Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Endorsement Page -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 1: The Theory of Ressentiment -- Scheler's Theory of Ressentiment -- Sociology of Ressentiment -- Psychology of Ressentiment -- Collective Form -- Contemporary Ressentiment Studies -- Origin -- Political Psychology -- Reevaluation -- Repression -- Ressentiment Politics -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 2: Literature Review on "Anticorruption" Campaigns -- Campaigns -- Origin of CCP -- Mao Zedong -- The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries: 1950-3 -- The Cultural Revolution: 1966-8 -- Strike Hard Campaign: 1983-5 -- Anticorruption Campaign Goals -- Resentment and Ressentiment in Campaigns -- Organization of Anticorruption Campaigns -- Xi Jinping: Leadership -- Xi Jinping: Ideology -- Xi's Anticorruption Campaign -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 3: Corruption and Ressentiment -- Nature and Types of Corruption -- Level of Corruption -- Types of Corruption -- Causes of Corruption -- Government Causes -- Economic Causes -- Cultural Causes -- A Case Study -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 4: Ideology and Corruption -- Motivations: Which One Strongest? -- Power Consolidation -- Protect the Party -- Consolidate Power for Reform -- Help the People -- Conflicting Goals -- Factions -- Careers and Corruption -- Families, Campaigns, and the Rule of Law -- Anticorruption Campaign and the Cultural Revolution -- Fighting Factions -- The Big Faction -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 5: Power and Anticorruption -- The System -- Legality -- Investigative Process -- Punishments -- The Dictator's Dilemma -- Corrupt Anticorruption -- The Totalizing Mindset -- Authoritarian Anticorruption -- Indoctrinating Ethics -- New Rules -- The Fear Model.

Steven P. Feldman argues that Chinese political culture, based on the core principle of small group loyalties, is inherently unstable, resulting in an ongoing tendency for leaders to concentrate power in order to accomplish their goals. He examines this trend in Xi Jinping's regime through the concept of pre-totalitarianism.

For over three decades social studies of science have investigated 'objectivity' as a central, socially constructed assumption in scientific and engineering work. This literature has seldom been utilized in the study of organizations despite the fact that knowledge production and knowledge use in scientific and engineering organizations are presumed to be objective or independent of individual and social influences. In this article, the social studies of science literature as it conceptualizes and understands objectivity is reviewed. An analysis of the data on decision-making at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the years preceding the explosion of Challenger is carried out using concepts from this literature. Data on decision-making at NASA during the years preceding the explosion of Columbia are also analyzed. It is shown that the culture of objectivity at NASA interacted with time pressures to produce a misunderstanding of flight risk. This misunderstanding resulted from two general aspects of NASA's culture: (i) an over-confidence in quantitative data went hand-in-hand with a marginalization of nonquantifiable data, leading to an insensitivity to uncertainty and a loss of organizational memory; and (ii) problem definition and solution creation were constructed as if they were independent of organizational goals, resulting in an inaccurate estimation of risk.

Foucault-inspired organization theory has interpreted the Enlightenment effort to make reason the foundation for human freedom as a failure. Reason is seen as developing into "disciplinary knowledge," which dominates modern organizations and the individuals who live and work in them. In fact, the individual's very identity is the means by which the individual is enslaved. Knowledge is thus seen as nowhere separate from power. In this essay, I will use a concept of traditional authority to examine Foucault-inspired organization theory and its power/knowledge conceptual framework in terms of their ethical and cultural implications. This will include Foucault's influence on both the literature in critical organization theory and postmodern organization theory. My approach will highlight the Foucault-inspired misinterpretation of the effect of the Enlightenment on modem organizations, its rejection of the authority of the past as a basis for moral order, and its impossible attempt to find "freedom" through the destruction of cultural authority.

The organization theory literature on stories concentrates on the role stories play in political processes, especially the representative and integrative aspects. In this essay, I will build on this literature by introducing Victor Turner's work on cultural change. Stories will be seen as not only representing and integrating political process, but also creating them. By focusing on the creative aspect of stories, their role in organizational change is highlighted. This framework is applied to stories about a change of leadership in an electronics company. Two conclusions emerge. First, stories are a form of cultural creativity that can be used to mediate conflicts and contradictions that arise from changing circumstances. Second, stories, despite the fact that they are a form of cultural change, can have a negative influence on the process of organizational change.

The management of technological development involves a dilemma; the manager must strive to understand the diverse specializations required to develop new technology, but he must focus on integrating these specializations. The former requires knowledge, the latter power. It is my contention, however, that in technologically-oriented work groups, there is a tendency for the importance of technology to be exaggerated while power issues are ignored. This process is referred to as the idealization of technology. The result is an inattention to organizational goals and cooperative processes. In this essay, the interpretive concept of culture and the psychoanalytic theory of idealization is used to investigate this problem. The framework is applied to an engineering department whose primary work is the development of advanced technological products. The process of idealization distorts organizational reality in such a way that continual distortions are needed, is a cultural mechanism that is used to mediate the conflict between the exercise of power and the fear of power, integrates the individual into the organizational culture while simultaneously undermining cooperative relations, and encourages conformity while undermining power relations.

The literature on organizational politics has described organizational decision making as a fluid, informal process characterized by conflict and compromise. One of the most important reasons decision making tends to become politicized is because decision situations are uncertain and open to multiple interpretations. The political process develops as coalitions attempt to define the decision context to gain control over the decision-making process. But the concept of information typically used to investigate organizational politics is defined in terms of the ability to predict future states of the world. This definition completely overlooks the socially constructed nature of information and the fundamentally socially constructed nature of the decision-making process. The result has been an ignoring or underestimating of the role the distortion and manipulation of information plays in communicating and decision-making processes. In this essay, information is understood as a socially constructed phenomenon and a concept of secrecy is developed to investigate its effect on decision making. This framework is applied to a battle between staff and line groups for control over the Phone Stores in a Bell Telephone operating company. The concept of secrecy is developed empirically and elaborated theoretically.

The collective attribution of meaning to offices of authority and the constraints this attribution imposes on the. individuals who occupy these offices is little understood in the study of bureaucratic organization. In this essay, the relationship between the CEO and the vice-presidents in a Bell Telephone operating company is analyzed with regard to this phenomenon. An interpretive concept of culture is employed to gain access to the locally constructed system of symbols that these managers used to guide their behavior. The concept of institutional charisma is utilized to bring into focus the part of the cultural system that was used to attribute meaning to relationships of authority. My approach is contrasted with the management as symbolic action approach and the historical-interpretive approach to the study of culture in organizations. The former is found to be based on a false dichotomy between expressive and substantive levels of reality which limits its range of applicability. The latter is found to rely too heavily on the factor of change and to overlook what Weber called the "eternal yesterday" in human behavior.

The cultural aspects of organizations have been mostly overlooked in the study of management. This is particularly important because the Protestant ethic which organized the sociopsychological matrix for the industrial revolution no longer commands enough authority to continue organizing individual motivation and societal needs. Thus, local solutions have evolved to deal with cultural ambiguity and they have evolved with little thought as to their implications. In this essay, the cultural aspects of interpersonal relations in a telephone company are analyzed. This analysis was carried out during a year long full-time fieldwork period which employed participant observation, structured and semi-structured interviews, and document analysis for data collection purposes. Strong demands for conformity were found to dominate interpersonal relations. Three types of response to these demands were discovered: acceptance based on conscious suppression of personal interests, acceptance based on unconscious distortion, and secret rejection. These mechanisms for dealing with strong demands for conformity were found to affect managerial development, interpersonal communications, and organizational adaptability. Given these kinds of superior-subordinate relations, it was anticipated that the Bell System will have great difficulty adapting to a competitive marketplace.