Business Commons^™

Technology, Economic Growth, And The State: American Political Culture And Economy, 1870-2000, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

In the essay that follows, I will examine three periods in American economic life, with a focus on the interplay of technological innovations, economic transformation, and the responses to them. The first period, focused on the decades between 1870 and1920, experienced the emergence of the corporation as the major form of production and, not surprisingly, the development of oppositional political movements to it. The second period, from 1933 to the 1960s, marked an era of reform efforts to balance the relationship between management and labor, efforts that, ironically, accepted as their premise the structure and rationale of the corporation itself. …

Alienated Politics: Labour Insurgency And The Paternalistic State In China, Eli Friedman

Eli D Friedman

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of ‘alienated politics’. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm be-cause of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive capacity of the state, the central government has in fact responded to highly localized resistance by passing generally pro-labour legislation over the past decade. The …

Surf-N-Turf, But The Sustainable Kind? The Limits And Potential Of Market-Driven Regulation In Food Production, Zdravka Tzankova

Zdravka Tzankova

This article examines the dynamics and likely effects of NGO efforts at private, market-driven regulation of antibiotics use in US agriculture. Such NGO efforts aim to eliminate the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy animals for the purposes of prophylaxis and growth promotion. To that end, NGOs are pressing large food retailers, who are some of the most powerful market actors, to demand antibiotic- free meat and to refuse selling meat produced with sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics.

Curbing agricultural overuse of antibiotics is critically important for public health because overuse erodes the curative power of antibiotics by creating antibiotic resistant …

The Invisible Hand Of Business Strategy Processes: Culture, Power And Politics In Stragegy In A Developing Country, Ananda Wickramasinghe

Ananda Wickramasinghe

This paper argues the reasons for limited compatibility of western strategic approaches with production relations in Sri Lankan tea plantation sector from findings of case study research. Reasons for this include the great diversity within the sector in relation to key issues including caste and class, ethnic groups and their political groupings, and in particular to modes of production which span traditional, capitalist and state capitalist models. Managers in developing countries struggle to assimilate such prescriptive perspectives and frameworks into their firms in response to external pressures. This suggests strategy research needs to be informed beyond generalised strategy and national …

Die Politik Der Neuen Arbeitsorganisation: Kooperation, Opposition Oder Partizipation?, Lowell Turner

Lowell Turner

[Excerpt] Es ist inzwischen ein Allgemeinplatz, daβ unter der Last sich verändernder Weltmärkte, politischer Kräfteverhältnisse und Technologien traditionelle fordistische Produktionsmethoden neuen, flexibleren Organisationsformen Platz machen. Vor allem die auβerordentliche Wettbewerbsfähigkeit japanischer Firmen, die innovative Formen der Produktionsorganisation nutzen, zwingen westliche Manager, die Produktion zu reorganisieren; und überall übt dieser betriebswirtschaftliche Zwang starken Druck auf die Gewerkschaften aus. In vielen Ländern sind diese Prozesse eng mit dem Niedergang der Gewerkschaften im letzten Jahrzehnt verbunden und haben diesen zum Teil mit hervorgerufen. Dies gilt vor allem für Länder wie Groβbritannien, Frankreich, Italien und die USA, wo Gewerkschaften keinen institutionell gesicherten Einfluβ auf …

Accounting, New Public Management And American Politics: Theoretical Insights Into The National Performance Review, Ann Watkins, Cecil Arrington

Ed Arrington

Borrowing from the work of political theorists Sheldon Wolin and William Connolly, this essay seeks to provide additional rationalization for the expansion of accounting within domains like the public sector. We suggest that such an expansion is intimately linked to social and cultural transitions which have led political theorists to not only question modern political theory but to also recognize the political significance of practices like accounting to political theory. We contend that these same transitions also make possible expansions of accounting through NewPublicManagement (NPM) initiatives like the U.S.'s NationalPerformanceReview (NPR). Seen in this way, accounting theory begins to move …

Late-Modern Politics And The Ubiquity Of Accounting: The Expansion Of New Public Management Within The Us Public Sector, Ann Watkins, Cecil Arrington

Ed Arrington

No abstract provided.

[Review Of The Book Icons Of Democracy: American Leaders As Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters And Democrats], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Icons of Democracy is a welcome change from the rather arid, often quantified analyses of political leadership so prevalent in academic writing. Well read in both primary and secondary sources, Miroff has deeply grounded his ideas in the rich historical context. In addition, he carefully chose his subjects and drew from their experiences central themes which, in divergent fashion, they also held in common. The resulting collective biography engages and challenges the reader. While partial to leaders in the dissenting tradition (they are "our true subversives and at times our truest democrats"), Miroff consistently points to the complexity of …

You Say You Want A Revolution? [Review Of The Book The Other Side Of The Sixties: Young Americans For Freedom And The Rise Of Conservative Politics], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Was the New Left a premature revolution, the fruits of which must await a future set of proper conditions to develop? Or was it more a victim of a giant government conspiracy that crushed a vibrant and growing oppositional tendency? Adherents of these and similar interpretations thus can explain the demise of the New Left while protecting its image as a tribune of a people in inevitable, if slow, political motion. But a perspective less protective of the New Left might reveal more. Perhaps treatments of that era have never fully captured either the complex turnings of America's political …

In The Jungle Of Cities [Review Of The Book Harold Washington And The Neighborhoods: Progressive City Reform In Chicago, 1983-1987], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] At first glance such a spatial transformation of work may seem positive, as indeed it was for the largely white work force that left the city and staffed these new positions. But left behind geographically, economically, and socially were the largely black (and to a lesser extent, Mexican) working-class residents. It was at this juncture, with jobs disappearing and the urban social structure fragmented, that black Chicago, symbolized in the person of Harold Washington, finally assumed political power. In Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods, editors Pierre Clavel and Wim Wiewel have collected a group of essays that examine the …

America Reborn? Conservatives, Liberals, And American Political Culture Since 1945, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] From the perspective of the early twenty‑first century, we can chide the good professor for not carefully considering the consequences of what he wished for half a century ago. For it is clear that the force of this conservative movement in America was in fact “stronger than most of us [knew]” or could have imagined in 1950, or, indeed, in 1968. This conservative “impulse”, those “irritable mental gestures”, has largely restructured American political thinking with a force and popular approval that remains stunning to consider. The growth of the conservative movement since 1945 was also accompanied by the slow …

Response To Sean Wilentz, "Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness And The American Labor Movement, 1790-1920", Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] Wilentz's critique of the exceptionalist theme in American historiography is to the point. Whether one applauded the absence of feudalism, and therefore class conflict, in America with the historians of the 1950s or bemoaned that liberal democratic tradition as the "nail in the coffin of class consciousness" in the 1970s, either interpretative structure sacrifices empirical evidence for grand theory. In the former, the careers of Thomas Skidmore or Ira Stewart are all but incomprehensible; in the latter, men like Joseph R. Buchanan or Eugene V. Debs have little relevance. More importantly, the actual experience of the majority of American …

Faith, Politics, And American Culture [Review Of The Books Letter To A Christian Nation, Pity And Politics: The Right-Wing Assault On Religious Freedom, Faith And Politics: How The “Moral Values” Debate Divides America And How To Move Forward Together, The Compassionate Community: Ten Values To Unite America, Righteous: Dispatches From The Evangelical Youth Movement, And Believers: A Journey Into Evangelical America], Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In January 2004, before a black church congregation in New Orleans, President George W. Bush commemorated Martin Luther King's birthday with a spirited promotion of his faith-based initiatives. Appropriating the slain Civil Rights leader's profession of faith, Bush proclaimed his ultimate purpose was to change "America one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time." He emphasized voluntary action by citizens (four times he extolled them as "the social entrepreneurs") and he consistency denigrated the role of government but for one critical function: providing "billions of dollars" to faith-based social-service groups. Proclaiming the values of the Christian Bible as …

Politics In The Oxley Region 1894-1920, Robert Castle, James Hagan

Robert G. Castle

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Human Resource Management In Implementing Process Innovation, Michael Zanko, Richard Badham, Maren Schubert

Michael Zanko

This paper analyses a longitudinal case study of organizational and human resource management (HRM) dimensions in the implementation of an approach to product development (concurrent engineering (CE)) in a multinational firm engaged in defence electronics. Most aspects of managing product development in CE are linked to people management. Yet in this case, other than project team structure, prescriptive HRM dimensions of CE received little attention in the implementation process. This failure to address the 'formal' prescribed HRM issues is explained by a multilayer analysis of the play of power and political lobbying among 'stakeholders' over time: the HRM function, key …

The Politics Of Sociotechnical Intervention: An Interactionist View, Karin Garrety, R Badham

Karin Garrety

In this article, we apply concepts from symbolic interactionism - a well-established tradition of interpretivist sociology - to investigate the social and political processes involved in a sociotechnical intervention. The intervention was designed to elicit operator involvement in an experimental trial of an advanced manufacturing system at an industrial site in Australia. The interactionist concepts of social worlds, boundary objects and trajectories are used to explore the interrelationships among the theoretical, practical and contextual elements of intervention. We believe that these concepts are flexible intellectual resources that can extend and enrich our understanding of the politics involved in the shaping …

Humanistic Redesign And Technological Politics In Organizations, R. Badham, Karin Garrety, Christina Kirsch

Karin Garrety

The political nature of technology design and implementation is explicitly addressed in human centered projects to introduce technologies that support job enrichment, group autonomy and industrial democracy. Yet the political meaning of such projects does not simply manifest itself in pure form from the methods employed or the intentions of the humanistic actors but, rather, from the complex configuration of these and other factors present in the design and implementation context. This paper illustrates this theme in an analysis of a case study human centered project. It argues that an improved understanding of the configurational politics surrounding such projects is …

Rebels Without Applause: Time, Politics And Irony In Action Research, R J. Badham, Karin Garrety, M. Zanko

Karin Garrety

Purpose of this paper: This paper seeks to raise for discussion and reflection some of the key dynamics of action research projects-in-practice. It focuses in particular on how action researchers broker academic and client interests, and how this brokering shifts over time. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on participant observation, drawing on the reflective and processual accounts of action researchers involved in a collaborative academic-industry-government project. Findings: The paper argues that the scope of action research projects to effectively address the needs of both audiences is compromised by managerialism in universities and organizations. However, the emergent and chaotic nature of …

Organizational Change Stories And Management Research: Facts Or Fiction, Patrick M. Dawson

Patrick Dawson

Company change stories are often constructed around a linear series of ‘successful’ events which serve to show the company in a positive light to any interested external party. These stories of company success sanitise this process and offer data for change experts to formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to best manage change. This position is criticised in this paper which draws on processual case study data to argue that change is a far more complex muddied political process consisting of competing histories and ongoing multiple change narratives which may vie for dominance in seeking to be the change story. …

The Way It Really Happened: Competing Narratives In The Political Process Of Technological Change, Patrick M. Dawson, D. Buchanan

Patrick Dawson

Corporate narratives concerning technological change are often constructed around a linear series of events that show the organization in a positive light to internal and external observers. These narratives often sanitize the change process, and present data from which commentators can formulate neat linear prescriptions on how to implement new technology. In contrast, this paper draws on processual-contextual theoretical perspectives to argue that technological change is a more complex political process represented by multiple ongoing narratives which compete with each other for dominance as definitive change accounts. A central aim of this paper, therefore, is to demonstrate the analytical significance …

Agrarian Reform And Philippine Political Development, Frede G. Moreno, Susana Evangelista Leones

Frede G Moreno

Landownership problem and control of resources remains as a political development issue in the Philippines. Agrarian reform is a necessary condition for agricultural modernization and rural industrialization and the fundamental mooring for global competition. Agrarian Reform has contributed to improvement of the socio-economic conditions of landless farmers and political development of the Philippines in terms of engaging the landless in the process of policy making and distribution of large private landholdings to the landless. Modalities giving peasants a stake in society such as decisive role in agrarian legislations, engaging them in dialogue to resolve agrarian cases, presenting manifesto pinpointing their …

The Sidelining Of Top It Executives In The Governance Of Outsourcing: Antecedents, Power Struggles, And Consequences, Subrata Chakrabarty, Dwayne Whitten

Subrata Chakrabarty

Contesting The Dinosaur Image: The Labor Movement’S Search For A Future, Richard W. Hurd

Richard W Hurd

[Excerpt] But the increased effectiveness of labor's political activities has not resulted in major improvements legislatively, and now there is a hostile President who opposes nearly every aspect of the union policy agenda. The promise for the future lies in the demonstrated ability to mobilize at the grassroots. But there are recent signs that national unions are breaking ranks and pursuing narrow self interest. The USWA joined with the steel industry to persuade the Bush administration to restrict imports, and even hinted at a possible endorsement for his reelection in 2004 (Murray). The UMWA has praised the president's energy policy, …

Designing And Delivering Compelling Experiences: Insights From The 2008 Democratic National Convention, Sudhir Kale, Robin Pentecost, Natalina Zlatevska

Sudhir H. Kale

Purpose – Joseph Pine and Jim Gilmore coined the term “experience economy” to describe a paradigm shift in consumption. To survive in this new economy, businesses must provide customers with memorable consumption experiences. The purpose of this paper is to suggest eight ingredients that need to be incorporated into a compelling experience. Commercial experience providers, not-for-profit organizations, and political entities stand to benefit by integrating these elements in the experiences they provide to their targeted constituencies.

Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative phenomenological case study approach is employed using the 2008 Democratic National Convention as the referent for dissemination of a compelling …

Ceo Compensation At Tarp Institutions, Karl T. Muth

Karl T Muth

This is a PowerPoint presentation given at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business on March 10, 2010. It requires the newest version of Microsoft PowerPoint.

Regulation By Markets And Higher Education, Benedict Sheehy

Benedict Sheehy

Markets have a number of uses. One increasingly important use by politicians is as a means of regulating the supply and distribution of goods and services formerly supplied and distributed by governments on non-market bases. The use of markets as a regulator of higher education is not novel. However, the increased reliance on markets as a regulator of higher education is an on-going experiment with certain predictable failures. This article explores the uses of the market in the supply and distribution of higher education and weighs it against the stated policy objectives, with particular attention to the application proposed in …

Constituting Vanuatu: Societal, Legal And Local Perspectives,, Benedict Sheehy, Jackson Maogoto

Benedict Sheehy

Governance in Vanuatu has been a source of concern for Australia as it forms part of Australia’s ‘Arc of Instability.’ Vanuatu has adopted a modified Westminster system as that system is often advocated as the model for constitutions and governance around the world. In various former colonies local populations were expected to simply absorb its liberal democratic principles apparently on some assumption that such principles were an innate part of human nature. Most readings of history would come to a different conclusion. Vanuatu illustrates this error and the complexities of a society that not only creates a broad challenge for …

The Convergence Of Ifrs In China: A View On The Influence Of Political Ideology On Chinese Accounting Profession, Y. Zhang, J. Andrew, H. W. Collier

Henry Collier

A historical perspective lens may be useful to help people understand the world of accounting and accounting research. Some believe that the role that accounting plays in current society could be better understood by reviewing its historical association with the institutionalization development within which it operates. Accounting as it is practiced in capitalist system has been predominately viewed as a technical and context-free activity. However, if a meta-level concern addressing broad structural and institutional environment from which accounting emanated is absent, there must be doubt that the conventional accounting can claim to be comprehensible and to contain true information. This …

The Trouble With Stockjobbers: The South Sea Bubble, The Press And The Legislative Regulation Of The Markets, Benedict Sheehy

Benedict Sheehy

Abstract: The South Sea Bubble Act of 1721 is often taken as the first securities legislation. Further it is understood to be a response to a stock market scandal. In fact, the Act was enacted prior to the scandal and indeed the likely cause of the collapse of the stock bubble itself. This article reviews the historical context, including the finance of government of the era, the development of the South Sea Company and its bubble, the legislation, burst and subsequent effects. It places securities legislation in its historical context as part of a broader movement in corporate law, shifting …