| Cloaked Culture and Veiled Diversity: Why Theorists Ignored Early U.S. Workforce Diversity |
| | Kurowski, Lois Landis | U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | 73134.3272@compuserve.com | 518-426-4263 |
| | This paper examines four questions: Was the U.S. workforce diverse in previous times? What were the origins of its diverstiy? How did management scholars of the past view the diversity of the U.S. workforce? Why did they view diversity as they did? While the workforce was diverse, particularly in the era 1880-1930, the diversity was addressed exclusively in practitioner literature, not in theoretical literature. Five intellectual trends contributed to the "invisibility" of diversity in theoretical literature: ethnocentrism, America's vision of itself, nativism (especially racial nativism), assimilationism and convergence theory. |
| | Keywords: Diversity; Frederick Taylor; |
| The Key to High-Performing Suggestion Systems: Lessons From Their History in Sweden and Japan |
| | Ostberg, Louise | U. of Massachusetts, Amherst | agr@som.umass.edu | (413)-545-5640 |
| | Robinson, Alan G. | U. of Massachusetts, Amherst | agr@som.umass.edu | (413)-545-5640 |
| | Schroeder, Dean M. | Valparaiso U. | dean.schroeder@valpo.edu | (219)-464-5177 |
| | Five decades ago, national initiatives were started in Sweden and Japan, backed strongly by their
governments, to promote the widespread use of effective suggestion systems in companies. Although
both countries made suggestion systems a national priority, they took opposite positions on the key
question that confronts companies wanting to get more ideas from their employees. Unwittingly,
they had begun a huge fifty-year long experiment comparing today's two main alternative models for
managing employee ideas. The outcome, whose message could not be clearer, offers a unique
opportunity to understand why such a wide gap has opened up between the state of the art in
managing idea systems, and the state of the practice. |
| | Keywords: suggestion systems; Sweden; Japan |
| Historical Transformation: A Study in Organizational Change |
| | Nilakant, Venkataraman | U. of Canterbury | vnk@mang.canterbury.ac.nz | 64 3 364 2987 Ext. 8621 |
| | A proliferation of paradigms characterises the current state
of organization theory. The dominant perspectives within organization theory
are the structural contingency theory, the population ecology theory,
the resource dependence theory and the institutional theory. This has led to
an ongoing debate between those who argue for a single paradigm and those who
prefer multiple perspectives on organisations. This paper contends that
historical analysis can provide a means for deciding between competing
claims of a single paradigm approach and a multiple perspectives approach
in organization theory. It presents a historical analysis of a unique form of
business organisation that originated in India in the 19th century, flourished
till the early part of this century and then declined in the subsequent years.
This organizational form was eventually abolished by legislation in the 1970s.
A study of the historical transformation of this business form, which was known
as the managing agency system, provides a means of testing dominant perspectives
such as the contingency, population ecology, resource dependence and institutional
theories. Based on a historical analysis of the managing agency system, this paper
argues that none of the dominant perspectives on organisations, by itself, can
provide a unified and complete explanation that accounts for the growth, decline
and demise of the managing agency system in India. Therefore, any coherent theory
of organizational change must necessarily incorporate multiple perspectives on
organizations and change. Historical analysis, it is argued, can help in the
development of such a theory. |
| | Keywords: Historical analysis; Organizational change; Organization theory |