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Organic organizations rely little on formalization in its classical meaning. Instead, behaviour is governed and expectations are generalized with means that Etzioni has classified as identitive power. Bureaucracies are characterized partly by their use of coercion and purchase (utilitarian power) of motivation of its members, while organic, empowering, flat, learning organizations tend to use symbols that do not constitute threats or rewards as means of motivating members. Instead members are motivated, or committed, by personal identification with the organizational identity. This form of motivation can be compared with rule-based or identity-driven decision-making, by which organizational decisions are guided by organizational and personal identities rather than by a calculation of preferences and expected outcomes. In this paper, three decision-making problems are identified that are caused by improperly functioning differentiation between personal identities of organizational members and organizational identities when identities are the basis for both motivation and bounded rationality (decision-making).

This paper examines the impact of restructuring within the transport and logistics sector on women managers working at senior and less senior (middle/junior management) levels of the organization. The majority of women experienced increased performance pressures and heavier workloads as well as an increase in working hours. At the same time, there were pressures to work at home (i.e. weekends and evenings) and reduced opportunities to work from home (i.e. during normal office hours). Management level emerged as an important factor in how these changes were interpreted. Senior managers perceived more positive outcomes in terms of increased motivation and loyalty. Despite a longer working week, they were less likely to report low morale as an outcome from long hours. In fact, irrespective of management level, women working shorter hours were more likely to report low morale as an outcome. Results are discussed in relation to literature on restructuring and careers, in terms of perceptual framing and in relation to different levels of investment in the organization.

Increasing uncertainty of supply networks, globalization of businesses, proliferation of product variety and shortening of product life cycles have forced Indian organizations to look beyond their four walls for collaboration with supply chain partners. With a gross domestic product (GDP) of over US$474.3 biilion, the Indian industry spends 14 percent of its GDP on logistics. Considering this scenario, it is necessary to study the supply chain practices being followed by the Indian industry and to suggest areas for improving the same. This paper is based on a joint survey, covering 156 organizations, carried out by Management Development Institute, Gurgaon and KPMG India. The paper primarily focuses on the status of four major supply chain dimensions. The paper recommends that the Indian industry should align supply chain strategy with business strategy, streamline processes for supply chain integration, form partnerships for minimizing inventory and focus on infrastructure and technology deployment to build a India‐specific supply chain.

Many of today's organizations already have a strong integration of groupware systems within their IT‐infrastructure. The shared databases of these groupware systems form organizational memories, which comprise the complete knowledge of an organization collected over the time of its existence. One key problem is how to find relevant knowledge or information in continuously growing and distributed organizational memories. In many cases, the basic functionalities and mechanisms of groupware systems are not sufficient to support users in finding required knowledge or information. Topic maps provide strong paradigms and concepts for the semantic structuring of link networks and therefore, they are a considerable solution for organizing and navigating large and, continuously growing organizational memories. The K‐Discovery project suggests applying topic maps to groupware systems to address the mentioned challenges. Thus, the K‐Discovery project introduces a conceptual framework, an architecture, and an implementation approach to create knowledge structures by generating topic maps from organizational memories and offers navigation tools to exploit the created structures.

Theories of democratic government traditionally have relied on a model of organization in which officials act impartially, accept clear lines of accountability and supervision, and define their day–to–day activities through rules, procedures, and confined discretion. In the past 10 years, however, a serious challenge to this ideal has been mounted by critics and reformers who favor market, network, or "mixed–economy" models. We assess the extent to which these new models have influenced the work orientations of frontline staff using three alternative service types—corporate, market, and network—to that proposed by the traditional, procedural model of public bureaucracy. Using surveys of frontline officials in four countries where the revolution in ideas has been accompanied by a revolution in methods for organizing government services, we measure the degree to which the new models are operating as service–delivery norms. A new corporate–market hybrid (called "enterprise governance") and a new network type have become significant models for the organization of frontline work in public programs.

In order to contribute to the effectiveness ofpublic and private organizations, in the last twentyyears organizational climate has been analyzed frommany points of view, as of public administration togroup psychology. While some authors have alreadyidentified the importance of organizational climate(Williamson, 1997; Guldenmund, 2000) on organizationalefficacy issues, many investigators state thatthe relationship between the two has been insufficientlyexplored (Silva, 2003). Organizational climateperceptions in bureaucratic organizations place somedoubts for the researchers thus far (Meyer, 2003). Asin the twenty-first century public sector organizationsexperience the tensions that arise between the demandsof government, business, and civil society, thesurveys on different aspects of organizational climateand effectiveness continue to be important up to now.In addition, the relationship between organizationalclimate and effectiveness in public sector of EastEuropean countries has mainly been a theoreticalproposition. Therefore, the main purpose of this researchwas to evaluate the relationship between organizationalclimate and effectiveness in Lithuanian Government which is one of the principal public organizationsthat serve in public interest for Lithuaniansociety.

AbstractThe focus of this article is organizational behaviour in and around the private sector in Tanzania at a time of transition through liberalization and the promotion of private sector activity; how the private sector has re‐emerged in the very recent past; how it operates as a group or, more accurately, as a set of groups, and the relationships between its component parts and with other development organizations (notably public actors: the state and aid donors). Within this framework our interest is in how organizational behaviour is mediated and trust is built through the brokering of relations between different organizations which intersect the public and private (and what this means for the public sphere). The article assesses the usefulness of a three‐level framework for analysing organizational and institutional transformation, shows that some tentative but modest change is occurring, and that a range of incomplete but positive political processes are happening. We show that institutional development is the weak link in these processes. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractAlong which basic lines could an organization which plans to invest in knowledge management proceed? What general initiatives can be suggested for knowledge management? First, an array of knowledge management goals and strategies is presented taken from theoretical and empirical studies which are then related to each other in the light of what we call a strategic intervention into an organization's way of handling knowledge. We then make the case for the integration of process orientation into a comprehensive multi‐dimensional framework for knowledge management strategies. Process‐oriented knowledge management initiatives are designed to provide employees with task‐related knowledge in the organization's operative business processes. We argue that with this framework the resulting process‐oriented knowledge management strategies address the integration of the resource‐based view of an organization — which is the main focus of knowledge management — with the market‐oriented view — which is implicitly brought about by process orientation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Managers evaluate the organizational performance by comparing it with historical aspiration levels, and are more likely to make strategic changes when the performance falls below the aspiration level. Historical aspiration levels can be updated with different speed, because a focus on current performance will lead to quickly adjusting aspiration levels where historical performance has low weight, while a focus on past performance will lead to slowly adjusting performance levels where the current performance has low weight. A simulation model of aspiration-level learning and strategic change under uncertainty yields the following findings: (1) Slow adjustments of an aspiration level gives higher performance across different levels of environmental uncertainty, (2) slow adjustments of aspirations will dominate in populations with different adjustment levels if low-performing organizations are removed and replaced by organizations of the form currently performing best, and (3) stronger selection leads to faster domination by slow adjusters. Empirical analysis of format changes in radio stations finds slow adjustment of aspiration levels to be prevalent, and finds slower adjustment in competitive markets, as predicted.

This largely descriptive book sets out three questions of interest to international relations scholars and policy-makers: What is global civil society? What are its origins? And what are the roles of individuals in creating and maintaining it? After a brief literature review, the book provides a definition: global civil society is 'a socially constructed and transnationally defined network of relationships that provides ideologically variable channels of opportunity for political involvement' (p. 19). This definition reflects the book's grounding in 'people-centered' International Relations theory, drawing on the English school of Wight and Bull and paralleling the American constructivist paradigm to focus on agency as well as structure. It then examines eight Northern non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as exemplars of how global civil society is creating itself with heavy reliance on the Internet. All are progressive advocacy organizations: three environmental, three development-focused, and two 'online resource networks' that attempt to serve the communications and information needs of large NGO networks.