Knowledge that Transforms

This paper considers the implications of the work of the French social theorist, Jean Baudrillard, for contemporary strategies of employee management which focus upon the centrality of culture and its purposeful organization and dissemination. Starting with an exploration and consideration of the philosophical assumptions which underpin classical conceptions and models of employee motivation, it charts the ongoing refinement of these ideas, up to and including, the current fascination with the promise of corporate culturalism to deliver levels of high employee motivation and commitment. The work of Jean Baudrillard is then outlined and employed to develop a critical analysis of not only the philosophical presuppositions which continue to underlie the management of motivation but, also, the potential consequences of the current fascination with the management of organizational culture as a means towards increased levels of employee commitment and output. In conclusion, it suggests that the same postmodernizing process which Baudrillard identifies as the outcome of the intense mediatization of society is also produced and reproduced within the domain of the contemporary work organization, due to the championing of similar strategies of cultural management, especially by personnel or human resource academics and practitioners. Such a development is not, however, greeted with optimism. Rather, it is suggested that this particular diagnosis of the postmodern condition views the result as the production and reproduction of a deeply disinterested and enervated workforce; one which demonstrates enthusiasm neither for corporate goals nor indeed the furtherance of their own life‐projects.

This paper investigates how group‐controlled transition rites in an air traffic control organization are experienced by job changers and those responsible for socializing newcomers on behalf of the work group and unit. Contrary to earlier functionalist accounts, these admission rites were neither fully understood as intended nor accepted as legitimate by job changers. The findings indicate that shared meanings between newcomers and `‘lders’ may not be necessary if such rites are to be accepted as an essential feature of the process of granting or withholding membership of the unit. More crucial to their acceptability is whether or not job changers believe that elders are fully acting in the interests of the group and unit. We show that the legitimacy of such socialization practices is subject to decay from organization‐wide restructuring which weakens units' social coherence and gives rise to doubts about the integrity of those members who assume an elder role. The implication of these findings is that group‐controlled transition rites emerge where management has no choice but to delegate features of work control to the group. Equally, if the legitimacy of such group‐level practices is undermined by organizational changes, it is unlikely that this form of socialization can be rectified by management intervention

This paper presents the findings of deconstructing a short extract from a report written by a National Health Service Trust chief executive. Changes in National Health Service management since the early 1980s are briefly discussed. This is followed by a theoretical discussion of deconstruction and metaphorization. The text is analysed focusing on the ‘binary opposites’ reason and emotion. It is argued that reason is given hierarchical pre‐eminence and that emotion is hidden or marginalized but that both concepts are central in order to arrive at an understanding of the text. The chief executive appears to constitute his role in ways which might be characterized as engineering (reason) and as traditional fatherhood (emotion). Metaphors in the text are used in order to provide evidence to support these characterizations. One implication which is particularly highlighted is that management in this text is seen as a distinctively masculine practice – perhaps surprisingly within what is presumed to be the caring and supportive environment of a health care organization. The paper ends with some reflexive reflections on the analysis.

The case of the Honda Motor Company has been cited frequently in the strategic management literature. A review reveals that Honda's strategy has been used to illustrate and support apparently contradictory positions on a series of conceptual dichotomies, namely analytical planning versus learning, market positioning versus resource‐based and, within the last of these, core competencies versus core capabilities. A critical analysis of this literature reveals empirical inaccuracies and a focus on Honda's strategic successes to the neglect of its failures. More significantly, explanations and general strategy implications are couched in terms of reductionist one‐sided theories, a tendency which is only deepened when strategy thinkers debate ‘the meaning of Honda’. This theoretical approach is particularly ill suited to Honda, an important strategic capability of which appears to be precisely the reconciliation of dichotomous management concepts. Western strategy thinkers have therefore missed the opportunity to develop a more appropriate and productive paradigm for learning from Honda.

One of the greatest difficulties Japanese multinationals have had is managing American managers in their US subsidiaries. The reason for this is fundamental and profound: Americans and Japanese conceive of management very differently and have strikingly different conceptions of themselves as managers and of correct management practice. We do two things in this paper. First, borrowing from social psychology, we explore the idea of the ‘management self’. Second, we report our research on management self‐conception and style in Japanese‐owned factories or ‘transplants’ in the USA. The research reports the results of 34 interviews conducted with 19 US and Japanese managers in three electronics transplants. Each factory had adopted different combinations or ‘hybridizations’ of the management styles of the two countries. The three factories had very different characters. One was dominated by Japanese management practice, another by American practice, and the third was a hybrid of the two styles. We found four factors critical determinants of management style: the nationality of the general manager, a stated preference (or lack thereof) for bicultural management, control over the budget‐setting process, and the strength of the Japanese assignees

Participant observation in two universities is used to throw light on processes of sensemaking engaged in by managers concerned with human resourcing issues. Analysis of managerial sensemaking in the case study organizations is carried out using concepts from earlier sociological theorizing about human resource or personnel management, treating these theoretical ideas as resources for use in the researchers' own sensemaking. It is shown that theoretical ‘sense’ can be made of the managerial or ‘lay’ sensemaking in the universities in terms of a need to handle various tensions which are inherent in all employment management work in industrial capitalist societies. And it is argued that there is clear continuity between what is currently occurring and has occurred in the past. This interpretation is shown to differ from that of an alternative approach in social science sensemaking, that which uses the notion of a new paradigm of ‘HRM’.

Drawing on an extensive case study, we argue that management has to actively manage information flows, both within the organization and between the organization and its environment. Three tasks of knowledge management are, in our view, important in building technological capability: appropriation, teamworking and learning. ‘Appropriation’ includes the retention and effective utilization of internal knowledge. ‘Teamworking’ refers to the integration of diverse knowledge bases. ‘Learning’ embraces the acquisition and exploitation of externally held knowledge

The paper utilizes data collected from 34 equity international joint ventures (EIJVs) located in Hungary and 49 EIJVs located in Britain to examine the effects of autonomy on EIJV effectiveness. Study results suggest that for the total sample, permitting an EIJV to develop local HRM policies and to implement business plans independently contribute to EIJV effectiveness. Additionally, there is a positive correlation between EIJV age and effectiveness. When the samples are broken up, the results are consistent except that developing local HRM policies is not a significant factor with respect to EIJV effectiveness in Hungary. The paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating that autonomy is a multidimensional construct and by providing initial support for the development of a theory relating EIJV autonomy to effectiveness based on a hierarchy of autonomy measures. The paper also suggests a model of relative recommended autonomy levels for different EIJV activities.

In order to further examine the relationship between executive pay and company performance, this paper investigates the linkage between two separate components of executive compensation (i.e. cash compensation and stock options) and market return performance, among a selected sample of US pharmaceutical company CEOs and COOs. In the surveyed sample, changes in cash compensation were found to exhibit a between‐firm relationship with lagged market returns, while Δ stock option grants displayed a within‐firm relationship. The former result suggests a commonality in practices across all firms, while the latter denotes idiosyncratic firm‐specific practices. These contrasts represent different degrees of the agency problem in the contracts for cash compensation as compared to the stock option components. Levels of cash compensation were affected primarily by firm size. Market returns were not instrumental influences on the levels of both compensation components

In the Czech Republic and elsewhere in the region, researchers have noted the widespread adoption of the multi‐divisional form (MDF) by the former state‐owned enterprises. In contrast to the accepted explanations in western capitalist societies, the spread of the MDF in post‐Communist economies has had little or nothing to do with growth strategies such as diversification. Developing ideas from the existing western literature, the paper examines the role of economic, institutional and strategic choice factors in three large, former state enterprises within the Czech post‐Communist context. The findings suggest that all three factors are theoretically important, but neither equally nor independently so. In particular, economic factors acted as a major constraint on structural choice only under extreme conditions, while institutional factors and strategic choice are best understood as interdependent moments in a recursive process of structural enactment.