Advances in Organization Studies

In the past, contingency and neo-Marxist theorists of culture reduced culture to an effect of something other than itself and, as they made culture metaphorical, they constituted its object of inquiry — a somewhat impossible pretension. This book extends the debate considerably. It does so through considering the work of Foucault in the context of the analysis of culture. While Foucault has had a considerable impact on organization studies, up to the present no text has systematically addressed what happens to organization culture when it encounter a Foucauldian gaze. Read this book and you will find out.Stewart Clegg, UTS, Sydney

With the economic crisis in Asia, which unfolded in recent years, the development ‘model’ on which the phenomenal earlier success of several countries in the region was built requires increasing scrutiny. This anthology questions the validity of the notion promoted by some observers and international financial organizations that there is a universally applicable model of industrialization common to Asian countries. A number of senior and highly regarded Asia specialists are taking a critical look at the various development experiences of several (and some often neglected) Asian countries and evaluate their experiences in a comparative perspective. Comparing the analyses of countries such as Mongolia, the Pacific Islands, or Sri Lanka with Singapore, South Korea and other countries of the region leads the editors of this volume to the conclusion that the fashionable talk about a ‘model’ is not justified and that the picture is much more complex.

Paradox — the simultaneous existence of two inconsistent states — has become orthodox. The orthodox is now the paradox. The orthodox world of ordering, controlling and organizing is increasingly opposed to a normalizing world of disordering, disrupting and disorganizing. And organization studies cannot avoid changing its conceptions of reality as that reality changes. In the future, organization studies will be the study of paradox, how to understand it, how to use it.

In this book of original contributions addressed to management and organization paradoxes the authors address the new state of the field in terms of representations — representing paradoxes — and materialisations — materialising paradoxes. The themes — although varied, ranging from dialectics to internal tensions; from collaborations to ethics and value conflicts; from resistant labourers and wharfies to cartoon characters such as The Simpsons; from the irrationalities of finance to the psychoanalytic rationalities of auditing, and from issues of governance in Asian and international business to the composition of the new knowledge work force in the business professions — cohere around core aspects of paradoxicality.

Overall, the contributions to Management and Organization Paradoxes are diverse and challenging. Each contribution takes a different angle on the central theme. All of the chapters illuminate diverse aspects of contemporary paradoxes in management and organization theory. The book provides, in each of its chapters, a challenge to the still overwhelmingly rationalist views of theory and practice that dominate the field and provides new directions for understanding organizations and management.The contributors are drawn from leading European, Australian and Latin American contributors.

Why are some firms successful on global markets whilst others are not? In this collection of papers, a group of distinguished international researchers examine the inter-relationship between national context, firm performance and global competitiveness. In a series of empirical studies covering major industries (such as banking, telecommunications, construction, automobiles, and airlines) in a number of European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Finland, Slovenia), the studies show how distinctive patterns of firm competences and capabilities arise from national contexts. These influence the way in which firms perform in response to changing technologies and competitive pressures. Thus the impact of the globalisation of economic activity may be to reinforce existing national differences in firm performance rather than producing a homogenisation and standardisation.

This book will be of interest to researchers in business and management, sociology, economics and political science for its comparative organizational approach to problems of economic performance.

Carl Rhodes examines the implicit power of writing and authorship that is at play when people and organisations are (re)presented in research. To explore this, the book reports a research project in the area of organisational storytelling that investigates how people in one organisation used stories to (re)present their own learning experiences from the implementation of a quality management program. This research is written in three principal genres: autobiography, ethnography and a fictional short story. These (re)presentational strategies are reviewed to examine how different genres effect authority in different ways. Drawing extensively on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on writers associated with postmodernism and poststructuralism, the book offers a challenging discussion of what organisational research might be when the notion of the equivalence of reality and representation is radically questioned.