Machine organizations are structures fine-tuned to run as integrated, regulated, and highly bureaucratic bodies. Machine organizations have the same basic characteristics: (a) their operating work is routine, (b) the greatest part of it is rather simple and repetitive, and (c) their work processes are highly standardized. In a machine organization, there is little room for […]
Performance refers to the ability to acquire resources necessary for organizational survival. Organizational performance results from a combination of industry or environmental conditions, the strategy that an organization’s decision makers choose, and the structure in place to support the strategy. Performance is a proxy measure that indicates legitimacy by resource suppliers and perceived organizational effectiveness. […]
Changes in international business since the past few decades have brought greater internationalization and integration. The term globalization captured these changes with considerable impact in increased cross-border movements of goods, services, capital, technology, and people. Based on global integration and local responsiveness dimensions, four forms of organizations are used to manage international business: global, international, […]
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Foucault and the Critique of Modernity
Foucault’s work can be summarized in three major shifts from the archaeological focus on systems of knowledge in the 1960s, to the genealogical focus on modalities of power in the 1970s and to the focus on technologies of the self, ethics, and freedom in the 1980s. Foucault contributed in many fields in the humanities and social sciences. As a member of postmodernist movement and in line with their deconstruction paradigm, he tried to show the problematic and suspicious aspects of rationality, knowledge, subjectivity, and the production of social norms. He thought that the quest of power invaded social and personal life and pervaded schools, hospitals, prisons, and social sciences. Foucault saw a link between power, truth and knowledge and he argued that liberal-humanist values became entangled with, and the supports of technologies of domination. He criticized both macro theorists who see power only in terms of class or the state, and micro theorists who analyze institutions and face-to-face interaction while ignoring power altogether.
The U.S. Senate passed a historic $871 billion health care reform bill on December 24, 2009, handing President Obama a Christmas Eve victory on his top domestic priority. Should it become law, the measure would constitute the biggest expansion of federal healthcare guarantees since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid more than four decades […]
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Web 2.0: Toward an Open-Content Movement?
A friend of mine, a brilliant economist, asked me recently if there was a new version of the Web called Web 2.0 and what could be the possible link with the new Internet Protocol, IPv6. My response was the following: Web 2.0 is a new version of the Web that replaces Web 1.0 and […]
In Nigeria, we have faced a profound situation where bankers, stockbrokers and all sorts of gurus and high ranking officers in the financial institutions have been far from transparent with transactions.
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Distributed Knowledge
Current innovations in information and communication technologies (ICT) provide new opportunities for engaging in geographically distributed work (Hinds & Mortensen, 2005). A workforce is distributed if: 1) knowledge workers operate in different physical locations, 2) team members communicate asynchronously for most normal interchanges even with collocated colleagues, or 3) team members work with different firms […]
Important Note: After reading this article, please assess your organization in terms of its current technological changes. Technological change refers to the development of an organization’s technology over time. In general, two types of technological change have been identified in the literature: continuous or incremental change and discontinuous or breakthrough change (Zyclidopoulos, 1999). Incremental technological […]
Amar (1998) observed that organizations whose success depends on innovation require a leadership style totally different from the one typically used by most leaders. Whereas leaders of traditional organizations succeed on their ability to artfully manipulate their environment, innovation leadership emanates from manager’s creative initiatives, intellectual preeminence, and technical or unique expertise that is of […]