Suchergebnisse

Organizational culture is a topic that has brought to the surface fundamental theoretical, methodological, epistemological, and political disagreements. Such disagreements could be fruitful for this topic area and for the field of organizational studies, more broadly defined. Unfortunately, all too often, disagreements among cultural researchers take the form of a debate about which theory or method is the "one best way": an open or unspoken struggle for intellectual dominance. When opposing points of view clash openly, assumptions are laid bare and declared unwarranted or foolish and alternate viewpoints are dismissed as misguided, empirically unfounded, or irrelevant to more important questions. In other kinds of papers, only a careful reading between the lines reveals the silencing of opposing points of view, as assumptions remain unstated or unchallenged and opposing points of view are omitted, marginalized in a footnote or an aside, or declared outside the paper's focus. If culture were a topic area where quantitative methods were used by all, and if these disagreements were purely theoretical, a classic experiment or comprehensive archival study might be able to prove, conclusively, that a particular argument is false. However, because so much culture research is qualitative, such definitive empirical answers are unlikely, and so the culture debates become even less tolerant of opposing views.

This paper discusses how institutionalized practices and structures contribute to sex inequality in universities, gendered definitions of faculty jobs and gendered limitations to knowledge in the field of organizational studies. This analysis shows why changing the numbers of women in academia (the `add women and stir' solution) is not likely to alter sex inequality in the organizational studies field unless major changes are made to the ways faculty jobs are structured and unless the assumption that the content of knowledge in our field is challenged.

This paper begins with a story told by a corporation president to illustrate what his organization was doing to "help" women employees balance the demands of work and home. The paper deconstructs and reconstructs this story text from a feminist perspective, examining what it says, what it does not say, and what it might have said. This analysis reveals how organizational efforts to "help women" have suppressed gender conflict and reified false dichotomies between public and private realms of endeavor, suggesting why it has proven so difficult to eradicate gender discrimination in organizations. Implications of a feminist perspective for organizational theory are discussed.

Our interest is in medical malpractice as an area of specialized practice for plaintiffs' lawyers, and we want to explore this area because plaintiffs' lawyers are key actors in the medical malpractice system. An understanding of their role is necessary in identifying what problems may exist in this system and in evaluating both proposed and enacted solutions. Indeed, some reforms appear to be specifically aimed at plaintiffs' lawyers who handle medical malpractice cases-especially the repeat players whose experience and expertise may give them, and hence their clients, a strategic advantage. Like most of the political rhetoric surrounding medical malpractice, the characterization of lawyers representing plaintiffs has always been vivid, symbolically charged, and divorced from reality. The rhetoric's purpose, of course, is not to present an accurate picture of reality. The idea is to gain political advantage by portraying such lawyers in the most negative light and to blame them for a host of ills curable only by medical malpractice reform. Writing in 1991, Randall Bovbjerg and his colleagues summarized the medical * Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation, Chicago, IL. community's views, saying that physicians believe there is systematic jury bias against them.1 Physicians also believe that "[bjecause malpractice plaintiffs receive extravagant amounts in malpractice cases, their contingent-fee lawyers also earn too much-far more than needed to assure competent representation. Hence, the lawyers are willing to take even more and weaker cases to trial in the hopes of hitting the 'jackpot."'2 Herein, supposedly, lies the gist of the problem. The "greedy, opportunistic lawyer" characterization leaves little room for a perspective that recognizes sophisticated specialization by plaintiffs' lawyers. Such an alternative perspective would require us to view malpractice differently, because it calls into question both the "jackpot lawyer" as a key cause of the "malpractice crisis" and what this theory presumes ...

The survival of a plaintiffs' lawyer's practice depends upon the generation of an ongoing flow of clients with injuries that the civil justice system will compensate adequately. If this requirement is not met, lawyers will leave this aspect of the legal market for more promising ones. If they do, legal services for injured people will be diminished as a result. In order to find out how this personal services legal market is defined and developed, we interviewed ninety‐five plaintiffs' lawyers in Texas. These lawyers use four major strategies to get clients: client referrals, lawyer referrals, direct marketing, and other referrals. What any particular lawyer does is shaped by the geographic market from which clients are drawn, and by the lawyer's reputation. Our findings provide fresh insights for the empirical literature on plaintiffs' lawyers, and they provide an empirical context for assessing the potential impact of changes in the civil justice system, like tort reform, on the ability of plaintiffs' lawyers to obtain clients.