Search results

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Confronted with cross‐cultural training the authors have used data collection instruments for flexibility and adaptability and to bridge the cultural and language gap. The frame of reference here is international but many of the advantages might also apply in other training contexts. This is how the utilisation reported in this article occurred.

In the field of human resource development, one of the most frequently discussed and used methods is the development of effective group action and teamwork. Such an emphasis is understandable when we remind ourselves of the complexity, size, and pressures on today's organizations.

This case study on consultation with an organization will deal with a continuing consultation process with a large semi‐governmental social welfare organization covering a period of six years. This organization has a national headquarters staff of 655 employees. It is organized on the basis of four regional operations and an overseas activity. There are more than one thousand paid employees in these regional offices under direct supervision of a field staff of several hundred persons, who give direct field consultation and program guidance to some 3,700 local units of the organization. It is estimated that the local units of this organization, including the regional and national office, involves more than 2 million volunteers.

RECENTLY we were at a garage. A customer had, during the night, left his car for repair. The instructions were stuck on the windscreen and repeated on the wing: REPLACE NEARSIDE WING ONLY.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

Intensifying efforts to utilize behavioral science concepts and knowledge in administrative research and practice in education during the past quarter‐century have produced an impressive body of literature, largely taxonomic in nature. Much of this literature involves system theory and attempts to identify and classify the various processes by which planned change may be controlled and directed. It thus gives rise to the concept of coherent change strategies and tactics: a concept useful to both the student of organizational change and the administrative practitioner. The author describes four major attempts to identify and classify strategies of organizational change and the tactice that “go with them. In general, these strategies address the problem of how to change organizations, but it is also necessary to know what to change. Leavitt has identified and described four crucial organizational variables which are amenable to administrative control and manipulation: (1) task, (2) structure, (3) people, and (4) technology. These variables are dynamically interrelated but are helpful to the researcher and the administrator in designing and monitoring systemic approaches to organizational change utilizing any strategy which may have been selected.

Although British industry and British film producers have now made some masterly incursions into the field of management training film production there are still some things they can learn from the Americans. This is most noticeable in the case of a film series built around the written works of a management consultant and featuring the consultant himself as one of a cast of a dramatised production. The series ORGANISATION RENEWAL, inspired by Gordon Lippitt, is a case in point. This series consists of five films dealing with background problems associated with changing the structure and practices of a viable organisation, the dynamic situation engendered in a group, the concept of teamwork and problems associated with coping with change.

The George Washington University organizational behavior students have been privileged to learn from professors who were students of three different founders of the field. The three strands discussed here are Roethlisberger and the Harvard Business School, Kurt Lewin and NTL, and Herzberg. This learning experience is very different from introductory textbooks, which give the impression that the field has made consistent, linear progress from the early days until today. The enriched experience includes a sense of the false starts, values conflicts, egos, lack of cross‐communication, and other dimensions of the human condition that played a role in the founding of OB&D. This article reviews the development of these strands and points out that, although there are similarities, they were working on different problems, using different data sources, with different units of analysis. The article concludes with a glimpse at how these three founders would view the field of OB&D today.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.