Organization Studies

Accounting has an ever-increasing significance in contemporary society. Indeed, some argue that its practices are fundamental to the development and functioning of modern capitalist societies. We can see accounting everywhere: in organizations where budgeting, investing, costing, and performance appraisal rely on accounting practices; in financial and other audits; in corporate scandals and financial reporting and regulation; in corporate governance, risk management, and accountability, and in the corresponding growth and influence of the accounting profession. Accounting, too, is an important part of the curriculum and research of business and management schools, the fastest growing sector in higher education. This growth is largely a phenomenon of the last fifty years or so. Prior to that, accounting was seen mainly as a mundane, technical, bookkeeping exercise (and some still share that naive view). The growth in accounting has demanded a corresponding engagement by scholars to examine and highlight the important behavioural, organizational, institutional, and social dimensions of accounting. Pioneering work by accounting researchers and social scientists more generally has persuasively demonstrated to a wider social science, professional, management, and policy audience how many aspects of life are indeed constituted, to an important extent, through the calculative practices of accounting. Anthony Hopwood, to whom this books is dedicated, has been a leading figure in this endeavour, which has effectively defined accounting as a distinctive field of research in the social sciences. The book brings together the work of leading international accounting academics and social scientists, and demonstrates the scope, vitality, and insights of contemporary scholarship in and on accounting and auditing.

This book focuses on the transition faced by business organizations and their stakeholders as they move from protected markets to open competition, and it explores how these changes can be facilitated by outside interveners/agents. Centering on four case studies — AT&T, Lucent, Electricité de France, and the Italian State Railways — the book analyses the approach to intervention, the problems created by existing systems of stakeholder dialogue, and the prospects for change. It draws two fundamental lessons. Firstly, that intervention in these situations must be broad and involving — a ‘full engagement’ approach — in order to achieve changes in relations and identities among a range of players. The book explores the key elements and practical techniques of this approach. Secondly, that the issues ultimately go beyond improving union-management relations or organizational structures; even in the best cases, the players have been unable to reach stable agreements in the face of continuing pressures for change. A deep transformation of the system of stakeholder relations is required — the creation of a system of ‘post-industrial relations’. The book includes discussion of managerial problems and intervention strategies in an ever more responsive and flexible economy, and also the implications for democracy in the work-place and the future of union representation. The book is valuable for consultants, unionists, managers, and public policy makers, and accessible also to students and the interested public.

This book demonstrates the importance of the role of knowledge in firms and economies. The authors clarify the theoretical debates on the production and use of knowledge in organizations, and examine the challenges that face those managing knowledge at different levels of the organization. They develop the notion of ‘community’ within the context of the firm and explore the ways in which these communities learn and produce new knowledge, positing from this emphasis a challenging model of distributed governance of knowledge within and beyond firms. Using insights from academic disciplines including economics, science and technology studies, cognitive sciences, economic geography, and management science, the authors use analytical argument and empirical cases to develop a new theorization of knowledge formation and management, and in turn a new conception of the firm.

Leadership is still much discussed, studied, and sought after, even though we now live in supposedly more democratic times with flatter organizations and empowered employees. But how can we best understand leadership? Are leaders born or made? Do they have particular traits or are we all potential leaders? Do the requirements for leadership change over time or are there timeless patterns? Do traditional approaches help us to pick and develop leaders or are there alternative ways that advance our understanding? This book investigates the notion of leadership in a series of historical case studies and rich essay portraits of some of the most famous, and infamous, leaders (e.g. Florence Nightingale, Richard Branson, Horatio Nelson, Martin Luther King, Henry Ford, etc.). The scenarios are drawn from right across the spectrum to include business, politics, society, and the military. The first part of the book considers four sets of parallel cases where leadership appears to be a major explanation of success and failure. The second part takes the four critical issues arising from these parallel cases (identity, strategic vision, organizational tactics, and persuasive communication) and explores them in detail. One main reason we have such difficulty in explaining and enhancing leadership, the author argues, is because we often adopt perspectives and models that obscure rather than illuminate the issues involved. The reliance upon traditional scientific analysis has not provided the anticipated advances in our understanding because leadership is more fruitfully considered as an art, or more exactly an array of arts, rather than as a science.

Since the early 1980s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others. Why has this happened? What does it mean when a society invests so heavily in an industry of checking and when more and more individuals find themselves subject to formal scrutiny? This book argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control. At the heart of a new administrative style, internal control systems have begun to play an important public role and individual and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. The author argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities. Not only is the manner in which they produce assurance and accountability open to question but also, by imposing their own values, audits often have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organization.

Personal authenticity was once a reference point from which critics and labour activists sought to challenge the domination of the corporation. Now it has entered into the parlance of managerial discourse. This book critically investigates the increasing popularity of personal authenticity in corporate ideology and practice. Rather than have workers adhere to depersonalising bureaucratic rules or homogenous cultural norms, many large corporations now invite employees to simply be themselves. Alternative lifestyles, consumption, ethic identity, sexuality, fun, and even dissent are now celebrated since employees are presumed to be more motivated if they can just be themselves. Does this freedom to express ones authenticity in the workplace finally herald the end of corporate control? To answer this question, this book places this concern with authenticity within a political framework and demonstrates how it might represent an even more insidious form of cultural domination. The book especially focuses on the way in which private and non-work selves are prospected and put to work in the firm. The ideas of Hardt and Negri and the Italian autonomist movement are used to show how common forms of association and co-operation outside of commodified work is the inspiration for personal authenticity. It is the vibrancy, energy, and creativity of this non-commodified stratum of social life that managerialism now aims to exploit. Each chapter explores how this is achieved and highlights the worker resistance that is provoked as a result. The book concludes by demonstrating how the discourse of freedom underlying the managerial version of authenticity harbours potential for a radical transformation of the contemporary corporate form.

This book provides a coherent overview of the most important theories and insights in the field of business ethics, together with a substantiated development of ethical norms and values with which organizations must comply. At the end of each chapter is a case study (e.g., Shell, KPN Telecom, IHC Caland, Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, etc.), ideal for graduate courses in business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

This book explores the ways in which the word ‘network’ has been deployed in literature. In particular, it offers a commentary on how the idea of networks has been used to illustrate contemporary forms of socio-economic organisation (as with the idea of a ‘network society’ or a ‘network state’), broadly conceived to also include the political aspects of networks. The term ‘network’ has become a ubiquitous metaphor to describe too many aspects of contemporary life. In doing so, the book argues, the term has lost much of its analytical precision and has no clear conceptual underpinnings. This study brings some intellectual clarity to the discussion of networks by asking whether it is possible to construct a clearly demarcated idea of a network as a separable form of socio-economic coordination and governance mechanism with its own consistent logic. In doing this, the primary contrast is with hierarchies and markets as alternative and already well understood forms of socio-economic coordination each with their own distinctive logic. The book identifies two underlying programmatic issues: the question of whether there can be a particular logic to the network form of organisation, and whether there are any limits to networks. The book contends that if networks are to mean anything then they must not apply to everything, so this raises an obvious limit to their embrace. The questions thus become where and how to draw these limits. These are reviewed in the light of the concrete organisational forms that networks have taken in the contemporary period.

How do firms cope with changing environments? Is flexibility really the solution? How can we measure a firm's flexibility? Can a more flexible firm be created? Based on an Igor Ansoff Award-winning study this book shows how flexibility has become the new strategic challenge for contemporary firms. Although traditional organizational forms have worked well in the relatively stable environments of the past, the globalization of markets, rapid technological change, shortening product life cycles, and increasing aggressiveness of competitors have radically altered the ground rules for competing in the 1990s and beyond. Increased competition forces firms to move more quickly and boldly than before, and to experiment in ways that do not conform to traditional administrative theory. This book offers a wealth of insights into the way firms can increase their flexibility. It is based on extensive interviews with practitioners and supported by many longitudinal case studies on flexibility improvement within large corporations. The book provides a strategic framework which explains what types of flexibility are effective under different organizational conditions and environmental characteristics. It also demonstrates an integrated method for diagnosing a firm's flexibility and for guiding the transition to greater flexibility and responsiveness.

In the 1980s and 1990s the governance witnessed a shift from the Weberian model of bureaucracy to the ‘new managerialism’ — a term used to describe the group of ideas imported from business and mainly brought into government by management consultants. Over the past fifteen years, the British, French, and Canadian governments have spent growing sums of money on consulting services, thus, policy makers inside the state have increasingly been exposed to the business management ideas that consultants bring into the public sector. There are major differences in the extent to which reformers in these countries accepted these ideas in bureaucratic reform. Accordingly, this is a book about policy change and variation. It shows that the reception given by states to managerialist ideas depends on the openness of policy-making institutions to outside expert knowledge and on the organization, development, and social recognition of management consultancy.