Corporate Bureaucracy Research Articles

Team formation as a component formation of a successful corporate environment

The article aims to substantiate the advantages of team building development in the modern corporate environment. An analysis of the history of the origin and rooting of the philosophy of team building in personnel management was carried out with the selection of chronological stages of the development of processes and their content. The study formulated the advantages of team building for the enterprise, which can be attributed to improved communication and cooperation between employees, which leads to increased productivity and creativity; improving problem-solving skills, which allows one to see a problem from different angles and develop creative solutions; involvement and motivation of employees, provides a stable and positive morale necessary for business, which increases labor productivity; greater satisfaction and loyalty of employees, gives them a sense of stability, satisfaction, which leads to increased productivity; reducing stress and conflicts in teams, creating an environment where everyone feels valued and respected; improving teamwork, which is the key to successful work on productivity. An analysis of research in Great Britain statistically proves the influence of factors such as satisfaction with the company's culture, work-related stress, and involvement in processes for the enterprise's profitability. The article suggests methods of improving management effectiveness that can help employees work better together, regardless of the size of the company: creating the foundations for clear communication and employee trust; reducing barriers to healthy collaboration, such as corporate bureaucracy; a precise formulation of duties; increased autonomy for more experienced workers; allocation of time and resources for creative projects. Based on the study, a general conclusion was made regarding the significant role of team building in maintaining a thriving corporate environment as a guarantee for the company's acquisition of competitive advantages. Keywords: team building, team, corporate environment.

Competition Determinants of Eurasian Economic Union Oil and Gas Companies

The present study examines the competition determinants of Eurasian Union oil and gas companies for the period of 2012–2020. The study covers a total of 24,813 firm-year observations. This study applied the GMM two-step estimation to capture the endogeneity problem. Our results reveal that leverage, profitability, and efficiency are the main competition determinants. In the Eurasian Union, large oil and gas companies are less competitive. It may be caused by higher corporate bureaucracy and high transaction costs. Oil and gas companies with an efficient level of sales are more competitive in the market. Also, the increase in leverage provides a tax shelter. The price cost margin, the Boone Indicator, and the firm’s income total income ratio are confirmed as efficient competition indicators.

The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States

This article challenges the historiographical commonplace that twentieth-century American management discourse was dominated by bureaucratic aspirations to objective expertise and rational planning. Proposing the category of “entrepreneurial management” to describe the countervailing tendency, it demonstrates the persistence of intellectual interest in managers who used the personal qualities of leadership to enlist enthusiasm among subordinates for their firm's initiatives. By the mid-twentieth century, these managerial leaders were commonly described as “entrepreneurs.” Through a reading of early twentieth-century writing on “human factor” management and Depression-era “human relations” theory, the article shows that intellectual interest in entrepreneurial leadership thrived during a period typically characterized as the height of scientific management and corporate bureaucracy. Analyzing Peter F. Drucker's postwar management writing in detail, the article concludes by arguing that the “entrepreneurialism” of the late twentieth century did not represent a break with the established managerial project, only the strengthened authority of one existing tendency within a variegated intellectual field.

Fortunate men or penny collectivists? General practice in Lancashire and Westmorland during the “classic” NHS

The enduring image of general practice during the “classic” NHS, from its creation in 1948 until its first major reform in 1974, is that provided by John Berger’s poetic prose and Jean Mohr’s captivating photographs in their 1967 study A fortunate man. It paints a picture of a country doctor equipped with almost universal medical expertise singularly devoted to his patients and his rural Gloucestershire community to the exclusion of everything else. Whilst such an image of general practice as a slow, idyllic cottage industry is alluring given the modern experience of industrialised primary care, it fails to capture the pressures and constraints of working under the NHS. Pressures were different but similarly inexorable, and noticeable by their absence from Berger and Mohr. Instead, it is far more accurate to see general practitioners (GPs) as “penny collectivists” within a burgeoning socialised medical economy which favoured the extension of hospital services. Within this health economy GPs were effectively impoverishedentrepreneurs being squeezed from below by rising patient demand, expectations, and professional rivalries, and from above through a complex corporate bureaucracy. This paper captures this dynamic through the oral histories of GPs who practised in Lancashire and Westmorland combined with archival records of local primary care bureaucracy from 1948 to 1974.

Centering the document — Towards a critical studio pedagogy in graphic design

As a designer and educator, I endeavor for this article to make an intervention in the way that graphic design is imagined, taught, discussed/debated, and practiced. I believe that graphic design objects mediate forms of sociality in ways that are banal and largely underexamined. This article explores the implications of an historiography that narrates the entanglement of graphic design with the administration of the settlerstate and capitalist enterprise through the genre of the document. Broadly defined, the document serves as the substrate for archival ways of knowing that are imposed as a function of the ideological hegemony of statist governance and corporate bureaucracy. As an instrument of state and capital, the document circumscribes how the world is named, and impacts the way it is ordered. Recognizing this is a prerequisite for mounting a challenge to this condition. This assertion is meant to serve as the backdrop against which to speculate on a different kind of graphic design pedagogy, charged with the education of practitioners who imagine and create other forms of what the radical pedagogue Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) calls “naming the world.” The intent of this article is to initiate an exploration of a framework for graphic design pedagogy charged with cultivating a student’s capacity to experiment with and invent forms that might actualize critical and emancipatory modes of sociality.

Exploring the Relevance of Intrapreneurship and Innovation in Mature Organizations

This study intends to explore the phenomenon of intrapreneurship and the relevance of the innovation processes in mature organizations by conducting three case studies on traditional industry sectors such as the textile, metalworking, and electronic components sector. The aim is to explore the role of entrepreneurial teams in such companies, to understand the inhibiting factors of innovation, and to find the essential conditions for these organizations to continuously innovate and promote intrapreneurship within their organizations. The findings reveal that several factors constrain employee participation in this process, including lack of qualifications levels, limited resources, corporate bureaucracy, and reduced time and budget. In the conditions necessary to support the innovation process emerge the support given by the management team, the qualification of individuals and teams, and the existence of an organizational culture that promotes communication, collaboration, and tolerance to risk.

Convict Labor in Turkey, 1936–1953: A Capitalist Corporation in the State?

AbstractThe article proposes the institutional analysis of convict labor as an alternative to both (profit-oriented) economic and (discipline-oriented) political explanations. The specialized labor-based prisons in Turkey from 1936 to 1953 are brought to light by archival research and are presented here as a rich case to discuss the experiential/subjective conditions of unfree labor regimes and the structural effects of institutions on the convicts’ experiences. I argue that the state department responsible for prison labor in Turkey was transformed into a capitalist corporation with bureaucratic management, and the target of convict labor system was neither profit nor discipline, but the creation of the corporate bureaucracy itself. As a consequence, both for prisoners and for the prison staff, labor-based prisons appeared as privileged places. Hence, unfree labor was volunteered.

Berkshire'ssDisintermediation: Buffett's New Managerial Modell

Berkshire Hathaway, among history’s largest and most successful corporations, shuns middlemen; its chairman, the legendary investor Warren Buffett, excoriates financial intermediaries. The acquisitive conglomerate rarely borrows money, retains brokers, or hires consultants. Its governance is lean, using an advisory board and bucking all forms of corporate bureaucracy. Berkshire’s shareholders also minimize the roles of intermediaries like stockbrokers and stock exchanges by trading little and holding for lengthy periods.By exploring Berkshire’s antipathy to intermediation, this article supports the view that public policy ought to make considerable room for companies to define their own internal business practices and that more companies ought to consider emulating aspects of Berkshire’s disintermediation. While Buffett’s legacy to date has been to lead two generations of value investors, Berkshire’s radically ingenious disintermediation has the potential to shape the next two generations of value managers, as argued in this paper and at greater length in the author’s recent book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.

Administrative Rationalization and Economic Performance in some South-Eastern European States

The field literature establishes an intrinsic connection between administrative rationalization and economic performance of a state. Dahl (1947) and Simon (1976) conclude that the rational model of administration influences both the governance and corporate bureaucracy. Rationality and performance become the bases of good governance. Recent studies of Evans and Rauche (1999) or Matei and Matei (2011) emphasise relevant statistical analyses that demonstrate the interdependency between bureaucracy and economic growth. In this context, the current paper aims to achieve and present a study on the quality of bureaucracy, emphasised by the features of rationality specific to Weberian bureaucracy and economic performance, expressed, for example through synthetic indicators, such as GDP per capita. The target group of states analysed comprises Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria and Greece. The research methodology includes the valorisation of results in the framework of other European projects and their statistic and economic interpretation in view to highlight the changes determined by the European Union enlargement.

BUREAUCRATIC PERSISTENCE PATHS: THE ROLE OF EMBEDDED AGENCY.

Corporate bureaucracy is widely condemned as obsolete, while radically different postbureaucratic forms have long been expected to replace it. Yet many organizations today continue to be governed b...

Active Investors, LBOs, and the Privatization of Bankruptcy

In this testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee on February 1, 1989 (when LBOs and other highly leveraged transactions were under fierce attack by politicians and the media), the author identified “LBO associations” such as KKR and Forstmann Little as a valuable innovation in organizational form—a new model of management and governance that was competing directly with the headquarters of large public corporations, especially conglomerates. In the author's words, LBOs “substitute incentives provided by compensation and ownership plans for the direct monitoring and often centralized decision‐making in the typical corporate bureaucracy.”In illustrating his point, the author noted that whereas the CEOs of U.S. companies during the '70s and '80s saw their personal wealth go up by only about $3 for every $1,000 increase in firm value, the average CEO in an LBO experienced a change of $64 per $1,000—and for the partners of the LBO firm, the closest equivalent to a conglomerate CEO, the change was about $200 per $1,000.Based on the performance of the first wave of LBOs to return to public ownership, such dramatic concentrations of equity ownership appear to have produced large gains in operating efficiency. (And since the author's testimony, these findings have been confirmed by subsequent studies of later periods and in other countries.) The heavy debt loads in these transactions, besides making possible the concentration of equity ownership, also perform an important control function, intensifying the search for efficiencies and discouraging reinvestment in low‐return projects. For those LBOs that have trouble servicing their debt loads, the author argues that the costs of insolvency should turn out to be significantly lower than for traditional public companies because LBOs provide strong incentives to keep the process of reorganizing troubled companies out of the bankruptcy court (a prediction that, although proving wrong in the early‘90s, has turned out to be true of the most recent wave of private equity deals).

“Society is Out There, Organisation is in Here”: On the Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility Held by Different Managerial Groups

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly significant managerial concept, yet the manager as an agent of corporate bureaucracy has been substantially missing from both the analytical and conceptual literature dealing with CSR. This article, which is both interpretative in nature and specific in reference to the U.K. cultural context, represents an attempt at addressing this lacuna by utilising qualitative data to explore the perceptions of managers working in corporations with developed CSR programmes. Exploring managerial perceptions of motives for CSR initiatives, methods of stakeholder engagement, organisational integration of CSR and its impact on managerial work, this study concludes that an instrumental approach dominates, which indicates an external-internal organisational paradox in the design and execution of CSR initiatives.

A Qualitative Account of Sex Workers: Is It Work Like Any Other?

The world of women and work is aptly included in the social science literature but is the world of women and work, and sex? When women work in the sex industry as strippers, prostitutes or in online chat rooms, is that employment which is subject to labor law protection and provisions of occupational safety and health? Should it be? For the sex worker, according to this book, much depends on the possibility for authentic sexual feeling to be temporarily removed from the workplace of the sex worker, just as a manger might remove the desire for strict ethical adherence from work in a corporate bureaucracy. If the heart and soul of the sex worker is removed from the workplace, in that case, the sex worker is thought to be employed just like the rest of us. Presently, legal protection for sex workers is not quite socially or politically accepted, but neither has been much of any work by women which comes with complete autonomy, freedom, and financial benefit. Wherever sex work may be along the continuum of employment-related credibility, it is made more credible in the book On the Game: Women and Sex Work, a researchbased journey into the public and private worlds of female sex workers. On the Game takes a bold position that few other social scientists are willing to take: that sex work is metaphorically no different from any other wage-earning work. The author states, “I introduce views of prostitution as work, comparable to any other...” (p. 34). Twice in the book, the author provides a famous quote by Marx: ‘Prostitution is only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker...’ (p. 41, p. 125; Marx 1975). On the Game attempts to deconstruct accumulated negative stereotypes of sex workers. It is a book not necessarily unwilling to view prostitution through a cultural lens. Rather, it is willing to do anything, so long as it views prostitution as “simply work”, much the same as work done by non-prostitutes.

1968: Lessons Learned

These last forty years, as each decade grinds to a close, there arrives the anniversary of 1968, with its invitation to nostalgia, the reconsideration of dashed hopes, or a pondering of the paradoxes of frustrated rebellion. Already in 1978 Régis Debray argued that the revolutionaries of '68 were as deluded and disoriented as Columbus arriving in the New World. They thought they were headed for the China of the "cultural revolution" when really they had landed on the beaches of "New Age" California. In the 1990s Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello put a different twist on this idea. The former soixante huitards, they argue in The New Culture of Capitalism, helped to break the dead hand of corporate bureaucracy and unleash a more entrepreneurial capitalism.

Connecting Business Needs with Basic Science

Two separate but simultaneous transformations--one in science, one in business--affect our world and our fortunes today. I believe these ongoing shifts, largely underway by 1995, will irrevocably transform their respective disciplines within a decade. More important, I fully expect that where they interact, the shifts will fundamentally change how the world will operate. While experts have liberally expounded upon these shifts in the literature of their own fields, the interaction between the fields is relatively unexplored. In fact, since the demise of the for-profit research powerhouses, this space has become almost uncharted. The corporate muscle for the technique of long-lead, basic research has atrophied for lack of an ability to directly connect it to future product sales. But something new is happening that is driving business and science back into partnership again. New dynamics and new techniques indicate that the time is ripe to define and exploit their joint potential. In this article I sketch out the transformations and explore the space between them. I explain how scientific understanding at the atomic scale has an increasingly vital link to commercial profit and loss, and how you can recognize the signs that your business has a need that science should be engaged to meet. What's Changing in Business The evolution of global markets is changing how companies must innovate. Speed--not just global scope--is what matters today. The gathering speed within markets deeply challenges conventional expertise, which values long hours and inspired trial and error as the keys to product innovation, market capture and profit growth. Companies tend to plug away at new ideas by trial and error (empirical method) with faith in their employees' expertise, creativity and insight. This is sustaining innovation, which exploits the sunk cost in current assets and extends the momentum of current products; companies naturally stay focused on products and processes at or close to their core business. But this faith and focus comprises a bet placed against the odds that a competitor won't gain the same or similar insights sooner--exercising patent rights and going to market with intellectual property barriers erected and with a significant market timing advantage. More dire, companies live in fear of being blindsided by disruptive innovation coming from known or unknown competition via a new product for an entirely new market that no one knew existed, or a new solution that makes current products obsolete overnight. A company can always counter its competition by expanding facilities, investing in training and hiring additional staff. But none of these tactics address the core limitation of the empirical method. Trial and error include embedded time constraints imposed by the nature of materials, chemistry and physics of the products being developed--no matter what the industry. Nor can such tactics counteract the tendency of all successful companies to repeat what has worked in the past. The entrepreneur's whatever-it-takes spirit of innovation is missing within corporate bureaucracy precisely because the bureaucratic machinery is so successful at churning out current product and sustaining market share over time. Stockholders don't want you to fix what isn't broken. Perturb it at your own peril! However, the entire innovation workflow--from new idea to purchase and use--begs for an overhaul if business is to respond successfully to the increasing speed of global markets. Empirical methods must be augmented with a faster, more grounded approach that gives substance not only to sustaining innovations but also to providing a richer environment for fostering disruptive insights. This new approach must also couple with the business process of identifying the best ideas and turning them into profits. Coming to that realization is the crux of the transformation in business: the need to engage an advanced method to overcome the friction between the speed of competitive innovation and the inherent limits of trial and error. …

The design of things to come: how ordinary people create extraordinary products

The iPod is a harbinger of a revolution in product design: innovation that targets customer emotion, self-image, and fantasy, not just product function. Read the hidden stories behind BodyMedia's SenseWear body monitor, Herman Miller's Mirra Chair, Swiffer's mops, OXO's potato peelers, Adidas' intelligent shoes, the new Ford F-150 pickup truck, and many other winning innovations. Meet the innovators, learning how they inspire and motivate their people, as they shepherd their visions through corporate bureaucracy to profitable reality.i¾ The authors deconstruct the entire process of design innovation, showing how it really works, and how today's smartest companies are innovating more effectively than ever before.

Ergonomics Implementation, the Right Way and the Wrong Way

This paper illustrates some of author's views of the ergonomics implementation challenges within diverse industries, manufacturing, office environments, and machinery/product design. We intend to analyze and review the roots of problems from different perspectives and recommend which ergonomics approaches are likely to succeed or fail. Most importantly it is imperative to find the actual cause(s) of obstacle(s) - problem(s) before looking for appropriate ergonomics solution(s) and acceptance of ergonomics innovations by end users. The presented material is based on the substantial authors' experiences in human factors engineering and ergonomics, in industry and academia and in various countries. Our objective is to present an integrated view of ergonomics within corporate bureaucracy in the contexts of favorable and unfavorable environments - factors that lead to success or failure.

Global Corporate Policy for Financing Health Services in the Third World: The Structural Adjustment Crisis

Western nations and international financiers are usually the donors for most of the Third World countries. International funds allocated for development projects in these nations are under control of such groups, in which global corporate policy, bureaucracy, and neo-liberalization play a major role. International financiers also bias the socio-political, environmental, local administration, and even public health policy of the poor nations. Financial packages are usually sanctioned, distributed, and reimbursed under strict terms and conditions that Third World nations must heed and agree to with the fundamental commitment to change accordingly. Obviously, these terms and conditions are complicated for local governmental authorities. In most of the implementation phase of a project supported by foreign loan/aid, the efficient features of their own or the donors may be reflected, while the proposal and prospects for the actual benefits are left to the local populace. Cutting government spending and neglecting the benefits to poor people, global capitalism maintains corporate policy that may also focus on the goals of profit making instead of public benefit. As such, enhancing privatization, structural adjustments have been devised by the international financiers in many sectors. The reason is that private sectors must necessarily comply with the market dynamics of free choice and with the belief that it could be more efficient and equitable than the local government's action. It is thus important that healthcare professionals, government officials, and others solicit their opinions about international policy on privatization programs through a range of cost-benefit analyses. In order to identify and evaluate the negative effects of structural adjustment, this article comments on international policy for financing health services in the Third World.

Creating an entrepreneurial culture in support of SMEs

This article focuses upon the importance of creating the 'cultural' climate for support of small enterprise development. It might well be a waste of time and resource to concentrate SME development efforts on entrepreneurs and their immediate 'support' agencies unless equal consideration is given to investing in the development of an 'enterprise culture' in the broader SME stakeholder environment. It is this environment that shapes the 'level (or skewed) playing field' for small enterprise development. In recognition of the fact that the words 'entrepreneurship' and 'enterprise culture' are frequently confused in the rhetoric that surrounds development, they are first defined. The enterprise culture derives from the 'life world' of the entrepreneur. Sensitivity to this world and its underpinning values lies at the root of creating conditions for 'effective'(as opposed to socially deviant) entrepreneurial behaviour. Entrepreneurial values and beliefs contrast sharply with those of government and corporate bureaucracy. Therein lies the root of the problem. Key SME stakeholders, and in particular donors, are likely to embrace bureaucratic cultures. Yet they are dominant 'supply side' customers for local development agencies, and as such they are capable of exercising a pervasive bureaucratic influence on the behaviours and values of such agencies, threatening their culture and more important their potential for long-term sustainability. The threat to the enterprise culture may paradoxically come from those who seek to support it. There is therefore an imperative to develop strategies for creating an enterprise culture among key stakeholders. This can only be achieved by a process of strategic partnership learning. How this might be achieved is discussed.

Governance at Ground Level: The Frontline Bureaucrat in the Age of Markets and Networks

Many governments have attempted to rearm their public management systems over the past decade. But how do reforms play out at the ontline of government where the work is done? We looked at the impacts of system changes on frontline staff. In an effort to understand the actual work orientations of ontline bureaucrats, we identified four distinctive images of bureaucratic work: procedural bureaucracy, corporate bureaucracy, market bureaucracy, and network bureaucracy. These images each have different foci on the use of goals, relationships with clients, approach to supervision, disciplinary strategies, and relations with other key organizations in their environment. Looking at government, private nonprofit, and private r-profit organizations, we found only three distinct images. The distinct market and corporate orientations we proposed merged into a single orientation not previously identified or analyzed in the research literature. We also und considerable variation among ontline bureaucrats in their orientations toward bureaucracy. Practitioners appeared to follow three common repertoires, but these were not determined by the type of organization they worked in. Managers wishing to prioritize ontline work may now identify the key attributes of these alternate approaches and compare them with performance information or use them to assess the training needs of agencies contributing to their programs. Clients and their advocates may also use these results to assess their changing prospects under different bureaucratic conditions. Perhaps there was a time when the term bureaucracy had a settled meaning and the institutions that it defined had a standard purpose. If so, this time has passed. In its place has emerged a variety of bureaucracies, temporary and fixed, public and private. Each lays claim to a share of popular attention and provokes supporters and critics. This profusion of bureaucracies raises important questions concerning the work that bureaucrats do, and through this, about the meaning of governance in the contemporary period. Contemporary research and a popular discourse describe changes in how governments, administrators, and theorists wish to define the key tasks of contemporary public officials and the contractors employed to assist them (Aucoin, 1990; Boston et al., 1991; Caiden and Seidentopf, 1982; Knott and Miller, 1987; Kooiman, 1993). Much of this literature takes the side of elected government in seeking to explain the organizational changes needed to improve public service accountability, lower cost, and improve economic performance (Considine, 1994; Pollitt, 1990; Pusey, 1991; March and Olsen, 1983; Metcalf and Richards, 1984). This concern with new ways to organize public bureaucratic work overlaps with the widespread adoption of strategies of privatization, decentralization, and contracting-out (Handler, 1996; Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993; Salamon, 1989), notwithstanding the obvious conflict involved when policymakers attempt to improve public organizations while simultaneously proposing to sell or abolish them. Many reformers include in their frame of reference a consideration of certain new norms and rules of conduct for the public official at the local, or ground level (see for example, Barzeley, 1992; Osborne & Gaebler, 1993). But for the most part, the literature has concerned itself with systemwide issues, or with changes in management behavior. Less attention has been given to the way ordinary officials reshape their roles in these times of significant structural change. Smith and Lipsky (1993) and Handler (1996) are exceptions to this general rule, providing valuable studies of local level effects in the US case. The systemwide changes described in the literature and publicized in the mass media are now so widespread in their effects in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the USA, and so persistent in their hold on the attention of successive generations of reformers, that we may logically expect them to have had major influences upon the local level behaviors, expectations, and strategies of ordinary public officials. …