Business and Management

Much has been written about leadership during the last eighty years, but little attention has been paid to leadership's ethical dimension. This book sets out to redress the balance and develop an understanding of what comprises ethical leadership in organizations. The book begins by drawing together relevant aspects of leadership theory and discussing them from an ethical perspective. It then offers a clear discussion of a range of ethics theories from the Anglo-American and European philosophical traditions, examining their implications for the study of leadership. It also considers ethics from the viewpoint of practising business leaders, using empirical data to illuminate some points raised during the earlier theory chapters. In the process, the book identifies a number of themes that relate to ethical leadership. It suggests that the route to ethical leadership lies in capitalizing on the moral upsides of these themes whilst avoiding their corresponding downsides. The book proposes that a consultative rather than directive leadership style is best placed to achieve this. However, it is also suggested that, in meeting these normative criteria, leaders need to go beyond the superficial, contingent prescriptions for democratic responsiveness that suffuse leadership and management theory. The book reflects on what it might take for such a model to be realized in contemporary, Western organizations, highlighting some challenges that this would present to conventional, managerialist expectations of leadership along with some possible enablers of consultative leadership

This book presents findings based upon eight case studies of inter-organizational forms, involving interviews with about 450 managers and workers from nearly sixty employing organizations across many different sites of employment — the supplier, the client, the franchiser, the franchisee, the public purchaser and the private provider. The empirical material used is extensive and grounded. The research is intended to contribute to contemporary debates on changing work organization and ‘the future of work’ by reconnecting the analysis of organizations with the study of employment and work as well as situating the study of employment within the context of changing forms of organization. The hope is that this book's research will contribute as much to understanding why there may be limits to fragmentation and disintegration as to an explanation of their presence and effectiveness.

This book is designed for those who find current management orthodoxies inadequate, who are interested in alternative ideas and how they might be applied to management practice, but are not enthralled by the esoteric world of theoretical books about theory. This book offers a bridge between the ‘esoteric’ world of theory and the practical world of management by exploring and illustrating some current theories (Fuzzy Logic, Actor-Network Theory, Chaos Theory, Constructivism etc.) through discussion of some everyday management issues (strategic decision making, appraisals, negotiation, leadership, culture, and motivation).

This title adopts a broad perspective that takes into account not only the strategic dimension of human resources management (HRM), but the professional and societal dimension. It combines academic research with a focus on practical conclusions and recommendations.

Information is not taken seriously. Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Information has some very odd characteristics, conveniently overlooked by senior managers passionate about knowledge-based, learning organizations; by politicians and public servants, compensating with policy and programme for the information failure of organization and market; and by the IT and dotcom communities, bent on adding value to what they treat as just a commodity. This book looks at innovation from an information perspective; one that puts information first. Its information perspective is applied to eighteenth-century agriculture and high technology, to technology transfer and espionage, to corporate strategy and intellectual property.

It is often assumed that the implementation and the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) will or should be the same in all situations with little regard to the particular social or cultural context of their use. Drawing on research in different societies (Europe, Latin America, etc.), this book explains the nature of organizational diversity in which ICT innovation takes place, and develops a conceptual approach to account for it. The book draws from institutionalist concepts of organizations, the sociology of technology, current debates on globalization, and critiques of the rationality of modernity. The theoretical perspective is supported empirically by four international case studies. This book shows how the processes of ICT innovation and organizational change reflect local aspirations, concerns, and action, as well as the multiple institutional influences of globalization.

It is now widely recognized that the effective management of knowledge assets is a key requirement for securing competitive advantage in the emerging information economy. Yet the physical and institutional differences between tangible assets and knowledge assets remain poorly understood. In the case of knowledge, the ownership and control of assets are becoming ever more separate, a phenomenon that is actually exacerbated by the phenomenon of learning. If we are to meet the challenges of the information economy, then we need a new approach to property rights based on a deeper theoretical understanding of knowledge assets. This book provides some of the key building blocks that are needed for a theory of knowledge assets. The author develops a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, for exploring the way knowledge flows within and between organizations.

Two themes have become epicentres of new management thinking in the late 1990s: knowledge management and competence-based approaches to strategic management. These two themes share a common interest in identifying important forms of organizational knowledge and in understanding processes through which knowledge can be transformed into organizational capabilities and competences. Drawing on the latest research by a number of noted management scholars, this book presents new insights into various kinds of knowledge that are of value to organizations, organizational interactions that can create strategically useful knowledge, alternative processes for managing knowledge, and approaches to integrating key forms of knowledge into organizational processes of competence building and leveraging. The papers in the volume collectively define a powerful conceptual framework for understanding organizational knowledge and its central role in building and leveraging organizational competence. They present well articulated, logically consistent conceptualizations that will provide new theoretical impetus for management researchers, while at the same time providing case studies and examples of practical applications that suggest useful new methods and tools for management practitioners.

This book develops a general ‘logic’, or heuristic of discovery, to explain the emergence of novelty in individual thought, organizations, industries, and economies. It draws on a variety of literatures, discussing theories of organizational learning, evolutionary and institutional economics, knowledge, and language. It brings these together in a unifying framework and applies that for an analysis of innovation systems and the management of learning. Unification is based on the resource- or competence-based view in economics, in combination with a theory of learning by interaction. The central theme of the book is the relation between stability and change. In business literature this theme appears in the relation between exploitation and exploration. In evolutionary economics it appears in the relation between selection and adaptation. The general heuristic shows how exploitation can provide the basis for exploration. The analysis is illustrated with many phenomena and empirical results from the different literatures.

Much is stated and written about the new world of work but how much do we know about the contemporary workplace? What influence have Japanese management techniques (Just-in-Time Production and Total Quality Management, for example) had on the way work is organized in ‘transplants’, and more broadly in other firms and sectors? Have the systems and mechanisms of control changed radically in recent years, or are they much the same as they have always been? This book is in a long tradition of ethnographic research in industrial sociology and management/labour studies. Not only does it offer rich empirical data on the lived reality of work and a management practice that may share little in common with that found in the textbooks, it also raises a number of important issues about the best ways to understand the complex and changing nature of work.