Knowledge that Transforms

Legal regulations pose both opportunities and constraints that can influence behaviours in and of organizations. This article uses a multiple constituency perspective to examine one such influence. Data from 340 units of a US medical service firm indicate that different legally mandated types of doctor involvement in unit operations are significantly related to variations in the satisfaction reported by manager, employee, and patient constituencies. It is concluded that different forms of legal regulations, which are intended to represent the broad interests of a‘public‐at large’constituency, are differentially related to an organization's satisfaction of other special interest constituencies.

Studies of recent developments in personnel management have concentrated on personnel specialists. It is also necessary to consider how general managers view labour relations. This article analyses a survey of the senior site managers, ‘factory managers’, in 229 large manufacturing establishments. The need to examine higher levels of firms notwithstanding, the establishment level remains of crucial importance, for it is here that policies are implemented. Factory managers might be expected to see labour relations as unimportant. In fact, they saw them as crucial to the operation of the plant, and the managers played a substantial role in decisions on personnel questions. They saw labour relations not in terms of overcoming union opposition, or even of formal institutions, stressing instead the involvement of individual employees. This article analyses these findings and raises some questions about the extent and depth of British management's commitment to this new style of labour relations.

When growth and decline are examined with regard to the administrative component of organizations, an apparent dichotomy exists between crosssectional designs and within organization longitudinal studies. The results of longitudinal studes indicate the existence of a ratcheting effect of the administtrative component which cannot be explanined by the size construct alone. Therefore, an analysis of the ratchet effect is presented and a conceptual model of factors influencing the growth and decline of the administrative component is propsed.

The article reports the results of a naturally occurring field experiment which took place in the Judge Advocate function of the Tactical Air Command (TAC), a major command within the US Air Force. Official Air Force goals for courts‐martial processing time had existed for years but generally were ignored because they were considered unrealistic and unimportant. A new TAC staff advocate decided that processing time should be improved and took steps to emphasize goal attainment through various procedures. The result was a significant improvement in courts‐martial processing time as compared to the rest of the Air Force where no such emphasis occurred. The implications of the results for goal setting theory and leadership are discussed.

This paper discusses the emergence of management education and training in the UK, France, Germany, USA, Japan, USSR, and China. It argues that given kinds of environmental changes may lead to a wide variety of training responses, depending on the industrial and cultural contexts in which they take place.

Decisions on bargaining structure are at the heart of the management of industrial relations. Within the multi‐plant company these decisions are influenced by competing centrifugal and centrepetal pressures. Bargaining structure, alongside a series of other techniques, is used by managers at the head office and the plant to achieve a balance between centralization and decentralization. Head office managers exercise central control over some major industrial relations issues, while the extent of their influence is masked by decentralized bargaining structure and other techniques which create an illusion of plant autonomy. These centrifugal and centrepetal pressures emerge not just from industrial relations considerations but are also part and parcel of wider business strategy concerns. Empirical evidence suggests that these countervailing pressures have intensified in recent years.

This article presents evidence and argument concerning the utility of the concept of task uncertainty for organization theory and practice. The results from two studies, one field and one laboratory, are reported. The results support the hypotheses that: (1) perceptions of task uncertainty are a simple function of the number and analysability of exceptions encountered, and (2) perceptions of task exceptions and search difficulty have distinct relationships with behaviours of interest (communication and decision‐making). Given these two findings, it is argued that the concept of task uncertainty should be replaced by the two source constructs.