Organization and productivity in R & D Teams: A Report of Research Findings

The present report is a revised and updated version of the report presented to companies participating in the study in November, 1985. The analyses in the previous report were based on 160 to 190 teams. The analyses in this paper are based on the total sample of 224 teams.The authors report findings from 224 teams in Silicon Valley on the effects of factors on team productivity and innovativeness. The factors are of four types: interaction, team composition, team organization, and perceptions of the company. Some of these finding were published by Cohen and Zhou (1991).This study was supported by the National Science Foundation— Grant ISI-804340

Colonial refractions: the 'Gypsy camp' as a spatio-racial political technology

Camps for civilians first appeared in the colonies. Largely drawing on the literature on colonialism and race, this article conceptualizes the 'Gypsy camp' in Western European cities as a spatio-racial political technology. We first discuss the shift, starting with decolonization, from colonial to metropolitan technologies of the governance of social heterogeneity. We then relate this broad historical framing to the ideas and ideologies that since the 1960s have been underpinning the planning and governance of the ‘Gypsy camp' in both the UK and Italy. We document the 1970s emergence of a new and distinctive type of camp that was predicated upon a racially connoted tension between policies criminalizing sedentarization and ideologies of cultural protection. Given that the imposition of the ‘Gypsy camp' was essentially uncontested, we argue that the conditions of possibility for it to emerge and become institutionalized were both a spatio-racial similarity with typically colonial technologies of governance, and the fact that it was largely perceived as a self-evident necessity for the governance and control of one specific population. We conclude by calling for more analyses on this and other forms of urban confinement in both the Global North and South, in order to account for the increasingly disquieting mushrooming of confining and controlling governance devices, practices and ideologies

The institutions of archaic post-modernity and their organizational and managerial consequences: The case of Portugal

The long march of modernization of the Western societies tends to be presented as following a regular sequence: societies and institutions were pre-modern, and then they were modernized, eventually becoming post-modern. Such teleology may provide an incomplete or distorted narrative of societal evolution in many parts of the world, even in the ‘post-modern heartland’ of Western Europe, with Portugal being a case in point. The concept of archaic post-modernity has been developed by a philosopher, José Gil, to show how Portuguese institutions and organizations combine elements of pre-modernity and post-modernity. The notion of an archaic post-modernity is advanced in order to provide an alternative account of the modernization process, which enriches discussion of the varieties of capitalism. Differences in historical experiences create singularities that may be considered in the analysis of culture, management and organization

Puritans, visionaries and survivors

All readings take place in the here-and-now, even of texts written back there and then. Nowhere in management and organization theory has this been truer of anyone than Max Weber. Unread in English during his lifetime, it was nearly 30 years after his death before his ideas had much impact. When they did, they were read in a context and tradition years away from those in which they were conceived. And, ever since, they have been subject to systematic reinterpretation on the one hand and neglect on the other. The paper addresses how one might use Weber today, in terms of his sensitivity to current issues, such as sustainability, as well as the still largely unacknowledged foundation that Weber constructed for contemporary cultural studies. The paper will bring these two themes together, using analysis of contemporary equivalents to the popular culture that formed the basis for some of Weber's own investigations. Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications

Del caos a los sistemas: los fundamentos de ingeniería en la teoría de la organización, 1879-1932

El presente documento rastrea la génesis del paradigma de sistemas en el estudio de las organizaciones en los Estados Unidos remontándose a las prácticas de ingeniería del siglo XIX. Los análisis empíricos para el periodo 1879-1932 se basan en los datos primarios recogidos de las tres publicaciones periódicas en que por primera vez se codificó y cristalizó el estudio de las organizaciones: Engineering Magazine, American Machinist, y ASME Transactions. Se halló que la evolución del paradigma de sistemas fue un producto de por lo menos tres fuerzas que forman una gestalt interactuante: (1) los esfuerzos de los ingenieros mecánicos que buscaban legitimidad industrial y cuyo paradigma profesional se virtió dentro del campo organizacional; (2) el periodo progresista (1900-1917) Y su retórica sobre profesionalismo, igualdad, orden y progreso; y (3) la agitación laboral, la que se percibía como una amenaza al orden económico y social estable. El documento proporciona una interpretación cultural y política, más que una funcional y económica, al surgimiento del pensamiento administrativo y la evolución de la teoría de la organización

Expected Managerial Careers within Growing and Declining R & D Establishments

The authors distinguish six types of productivity in different contexts and develop six corresponding scales and estimate reliability coefficients. Coefficients differ depending on context, supporting an argument that the meanings of productivity, and so its appropriate measurements, differ depending on structure and goals of the teams. This TR was published by the authors (1989).We thank Frank M. Andrews for his comments and Shaul Gabay and Yasmin Alkalay for their assistance. The data were gathered for a project financed by National Science Foundation Grant ISI # 8304340 conducted at the Center for Sociological Research at Stanford University, Bernard P. Cohen, Principal Investigator. Ideas and results expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the National Science Foundation