Organization Studies

The problem for western European trainers, educators and managers working to assist eastern Europe make the transition to a market economy is less a matter of knowledge transfer, and more a difficulty of meaning transfer. It is argued that the western side has grossly underestimated the difficulties involved in the creation of shared understanding because it has scarcely recognized the issue of cultural differences; the assumption has been made that we can be 'sensitive to cultural differences' while remaining ignorant of differences of history and custom, values and ideology. A second assumption is that provided 'a good interpreter' can be found, communication is not a problem; that the language in which culture is encoded and expressed within the experience of the two indi viduals concerned will generate the same meanings for both parties; in short, that there is no difference between langue, language as translated, and parole, language as experienced in a given culture. A simple technique for comparing the parole of two different languages, English and Polish, is outlined, and 5 key words in the business and management vocabulary are used to illustrate the assertions previously made.

This paper attempts to examine Taylorism and the development of Human Resources Management (HRM) in Japan. It looks at the translation of Taylor's works, books based on his ideas, and direct applications of 'Scientific Manage ment' as well as the later work of practitioners promoting their diffusion in Japanese enterprises. It concludes that imported Taylorism was an important factor in the development of what most observers have held to be a uniquely indigenous Japanese system of organization and management, and that late Tay lorism may have been the bridge to Total Quality Management (TQM) in the post-war period. Japan's clear contribution, it concludes, was to absorb and adapt such imported concepts and practices in an 'organization-oriented' rather than a 'market-oriented' context.

This paper treats discourses in organizations in relationship to the management of identities and impressions. It is based on an ethnographic study of an advert ising agency and explores how advertising professionals describe themselves, their work and organizations, the profession and their clients. Various functions of such descriptions are proposed, from identity work to marketing. The relation ship between the level of discourse and deeper cultural levels is investigated through the cultural sociologies of Asplund and Bourdieu. The 'habitus' of advertising workers is discussed and 'anti-bureaucracy' is proposed as a concep tual figure — a basic way of conceptualizing vital segments of one's cultural reality — characterizing the advertising industry (in Sweden), informing the meaning of the particular ways of talk that is typical among advertising workers.

Although some organizational scholars invoke the alleged incommensurability of metatheoretical paradigms in order to legitimize a plurality of approaches to the field, others have called for cross- or multi-paradigm inquiry into organizations while yet maintaining the essential incommensurability of paradigms. As long as the incommensurability thesis itself is maintained, however, calls for cross- or multi-paradigm inquiry are compromised, and legitimate goals of theoretical and metatheoretical diversity are poorly served. The problem is not with such calls for broader but still diverse perspectives, but with the incommensurability thesis to which they infelicitously are tied. Giddens' structurationist metatheory pro vides a means to honour both calls for a broader, more unified perspective and demands for metatheoretical and theoretical pluralism, without resorting to the self-stultifying incommensurability thesis. A structurational analysis enables us to give up the idea of impermeable and imperialistic paradigms, while yet main taining distinctive perspectives within organizational inquiry.

This paper examines a city council's persistence with a failing department over a five-year period. The case is an example of escalation of commitment where decision-makers inherit a previously unsuccessful and long established decision as distinct from involvement in an ad hoc venture. It is concluded that the pres sures to escalate in established decisions are different from those previously observed in ad hoc ventures. Escalation in established decisions is cyclical, altern ating between structural and social pressures. Project and psychological factors are secondary. Powerlessness is identified as a new structural variable. It is specu lated that escalation in established decisions may be basically structural. Decision- makers' actions are reminiscent of behaviours observed in previous studies of strategic decision-making.

Research on the nature and significance of organizational dress has been very productive recently, following the publication of my seminal piece 'Suitable Research: On the Development of a Positive Theory of the Business Suit' in 1985. In this paper, I expand the research domain in two directions. First, the subject matter of Organizational Dress Research (ODR) is broadened to include the organizational tie. Second, the research methods employed are enriched by the addition of a typological approach. Hence, both substantive and methodol ogical issues are addressed in this paper. This allows me to spell out, in the conclusion, a rich agenda for further research.