Strategic Marketing
NOTES Lecture 3: The ORGANISATION AS CONTEXT FOR CHANGE: More
Recent theories of Organisation
(Notes in lieu of reading Burnes chapter3 - Adapted from: Burnes, B. (2009) Managing
Change, Fifth edition, Pearson Education Limited)
The focus of this chapter is on what Burnes describes as proto-paradigms that have come to dominate Western managerial thinking and writing since the 1980s, namely:
The Culture-Excellence approach, the Japanese Management approach, and the Organisational Learning approach
However, it should be said that Burnes does not adequately circumscribe the notion of
'paradigm' and, if we were to follow Thomas Kuhn's lead, then these three movements would probably not qualify for paradigm status, whereas the previously discussed approaches
(classical, human relations and contingency, could possibly fit the definition of a paradigms better). Culture-excellence is very much an attempt to counter Japanese competitiveness by drawing on and re-shaping the American and British traditions of individualism and free market liberalism. It emerged in the early 1980s and its principal exponents (Tom Peters and Robert Waterman,
1982; Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 1989; and Charles Handy, 1989) have attempted both to predict and to promote the ways in which successful (excellent) companies will and should operate in the future. Peters and Waterman, Kanter, and Handy argue that organisations are entering a new age, where familiar themes are taking on different meanings and are being expressed in a new language. Contrasting the old with the new, they argue that:
Muscle power is being supplanted by brain power: the ability to make intelligent use of information to create ideas that add value and sustain competitiveness.
Organisation structures will be flatter and hierarchical and bureaucratic controls will be replaced by cultures that stress the need for, and facilitate, flexibility and adaptation.
Above all, organisations
Recent theories of Organisation
(Notes in lieu of reading Burnes chapter3 - Adapted from: Burnes, B. (2009) Managing
Change, Fifth edition, Pearson Education Limited)
The focus of this chapter is on what Burnes describes as proto-paradigms that have come to dominate Western managerial thinking and writing since the 1980s, namely:
The Culture-Excellence approach, the Japanese Management approach, and the Organisational Learning approach
However, it should be said that Burnes does not adequately circumscribe the notion of
'paradigm' and, if we were to follow Thomas Kuhn's lead, then these three movements would probably not qualify for paradigm status, whereas the previously discussed approaches
(classical, human relations and contingency, could possibly fit the definition of a paradigms better). Culture-excellence is very much an attempt to counter Japanese competitiveness by drawing on and re-shaping the American and British traditions of individualism and free market liberalism. It emerged in the early 1980s and its principal exponents (Tom Peters and Robert Waterman,
1982; Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 1989; and Charles Handy, 1989) have attempted both to predict and to promote the ways in which successful (excellent) companies will and should operate in the future. Peters and Waterman, Kanter, and Handy argue that organisations are entering a new age, where familiar themes are taking on different meanings and are being expressed in a new language. Contrasting the old with the new, they argue that:
Muscle power is being supplanted by brain power: the ability to make intelligent use of information to create ideas that add value and sustain competitiveness.
Organisation structures will be flatter and hierarchical and bureaucratic controls will be replaced by cultures that stress the need for, and facilitate, flexibility and adaptation.
Above all, organisations