Search results

Without the stories, or narratives that organisations construct, there could be no social negotiation or sense making. A problem is that the narratives are often “too straight”, too simplistic and self‐serving to be helpful representations of reality. Most stories in organisations that are used to manage change efforts are too simple, and too much believed. They foster naive optimism that soon degenerates into cynicism. Stories are maps, but are often confused with the territories themselves. Some examples of stories or accounts of organisational change efforts that are straight, and how they might have been made more “crooked”, are discussed. Some suggestions on how leaders in organisations can become more thoughtful consumers of straight stories and make those stories more helpful maps to guide organisations through the turbulence of change are offered.

This paper explores the issue of transferring western human resource management (HRM) practices to Algeria. Drawing on a case study of a large industrial company, the research identifies the motives for the transfer and examines the selection and implementation process of western HRM practices in Algeria. Evidence generated from the case study reveals that while management justifications for the transfer of western HRM practices capture the economic and technical rationale for western HRM practices, they fail to identify local conditions under which these HRM practices might be transferred. The applicability of western HRM is hindered by the unplanned and haphazard importation of western HRM practices.

The challenge is to manage the organization's culture so that you can tap the company's strengths to achieve superior performance and identify its weaknesses in time to overcome them before they cause serious damage.

Research on organizational culture has provided much needed subtlety in understanding organizational events. However, it has a cognitive bias which leaves implicit the treatment of emotional phenomena. Organizational stories can provide a window on affect in organizations if we view stories as symbolically embedded appraisals of wellbeing. Presents an illustrative case to demonstrate how such enquiry might proceed.

The history of international business has generated a growing literature. Over the AIB's fifty years, scholars associated with AIB have contributed to this literature but it has been a far broader one. This chapter surveys a sample of the wide variety of works on the history of multinational enterprise, published from the 1950s onward. The works are not only in business history but also in diplomatic and legal history. The literature makes it clear that the multinational enterprise has a long history and is far from a post-World War II or post-1989 phenomenon. The chapter shows the variety in the accumulation of studies in business history directly related to international business as well as the forums where business historians present their findings. It considers why and how international-business history matters for international-business research.

THE responsibility for materials handling methods, as for all other production methods, should be made the clear responsibility of the head of Work Study. The reasoning behind that firm conclusion is very logical. Industry in general depends for its success upon the application of some process such as machining or finishing of raw materials. Every such operation adds to its value and builds up a firm's turnover. It is therefore obvious that the more time there is devoted to conversion the less will be wasted on profitless storage or unproductive transport from one part of the works to another.

We propose an elaboration of the social structure and personality framework from sociological social psychology that is intended to promote integration across social psychological traditions and between social psychology and sociology, using the study of inequality as an example.

We develop a conceptualization of “generic” proximate processes that produce and reproduce inequality in face-to-face interaction: status, identity, and justice.

The elaborated framework suggests fundamental questions that analysts can pose about the macro-micro dynamics of inequality. These questions direct attention to the “how” and “why” of macro-micro relations by connecting structural and cultural systems, local contexts, and the lives of individual persons; highlighting implicit processes; making meaning central; and directing our attention to how people act efficaciously in the face of constraint.

Applying this framework, scholars can use existing theories and generate new ones, and can do so inductively or deductively.

Research on inequality is enriched by social psychological analyses that draw on the full complement of relevant methods and theories.

We make visible the social psychological underpinnings of sociological research on inequality and provide a template for macro-micro analyses that emphasizes the centrality of social psychological processes.

Using his Information Scientist pseudonym of Icarus, Alan Gilchrist once called the Aslib Co‐ordinate Indexing Group (CIG) (now Aslib Informatics Group) a bunch of free‐thinkers—the hippy fringe of the information profession. As the leading light of this Group (Leo Jolley was its Chairman from its formal inception in 1970 until his death on Christmas Day 1976) one might have expected him to epitomize these alleged qualities, but this was not so. Leo was neither long‐haired, figuratively or otherwise, nor was he a particularly free‐thinker. His work relating to information retrieval tended to be highly formalized: for a time he was unjusdy criticized for his attempt to rigorously define the fundamental nature of feature card systems. Later he had to suffer similar criticism from the present writer when he attempted to define and standardize the vocabulary relating to co‐ordinate indexing and thesaurus construction. Leo was a highly individual thinker, however, and he certainly existed at the fringe of the information profession. His contacts with the profession appear to have been limited to the CIG and to the Classification Research Group. He was neither a member of the Institute of Information Scientists nor of the Library Association, and was affronted if accused of being a librarian. Thus, he formed a part of that limited band who have contributed much to the profession without really being a part of it. This must be qualified, however, in that he had established a company (J. L. Jolley and Partners) which operated a range of services from consultancy to punching holes in feature cards.

Talk around Britain's application to enter the European Economic Community goes on; it has never really ceased since the first occasion of the French veto, although in the last year or so, the airy promise of the first venture has given way to more sober thoughts on the obstacles to joining and the severe burdens to be carried not only by the British people but by many of our kith and kin beyond the seas if the country becomes a full member of the Community.