Business Theorists From The United States

"New and dynamic concepts of management and organization are evolving which are a measure of the span and the challenge of the business of tomorrow. These concepts are predicated upon the assumption that management is an identifiable, measurable, and transferable activity and that it can be mastered as can any other skill. Many of the older concepts of management and organization have been put to question and abandoned or replaced. Much of this new thinking has taken place so quietly and unobtrusively, even secretly, that it has not generally been reported. The fact is that some companies consider their methods of management and organization as much a competitive factor as marketing methods, applied research, or new production processes. And often they guard such information as carefully as other classified data about their businesses"

"Although "loyalty" itself is a fertile relationship concept, its nuances have been lost in traditional brand loyalty research. Operationalizations relying on sequence or proportion of purchase perhaps better reflect a notion of inertia than loyalty with its full relational significance. Even well-intentioned attempts to consider loyalty as more than repeat purchase (Jacoby and Chestnut 1978) reduce the process to 'narrowly cognitive utilitarian decision-making' thus failing to capture 'the talismanic relationships consumers form with that which is consumed' (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989, p.31)"

"Chaos in Research-land: the sorry status of brand loyalty measurement."

"The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources."

"The manager is one of the great unknowns in business. Although perhaps the most common word in the corporate lexicon, the term "manager" meets with little agreement as to nature, meaning, or scope. This is all the more surprising when we consider the vital importance of precise understanding of this expression to most enterprises. Most company organization charts are studded with dozens of boxes entitled manager of one kind or another. Each such position, presumably, has been assigned management responsibility and authority. In most cases, the performance of the person holding this position is being appraised as a manager and his potential for advancement is gauged against what is assumed to be a management yardstick."

"Brand loyal behavior is defined as the overt act of selective repeat purchasing based on evaluative psychological decision processes, while brand loyal attitudes are the underlying predisposition to behave in such a selective fashion."

"Total Quality Management presents the basic principles and tools associated with TQ and provides many illustrations and end-of-chapter cases that can be used as the basis for class discussion. Many cases focus on large and small companies in manufacturing and service industries in North and South America, Europe, and Asia–Pacific. Unlike most books on TQ, this one is organized according to traditional management topics. This organization helps students to see the parallels between TQ and management theories in areas such as organizational design and leadership. TQ is often presented as new or different, which it clearly is not. This book has three objectives: to show students how these principles and methods have been put into effect in a variety of organizations, to illustrate the relationship between TQ principles and the theories and models studied in management courses and to familiarize students with the basic principles and methods associated with total quality."

"The succes of a brand on the long term is not based on a number of consumers that buy it once, but on the number of consumers who become regular buyers of the brand."

"Adaptation is a crucial challenge for organizations, and an important theme in the strategy and organization theory literature. We still have much to learn, however, about the strategic processes by which adaptation is achieved. In this paper we focus on a basic element in the adaptation process, i.e. flexibility within the strategic decision-making process. We concentrate on strategic decisions because these choices are the most important adaptations the firm makes. We suggest that the core of all organizational adaptation is a decision-making process. Unless the decision-making process itself is flexible, it is unlikely the organization can be flexible enough to adapt."

"Harold D. Koontz (1908–1984) and Cyril O’Donnell (1900–1976) of the University of California at Los Angeles defined management as "the function of getting things done through others." They furthered Fayol’s ideas and sought to provide a conceptual framework for the orderly presentation of the principles of management. According to Koontz and O’Donnell, managers were known by the work they performed, which was planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. These authors pointed out that, although some authorities maintained that these functions were exercised in the sequence given, in practice managers actually used all five simultaneously. They stressed that each of these functions contributed to organizational coordination. Coordination, however, was not a separate function itself but was the result of effective utilization of the five basic managerial functions. Koontz and O’Donnell offered a number of principles: in organizing, for example, "the principle of parity of authority and responsibility" and "the principle of unity of command"; in planning, "the principle of strategic factors"; and so on. The Koontz and O’Donnell text became an enduring, integral part of the search for a systematic body of management knowledge."

"We introduce this theory-development forum by comparing total quality and management theory at both global and topic-specific levels. Our analysis suggests that management research could be enhanced by incorporating some insights of total quality into management theory. We also conclude, however, that management practice could be improved by incorporating insights from management theory into total quality efforts, and that, in fact, total quality has already incorporated many such insights. Finally, we suggest some directions for theory development and research on total quality."

"Our position is that a deterministic orientation can be meaningfully applied to a distinct subset of RPB, a subset we refer to as BL [Brand Loyalty]."

"Objectives are goals established to guide the efforts of the company and each of its components. Effective management is always management by objectives. An organization can grow and change in an orderly and progressive manner only if well-defined goals have been established to guide its progress. Not only must there be an objective for the total organization, but, since each component can accomplish only limited work, there should be spelled out division and departmental goals which serve as specific guides for subordinate units. These enable individual managers to operate with maximum freedom but always within the framework of over-all company objectives. Unless such goals are established, there is likely to be haphazard activity, uneconomical commitment of capital funds, poor utilization of people, and mediocre operating results over the long term."

"Brooks Adams advocated that the chief function of administration should be to facilitate social change, or paradoxical as it may seem, to assure social stability by facilitating social change. Great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President Quincy Adams, brother of the "educated" Henry Adams, Brooks Adams produced, during the early 1900'S, a series of unorthodox historical essays. Their titles were more radical than their contents: The Law of Civilization and Decay, "The Collapse of Capitalistic Government," and The Theory of Social Revolutions. The last of these is quoted below; the first was regarded by Theodore Roosevelt as a "melancholy" but "powerful" book with "a very ugly element of truth.""

"To Donham, the case study stood squarely in the legal and cultural tradition of Anglo-American thought. Unlike French or Spanish law. Donham emphasized, English law was grounded on the doctrine of stare decisis, in which the written case decisions of the past shape, and instantiate, the law. Just as the recording of cases allowed English common law to break the arbitrariness of local law. Donham argued in 1925, business needed to universalize its procedures by itself adopting the case system. The chaos of local law that ruled in England before the common law. Donham contended, "is exactly the same situation that we have [in the world of business] where practically every large corporation is tightly hound by traditions which are precedents in its particular narrow field and narrow held only The recording of decisions from industry to industry [enables] us to start from facts and draw inferences from those facts; [it] will introduce principle... in the field of business to such an extent that it will control executive action in the field where executive action is haphazard or unprincipled or bound by narrow, instead of broad precedent and decision" ( W. Donham, transcript of talk to the Association of Coll. School of Business Committee Reports and Other Literature, 5-7 May 1925. Harvard Business School, box 17, folder 10. 62)."

"The highest standard for each individual is that which his conscience tells him is best."

"Prior to establishing Louis Allen Worldwide, Louis Allen was with the international consulting organisation Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Inc. His assignment focussed primarily on companies facing problems of organisational growth and development. During this assignment, he discovered that although organisations differ significantly, they also shared many similarities. He then began to distil the commonalities, organising them into a teachable form, and teaching client companies how to use this knowledge for themselves."

"The organization... is not an end in itself. Organization, properly designed, can help improve teamwork and productivity by providing a framework within which people can work together most effectively. But we must relate the people to the design. In many cases, the organization structure which has technical excellence is, for practical purposes, quite useless because it is not fitted to the needs of the people it is designed to serve, ft is a lifeless pattern."

"The manager is a new kind of professional, destined to take his place with the scientist and the educator in shaping the society of the future. Expert in a complex, difficult, and most demanding kind of work, the role of the professional manager is critical and his potential is unlimited. In the years ahead, competence in management will mark the difference between the leaders and the also-rans. This will hold true not only in business, but also in government and education, and in all those situations in which people wish to maximize their efforts for their common benefit."

"A manager is a leader who enables people to work most effectively together by performing primarily the work of planning, organizing, leading and controlling."

"Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources"

"Before one could speak of brand loyal, one must have the opportunity of being disloyal."

"The present status of brand loyalty research can be characterized as that of a construct undergoing substantial revision and redirection in measurement orientation. From an overly behavioral macro approach, it is gradually making the transition to a more micro understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying choice behavior. If brand loyalty is ever to be managed, not just measured, it will have to be elaborated in a much more detailed description of cognitive activities."

"Building the house of quality requires six basic steps:"

"Quality management is ... an approach to management made up of a set of mutually reinforcing principles, each of which is supported by a set of practices and techniques."

"Technology - and its relationship to organizational structures, processes, and outcomes - has long been of interest to organizational researchers. Over the years, different research perspectives on technology have developed in parallel with research perspectives on organizations - for example, contingency theory (Woodward 1965, Galbraith 1977, Carter 1984, Daft and Lengel 1986), strategic choice models (Child 1972, Buchanan and Boddy 1983, Davis and Taylor 1986, Zuboff 1988), Marxist studies (Braverman 1974, Edwards 1979, Shaiken 1985, Perrolle 1986), symbolic interactionist approaches (Kling 1991, Prasad 1993), transaction-cost economics (Malone et al. 1987, Ciborra 1993); network analyses (Barley 1990, Burkhardt and Brass 1990, Rice and Aydin 1991), practice theories (Suchman 1987, Button 1993, Hutchins 1995, Orr 1996), and structurational models (Barley 1986, Orlikowski 1992, DeSanctis and Poole 1994)."

"As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations."

"Every piece of data suggests that workplaces are in dire shape and there is low levels of trust in leaders. For instance, data on employee engagement from Gallup show that worldwide only about 13% of employees report being engaged with their work, and in the U.S., the number is barely higher at 20%. Job satisfaction has declined almost linearly since 1987 to the present. The Edelman Trust index indicates that the public at large has low trust in leaders, while other surveys show that employees do not expect their own leaders to make ethical decisions or to consistently tell them the truth about difficult situations."

"Rather than positing design and use as disconnected moments or stages in a technology's lifecycle, the structurational model of technology posits artifacts as potentially modifiable throughout their existence. In attempting to understand technology as continually socially and physically constructed, it is useful to discriminate analytically between human action which affects technology and that which is affected by technology. I suggest that we recognize human interaction with technology as having two iterative modes: the design mode and the use mode. I emphasize that this distinction is an analytical convenience only, and that in reality these modes of interaction are tightly coupled."

"Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices."

"Technology is built and used within certain social and historical circumstances and its form and functioning will bear the imprint of those conditions."

"The theme of this book, and the underlying premise of the external perspective on organizations, is that organizational activities and outcomes are accounted for by the context in which the organization is embedded."

"The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further."

"The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge."

"This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model-- the structurational model of technology--is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the limits and opportunities of human choice, technology development and use, and organizational design. Implications for future research of the new concept of technology and structurational model of technology are discussed."

"Democratically elected worker representatives cannot get away with symbolic or partially diffused innovations; they will be thrown out of office. They will demand that the program be 39 either abandoned or institutionalized and spread to cover more of their constituents"

"The importance of top management commitment to organizational change is so well accepted that it is almost cliché to repeat the fact. We would therefore expect managerial values to be just as important in this area as in others that require strategic direction and leadership."

"Nearly fifty years ago... Douglas McGregor launched a debate over how to manage The Human Side of the Enterprise. By comparing what he called Theory X and Theory Y perspectives, he challenged the management profession to reexamine its assumptions about the motivations employees bring to their jobs. The question was: Could employees be trusted and empowered to do good work, or did they have to be closely directed, monitored, and controlled to act in the interests of the firm? While McGregor’s Theory Y sparked important innovations in human resource practices, it did not challenge fundamental assumptions underpinning the 20th Century organizational model. If, as is widely recognized, human capital and knowledge are the most important sources of value for the 21st Century organization, then fundamental assumptions about the relationship between work and organizations will also need to be challenged."

"Technology has always been a central variable in organizational theory, informing research and practice. Despite years of investigative effort there is little agreement on the definition and measurement of technology, and no compelling evidence on the precise role of technology in organizational affairs. I will argue that the divergent definitions and opposing perspectives associated with technological research have limited our understanding of how technology interacts with organizations, and that these incompatibilities cannot be resolved by mutual concession. What is needed is a reconstruction of the concept of technology, which fundamentally re-examines our current notions of technology and its role in organizations."

"The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output."

"A critical aspect of the operation of the New Deal system was the long history of incremental change and resistance to more fundamental modification. This incremental adjustment orientation was apparent in government policy, managerial practice, and union bargaining objectives."

"Our central argument is that industrial relations practices and outcomes are shaped by the interactions of environmental forces along with the strategic choices and values of American managers, union leaders, workers and public policy decision makers."

"The workplace changes being introduced jointly have two basic objectives: (1) to increase the participation and involvement of individuals and informal groups work so as to overcome adversarial relations and increase employee motivation, commitment, and problem-solving potential; and (2) to alter the organization of work so as to simplify work rules, lower costs, and increase flexibility in the management of human resources."

"Given that organizational theory deals with different ways of organizing human activity, how does one “theorize” about organizations? In most scientific disciplines, if one wants to theorize about something and ultimately study it, the most common approach is to bring it into a laboratory for closer inspection. Unfortunately, organizational theorists cannot do this because organizations are largely abstractions, and thus cannot be subjected to laboratory investigations. Although we can draw elegant organization charts to represent reporting relationships, and so on, what keeps an organization together is the fact that an organization’s employees understand it and adapt their behavior accordingly."

"In terms of academic roots, the field that really has taken the lead in theorizing about the organization of purposeful human behavior is sociology. Sociology is essentially the study of macro-level forces (e.g., social stratification, social institutions) on human behavior (e.g., Merton, 1968; Parsons, 1951)... Given this historical backdrop, it is natural that sociologists would be more interested in the impact of the structure and design of organizations than psychologists would be. In fact, the Hawthorne studies, which are considered one of the most important historical events contributing to the development of organizational psychology, were conducted under the direction of sociologist Elton Mayo."

"American corporations often say human resources are their most important asset. In our national discourse, everyone talks about jobs. Yet as a society we somehow tolerate persistent high unemployment, 30 years of stagnating wages and growing wage inequality, two decades of declining job satisfaction and loss of pension and retirement benefits, and continuous challenges from the consequences of unemployment on family life. If we really valued work and human resources, we would address these problems with the vigor required to solve them."

"Unions are an essential part of the democratic fabric of society, but they are not necessarily desirable or acceptable `in my firm or on my property."

"The earliest scientific investigations related to the field of occupational stress were conducted by the well-known physiologist in the early part of the twentieth century (e.g., Cannon, 1914). Cannon was a pioneer in the investigation of the relationship between emotions and physiological responses, and is perhaps best known for having coined the term homeostasis."

"Hackett and Guion (1985) offer a number of explanations for the weak relation between job satisfaction and absenteeism. One reason is the measurement of absenteeism itself. Although at first glance absenteeism would appear to be a rather simple variable, it is actually quite complex. For example, when measuring absences, one can distinguish between excused and unexcused absences. Excused absences would be allowed for events such as illnesses and funerals. In unexcused absences, the employee simply does not show up at work. One could argue that job satisfaction would be more likely to play a role in unexcused than in excused absences."

"’s work was undoubtedly pioneering, but it must be remembered that he focused primarily on physiological reactions to aversive physical stimuli. He was not focusing on stress in the workplace. The first large-scale program of research focusing exclusively on stress in the workplace was undertaken at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research in the early 1960s. What is particularly noteworthy about this research effort is that the focus was on psychosocial factors in the workplace that may be stressful to employees. Psychosocial factors represent aspects of the work environment having to do with interactions with other people. In particular, the Michigan researchers focused much of their attention on what they termed role stressors... which are aversive working conditions associated with behaviors expected of each employee in an organization."