Ali Mir

The New Age Employee: An Exploration of Changing Employee-Organization Relations

This article examines the employee-organization relationship in the current industrial landscape. “New age employees” have substantially different expectations from organizations—stemming from their own articulateness about their career needs as well as mistrust of organizational loyalty in the aftermath of the recent waves of organizational downsizing. The changing employee-organization relationship is explored through the theoretical lens of organizational commitment; a series of propositions about the commitment levels of new age employees is advanced; and a framework to assist HR managers in their attempts to recruit, train and retain the new age employee is offered. The article concludes with an explanation of the implications of this framework on human resource management in the public sector.

The Organizational Imagination: From Paradigm Wars to Praxis

The authors use the insights of C. Wright Mills and his book The Sociological Imagination to argue for a more socially engaged organizational research. Although epistemological and methodological discussions about organizational research have opened up a space for alternate and critical theorizing, management scholarship needs to continue its search for effectiveness by developing an organizational imagination. This imagination will allow researchers to make linkages between history, structure, and individual lives in the service of an intellectual and political transformation. It will therefore push the boundaries of organizational theory to include an active engagement with the institutional forces that seek to contain and domesticate it.

Hegemony and its discontents: a critical analysis of organizational knowledge transfer

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs), and how the imperatives of thought and action that constitute new knowledge are received in the terrain that constitutes the MNC subsidiary.Design/methodology/approach – This study employs an ethnographic approach, and juxtaposes primary data collection with a variety of secondary data sources.Findings – The data are analyzed in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and three themes theorized that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations.Originality/value – This paper goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industri...

The Hegemonic Discourse of Management Texts

Mainstream management texts seek to legitimize a social order in which certain power relationships are naturalized and seen as the logical end of a historical development. Also, the ideological basis of managerialism determines the nature of the managerial discourse in which some interests are privileged whereas others are marginalized. Because they promote a managerial ideology in which sectional interests are passed off as universal, management texts can be seen, at least partly, as instruments of propaganda.

Producing hi-tech: globalization, the state and migrant subjects

This paper examines the role of the state in the context of globalization. Taking up the specific case of Indian software engineers and their migration to the USA, the authors show the involvement of the Indian state and the US at different levels. The growth of the IT labour sector was based on changes in the higher education policy of the Indian state while the large-scale migration of IT workers from India required changes in the immigration policies of the US. The authors argue that these policy changes reflect how nation-states alter their national policies to meet the demands of the global economy. Equally important, the authors show that the policy changes are indicative of the unique political context and culture of each country. In the case of India, the education policy changes relate to caste politics while the immigration policy of the USA shares the legacy of US race politics.

The colony writes back: Organization as an early champion of non-Western organizational theory:

It is perhaps a truism that modern organizational theory has tended to objectify the colonized nations, and the subjects of imperialism. Even the critical traditions in OT tend to be mired in Eurocentric assumptions, and many of the issues that affected the ‘victims of globalization’ simply did not figure in OT debates till the 1980s. In the 1990s, when organizational theorists focusing on workers and subjects from the poorer South began expressly to ‘write back’, i.e. theorize eloquently on how they could restore their own agency in organizational life, they found a contingent ally in Organization. Not that the Journal did not have its blind spots in this regard, but since its inception in 1994, it has published a number of articles that sought to give voice to those who decentred OT’s Eurocentric assumptions. In this brief essay, we attempt to chart that partnership, and speak about a possible role for Organization in furthering this quest.

Offshoring, exit and voice: implications for organizational theory and practice

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore the impact of corporate offshoring moves on the economic and psychological contracts between firms and their employees.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws upon literature from diverse social sciences to explore the phenomena of social contracts and offshoring. Especially deploying the exit‐voice theory of Alfred Hirschman, it is argued here that offshoring decreases the regenerative power promised both by exit and voice in helping organizations recover from decline.Findings – Organizational systems and processes designed to deal with the “post‐offshoring worker” only serve to accentuate the sense of alienation felt by workers at the way they are regarded. This scenario poses a serious challenge to researchers and practitioners who need to make sense of these effects and deal with them accordingly.Originality/value – This paper highlights, honors and legitimates everyday relations at the workplace on both sides of the offshoring divide, as sites of class stru...

Managerial Knowledge as Property: The Role of Universities

In this paper, we analyze the manner in which universities have been deployed as institutions to privatize knowledge. We use the example of the establishment of management institutes in India in the 1960s by US institutions such as the Ford Foundation. The import of management education into India served to delegitimize local managerial practices, and to produce a workforce capable of serving the interests of multinational corporations rather than addressing local priorities. We conclude through this example that management pedagogy has constantly been deployed to render certain forms of public knowledge appropriable by private institutions such as corporations. We end by suggesting that management pedagogy should act to restore a new concept of knowledge, where it is presented not merely as a resource, but as a public consciousness..

The Trajectory of Bollywood Lyrics

Elaborate songs and dances are the distinct markers of Bollywood. Many cinematic songs dominate the musical landscape of the country. Ali Mir and Raza Mir investigate the deployment of songs in Bollywood, sometimes to propel the cinematic narrative and sometimes to interrupt it. They trace the trajectory of song lyrics in Bollywood films from the early days of anticolonial struggle, through the period of the hegemony of the Progressive Writers’ Association (i.e., a movement by lyricists to use popular music to effect social transformation), to the current period of neoliberalization, where lyrics are either fantastical or a form of depolitization.