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Believing that the goal of maximizing shareholder value as reflected in the stock price and the management methods of hierarchical bureaucracy combine to cripple the capacity of the firm to innovate, the author offers a new management model.

Assuming that the goal of the change process is to foster continuous innovation of products and processes to serve customer needs, the author lays out a roadmap for leaders seeking to move beyond maximizing shareholder value and re-engineering bureaucracy.

Any new management model should align with the concept that the best way to serve shareholders’ interests is to deliver value to customers.

Practices like self-organizing teams, platforms, networks and ecosystems enhance and magnify the value of what employees themselves want to do. Instead of hierarchical management having an adversarial relationship with employees, managers can have a collaborative trusting relationship where institutional and personal goals coincide.

The article offers leaders a rationale for instituting a combination of managerial, social and political approaches, with change platforms that are allied to an inspiring social and political change movement.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework for researching gender equality implications of Clinical Microsystems, a new public management‐based model for multi‐professional collaboration and improvement of health care delivery.

The paper draws on literature from gender in organizations, new public management, multi‐professional collaboration and organizational control to critically analyze the Clinical Microsystem model.

While on the surface an egalitarian and consensus‐based model, it nevertheless risks reinforcing a gendered hierarchical order. The explicit emphasis on social competencies, on being collaborative and amenable to change risks, paradoxically, disfavoring women. A major reason is that control becomes more opaque, which favors those already in power.

The paper calls for researchers as well as practitioners to incorporate concerns of equality in the work place when introducing new work practices in health care. For research, the authors propose a useful theoretical framework for empirical research. For practice, the paper calls for more transparent conditions for multi‐professional collaboration, such as formalized merit and advancement systems, precisely formulated performance expectations and selection of team members based strictly on formal merits.

A gender analysis of a seemingly anti‐hierarchical management model is an original contribution, adding to the literature on Clinical Microsystem in particular but also to critical studies on new public management. Moreover, the paper makes a valuable practical contribution in suggesting ways of avoiding the reproduction of gender inequalities otherwise implied in the model.

The paper aims to shed light on how a group of feminist managers/leaders, in education and social studies departments, a notably under-explored and under-theorised group, “do power” in the increasingly corporatized education marketplace.

The research draws on the narratives of a small group of feminist women who hold authority positions at middle or senior levels. It draws on data from ethnographic interviews and participant observation carried out as part of an in-depth narrative inquiry (Andrews et al., 2008), carried out at three higher education institutions in the UK.

From a small sample such as this, any findings are necessarily tentative. Nonetheless, findings suggest that, whilst taking account of individual differences in styles, there has been a shift, over time, in the ways that the management role is approached by some feminist women. Analysis of the data also reveals that gendered expectations remain for those who carry the “feminist” label and asks whether these expectations are realistic.

The sample group is small which raises questions about what can and cannot be claimed. However, along with Maguire (2008), the author’s purpose is not with generalizability but seeks to explore issues and open up further areas of study.

This paper is an original empirical research which explores an under-researched group of women, namely, feminist managers and leaders who operate within the education marketplace. As they negotiate the challenges of working within the neoliberal academy, these women try, to varying degrees, to remain true to their feminist values and beliefs.

The article reports on anti-hierarchical approaches to managing work outside the U.S. and independent of software development as evidenced in presentations at the November Drucker Forum by the French group, Vinci and the Chinese group, Haier.

The article looks at how radical innovations in organization structure, management processes and mindsets are being adopted by companies seeking the rapid-paced, customer-focused continuous innovation needed to survive in today’s dynamic marketplaces. These approaches are spreading throughout many established organizations. For traditionally managed hierarchical organizations, the transformation often involves radical shifts in power, attitudes, values, mindsets, ways of thinking and ways of interacting with stakeholders—customers, employee talent, shareholders and partners.

The Vinci Group is organized with 3,500 business units, so that there are in effect 3,500 entrepreneurs, all intent on developing good ideas. The Haier Groups has transformed its organization into a flat platform with thousands of micro-enterprises. There are no more than eight people in each one.

The Haier platform enables the microenterprises to interact closely and intensively with users, allowing them to participate in the development and production process. The goal is to align Haier’s people and the value they can create for customer users. The need is to unleash people’s potential so as to maximize value to users.

The article reveals that when companies disrupt the traditional “efficiency-based” organizational structure the do so in unique ways. Typical of the homegrown approach to post-bureaucratic organizations, Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier, pioneered a management model called “Rendanheyl,” which entails three disruptions: disrupting employees, disrupting organizational structures and disrupting compensation structures.

This article addresses why movements towards less-hierarchical organizing may be unsustainable within organizations.

Eschewing hierarchy may prove sustainable if alternative forms of management are acceptable to both employees and managers accountable for those employees’ performance. Developing alternatives means dealing with the fundamentally contradictory functions of coordination and control. Through a qualitative case study of a manufacturing company that removed first-line supervisors, this article analyses how issues of control and coordination were dealt with formally and informally.

Removal of the formal supervisor was followed by workers’ and middle managers’ efforts to informally reconstruct hierarchical supervision. Their efforts to deal pragmatically with control and coordination were frustrated by formal prescriptions for less hierarchy, leading to contested outcomes. The article identifies upward and downward pressures for the hierarchy’s reconstruction, undermining the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing.

This study is limited by the use of cross-sectional data and employees’ retrospective narratives. Future research on the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing should preferably be longitudinal to overcome these limitations.

Unless organizational changes towards less hierarchy engage with issues of managerial control and upward accountability, they are likely to induce pressures for hierarchy’s reconstruction.

The article offers an original approach to the classical problem of eschewing hierarchy in organizations. The approach allows us to explore the interrelated challenges facing such restructuring, some of which are currently unacknowledged or underestimated within the literature.

The management practices of three organisations in the computer industry, one North American, one Japanese and one British owned are described. Although operating in similar marketplaces, markedly different management styles and practices were apparent, with the British company showing much less evidence of “human resource management” activities than the other two.

This article considers a series of ways in which hierarchy is ontologically and politically opposed to flatness, particularly in the work of the artist Takashi Murakami and the cultural critic Dick Hebdige. It explores the attractions and problems of flatness as an alternative to hierarchy, but concludes that both are equally two-dimensional representations of organizing. Instead, alternative organizers with a commitment to anti-hierarchical practices would be better learning from the three-dimensional practical examples of anarchism, feminism, socialism and environmentalism.

Public administration has become the victim of its own success. Public policy making and problem solving during the first three decades after WWII began from an assumption that public managers had the competence to overcome policy barriers. The ʼdo more with less” slogan was a statement of professional competence. It was adopted because many believed it was an affirmation of that competence. Now it represents a fiscal demand as a scold to those who will otherwise waste the money. What the public hears is a perverse joke. The goal must be more effective governance, by approaching fiscal stability as a strategic enterprise. The potential tools for more effective services exist and are applied by governments across the globe. Yet the public clings to failed practices (NPM) that are best when dealing with short-term issues

This study aimed to explore prevalent characteristics of organizational culture (OC) and common sources of work stress in a Taiwanese work context. The authors also aimed to analyze how characteristics of OC may be linked to stressors.

A qualitative methodology of focus group discussions was adopted.

Four characteristics of OC were identified, including: family‐kin, informal work obligations, organizational loyalty and subgroup involvement. Job characteristics, home‐work interface, interpersonal relationships and career development were identified as common sources of work stress. Content analysis revealed that characteristics of OC could either alleviate or aggravate stress, depending on employees' perception and attribution. Double‐coding analysis indicated that stressors related to job characteristics seem particularly linked to informal work obligation but not to organizational loyalty as characteristics of OC.

The exclusive reliance on qualitative methodology is a limitation of the present study. However, the results have both theoretical and practical implications. The authors note that Western findings regarding OC may not generalize completely to a different culture and the Taiwanese context supports distinctive features of OC and work stressors. Consequently, any effective corporate stress interventions should be formulated taking the core cultural values and practices into account.

The in‐depth and culture‐sensitive nature is a major thrust of the present study, and the focus on the link between OC and stress is a rare effort in the Pan‐Chinese cultural context.

This paper intends to present and discuss the findings of a case study analysis of the adoption and use of a wiki system by a small enterprise that is intended as a tool for managing the knowledge needed to successfully perform its business activities. The study aims at contributing to the still insufficient research on the factors influencing the use of new Web 2.0 technologies in small organisations to support internal knowledge management.

The study combines a qualitative and quantitative approach. The main unit of analysis is the wiki system of a small company, particularly its implementation and usage by the company’s employees. Relevant information about the wiki was collected through six interviews to different company members, and by means of an online survey submitted to almost all employees. Interviews involved the CEO of the company, the system developers and two typical users. The survey was made through a questionnaire of 19 questions online administered by means of a popular free-access online poll website (freeonlinesurveys.com).

Through the reconstruction of the history of the system, the study allowed to understand how the wiki has been introduced and is effectively used inside the case company. The findings of the study highlight that the wiki technology, being light and user-friendly, can be particularly suited for small companies. At the same time, they reveal that the successful implementation of such a system is not a spontaneous and automatic result, but requires a resolute support by top management, a good motivation of participating employees and a clear definition of purposes and ways of use.

The findings of the study contribute both to the academic research, by making available to scholars further empirical evidence about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in small organisations, and to the practice, by providing some guidelines to managers of small companies who are attempting to adopt and use wikis to effectively manage their knowledge assets.

The paper contributes to the limited research about the adoption and use of wikis as knowledge management system, both in general and in the particular case of a SME. Furthermore, by investigating the behaviours and opinions of individual knowledge workers, it takes into account a perspective that the literature has so far neglected.