of nearly three thousand members; and the benefits for the wider societal setting. This book aims to examine how, in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk, ambitious scientific aims can be achieved by complex organizational networks characterized by cultural diversity, informality, and trust — and where Big Science can head next.

It has long been an interest of researchers in economics, sociology, organization studies, and economic geography to understand how firms innovate. Most recently, this interest has begun to examine the micro-processes of work and organization that sustain social creativity, emphasizing the learning and knowing through action when social actors and technologies come together in ‘communities of practice’; everyday interactions of common purpose and mutual obligation. These communities are said to spark both incremental and radical innovation. This book examines the concept of communities of practice and its applications in different spatial, organizational, and creative settings. Chapters examine the development of the concept, the link between situated practice and different types of creative outcome, the interface between spatial and relational proximity, and the organizational demands of learning and knowing through communities of practice. More widely, the chapters examine the compatibility between markets, knowledge capitalism, and community; seemingly in conflict with each other, but discursively not.

If the defining goal of modern-day business can be isolated to just one item, it would be the search for competitive advantage. Competition is more intense than ever—technological innovation, consumer expectations, and government deregulation all combine to create more opportunities for new competitors to change the basic rules of the game. At the same time, most of the old reliable sources of competitive advantage are drying up: the strategies employed by GM, IBM, and AT&T to maintain their positions of dominance in the 1960s and 70s are now obsolete. The authors of this book argue that the last remaining source of truly sustainable competitive advantage lies in “organizational capabilities”: the unique ways each organization structures its work and motivates its people to achieve clearly articulated strategic objectives. The book argues that managers must understand the concepts and learn the skills involved in designing their organization to exploit their inherent strengths. All the reengineering, restructuring, and downsizing in the world will merely destabilize a company if the change doesn't address the fundamental patterns of performance—and if the change doesn't recognize the unique core competencies of that company. The authors draw upon specific cases to illustrate the design process in practice, and they provide a set of tools for using strategic organization design to gain competitive advantage. They present a design process, explore key decisions managers face, and list the guiding principles for incorporating the design function as a continuing and integral process.

The constructing of identities—those processes through which actors in and around organizations claim, accept, negotiate, affirm, stabilize, maintain, reproduce, challenge, disrupt, destabilize, repair, or otherwise relate to their sense of selves and others—has become a critically important topic in the study of organizations. This volume attempts to amplify—and possibly refract—contemporary debates among identity scholars that question established notions of identity as “essence,” “entity,” or “thing.” It calls for alternative approaches to understanding identity and its significance in contexts in and around organizations by conceptualizing it as “process”—that is, being continually under construction. On the basis of diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions and contexts, contributions by leading scholars to this volume offer new perspectives on how individual and organizational identities evolve and come to be constructed through ongoing activities and interactions.

The practice of consultation between senior managers and employee representatives has a long history in British employment relations yet has often been a poor cousin to collective bargaining. Two trends have elevated the importance of consultation. First, the decline in trade union membership and the retreat from collective bargaining in the private sector has meant that consultation is often the only form of collective employee voice available. Second, since the 1970s the European Union (EU) has embarked on programme of legislative support for consultation, most recently in the information and consultation directive of 2002. The United Kingdom's Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations implementing the directive became fully operational in 2008. The book charts the meaning and development of consultation in the twentieth century and explores the justifications for the practice. The way EU intervention to promote consultation evolved and changed is analysed with particular attention to the adoption of the ICE directive. The half-hearted response to EU consultation initiatives in Britain is analysed with a critical assessment of UK governments' handling of the issue, employer hostility, and union ambivalence. The take-up and impact of consultation regulations, especially ICE, is assessed and the processes involved in effective consultation explored. The dynamics of consultation are described drawing a contrast between ‘active’ consultation, and more limited consultation used as a means of communication. The UK experience is compared with practices in Europe. Suggestions are made to improve take-up of consultation and changes needed to the EU directive and ICE regulations.

Strategic alliances are increasingly common, as many organizations look towards various partnering arrangements. This second edition of this text extends the first edition's comprehensive survey of strategic alliances. It presents different disciplinary perspectives (economics, strategy, organization theory) and numerous examples from the corporate world. The text has been revised and updated, taking account of new theoretical models, and its coverage of case studies has been extended.

Corporate networks form part of the institutional structure of markets and the business environment, enabling firms to coordinate their behaviour and regulate competition. Networks perform a number of economic functions: they reduce information asymmetries and uncertainty, and facilitate the redistribution of risk between banks, firms, and investors. Within these networks, firms collectively monitor one another and owners supervise their managers. This book analyses comparative data on interlocking directorates and capital networks between large corporations in the United States and five countries in Europe: Germany, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The structure of corporate networks is shaped by the traditions, culture, and institutions of a country. Corporate networks may be considered as a configuration of firms that are connected to one another by managers (interlocks), or as a configuration of managers who meet each other on the board of directors (network of the economic elite). The resources on which the dominance of the economic elite is based are bureaucratic power, property rights, and social capital. Bureaucratic control over a company is linked with property rights in the context of specific network configurations that vary between countries and lead to differing forms of managerial control. In the transitional economies, the type of capitalism that is evolving somewhat resembles Western managerial capitalism, but with certain significant differences. Privatization created a relatively high concentration of ownership. There is no clear-cut separation of ownership and control, but rather a balance of power between managers and owners.