Scandinavian Journal of Management Studies最新文献

The concept of legitimation has been used in the organizational analysis literature to refer either to processes by which power relations are mystified through the manipulation of symbols or to processes by which organizations conform to consensually defined standards of evaluation. This article traces the intellectual lineage of these approaches in the management literature and current and classic literature of the social sciences, and demonstrates the complementarity of their strengths and weaknesses. An integrative theory of legitimation, based on semiotics, is then presented which identifies the articulation of these approaches and allows a richer basis for the analysis of legitimation phenomena.

Business schools constitute large and important elements of the modern academic system throughout the world. The experiences in Sweden show that this position has not been reached without resistance. The development of the discipline there has occurred particularly during the last three decades as a result of governmental support to business education. Before that, several efforts to prevent the introduction of business administration in the traditional universities could be observed. Early in the present century there were barriers to entry from established departments in the universities, which, however, were overcome by supporters of business education through the creation of private business schools in Stockholm and Gothenburg. These two institutions eventually opposed new proposals to introduce business administration at the universities. They abandoned their resistance, however, as government support was necessary for their own survival. The pattern from Sweden seems to have counterparts in several other countries.

In what is known as the contribution-inducement model the organization is regarded as a coalition between various participants. If certain participants receive larger inducements that are necessary to hold the coalition together, what is called organizational slack will arise. Superfluous employees also constitute slack.

The existence of slack enables the organization to survive during bad times. Slack is also said to reduce conflicts and to play a stabilising role in the organization.

This theory is questioned in what follows — the starting point being a definition of the concept of slack. From the same initial assumptions as the slack theory, the article culminates in diametrically opposite conclusions.

This article presents a methodological suggestion for organizational learning and learning about organizations. “Framework” is employed as a fruitful organizational metaphor for the purpose of understanding and keeping in touch with change processes in the organization. The existence of change processes is seen to be a fundamental characteristic of organizations as social phenomenon. Organizations as framework are accordingly seen to be continously created and recreated by actors goverened by their cognitive frames. These frames and frameworks serve the contradictory function of both preconditioning creative activity as well as stabilizing and straightening — framing — human activity. The on-going change processes tend to take place “behind the back” of the organizational partipicipants due to the implicit nature of their frames, and the character of that change tends to remain within the basic prevailing assumptions of the focal organization. The ability to get in touch with these dialectics, also a prerequisite for the ability to manage organizational change processes, can therefore be seen to be dependent upon an ability to elicit and reflect upon the frames that the organizational participants make use of. A “frameworkshop” is proposed as one possible tool for frame work to help the participants of an organization explore the logic of their organizational life.

An empirical test of the major sections of Argyris' “Theory of Organizational Behavior” is discussed. Eight hundred subjects, from nineteen different health care organizations of differential types and differential sizes participated in this study.

As Argyris predicted, significant discrepancies were found between the employer's descriptions of organizational qualities required for organizational effectiveness and economics and the employee's perceptions of the working environment that is necessary to fulfill their needs and expectations on the job. In contrast, only mild support was found for the prediction that the employer-employee discrepancies were to increase with an increasing degree of the employee's social maturity. The “reaction variables” as hypothesized in Argyris' model were also confirmed.

Furthermore, results of this empirical test indicate a strong impact which organizational variables have on the perception of discrepancies among employees which are not part of Argyris' model.

It is suggested that the signs of the specificity of cooperative organizations are to be found in the mentality, ideality and morality of homo cooperativus. This specificity is undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis due to new environmental challenges emerging from the currently prevailing technological form of capitalism. In this new situation the homo cooperativus has to redefine his logic of action in order to cope with the necessity of accumulating financial, intellectual and political capital. Empirical findings in the U.K. and France suggest that this process of accumulation appears to be showing signs of an emergence of a new generation of homo cooperativus. The theoretical implications of the findings and the future of cooperatives as specific forms of economic organizations are presented and discussed.

This article develops a model of strategic agenda building describing the conditions under which strategic issues are likely to receive collective organizational attention. The model depicts how the issue and organizational contexts determine the issues that reach the agenda. Within the issue context, the salience of an issue (i.e., its perceived magnitude, its abstractness, simplicity and immediacy) and the level of issue sponsorship (i.e., issue attachment and strategic location) determine the force behind an issue and the likelihood that it will be placed on the strategic agenda. However, the effect of issue salience and sponsorship on an issue's force is moderated by the size and variety of issues already under consideration (i.e., the agenda structure). The article concludes with consideration of the theoretical and practical implications of this dynamic, process-oriented approach to strategic issue identification and legitimation.

Models of organizational change are discussed from the two following aspects: mode of change (concern with problems vs concern with solutions) and character of coupling (tight, loose, or uncoupled).

The problem-driven, solution-driven, and ideology-driven models of (coupled) organizational change are examined in this perspective, as is the uncoupled “muddling through.”

It is suggested that a fifth alternative — the “displacement model” — may also be theoretically possible. More generally, a picture of organizations seen as “tangles” is proposed to complement tightly or loosely coupled systems. The anomalous case of change in the local government of Täby, Sweden, is given as an empirical illustration.