Environment, organization and effectiveness: a biographical approach

Article Abstract:

Answers to the question of what makes an organization effective have proved elusive despite more than 20 years of intensive theorizing and research. This paper offers an approach to analyzing organizations explicitly based on two of those benefits. The first is the shift toward a more dynamic orientation for explaining organizational configurations and outcomes. The second is the identification of strategic decision-making as the key link between organizational environment, structures, and effectiveness. By merging these two, we construct a biographical approach to the study of organizations. An organization's biography - the pattern of its evolution - can be conceptualized as a succession of decisions and their consequences, with some decisions having a major long-term influence on the direction taken by the organization and its effectiveness, while others have but an incremental influence. This article is an initial effort to make concrete our ideas. The opening section discusses organizational decision-making and organizational effectiveness. This is the core of our approach: a basis for categorizing organizational decisions and in particular for singling out those which can be regarded as strategic. It is our contention that significant decisions vary across organizations and that one of the tasks of the biographer is to specify them for each major category or type of organization. Our general discussion of decision-making is therefore pursued in the context of the rehabilitation organizations that serve as our empirical referent. A number of key decisions for sheltered workshops are identified and their potential relationships to environmental, structural, and effectiveness variables are considered. The possibilities of a biographical approach are then demonstrated by locating specific features of sheltered workshops and their decision processes within the more general theoretical concepts of the sociology of organizations. Three models of environment, structure, and effectiveness in sheltered workshops are derived from the literature and used to generate a testable model that is examined empirically. The results of that exercise are sufficiently promising to lead us to advocate replication of our exercise in other organizational domains. The basis for advocacy is presented in the concluding section of the paper, which discusses the implications of the findings for organizational analysis. (Edited abstract.) (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Research, Organizational effectiveness

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Introducing market forces into managerial decision-making in Chinese industrial enterprises

Article Abstract:

This paper focuses on the fundamental changes in the management of state enterprises that are taking place in China. Specifically, we discuss the expansion of enterprise autonomy and changes in the managerial decision-making structure. The genesis of the reform programme is traced back to inefficiencies caused by the over-centralized state planning system which reduced enterprise management to little more than an administrative function dominated by the Party secretary. As a consequence, managerial and technical cadres became demoralized and the growth of staff functions such as accounting, marketing and personnel management was stunted. From a series of experiments launched in 1978 has grown the realization that tinkering around with the state planning apparatus is insufficient to stimulate entrepreneurship and vigorous industrial expansion. Accordingly, reform has been launched on a broad front both within the state apparatus, in an endeavour to roll back external constraints on enterprise, and within the enterprise itself, by seeking to provide powerful incentives both to managerial cadres and workers through a system stressing individual responsibility and rewards commensurate with results. A number of severe constraints on the reform programme are analysed, in particular, the changing balance of power within the enterprise between the factory director, the Party secretary, the workers' congress and the trade union. Contradictions exist within the new structure of decision-making but, given a period of political stability and sustained economic growth, there should be sufficient surplus to mollify discontent and stifle those who refuse to give up their belief in the virtues of having 'politics in command' of the industrial enterprise. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Decision-making, Decision making, China, Marketing, Marketing management, Industrial management, Corporations, Chinese

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Challenges in researching corporate restructuring

Article Abstract:

This article reviews research on corporate restructuring by examining representative studies of acquisitions, divestitures and management buyouts. theoretical arguments used in prior research on these aspects of restructuring are presented and the empirical evidence is reviewed. Three challenges in researching corporate restructuring are identified: trading off theoretical abstraction for institutional detail, defining strategically meaningful research questions, and the pursuit of partial models versus development of a comprehensive theory of restructuring. The conclusion is that theoretical and methodological pluralism are essential for advancement of research on this topic. The article concludes with a call for more research involving institutional detail and linking modes of restructuring to performance. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Analysis, Corporate reorganizations

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