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

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

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

The emergent organization::Primary and complex metaphors in theorizing about organizations

We argue that complex metaphors in organization theory are made up of smaller primary metaphors or metaphorical parts that form the atomic components of the molecular structure of complex metaphorical thought. Using examples from organization theory, we demonstrate that (a) complex metaphors are made up of primary metaphors that are often grounded in our embodied experiences as human beings; and that (b) complex metaphors can be dynamically elaborated, extended and reinterpreted in novel ways. Metaphorical thought thus emerges from primary metaphors and evolves over time which is a perspective that is more alive to changes in the social construction of organi-zations than the traditional view of stable ‘root ’ categories of metaphorical thought that pervade organization theory