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Personnel specialists often bear the brunt of organisational change. Whether through the painful experiences of managing a redundancy, or as company representatives negotiating the introduction of new technology with trade unions, the shock waves of organisational change permeate most aspects of the personnel function sooner or later. Over recent years, much effort has been directed towards understanding the processes and problems of organisational change and of developing ways of more satisfactorily dealing with it. Much of these efforts have been drawn together into a body of techniques, ideas, case studies and more general wisdom which has acquired a distinctive identity.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of centralization and formalization on the frequency of political tactics (FPT) used by employees. It also examines political will as the underlying variable that mediates the relationship between the focal variables.

The study uses data (n = 234) collected from a large public sector organization in India. The interrelationships are tested empirically using structural equation modeling.

The findings suggest that both centralization and formalization significantly influence the FPT used by employees. Also, political will partially mediate the relationship between centralization, formalization and FPT.

The study provides evidence of the influence of centralization and formalization as two organizational realities that lead to employee engagement in political tactics. It also elucidates the importance of political will and the need to develop social astuteness to maneuver through the maze of organizational politics. The study is conducted in a public sector organization in India and uses cross-sectional data. Therefore, generalizations must be made with caution.

The study establishes political will as an important mediator between centralization, formalization and political behavior, fostering in-depth research into the structural aspects of public sector organizations. It also establishes political will as an important individual disposition of employees that augments the engagement of employees in political behavior in highly centralized and formalized organizations.

Business process re‐engineering (BPR) promises to transform organizations by fundamentally altering their core processes, thereby achieving radical improvements in performance. As the number of actual re‐engineering projects increases, the rhetoric surrounding BPR has shifted to reflect greater cynicism and discomfort over its claims. In the absence of compelling and trustworthy evidence about the success of BPR projects, critics have exposed logical contradictions within BPR’s “manifesto” for revolutionary change and insinuated that BPR’s utopian rhetoric masks political motives. This paper contributes to this discussion in three ways. First we examine two difficulties affecting the evaluation of BPR programmes: defining what process re‐engineering really is, and determining whether BPR has been applied successfully. Second, we examine four fundamental contradictions inherent in BPR’s analysis of organizations: the fallacy of its “clean‐slate” assumption, the paradox of information technology’s role as an enabler of organizational change, the hypocrisy of employee empowerment, and the irony of employee commitment. Third we propose that such contradictions be addressed in both research and practice by employing theoretical perspectives that are prepared to accommodate contradictory phenomena, in contrast to the simplistic, deterministic logic guiding current investigations of BPR’s effectiveness. We suggest theories of organizational learning and organizational politics to understand and resolve the contradictions embedded within BPR.

Although there are many models of decision making, there are few attempts to match the appropriate decision strategy with different situations. After reviewing and comparing six contemporary decision‐making models, a framework and propositions are developed that match strategies with circumstances. The article concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical application of the proposed contingency model decision making.

The discovery of meso-level social orders in organizational theory, political sociology, and social movement theory, what have subsequently been called sectors, policy domains, and most popularly, fields (or in organizational sociology, organizational fields), opens up a theoretical terrain that has not yet been fully explored (see Martin, 2003 for one view of fields). In this chapter, we propose that in fact all of these phenomena (and several others), fields, domains, policy domains, sectors, networks, and in game theory, the “game” bear a deep theoretical relationship to one another. They are all a way of characterizing how meso-level social orders, social spaces are constructed. We want to make a bold claim: the idea of fields is the central sociological construct for understanding all arenas of collective strategic action. The idea of fields is not just useful for understanding markets and political policy domains, but also social movements, and many other forms of organized social life. In essence, scholars working on their particular empirical corner of the world have inadvertently discovered something fundamental about social structure: that collective actors somehow manage to work to get “action” toward their socially and cultural constructed ends and in doing so, enlist the support of others in order to produce meso-level social orders.

Justice is a traditional and central moral criterion in society, and is determined, expressed, and assessed differently in different social settings. The purpose of this paper is to propose a justice perspective from contemporary political philosophy in order to explore and prescribe ethical justice behavior in the context of entrepreneurial firms.

John Rawls' influential political theory of justice is examined and then discussed as a potential guide for the ethical decision making of founders of new organizations.

The empirical realities of entrepreneurs are curiously analogous to Rawlsian choosers in the original position as they operate under a similar veil of ignorance. As a development of the authors' argument, three entrepreneur‐inspired justice principles are suggested.

A society of entrepreneurs who value fairness with regard to their stakeholders is likely to shape the business environment in ways that figure into assumptions of business decisions for all organizations, which may in turn result in a society in which all organizational stakeholders are treated fairly.

The paper shows that a Rawlsian justice perspective is plausible, illuminating, and potentially useful when applied to the entrepreneurial context.

Decision making is considered an important topic in management studies. However it is postulated that current thinking in decision making is out of date and inapplicable in today's organisations. Hence, a more realistic approach needs to be considered. A political framework is offered as the alternative mechanism for understanding decision making processes in organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine three substantial trends in public administration research from a Norwegian perspective with a special focus on administrative reform that addresses organizational arrangements rather than changes of policy by focusing on government capacity and good government.

The paper is synthesizing trends in Norwegian public administration research over the past 30 years by using existing publications and also by contrasting it to development in other countries.

The paper describes, first, the theoretical development toward meso-level theories and an institutional turn in public administration research. Second, it focuses on the methodological development toward more time series analysis and comparative and objective data. Third, it addresses the trend from processes and administrative behavior to performance and effects.

The paper addresses the increasing internalization of public administration research, the strengthened focus on empirical studies of “living” organizations, the need to address the big issues and large forces in public administration and also the transformative periods and unsettled situations going beyond settled stable situations.

Although the focus of management education is on helping the powerful to be more effective in using their power, it gives less attention to the role of politics, in exercising power, than other areas of education. Political understanding is relevant in every kind and at every level of organisation. This article pursues the argument that political competence be included in any portfolio of basic management skills. Referring to their own previous work in this area, the authors, offer a number of issues for consideration by management educators interested in the same objective. These include the question of how political “nous” becomes a teachable skill; how the obtaining of such skills contrasts with other development models used by psychologists; the process of enabling managers to explore their “bottom line”; and understanding the political purposes of the different interests involved in management education ‐client organisations, participants and trainers.

The application of different models of organization to the study of schools is common in the literature on organizational theory. This literature distinguishes rational models, such as the bureaucratic ideal type, from natural systems models, such as the concept of schools as loose‐coupled systems and the image of schools as political arenas. This article examines the extent to which some specially selected schools in Australia and New Zealand can be viewed as resembling certain organizational models. The article concludes that there is no one model which is suitable for describing schools although many of the different models described by theorists seem to be relevant to the schools studied. The article also seeks to isolate some of the factors that result in schools resembling certain organizational models rather than others.