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Management strategy within the Ford Motor Company has been going through a quiet revolution in the last decade. From being a utility car producer understanding competitive advantage exclusively in cost terms and equating management with control Ford have adopted a long‐term strategy of design‐led product innovation and promoting high trust labour relations. At the heart of this change strategy are the twin thrusts of ‘Participative Management’ aimed primarily at the executive level and ‘Employee Involvement’ for salaried and hourly employees. Both projects were borne of the watershed, if inherently flawed, ‘After Japan’ initiative of the early 1980s. ‘After Japan’ represented Ford's assimilation of the organisational — as well as economic — challenge thrown down by Japanese manufacturing. But what began as an ambitious attempt to impose Japanese factory institutions such as quality circles on a suspicious workforce rapidly degenerated into a conventional cost‐cutting exercise. From this experience, however, Ford's strategists moved towards a more processual, less mechanistic, understanding of organisational change. We shall examine the results of the ‘El’ process in a variety of settings and the impact of ‘PM’ on decision‐making processes within Ford UK.

The purpose of this paper is to question the purpose of the business school and its role in management education.

The paper develops an historical analysis of the origins, development and identity of the business school, reflecting the views of the business school's multiple stakeholders. The paper reviews traditional business school design and how this is driven by particular concepts of purpose and identity. It questions whether these concepts are sustainable in the light of current forces for change.

The paper identifies the current major design challenges facing business schools as knowledge, narratives and practices and argues for a new narrative of sustainable strategic management as a guiding force for future development.

The paper identifies the current knowledge challenges facing business schools and argues that business schools need to rethink their focus on “school” as well as “business”.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the current economic crisis offers an opportunity to rethink the role of the business school and how business schools can reinvent what they do by an engagement with history and the design sciences.

The paper draws on an ongoing research project into the role of the business school. It provides an historical analysis of the business school's evolving role.

Debates about the nature of the business school fall into two camps, one that argues that the business school is a professional school, and another that says the business school needs to be a better social science school. This paper suggests an alternative perspective, more geared to a view of management as an art, rather than a science, offering less economics, more humanities and history.

The paper aligns itself with a growing call for business school reform and suggests how alternative disciplines might help shape its future.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.

Kent Library of Southeast Missouri State University received an historic document in 1979. This document appeared to be a death warrant for Sarah Good from 1692. Sarah Good was executed for practicing witchcraft in Salem. After closer examination, the document was declared to be a forgery, with similar documents distributed during the 1930s. This article examines the history of this document, explains why the document was declared a forgery, further examines features that are often found in forgeries, and gives suggestions that libraries can use to identify forgeries.

We develop a discourse of strategic management as design, using a conceptual base drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, as an alternative to the prevailing strategy discourse (strategy as “economizing”). We then use contemporary design theory to theorize strategic management as a design activity in which the focus is on innovation, with the emphasis on future strategies based on the creation of desirable unknowns.