Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The agile manifesto case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
The agile manifesto
Chapter
All change?
This chapter begins by looking at whether or not it can be claimed that new forms of work organization have emerged in recent decades. It analyzes different forms of working, managing change, and technology, including the Japanese model of management. It also explains how the Japanese model was perceived in the 1970s and early 1980s as a new way of improving productivity and competitiveness, how real that was, and how well it translated into Western organizations. The chapter documents some of the key changes that are widely celebrated and discussed in the management literature. It critiques how much change has actually happened in terms of work organization in the last two or three decades.
Chapter
American Dream Mall
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The American Dream Mall case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
The battle for equal pay
Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The battle for equal pay case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
A brief history of organization theory
This chapter defines organization theory as a multidisciplinary enterprise that draws from diverse sources, indicating perspectives and disciplines that contributed ideas to its development. It focuses on concepts and theories developed within the modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives and presents influential ideas from which these perspectives emerged. It also looks at the tension between theory and practice that leads to the continual formulation of new concepts, theories, and perspectives. The chapter introduces political economists and sociologists whose ideas were highly influential when organization theory was born and whose work continues to inform this field of study today. It points out that the historical record concerning organization does not extend much into ancient times as Adam Smith was the first person on record to publish a formal theory of organization in 1776.
Chapter
Bringing it all together
Fond farewells
This chapter explains the importance of connecting organizational behaviour theories together. Organizational behaviour is often thought about, researched, and taught as a collection of separate topics. Issues such as motivation, culture, or teamwork often draw on different theorists and are presented as independent issues. Yet, to really understand how things work in practice, we need to see the connections between these elements. The chapter then examines the differences between the rational and social perspectives of organizing, before considering the differences between the formal and informal perspectives of understanding organizational behaviour. It then looks at the assumptions between mainstream perspectives that seek to produce greater control over workers and critical perspectives that search for freedom and emancipation. The chapter also assesses why from a critical perspective managers and workers have different interests.
Chapter
Building teams around strength
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Building teams around strength case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Bureaucracies which control populations
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Bureaucracies which control populations case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Car makers tell Trump that climate change is real
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Car makers tell Trump that climate change is real case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Carbon trading
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Carbon trading case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Book
Edited by Oxford University Press
Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The case studies covered here provide an insight into how a diverse range of businesses operate and respond to challenges and opportunities.
Chapter
Changing the organization
Planning and emergence
This chapter begins by studying how people have different perspectives on change. On the one hand, change might be seen by managers as a reasonable action to take in response to certain triggers or pressures. On the other hand, change can cause anxiety, fear, and upset among the workforce that it affects. The chapter then presents three broad approaches which examine the implementation of change against the backdrop of such conflicting perspectives. First, it considers a naïve approach to change which stems from viewing the organization in simplistic terms, as a set of building blocks. Second, the chapter suggests that viewing the organization as an iceberg (the planned approach) shows its hidden depths which affect the implementation of change. Finally, an emergent approach to change sees the organization as a river, constantly in flow.
Chapter
Corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and business ethics
Can businesses act sustainably, ethically, and responsibly?
This chapter discusses business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and sustainability. Business ethics deals primarily with the principles that should be used to govern business conduct, how people should act, and the underlying philosophies behind ethical actions. CSR looks at the wider social and environmental responsibilities that businesses have and how they should meet them. Meanwhile, sustainability focuses on increasing concerns with the environment (particularly climate change), but it also has the wider meaning of the long-term sustainability of the firm itself. Should privately owned, profit-seeking companies be concerned with acting in a socially responsible, moral, and humane way? The response that one makes to this question depends, to a large degree, on one's beliefs as to the central purpose and responsibility of businesses, which can be summed up in the following five categories: shareholder capitalism, stakeholder capitalism, ethical capitalism, ethical within capitalism, and ethical against capitalism.
Chapter
Credit ratings
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Credit ratings case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Culture
This chapter looks at what culture means in the context of behaviour in organizations, questioning whether it is possible to assume that everyone means the same thing when talking about culture. It determines whether it makes sense to talk about different cultures in an age of globalization and if it is viable to consider changing culture. It also traces how the concept of organizational culture is defined and discussed, assessing the theory and evidence that have insight into a wide range of aspects of culture within organizations. The chapter highlights culture as a popular explanatory concept frequently used to describe a company, a rationale for people’s behaviour, a guideline for action, a cause for condemnation or praise, or a quality that makes a company ‘what it is’. The chapter examines the concept and definition of organizational culture that led to many debates.
Chapter
Dan Price, the CEO who raised his firms’ minimum wage to £50,000 by cutting his own salary, was then sued by his brother
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Dan Price, the CEO who raised his firms’ minimum wage to £50,000 by cutting his own salary, was then sued by his brother case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Developments in rational organization
Towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution
This chapter begins by tracing how rationalization developed in the Third Industrial Revolution, drawing on the development of computerization. More recently, commentators have suggested that we are entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution. While this brings new forms of organization, it is also an evolution and development of the computerization of the Third Industrial Revolution, and the Taylorist and bureaucratic systems of the Second Industrial Revolution. The chapter then looks at two current and ongoing examples of the trends of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. First, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are natural extensions of the desire in both the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions to replace human with machine labour; the chapter considers which jobs are in danger of being automated in the near future. Second, the chapter examines the recent rise of the gig economy, where workers take on one short-term job after another, the whole process managed by computer algorithms.
Chapter
Discovering the social organization
The Hawthorne studies and the human side of the organization
This chapter looks at the Hawthorne studies, one of the most influential pieces of research in organizational behaviour. It begins by recounting the perspective that the Hawthorne studies grew out of Taylorist assumptions about the importance of the physical conditions of work and the emergence of interest in the informal side of the organization. The chapter then challenges this typical account, arguing that it is not all it appears. While Elton Mayo and his colleagues stated that they ‘discovered’ the social side of the organization and that workers are naturally cooperative, several critics have argued that the way Mayo interpreted his data was highly ideological, claiming that the research methodology and interpretation of findings were flawed. Moreover, they argue that the results of the Hawthorne studies have been used by management as a better way of controlling workers, rather than empowering the workers as Mayo and his colleagues claimed.
Chapter
The dress
Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The dress case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
Chapter
Ebuyer
The Cases in Organizational Behaviour provides a bridge between course textbooks and key real-world examples. The Ebuyer case study summarizes and examines the scenario and includes supporting commentary from Daniel King and Scott Lawley.
