Bent Flyvbjerg: power and project management – an appreciation

© 2008, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a critique of Bent Flyybjerg's work that has high relevance to the project management (PM) literature. Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes the form of a narrative with argument and analysis. Findings – The paper challenges readers, PM academics and practitioners to view PM with a political perspective. This paper was delivered at the ICAN 2007 Conference (which is the focus of this issue), which was entitled “Mission Control: Power, Knowledge and Collaboration in Project Practice.” Originality/value – This paper triggers and sustains the debate about the influence of power and its unintended consequences that may affect projects. The review raises PM issues worthy of consideration that are often neglected

Clues, cues and complexity: unpackuing the concept of organizational surprise

We discuss why surprises, defined as events that happen unexpectedly or expected events that take unexpected shapes, are important to organizations and should be considered in the organizational literature. The concept of organizational surprises is unpacked on the basis of a typology built around the (un)expectedeness of issue and process. This typology uncovers the several types of surprising events that organizations may face, and contributes to the literature by suggesting that different surprises require distinct approaches.

Management: thesis, antithesis, synthesis

Increasingly, managers live in a world of paradox. For instance, they are told that they must manage by surrendering control and that they must stay on top by continuing to learn, thus admitting that they do not fully know what they do. Paradox is becoming increasingly pervasive in and around organizations, increasing the need for an approach to management that allows both researchers and practitioners to address these paradoxes. A synthesis is required between such contradictory forces as efficiency and effectiveness, planning and action, and structure and freedom. A dialectical view of strategy and organizations, built from four identifiable principles of simultaneity, locality, minimality and generality, enables us to build the tools to achieve such synthesis. Put together, these principles offer new perspectives for researchers to look at management phenomena and provide practitioners with a means of addressing the increasingly paradoxical world that they confront.dialectics, improvisation, paradox, synthesis

STRUCTURING FOR GLOCALIZATION: THE MINIMAL NETWORK

Globalization and localization seem to be opposite concepts – a thesis and its antithesis. Nonetheless, managers seem to be able to handle the paradox posed by these two contradicting tensions by enacting, via action, a synthesis that allows for the co-presence of a high level of global integration and local adaptation (instead of a compromise between both), which has been labeled glocalization. We discuss how the concept of improvisation allows this synthesis by developing the two poles that ground it, namely ‘glocal’ strategy and ‘glocal’ organization. Global advantage requires a dialectical capability that organizations rarely achieve, and the importance of which orthodox management theory rarely recognizes. JEL codes:

Recovering experience, confirming identity, voicing resistance: The Braceros

Purpose – This paper investigates how the learning trajectory of corporations utilising information and communication technologies has been matched by the labour movement and social movements associated with it. Design/methodology/approach – The paper investigates new communication dynamics of labour in the international setting. It then focuses on a broader and richer set of online practices by labour by drawing on material placed on the world wide web by members of and advocates for the Braceros (the strong arms) – migrant Mexican workers. These practices follow on a history of effective use of the new information communication technologies by the Zapatista movement in Mexico. Findings – The paper places these activities in the context of globalisation and the global movement of capital and labour. It argues that the practices of online communication associated with the Braceros can be harnessed to move beyond the reactive shadowing of capital by labour. Instead innovative and proactive forms of monitoring policies and critiquing outcomes become possible. Practical implications – Internet-based counter-coordination allows the construction and diffusion of a different understanding of the nature and consequences of the current mode of globalisation. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the ways in which information and communication technologies can be used to engage in thematic mapping and construction of memory by labour and provides an example of the electronic sampling and indexing of material

Organization Theory in Business and Management History:Present Status and Future Prospects

A common lament is that business history has been marginalized within mainstream business and management research. We propose that remedy lies in part with more extensive engagement with organization theory. We illustrate our argument by exploring the potentialities for business history of three cognitive frameworks: institutional entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory and Bourdieusian social theory. Exhibiting a higher level of theoretical fluency might enable business historians to accrue scholarly capital within the business and management field by producing theoretically informed historical discourse; demonstrating the potential of business history to extend theory, generate constructs and elucidate complexities in unfolding relationships, situations and events

At the Intersection of Theory and History:A Research Agenda for Historical Organization Studies

In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault (1970: xv) recites Jorge Luis Borges’ fictional taxonomy of animals to capture the fragmentation and confusing arbitrariness of any culturally determined system of knowledge. Much the same confusion might arise by using the total knowledge of organization theory to construct a taxonomy of organizations, dividing them thus: “(a) those belonging to the gods, (b) dead, (c) profitable (d) open systems, (e) machines, (f) positive, (g) processes, (h) cows, (i) emotional, (j) performing, (k), imagined, (l), mindsets, (m) enacted, embodied, embrained, (m) et cetera, (n) broken, (o) inimitable, (p) isomorphic, (q) occupying niches, (r) contingencies against dread, (s) structural adjustments, (t) broken hammers, (u) spider plants, (v) brains, (w) cages, (x) animals, (y) psychic structures, (z) classified elsewhere.”Fanciful? Not really. We have no doubt that each one of these terms might fruitfully be used to develop a whole panoply of theories about what organizations are. In fact, in every case we can think of literatures that do precisely that. Indeed, they do precisely that and much more besides; the imaginaries of theory know no bounds. If we want to signify what is an organization there are far too many ways of answering the question to satisfy a sober and disciplined mind. Such minds are too industriously proclaiming the verity of their schemas and casting scorn on those of others, thus showing the sobriety and discipline of the minds in question. <br/

Historical Organization Studies:Advancing New Directions for Organizational Research

Historical organization studies is ‘organizational research that draws extensively on historical sources, methods and knowledge to promote historically informed theoretical narratives attentive to both disciplines’ (Maclean, Harvey and Clegg, 2016: 609). Put simply, it seeks to blend history and organization studies. The present status of historical organization studies is that of an emergent academic movement rather than an established community of practice. For more than two decades, organization theorists have pointed to the need for more and better research that recognizes the importance of the past in shaping the present and influencing the future (Kieser, 1994; Zald, 1993). Some have identified a distinct ‘historic turn’ in organization studies, an epistemological shift led by scholars who perceive the field to have been constrained by its orientation towards contemporary cross-sectional studies covering limited periods of time (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Mills, Suddaby, Foster and Durepos, 2016). By historicizing organizational research, it is argued, the contexts and forces bearing upon organizations might be more fully recognized and analyses of organizational dynamics might be improved.How, precisely, might organizational research be historicized? How might a traditionally empirically oriented discipline such as history be incorporated into atheoretically oriented discipline such as organization studies? How might the power of history be harnessed to advance the explanatory potential of organization theory? What might history tangibly contribute to our knowledge of management and organizations (Clegg, 2006; Clegg and Courpasson, 2007)? We are now embarking on a new stage in the establishment of historical organization studies as a distinctive epistemological and methodological approach that develops a historical research strategy within the broad field of organization studies. This book makes a timely intervention that advances the discussion while extending and deepening what has already been achieved. Hence, it offers a mixture of conceptual and theoretically informed empirical papers that help to define the field and to orient it further in future. In this way, the book serves both as a landmark in the development of the field and as an important milestone in building an emergent and strengthening community of scholars. It thereby contributes to the reimagining of historical organizational studies while advancing new directions for organizational research. This chapter takes stock by evaluating the current state of play, explores recent scholarly exemplars on theorized history, while looking at the possibilities offered for future research

Clues, Cues and Complexity: Unpacking the Concept of Organizational Surprise

We discuss why surprises, defined as events that happen unexpectedly or expected events that take unexpected shapes, are important to organizations and should be considered in the organizational literature. The concept of organizational surprises is unpacked on the basis of a typology built around the (un)expectedeness of issue and process. This typology uncovers the several types of surprising events that organizations may face, and contributes to the literature by suggesting that different surprises require distinct approaches.N/