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The new South Africa came into being in 1994. The new government inherited the national public service and those of a variety of former provinces and homelands that had to be amalgamated to form a national unified public service. Although this task was accomplished rapidly, the resulting public service was very large, and exhibited many features of traditional bureaucracy, including hierarchical structures, limited automation and IT applications, low levels of training, a poor work culture, language and cultural barriers, and an overall orientation towards inputs and processes rather than service delivery and results. Within the first three years of the new order, substantial effort was devoted to reforming the bureaucracy. New public service legislation and regulations were introduced, new and powerful central personnel agencies were created, English became the language of administration, and substantial authority was devolved to departments and provinces. Despite these reforms, progress in improving results in terms of service delivery, especially to previously disadvantaged communities, was mixed. Towards the end of the 1990s increased attention was paid to means of improving service delivery. Three important initiatives in this regard were Batho Pele (1997), the adoption of eight nationwide principles for better service delivery; a public private partnerships initiative (2000) and the promotion of alternative service delivery. While alternative service delivery initiatives are largely at pilot stage, they offer a promising alternative both to traditional bureaucracy (with its cost and poor service delivery focus) and to a narrow version of privatisation (which could involve heavy social costs, job losses, and regressive redistribution of wealth). This paper reviews these developments and outlines some promising alternative service delivery pilot projects.

This case aims to describe the practices of Salesforce.com, one of the most successful examples of a company transitioning from traditional management to radical management.

The article explores the factors that made the implementation successful and identifies the pitfalls that were avoided. Salesforce.com provides on‐demand services for customer‐relationship management.

Salesforce.com has had more spectacular results than most other companies that have adopted the radical management principles of Scrum.

Over the past five years Salesforce.com has delivered a 41 percent annual return to shareholders. This extraordinary performance – in fact, an example of an innovation turnaround – occurred after the firm instituted a set of radical practices that make it a model for business seeking to grow though continuous innovation.

The leadership at Salesforce.com saw that if a radically different approach to management were to be introduced in one part of the organization, there would be a tension at the interface between the part of the company still doing traditional management and the part managing work in the new way. So they opted to go all out with change right across the whole organization.

What made Salesforce.com different is that when it innovativeness was threatened it adopted a radically different way of managing work. It implemented a set of agile, customer‐driven, outcome‐oriented, iterative management practices known in software development as Scrum.

After firms have made a technological breakthrough they need to practice continuous innovation to delight their customers so they will be able to keep dominating those markets in an enduring fashion. This masterclass aims to address the question, “So what’s involved in this rapid innovation?”

To answer the question, the author looks first at a primer, What is DevOps? by Mike Loukides. It describes the continuing acceleration in innovation in software development. To illustrate best practice the author looks at the case of Software developer Etsy.

In leading firms, instead of management approval being required for all changes, now all improvements that have been fully tested are deployed immediately – Within the broad strategic framework, the staff is authorized to proceed with continuous improvement.

The reality is that most firms today, whether they know it or not, are already software companies and will steadily become more so. Their competence in dealing with software will be a key part of their competitive edge – or lack thereof.

For leaders in all markets the lesson is – networked organizations using agile management practices and continuous deployment with a culture of trust, delegation and collaboration are able to move and innovate much more rapidly than traditional managements that are saddled with legacy cultures of hierarchical bureaucracy.

The purpose of this paper is to track changes in organizational and occupational stress in the Finnish police force during the police reform years. It also estimates the effects of organizational stressors on labor turnover intention (LTI).

The study is based on six distinct cross-sectional Police Personnel Surveys from 1999 to 2012. The surveys are not sample based, but have targeted the entire police force with good response rates. The study employs hierarchical logit models to predict LTI.

Police agencies can be depicted as hierarchical frontline organizations. Major reforms in such agencies can be expected to give rise to increased organizational conflicts and stress. The empirical findings of the paper fall in line with the theory. Organizational stress and LTI have been increasing in the Finnish police force during the police reform years. However, at the same time, personal and occupational stressors have actually been reducing in the police force. Turnover intention was observed to be a positive function of those particular organizational stressors that have increased the most over the reform years.

The data are cross-sectional. No direct causal conclusions can be drawn from the results of this study. A non-material violation of the linearity assumption was detected in two logit models.

Relying on Tops and Spelier's 2013 theory of police organizations as frontline organizations, the paper introduces a new theoretical construct – hierarchical frontline organization – and combines its theoretical ideas with comprehensive long-term data from the Finnish police force.

This paper sets out to review the sociological perspective on the changing role of managers in US corporations following the demise of Fordist hierarchies.

The paper reviews literature on how changing managerial prerogatives altered the control of the workplace, and provides a theoretically informed assessment of the current impasse.

The post‐Second World War decades saw sustained economic growth that was predicated on an employment relationship in which managers and workers had relatively secure career ladders within firms and were provided with regular pay increases. The changing competitive environment in the 1980s altered this relationship: traditional hierarchical structures were increasingly subject to internal market forces, and organizations supplanted and supplemented their operations with network forms.

The paper shows how workplace changes increased insecurity for managers by questioning the traditional operation of that role within organizations; though simultaneously, these changes served to enhance features of overall organizational efficiency and equalize opportunity for career advancement.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the personal challenges of a change agent, namely, a catalyst, attempting to promote organizational change in a hybrid and complex educational organization. The study mirrors subjective experiences with classic bureaucracy research and the theory of collaborative community. It analyzes the lack of work developmental scaffolds in the transition from a bureaucracy to a collaborative community.

The study uses autoethnographic methods.

A hybrid and complex context does not offer firm scaffolds for a change agent. Classic bureaucracy research and the theory of collaborative community have difficulties to explain the personal challenges of the change agent.

Research on weak or missing organizational scaffolding and transitional challenges should be studied using a multidisciplinary approach. The concepts of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding in a complex context should be revised.

Hybrid and complex organizations should develop new ways to scaffold and manage their work development.

This paper shows and analyzes the personal challenges of a change agent on a hybrid and complex organization. The autoethnographic approach gives important knowledge about the lack of theoretical explanation of the problematics of organizational transition.

Summarizes emerging patterns of corporate restructuring and process re‐engineering – describing current responses of marketplace enterprises to ongoing demographic, economic and technologic changes in the business operating environment – and assesses the applicability of those transformational adaptations to educational processes and institutions.

One of the dominant features of the age of globalization is the rampant expansion of organization. In particular, formal, standardized, rationalized, and empowered forms of organization expand in many domains and locales. We discuss these features of organization, showing that hyper-rationalization and actorhood are main themes of organization across presumably distinct social sectors and national societies. We explain the ubiquity of such organizational forms in institutional terms, seeing the global culture of universalism, rationality, and empowered actorhood as supporting the diffusion of managerial roles and perspectives.

This article aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

The briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This review is based on “Successfully implementing radical management at Salesforce.com,” by Stephen Denning. The results of radical management at Salesforce.com speak for themselves, though the Scrum activities themselves – many just good commonsense business practice – seem far less radical than the results.

The article provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

Wiki technologies, which are popular in social settings, are beginning to contribute to more flexible and participatory approaches to the exploitation of knowledge in corporate settings. Through the lens of activity theory, this paper aims to investigate contentious challenges to organizational activities that may be associated with the introduction of corporate wikis, in particular the potential democratization of knowledge work.

From a study of several cases of corporate wiki adoption, this paper presents and interprets two representative cases sampled to provide more generalized results. Qualitative data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and observation. The analysis followed a systematic process of data reduction, display, and rich interpretation using the concepts of activity theory.

This research provides new understandings of the undervalued activities of knowledge workers, their challenges as wiki users and resulting implications for organizational transformation and improved organizational performance.

There is potential bias and limited scope as the choice of cases was determined through organizations known to the researchers and involved some action research. However, the authors justify this approach for a dynamic, emergent topic worthy of immediate investigation and direct applicability of findings to corporate practice.

This paper addresses the implications of new Web 2.0 technologies for the democratization of knowledge management in the workplace.

The novelty of this work lies in using activity theory to explore reasons why some organizations are more successful than others in implementing wikis. This work contributes to research on how social and technological interventions may lead to improved exploitation of knowledge as a corporate resource.