Towards A Critique of Managerialism: the Contribution of Simone Weil*

This paper seeks to make a contribution to the critical literature on management and, more particularly, to the critique of managerialism. This is achieved via a consideration of the hitherto neglected writing of Simone Weil (1909–43) on management, work and organizations. Following an introduction to this work, attention is focused on Weil's notion of oppression, and detailed consideration is given to the conceptualization of management as a form of oppression. the bulk of the paper elaborates the significance of Weil's work for the critique of contemporary forms of managerialism. In particular, the development of new forms of managerial expertise, and the phenomenon of self-management, are analysed as forms of oppression. It is suggested that Weil offers the basis of a non-relativist post-Marxist form of ethically grounded critique in the field of management studies.     

Conceptualizing Knowledge Creation: A Critique of Nonaka's Theory*

abstract Nonaka's proposition that knowledge is created through the interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge involving four modes of knowledge conversion is flawed. Three of the modes appear plausible but none are supported by evidence that cannot be explained more simply. The conceptual framework omits inherently tacit knowledge, and uses a radically subjective definition of knowledge: knowledge is in effect created by managers. A new framework is proposed suggesting that different kinds of knowledge are created by different kinds of behaviour. Following Dewey, non‐reflectional behaviour is distinguished from reflective behaviour, the former being associated with tacit knowledge, and the latter with explicit knowledge. Some of the implications for academic and managerial practice are considered.     

Beyond workaholism: Towards a general model of heavy work investment

Although the term workaholism is widely used, little consensus exists about its meaning, and there is a great need for further theoretical and methodological advancement. We attempt to address this need by introducing the concept of Heavy Work Investment (HWI), and viewing workaholism as only one of its subtypes. Furthermore, we propose a model consisting of four main components: HWI, its possible predictors, its types, and its outcomes.In this model, using Weiner's (1985) attributional framework, we differentiate between situational and dispositional types of HWI, each with its own subtypes, as based on the predictors of such an investment. For example, financial-needs-based and employer-directed are situational subtypes, whereas workaholism and work-devotion are dispositional subtypes. Based on the proposed HWI model, we compare dispositional investors with situational investors.Finally, the measurement of HWI, as well as future research directions (study of situational investors, research across time and cultures, and exploration of inter-generational similarity/difference) is also discussed.     

Towards a Theory of Organizational Improvisation: Looking Beyond the Jazz Metaphor

abstract This paper calls for research on organizational improvisation to go beyond the currently dominant jazz metaphor in theory development. We recognize the important contribution that jazz improvisation has made and will no doubt continue to make in understanding the nature and complexity of organizational improvisation. This article therefore presents some key lessons from the jazz metaphor and then proceeds to identify the possible dangers of building scientific inquiry upon a single metaphor. We then present three alternative models – Indian music, music therapy and role theory. We explore their nature and seek to identify ways in which the insights they generate complement those from jazz. This leads us to a better understanding of the challenges of building a theory of organizational improvisation.     

For the Sake of Argument: Towards an Understanding of Rhetoric as Process

ABSTRACT   This paper seeks to respond to two particular aspects of Legge's work, her development of the concept of rhetoric and her commitment to the educative process. Legge has been drawing attention to the concept of rhetoric for a long time (e.g. Gowler and Legge, 1981 , 1996 [originally 1983]; Legge, 1989 , 1995a ). However, despite its popularity as an epithet, the process of rhetoric remains largely unexplored. Locating rhetoric within a poststructuralist view of language, this paper utilizes and explores the contribution of 'The New Rhetoric' to such an understanding, focusing on issues of style and context. This is used to illustrate a characterization of rhetoric which emphasizes its quality as a closed system with an important role in maintaining the status quo of 'managerialism'. Highlighting the key concept within 'The New Rhetoric' of audience , we suggest that to achieve change it is necessary to intervene in the closed cycle of the relationship between producers and consumers of management knowledge.     

Consequences Of The Psychological Contract For The Employment Relationship: A Large Scale Survey*

The renewed interest in the concept of the psychological contract has come to the fore in attempts to describe, understand and predict the consequences of changes occurring in the employment relationship. Recognizing that the employment relationship includes two parties to the exchange process, we set out to examine the content and state of the psychological contract from both the employee and employer perspective. The two perspectives permit an examination of the mutuality of obligations, which has not received much empirical attention to date. The research methodology consists of two surveys conducted in a large local authority directly responsible and accountable for a range of public services including education, environmental health and social care to the local population. The key findings suggest that the majority of employees have experienced contract breach. This view is also supported by managers, as representatives of the employer, who further indicate that the organization, given its external pressures, is not fulfilling its obligations to employees to the extent that it could. Overall, the results indicate that employees are redressing the balance in the relationship through reducing their commitment and their willingness to engage in organizational citizenship behaviour when they perceive their employer as not having fulfilled its part in the exchange process.     

The Risk Taker As Shadow: A Psychoanlytic View Of The Collapse Of Barings Bank*

This paper examines the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995 as a consequence of the activities of Nick Leeson, a 27-year-old trader. It seeks an explanation for this event using psychoanalytic concepts and their application to organizational dynamics. It is argued here that the anxiety associated with 'Big Bang'– the deregulation of the UK financial sector – drove Barings' senior executives to engage in primitive basic assumption thinking which involved the seeking out of a 'saviour' who could be depended on to 'rescue' the bank. Further, their concerns about their own conservatism led these senior executives to create as 'saviour' an opposite or 'shadow' to themselves. They therefore set up the highly risky 'Baring Securities' operation, unwittingly creating a damaging cultural split between it and the conservative heart of the bank. Then – in choosing Nick Leeson to embody the 'shadow' role within Baring Securities – they selected an extreme risk taker least able to 'save' the bank. In the event, Leeson's fraud ruined the bank. It is further argued that Leeson was burdened with unconscious guilt, thus leaving clues about his activities with the hope that someone would halt him. However, basic assumption thinking within Barings prevented this from happening.     

Optimal Strategy and Business Models: A Control Theory Approach

This study picks up on earlier suggestions that control theory may further the study of strategy. Strategy can be formally interpreted as an idealized path optimizing heterogeneous resource deployment to produce maximum financial gain. Using standard matrix methods to describe the firm Hamiltonian, it is possible to formalize useful notions of a business model, resources, and competitive advantage. The business model that underpins strategy may be seen as a set of constraints on resources that can be interpreted as controls in optimal control theory. Strategy then might be considered to be the control variable of firm path, suggesting in turn that the firm's business model is the codification of the application of investment resources used to control the strategic path of value realization. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Urbanization and the City Image in Lowry at Tate Britain: Towards a Critique of Cultural Cityism

This article explores cultural cityism at a time when a more expansive, ‘planetary’ urbanization is argued to have superseded ‘the city’ as the dominant urban form. It takes an essentially Lefebvrian problematic and works this through an examination of one aspect of contemporary metropolitan culture, the L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain, held in the summer of 2013. The article scrutinizes the juxtaposition of Lowry's images of the industrial city with the image of ‘global’, corporate London provided by Tate Britain itself. The exhibition is presented as evidence of Lefebvre's argument that although the urban core has imploded and exploded, through images the city ‘can perpetuate itself, survive its conditions’. Taking stock also of the preponderance of city images in culture more widely, it is argued such images make a fetish of the city, producing also an ‘urban pastoral’ that obscures the defining characteristics of urban life today. Finally, Benjamin's concept of the ‘dialectical image’ and Rancière's notion of the ‘sentence image’ are invoked to capture the flashing together of past and present city images and the opportunities for critical reflection this constellation presents.     

Strategy as Simulacra? A Radical Reflexive Look at the Discipline and Practice of Strategy*

ABSTRACT Over the past three decades strategic management has become a crucial aspect of business education and practice. At the core of strategic management – linking technique to worldview – is modelling (e.g. value chain, SWOT analysis) whereby the complex elements of strategic thinking are simplified. This accounts in large part for the apparent popularity of strategic management as complex interrelationships are pursued through relatively simple models. Yet has the field of strategic management realized the third order of simulacra? Is strategic management a model of simulation whereby reality has been replaced by hyperreality? A review of the extant literature on strategy explores the study and practice of strategy as a discourse, engulfed by its own truth effects. An examination of the concepts of reflexivity demonstrates the value of a postmodern radical reflexive account through the application of Baudrillard's (1983 , 1988 , 1991 , 1994 ) simulation and simulacra. It is through the development of a radical reflexive discourse of strategy as simulacra, this paper critically examines the study and practice of strategy and the lessons we can take from this perspective.     

Beyond a Liberal Critique of ‘Trickle Down': Urban Planning in the City of Malmö

This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of ‘trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industrial to a post‐industrial city, where, during the last two decades, we have found three concurrent components: the ideology of trickle down; several urban policy programs and governmental policies to ‘make' money and resources trickle down; as well as increased economic polarization and segregation. A liberal critique of trickle down would argue that market mechanisms cannot by themselves solve distribution, and that government policies therefore are needed. We argue for the need to go beyond a liberal critique of trickle down and stress how unequal distribution is built into the unequal production of the city.     

Corporate Entrepreneurship Activities through Strategic Alliances: A Resource‐Based Approach toward Competitive Advantage*

abstract Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) activities may significantly benefit from interfirm strategic alliances, although such benefits have not been sufficiently examined in the literature. In this paper, a resource‐based framework is presented to examine how strategic alliances offer entrepreneurial firms needed resources that may not otherwise be available. We argue that CE activities are likely to lead to resource gaps. We compare various options to fill resource gaps, and identify the pros and cons of the alliance approach. We then discuss the resource conditions that provide competitive advantage for a firm, if alliances are properly used to help implement CE. Finally, we examine how different types of alliance (e.g. joint ventures, R&D alliances, and learning alliances) facilitate various CE activities, including innovation, corporate venturing, and strategic renewal.     

Money as a Potential Anchor for the Price Level: a Critique of the P* Approach

A number of recent articles have attempted to restore the use of a simple measure of the money supply as an indicator of future price levels and to re-establish a causal link from money to prices. Most notably Hallman, Porter and Small (HPS) (1989a), (1989b) originated the approach using US data and Hannah and James(1989) have applied it to the UK The approach broadens the traditional idea of a constant velocity of money by introducing the notion of V* and Q*, the long-run value of velocity and income. These are then used to define P from the traditional quantity theory of money as the long-run equilibrium price level. The analysis then proceeds to estimate a standard Error Correction Model (ECM) for price determination with the levels effect given by (P-P*)t-1. The conclusion drawn is that 'a measure of money that determines the long-run future level of prices is useful in determining the proper monetary policy for attaining price stability. We have shown, through the construction of P*, that M2 can serve as this determinant for the price level' (Hallman, Porter and Small (1982a) p. 23).
We argue in this paper that the P* approach is flawed. It is certainly more complex than traditional monetarist approaches but the fundamental questions of causality are in no way either affected or resolved. The P* analysis is a variant on more conventional cointegration analysis (Engle and Granger (1987), Johansen (1988), Hall (1989)) and we argue that the Johansen framework allows us to address the question in a formal and more complete way. When this approach is applied to the US data used by HPS, we find that while the P* relationship does indeed represent a cointegrating one, it does not have a causal link with prices but rather the causality runs from prices to money - this result conforms well to the work of Hendry and Ericsson (1990) or Hall, Henry and Wilcox (1990), which use this form of relationship to model the demand for money.     

The Relevance of Strategy Research: Practitioner and Academic Viewpoints*

It is important for strategy research to have practical relevance given its professional orientation. the differing perspectives of academics and managers and the rapid development of the field of strategic management suggests a need to address the field's future direction. In this paper, a practitioners' agenda for the field is developed based on a survey of chief executive officers (CEOs) of major US corporations. A comparison of this agenda with one generated by academics highlights the differences between the two constituencies concerning issues of relevance for the future. Compared to academics, CEOs emphasize operating issues; disagree on the priority of strategic issues; and are generally unfamiliar with research-based journals. the two agendas should be viewed as complementary. Some implications for the field are discussed and suggestions made for dealing with the issue of relevance in future research and communicating the results to managers.     

Tragedy of the Partnership: A Critique of Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom thinks she has discovered a third way apart from private and government property: the commons. In her view, there is no “tragedy” associated with this third option. The present article takes strong issue with her. Our claim is that she has not properly distinguished between a commons and partnership arrangements. In the former case, outsiders cannot be excluded from entry; in the latter, they can. The reason for this confusion between the commons and private property in Ostrom's work is that she believes private property is possible only if government protects and enforces it. We show by using various historical examples that this assumption is wrong, and hence the central tenet of Ostrom's model of the commons fails.     

Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology: A Critique of Methodological Cityism

Urban political ecology (UPE), an offshoot of political ecology that emerged in the late 1990s, has had two major impacts on critical urban studies: it has introduced critical political ecology to urban settings, and it has provided a framework for retheorizing the city as a product of metabolic processes of socionatural transformation. However, there was another goal in early UPE programmatic statements that has largely fallen by the wayside: to mobilize a Lefebvrian theoretical framework to trouble traditional distinctions between urban/rural and society/nature by exploring urbanization as a global process. Instead of following this potentially fruitful path, UPE has become bogged down in ‘methodological cityism’––an overwhelming analytical and empirical focus on the traditional city to the exclusion of other aspects of contemporary urbanization processes. Thus UPE's Lefebvrian promise, of a research program that could work across traditional disciplinary divisions and provide insights into a new era of planetary urbanization, has remained unfulfilled. In this article we trace UPE's history to show how it arrived at its present predicament, and offer some thoughts on a research agenda for a political ecology not of the city but of urbanization.     

基于发动机协调控制的AMT换挡策略研究

为了改善电控机械式自动变速器(AMT)的换挡品质,分析了换挡过程理想状态下发动机转速、转矩变化的特性曲线,制订了基于CAN总线的换挡过程发动机协调控制策略。提出在换挡过程中,发动机减载和加载阶段通过变速箱干预转矩对发动机输出转矩进行短时的协调控制,空载阶段采用转速闭环PID控制的发动机协调控制策略。为验证该策略的有效性,基于MATLAB/Simulink软件平台搭建了仿真模型,以升档为例,对提出的控制策略进行了仿真验证。仿真结果表明,所提出的发动机协调控制策略能够满足实时性要求,减小离合器滑磨,有助于提高AMT的换挡品质。