Albert J. Mills

Managing the Organizational Melting Pot: Dilemmas of Workplace Diversity

It remains for future researchers to determine exactly why high-performance work systems improve plant performance and worker contentment. In their concluding chapter, the authors suggest that high-performance work systems improve plant performance because they elicit greater discretionary effort from workers and because they provide more opportunities for shop-floor learning. These are certainly plausible intervening variables; pinning down what precisely discretionary effort is and how exactly it shapes organizational outcomes would be a worthy extension of this study.

Making sense of sensemaking: the critical sensemaking approach

– The purpose of this paper is to revisit the oft cited but as yet not operationalized Weicks sensemaking framework, in order to provide suggested ways forward. Development of a method based on Weicks sensemaking is suggested as a starting point for a heuristic that takes into account missing elements from his original model while operationalizing (critical) sensemaking as an analytical tool for understanding organizational events., – Following the trajectory of sensemaking, the limitations of Weicks model were discussed (i.e. failure to address power and context) and the critical sensemaking was developed as a method that takes into account agency in context. Empirical studies that apply sensemaking were discussed., – It is concluded that plausibility and identity construction are key to understanding how some voices are heard over others and through critical sensemaking sense that can be made of such phenomena as the gendering or organizational culture and discriminatory practices in organizations., – A heuristic can help people to understand the socio‐psychological properties involved in behavioural outcomes., – Critical sensemaking builds on and operationalizes Weicks original sensemaking approach and demonstrates how it can be used in a range of empirical studies, something that Weick himself suggested was lacking.

Understanding organizational change

Part 1: Introduction 1,.Why Study Organizational Change? 2. Thinking About Change: Early Models of Organizational Change Part 2: Programming Organizational Change 3. Organizational Culture and Change 4. Change Management Techniques and Strategies Part 3. The Social Psychology of Change 5. Managing Change: Fads, Fashions and Gurus 6. Gender and Organizational Change 7. The Politics of Organizational Change 8. Making Sense of Organizational Change

Studying the Gendering of Organizational Culture Over Time: Concerns, Issues and Strategies

Abstract Beginning with the premise that “organizational culture” is a useful heuristic for the study of gender at work, this chapter focuses on the problem of studying the culture of organizations over time, setting out to demonstrate how the social construction of corporate history has, until now, lent itself to gendered notions of business practices. Arguing that history itself is but one of a series of discourses about the world, the chapter outlines a feminist strategy for the study of organizational culture over time that includes: (i) feminist historiography as history written from a feminist point of view; (ii) a commitment to the notion of history as discourse rooted in the present; (iii) a view of women’s rights development as a paradoxical process of progress and regress; (iv) a gender focus approach that studies the impact of discrimination on the social construction of masculinity/femininity and sexual preference; and (v) an approach that is sensitive to the contextualization of gender. British Airways is used as a case study to illustrate some of the problems of historic re/construction and feminist historiography.

Cockpits, Hangars, Boys and Galleys: Corporate Masculinities and the Development of British Airways

Abstract This chapter sets out to examine the role of masculinity in the development of a gendered organizational culture over time. The development of images of masculinity within one company—British Airways—is examined through content analysis of company newsletters, advertising copy, annual reports, internal memoranda, and written rules and regulations. Exploring the notion of “multiple masculinities,” the chapter traces the prominent forms of masculinity that emerged in British Airways and assesses their impact on the ways that organizational practices were developed, maintained, and understood. Four key corporate images of masculinity are examined—the pilot, the steward, the engineer, and the “native boy”—and it is argued that those images contributed to the exclusion of women and people of color from those occupations by laying down cultural rules about the ideal typical characteristics of the job holder. The chapter concludes by raising questions about the value of a multiple masculinities focus in explaining changing and contradictory practices of discrimination; the primacy of extra-organizational over organizational practices; and the relationship between multiple masculinities and hegemonic masculinity. Further research is suggested into the extent to which hegemonic masculinity is undermined, over time, by changing and contradictory forms of masculinity within definite sites of gender construction.

Situating Maslow in Cold War America A Recontextualization of Management Theory

This article makes the case for situating understandings of Abraham Maslow and his ideas within Cold War America. After discussing the general significance of Maslow, we set out the historical conditions of Cold War culture and social institutions in the United States. We then make links between these conditions and Maslow’s life, his work, and his reflexive awareness of them. This analysis maps, inter alia, Maslow’s place and agency in the Cold War academy and his positions on (un)Americanism, liberalism, religion and secularism, and modernization and Marx. The links identified reveal new explanations of Maslow’s life, work, and significance in the management canon and indicate that the Cold War should be considered as a hitherto missing grand narrative, within which the history of management ideas more generally should be situated.

Maslow: man interrupted: reading management theory in context

Purpose – This paper aims to build on recent work in the field of management and historiography that argues that management theorizing needs to be understood in its historical context.Design/methodology/approach – First, the paper attempts to show how a steady filtering of management theory and of the selection and work of management theorists lends itself to a narrowly focused, managerialist, and functionalist perspective. Second, the paper attempts to show how not only left‐wing ideas, but also even the rich complexity of mainstream ideas, have been “written out” of management accounts. The paper explores these points through an examination of the treatment of Abraham Maslow in management texts over time.Findings – The papers conclusion is a simple one: management theory – whether mainstream or critical – does a disservice to the potential of the field when it oversimplifies to a point where a given theory or theorist is misread because sufficient context, history, and reflection are missing from the p...

Cold War, chilly climate: Exploring the roots of gendered discourse in organization and management theory

Prior to the mid-1970s, gender was virtually absent from theories of management and organization (OMT), particularly within the North American context. In recent years, four strands of research have brought gender into management theory - gender and organizations, women in management, work-family conflict, and diversity management - but largely in ways that reinforce the masculinist project. With the exception of the more critical gender and organizations approach, gender continues to be discussed in OMT in ways that privilege masculinity and problematize femininity. This is particularly true of the work-family conflict literature and, to a lesser extent, the women in management literature. In this article, we are interested in the root of the gendered discourse within OMT. Through a feminist hermeneutic excavation of the development of modern OMT in post-war USA, we conclude that the continued masculinist project owes much to Cold War discourses of family and work

Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History and critical organizational historiography

The article describes what we have come to call ANTi-History, which entails the development of actor-network theory (ANT) as a critical approach to organizational historiography. It proceeds through four sections: 1) a review of the call for critical organizational historiography to establish the need for ANTi-History; 2) an overview of ANT to identify its potential to contribute to critical organizational historiography; 3) a development of ANT insights into an ANTi-History, through engagement with cultural theory historiography, and the sociology of knowledge; and 4) an account of the potential contribution of ANTi-History to critical management studies.

Management as a Cold War phenomenon

Those who foster the Cold War are ‘leading the world toward a massacre because they are abstract. They have cut the world in two and each half is afraid of the other . . . Within this perspective, even men [sic] become abstract. Everybody is the Other, the possible enemy, not to be trusted.’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, speech to the Vienna Congres des Peuples pour la paix, December 1952, quoted in Cohen-Solal, 2005: 338)