Knowledge that Transforms

This paper takes the regulation of identity as a focus for examining organizational control. It considers how employees are enjoined to develop self‐images and work orientations that are deemed congruent with managerially defined objectives. This focus on identity extends and deepens themes developed within other analyses of normative control. Empirical materials are deployed to illustrate how managerial intervention operates, more or less intentionally and in/effectively, to influence employees’ self‐constructions in terms of coherence, distinctiveness and commitment. The processual nature of such control is emphasized, arguing that it exists in tension with other intra and extra‐organizational claims upon employees’ sense of identity in a way that can open a space for forms of micro‐emancipation.

Critics of New Public Management argue that differences between public and private organizations are so great that business practices should not be transferred to the public sector. In this paper the theoretical arguments on the differences between private firms and public agencies are reviewed, and 13 hypotheses are identified on the impact of publicness on organizational environments, goals, structures and managerial values. Evidence from 34 empirical studies of differences between public agencies and private firms is critically evaluated. Only three of the publicness hypotheses are supported by a majority of the empirical studies: public organizations are more bureaucratic, and public managers are less materialistic and have weaker organizational commitment than their private sector counterparts. However, most of the statistical evidence is derived from studies that use narrow measures of publicness and fail to control for other relevant explanatory variables. Whether the existing evidence understates or overstates the distinctiveness of public agencies is therefore unclear. A research agenda and methods are identified for better comparisons of management in public and private organizations.

Previous literature has led to a lack of appreciation of: the range of organization/stakeholder relations that can occur; the extent to which such relations change over time; as well as how and why such changes occur. In particular, extremely negative and highly conflicting relations between organizations and stakeholders have been ignored. Due to this lack of appreciation it is argued that current attempts at integrating the separate strands of stakeholder theory to achieve a convergent stakeholder theory are premature. A model is presented which combines stakeholder theory with a realist theory of social change and differentiation. This model is intended to highlight why it is important to distinguish different stakeholders. The model also enables an analysis of the organization/stakeholder relationship, which is not exclusively from the organization perspective and which is capable of illuminating why and how organization/stakeholder relations change over time. The history of Greenpeace is used as an example.

Contrary to the popular conception in the corporate environmental management literature that corporations must learn new ecocentric paradigms before they can be expected to produce environmentally sound performance, the present results suggest that cognitive–level environmental learning in organizations does not inevitably precede behaviour change. Rather, at least partially, such learning is likely to occur in the course of action. The article also proposes that external pressure can set motion, but it alone does not lead to an environmental paradigm shift. In order to undergo such a shift, organizations will have to learn a meaning of their own to support new, more environmentally sound forms of activity.The present study examines empirically how two companies have learnt to incorporate environmental considerations into their managerial paradigms. It adopts a perspective according to which learning is portrayed as a process in which changes are brought about in the collective beliefs that the organization members hold about the relationship of their business to the natural environment (i.e. environmental management paradigm). Applying the grounded theory approach, the article identifies phases of environmental learning starting from the recognition or rejection of weak signals in ‘pockets’ of the organization, continuing through the gaining of new knowledge and experience towards ‘competition’ between old and new assumptions about the business–environment relationship, and finally proceeding to potential frame–break.

Despite the social and (increasingly) commercial significance of sport and sporting bodies worldwide, they remain under‐represented in the mainstream management literature. One of the more recent and dramatic examples of the global sports–media nexus is the ‘Super League saga’ in Australia. This paper recounts the tale of the Super League saga, providing a holistic analysis of the events and competitive issues arising by drawing on literatures concerning the economic nature and value of sports leagues, the resource‐based view of the firm and the nature of psychological contracts in changing environments. The analysis confirms the general monopolistic tendencies of professional sports leagues in an increasingly global industry driven by the sports–media nexus, in accord with a number of comparable cases internationally. The particular conditions of the Australian marketplace that exacerbate this tendency beyond, for example, that found in the USA, and differences in the outcomes of battles between rival leagues are also considered. The Super League saga portrays the importance of effective management of resources key to the production of the ‘rugby league product’ including, among others, the often over‐looked importance of careful management of local resources for the success of global strategies, and, where human resources are key, the importance of psychological contracting. The holistic analysis of the Super League saga in Australia affords lessons that extend well beyond the realm of sports.

Two disparate theoretical views of how informational contexts affect managerial sensemaking and decision making appear in organizational research. An organizational information processing perspective posits that increasing the flow of information within and between organizations will enhance environmental awareness. In contrast, behavioural decision making and social cognition research suggest that information may increase the occurrence or magnitude of overconfidence and illusions of control. These competing predictions were examined by means of an investigation of the relationship between informational contexts and top managers’ strategic issue interpretation. Findings indicate that managers whose organizations have environmental information readily available to them perceive higher control over issues than managers in organizations with lower informational availability. Moreover, managers in top management teams with higher information processing capacity seem to perceive higher degrees of control and manageability, and search for less data in issue interpretation, than managers in teams with lower information processing capacity. These results offer some support for the behavioural decision making and social cognition perspective, and question the organizational information processing prediction that organizations engaging in active information processing are more aware of the environment and more likely to assess environmental developments, trends or events in a more vigilant manner.