Knowledge that Transforms

High levels of occupational specialization, problems of cross‐functional integration and distinct bureaucratic tendencies have traditionally been seen as problems endemic to British management practice. Over the last decade, these problems are expected to have disappeared ‐ or at least diminished ‐ as major developments in management and organizational theory, as well as changing economic circumstances, have redirected management thinking towards ‘new’ ideas of flatter, simpler organizational structures, increased flexibility and decentralization, improvements in the quality of inter‐functional relations and the like. Yet, despite these developments, there is comparatively little research that has investigated actual patterns of change within management and, in particular, what is happening in what could be regarded as the mainstream of British industry ‐ namely, ‘ordinary’, medium‐sized firms operating in ‘traditional’ industrial sectors. Moreover, rarely does such research focus upon the implications of management change for the strategies of professionalization adopted by competing specialist occupational groups within management. This paper sets out to help fill these gaps, by reporting the findings from case studies of four such firms, taking into account the particular contexts and historical circumstances that have helped shape any such change and drawing out the key influences on changed management practice.

During the past decade, the shares of publicly traded companies moved increasingly into the hands of institutional investors. As large investors pressed companies to restructure, companies were observed in turn to restructure their shareholder base. Drawing on a 1989 survey of 761 US publicly traded companies, firms facing a hostile takeover environment or with large institutional holdings are found to seek greater employee stockholding. Large firms and those that had adopted takeover defences are more likely when threatened with takeovers or short‐term pressures to seek more employee and less institutional stockholding. Though managers are employed by owners, investor efforts to discipline their managers can lead the latter to replace the former.

Despite a long tradition of documenting unethical practices in organizations, the sociology of organization literature has seldom addressed the question of management ethics. One early work in the field, Melville Dalton's Men Who Manage (1959), did develop a contingent approach to ethics that is seen as a precursor to contemporary discussions in modern and postmodern organization theory. In this essay, Dalton's work is interpreted in terms of a premodern or traditional view of moral theory. It is concluded that Dalton and those who have followed him have reduced morality to politics and have provided an intellectual rationale for the contemporary dark ages of moral behaviour with its worship of the cult of the individual.

There has been considerable academic interest in the consequences of European integration for multinational companies and their subsidiaries, and the co‐ordination and control of human resource decision making. Against the backdrop of this debate, this paper examines the impact of European integration on management organization and human resource decision making in 13 British multinational companies. Although there were partial moves towards the development of European managers, a European‐wide approach to human resource matters was not yet a conspicuous feature of this sample of multinationals. the global preoccupations of the companies, as well as the persistence of national variations in consumer markets and modes of product regulation, were clearly major constraints on the emergence of European forms of corporate organization and underpinned the lack of enthusiasm for distinctively European approaches to employee management.

This paper advances the argument that a particular form of culturally, rather than materialistically, based historicism dominated organization and management studies in the 1980s. the 1970s were dominated by a materialistically based form of historicism in which economic, technological and organizational imperatives were deemed to drive the evolutionary dynamics, trajectories and outcomes of institutional and organizational transformation. In sharp contrast, the 1980s witnessed the rise of culturally or ideationally based forms of historicist thought and analysis in which the explanatory and political significance of factors located in a society's or organization's ‘material base’ were substantially downgraded in favour of variables embedded in their ‘ideological superstructures’. the paper traces the emergence, progress and implications of this cultural historicism in relation to four distinct, but interrelated discourses ‐ enterprise, flexibility, quality and human resource management. It also suggests that this analysis raises a number of fundamental theoretical and methodological issues concerned with three different approaches to the study of the interconnections between intellectual and institutional change in ‘late’ or ‘post’‐modern societies ‐ that is, the history of ideas, the sociology of knowledge, and technologies of government. the paper concludes with the argument that each of these broad approaches needs to be brought into clearer theoretical and methodological alignment in order to develop a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of, and elective affinity between, intellectual and institutional change. It also suggests that this need for a clearer theoretical alignment between these three approaches will become particularly pressing in the 1990s as an alternative discourse of citizenship emerges to challenge the ideological hegemony of the discourse of enterprise with its roots in cultural historicism.

Although much has been written about the different skills of managing people in work organizations there is a paucity of research and theorizing regarding a particular activity managers are often required to perform: that of dealing with the emotional behaviour of others. This paper aims to integrate research from clinical, social and occupational psychology with personal experience as a psychotherapist and management consultant to develop a framework of principles, strategies and tactics concerning how dysfunctional emotional behaviour of others can be managed effectively at work. the meaning of the term emotional behaviour is discussed and the issue of how emotional behaviour can be recognized is addressed. Five principles for managing dysfunctional emotional behaviour are outlined and strategies for the management of three common emotions (anger, anxiety, depression) are proposed, as well as consideration given to some specific tactics which illustrate how these principles and strategies can be implemented. Finally, guidelines concerning the management of different kinds of emotional reactions and the impact of organizational culture and emotional climate upon emotional behaviour are discussed along with the training implications of this framework.

Internationalization is often seen as posing distinctive human resource problems that are difficult to overcome. This paper takes an alternative approach by considering the processes by which firms, large and small, internationalize and the way they sustain overseas activity at different stages of their internationalization. It does so by reference to six challenges faced by firms in the course of internationalization. the result is to highlight continuities and regularities between international human resource management and the creation of an effective domestic organization, along with common underlying processes and skills centred on networking, teams and organizational learning. It is argued that this shifts attention from the specific tasks of the human resources function to more broadly defined human resource activities and processes which affect the growth of firms internationally. Secondly, it helps firms to think more positively about becoming international and to address relevant skills. Thirdly, it identifies appropriate activities, tasks and situations that business schools need to provide as part of an international management education. However, the paper also recognizes that internationalization involves specific differences between domestic and international business management. A number of these are rooted in country‐specific institutional factors which human resource management, the function, has to address. While processes may be common, knowledge is context‐bound.

This study analyses technological expansion by examining the interaction between firms' diversification strategy and internal capabilities. We argue that when new technologies emerge, firms that were actively pursuing diversification do not have equal intention to adopt the technologies. For firms that possess internal capabilities similar or relevant to the new technologies, their diversification strategy facilitates technological expansion, otherwise diversification strategy negatively affects technological adoption. This study improves our understanding on technological expansion. Existing studies try to identify organizational characteristics that facilitate or impede firm entry into new technological fields. This research reveals that the same organizational characteristic (e.g. diversification strategy) can exhibit different effects on technological adoption. It facilitates technological expansion if firms' existing capabilities can be applied to new technologies, otherwise it impedes new technological adoption.

In this paper we suggest that the study of attempts to secure headquarters level change may now be of increasing significance. Evidence of a wave of HQ level change is beginning to accumulate and requires further investigation. the twin purposes of this paper are: (1) in descriptive terms, to gather such evidence as is already available about the nature and extent of HQ level change; to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the extant literature; to suggest where further descriptive work needs to take place; and (2) in explanatory terms, to build some initial and alternative organizational and managerial theories that could inform the study of HQ change; to propose a medium‐term research agenda that can be tested in the field.