In this essay we argue that organization theory's effort to make sense of postbureaucratic organizing is hampered by a dearth of detailed studies of work. We review the history of organization theory to show that, in the past, studies of work provided an empirical foundation for theories of bureaucracy, and explain how such research became marginalized or ignored. We then discuss methodological requirements for reintegrating work studies into organization theory and indicate what the conceptual payoffs of such integration might be. These payoffs include breaking new conceptual ground, resolving theoretical puzzles, envisioning organizing processes, and revitalizing old concepts.
Engineering Culture grew out of an attempt to take seriously the conceptual and methodological requirements of a cultural perspective on organizations. Briefly, the book is a critical ethnography of a large and successful high-tech corporation lauded in the popular managerial literature for its innovative postbureaucratic “corporate culture.” The corporate culture, the official story went, drove the company’s employees to peaks of corporate performance and personal self-actualization. Academic views of these managerial claims fell, unsurprisingly, into two distinct camps. On the one hand (the upper one, of course) were those who participated in the construction of this grand utopian narrative: numerous texts reinforced, jargonized, and legitimated managerial claims and fed them back to ever-hungry corporate consumers of good words. On the other hand, less popular but no less persistent and no less grand, was a continuing stream of criticism of the corporation. In this view, utopian managerial claims were—as ever—no more than a disguise for malevolent managerial intentions, now in the form of tyrannical attempts to penetrate and shape employees’ minds and hearts.
This study examines 52 highly skilled technical contractors' explanations, in 1998, of why they entered the contingent labor force and how their subsequent experiences altered their viewpoint. The authors report three general implications of their examination of the little-studied high-skill side of contingent labor. First, current depictions of contingent work are inaccurate. For example, contrary to the pessimistic "employment relations" perspective, most of these interviewees found contracting better-paying than permanent employment; and contrary to optimistic "free agent" views, many reported feeling anxiety and estrangement. Second, occupational networks arose to satisfy needs (such as training and wage-setting) that employing organizations satisfy for non-contingent workers. Third, regarding their place in the labor market, high-skilled and well-paid technical contractors cannot be called-as contingent workers usually are-"secondary sector" workers; and their market is not dyadic, with individuals selling labor and firms buying it, but triadic, involving intermediaries such as staffing firms.
This article seeks to further understanding of the significance and impact of national identity in the context of organizational globalization. Arguing against the tendency of organizational researchers to pose this identity as an objective, cognitive essence, the article claims that national identity constitutes a symbolic resource that is actively and creatively constructed by organizational members to serve social struggles which are triggered by globalization. It offers support to this claim with ethnographic field data generated from an Israeli high-tech corporation undergoing a merger with an American competitor. The implications of the article concern the need for researchers to take into account the space for choice that organizational members have in defining national identity and the interrelationships between the enactment of this identity and processes of resistance to globalization.
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