Across the Red Sea, the Saudis watch Soviet influence increase on the horn of Africa. The Russian presence is felt in South Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And now, across the Persian Gulf, the populous and important nation of Iran, once considered the guardian of the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is in turmoil. Continuing heavy reliance on Middle Eastern oil is extremely dangerous to the security of the United States and its allies in the industrialized Western world.Letter to Shareholders (Amoco, 1978, pp. 4-5) In this paper, we analyze Chief Executive Officers' letters to shareholders in the United States petroleum industry during the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the industry's turbulent relationship with OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). We discuss and deploy the methodology of critical hermeneutics. The "texts" of the CEO letters, when juxtaposed against the "context" of key historical events, suggest that these letters were deployed to produce a certain attitude toward OPEC among their readers that deflected attention from the crisis of legitimacy faced by the oil companies domestically. We suggest that the trope of Orientalism helps us understand what exactly the texts sought to achieve through their pronouncements about OPEC.
Firms are central to wealth creation and distribution, but their role in economic inequality in a society remains poorly studied. In this essay, we define and distinguish value distribution from value creation and appropriation. We identify four value distribution mechanisms that firms engage in and argue that shareholder wealth maximization skews the value distribution towards shareholders and top executives, which in turn contributes to rising economic inequalities around the world. We call upon organizational scholars to study the value distribution role of firms and its consequences for society, and introduce the papers in this volume of the special issue on economic inequality, business, and society.
In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produced a high level of organizational cynicism regarding diversity. In our analysis, we particularly explore one adverse effect of this discourse of fashion; that it may trigger a form of meaningless imitation by organizations adopting diversity management initiatives, resulting in superficiality and organizational cynicism. At the same time, the discourse of fashion may also hold the key to enable meaningful change, for it has a powerful influence on organizational practitioners. Our article suggests that organizations need to be aware of the institutional field, and engage with it in a manner that imbues their initiatives with local relevance, for their initiatives to contribute to meaningful organizational change.
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...
Religion has been in general neglected or even seen as a taboo subject in organizational research and management practice. This is a glaring omission in the business and society and business ethics literatures. As a source of moral norms and beliefs, religion has historically played a significant role in the vast majority of societies and continues to remain relevant in almost every society. More broadly, expectations for responsible business behavior are informed by regional, national, or indigenous cultures, which in many parts of the world are heavily influenced by religious belief systems and religious institutions. In this essay, we discuss examples of how religion has functioned as a macro social force affecting business and society, discuss some of the key questions and issues related to research in this domain, offer some observations about why religion may be problematic with regard to its effects on business, and conclude by summarizing the articles contained in the special issue.
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