It is perhaps a truism that modern organizational theory has tended to objectify the colonized nations, and the subjects of imperialism. Even the critical traditions in OT tend to be mired in Eurocentric assumptions, and many of the issues that affected the 'victims of globalization' simply did not figure in OT debates till the 1980s. In the 1990s, when organizational theorists focusing on workers and subjects from the poorer South began expressly to 'write back', i.e. theorize eloquently on how they could restore their own agency in organizational life, they found a contingent ally in Organization. Not that the Journal did not have its blind spots in this regard, but since its inception in 1994, it has published a number of articles that sought to give voice to those who decentred OT's Eurocentric assumptions. In this brief essay, we attempt to chart that partnership, and speak about a possible role for Organization in furthering this quest.
This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Findings -We analyze our data in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and theorize three themes that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations. Permanent repository linkOriginality/value -This study goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industrial accumulation. It offers in some measure, the building blocks of a different organizational theory, one that is sensitive to those subjects who are consigned to the periphery of mainstream organizing. Keywords -multinational corporations, knowledge, hegemony, ideologyPaper type -Empirical We do not govern Egypt, we only govern the governors of EgyptLord Cromer, British Imperial Proconsul, 18852 If you took a taxi from Mumbai airport, and traveled due east through some of the most congested traffic in the world for around two hours, you would reach the suburb of Malegaon. Malegaon, which used to be a village of dairy farmers, has now been claimed by the ever-sweeping sprawl of Mumbai, and is now serviced by a two-lane "highway." This highway is lined with several workshops, where under leaky roofs and oppressively hot interiors, resides a community of some of the most skilled machinists in India. Give them a machine part, and they will replicate it to submillimetric precision. Give them a machine that manufactures 350 units a minute, and they will figure out a way to upgrade its output to 600 units a minute.Travel past the makeshift tea stalls, across the perennial puddle in a pothole on the highway, and you will enter one of the bigger workshops, which a modest, rusty sign identifies as "Bhavnani How does an artifact such as a mission statement physically travel across geographic and organizational barriers, and how does it attain legitimacy across dispersed spaces and among diverse groups? What are the processes by which globally scattered organizational beings and extra-organizational subjects such as Bhavnani & Sons "learn" to venerate and display this artifact? In this paper, we address these questions through a critical analysis of organizational approaches to "knowledge transfer" and by reporting the results of an ethnographic study of the practices of knowledge transfer in an MNC. We argue that representations of knowledge transfer in organizational studies fail to record the manner in which this process is implicated in the historical experiences of power differences and economic imbalances that undergird the international encounter. Despite the explosion of research in the field of knowledge management 3 over the last decade, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynam...
Mainstream management texts seek to legitimize a social order in which certain power relationships are naturalized and seen as the logical end of a historical development. Also, the ideological basis of managerialism determines the nature of the managerial discourse in which some interests are privileged whereas others are marginalized. Because they promote a managerial ideology in which sectional interests are passed off as universal, management texts can be seen, at least partly, as instruments of propaganda.
This article examines the employee-organization relationship in the current industrial landscape. “New age employees” have substantially different expectations from organizations—stemming from their own articulateness about their career needs as well as mistrust of organizational loyalty in the aftermath of the recent waves of organizational downsizing. The changing employee-organization relationship is explored through the theoretical lens of organizational commitment; a series of propositions about the commitment levels of new age employees is advanced; and a framework to assist HR managers in their attempts to recruit, train and retain the new age employee is offered. The article concludes with an explanation of the implications of this framework on human resource management in the public sector.
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