Knowledge that Transforms

There is a considerable line of research on organizations dealing with large scale, intrinsic hazards. We know a good deal, as a result, about both the causation of catastrophic failure and its avoidance. Past work has explained failure in terms of (for example) structural vulnerabilities and organizational degradation – and reliability in terms of collective mindfulness, rigorous enculturation and high levels of social redundancy. This paper presents a study, based on a qualitative analysis of two disastrous collisions on the UK railway, of organizations that are strongly reliability seeking yet ultimately experience catastrophic failure. It argues that these cases implicated an organizational incapacity to mobilize systemic reform. The possibility of the two failures had been well‐known in the organizations before their occurrence, but this knowledge could not be converted into modification. A model is presented to explain how processes of systemic reform co‐exist with a set of phenomena that tend to undermine them. It is these that need to be the principal focus of efforts at managing catastrophic failure risks.

In recent years there has been a discernible trend towards the outsourcing and subcontracting of work. However, there has been very little empirical research on employees' attitudes to work in outsourced firms. This study is conducted in the area of call centre services where there has been a substantial growth in the provision of external market suppliers. It examines employees' perceptions of their work and employment arrangements in both an in‐house producer and an external service provider and identifies and compares the factors that shape their organizational commitment and intentions to quit. The research found that the character of the internal labour market and the nature of the work regime were more important explanations of organizational commitment and intentions to quit in the external market supplier than in the in‐house producer. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the quality of customer service provided under subcontracting arrangements.

Empowerment initiatives have become popular in recent years in programmes of organizational change, but their impact as a practical managerial policy remains shrouded in ambiguities. We attempt to provide a fuller understanding of their impact, firstly by exploring managers' understanding of what constitutes empowerment, and secondly by locating the analysis of changes in managers' experiences of empowerment in the context of their experiences of changes in accountability practices. Drawing on data from interviews with managers and a mail questionnaire, we argue that the experience of empowerment is multi‐faceted, and shaped by managers' attitudes towards it. Moreover we find that accountability plays a more significant and independent role in encouraging managers to engage in empowerment than has hitherto been acknowledged.

This paper takes as a point of departure a notion of reorganization as a way of managing risk. It examines the reorganization process in the Norwegian central administration for homeland security. As a central theme the paper explores why the proposal to radically reorganize the administration by replacing a network model with a hierarchical model resulted in a much more modest change to a hybrid agency model. The descriptive part of the paper traces the reorganization process, starting with the initiative taken by the Ministry of Justice in 1999 to establish a public commission and ending with the final parliamentary resolution in 2002. Despite the 9/11 terrorist attack that occurred in the middle of the process and its implications for security, only minor changes were made to existing arrangements. A striking feature of the process was negative coordination, indicating that the wish to coordinate was greater than the willingness to be coordinated. To understand why this was so, we look at bureaucratic politics and bargaining between different interests, at institutional identities and strong cultures and traditions within different governmental bodies. We focus especially on framing processes within and between organizational fields.

Much has been written on the nature of skills and the extent to which there is increased skills development or a deskilling of workers in modern workplaces. This paper broadens the debate and explores these issues in the novel context of UK‐ and Japanese‐ invested retailers' operations in China. Data derived from over two hundred interviews at twelve retail stores in six Chinese cities and questionnaires completed by almost eight hundred employees elicited contextualized accounts of interactive service workers' own perceptions of their training and skills development. It was found that these firms made a substantial contribution to skills development, fostered and enhanced both directly by company training and also through experiential workplace‐based learning. It might be, however, that this constitutes an essential but ‘one‐off’ increase in skills in transitional economies such as that of China.