The economics of organizations is replete with the pitfalls of monetary rewards and punishments to motivate workers. If economic incentives do not work, what does? This paper proposes that workers’ self-image as jobholders, coupled with their ideal as to how their job should be done, can be a major work incentive. It shows how such identities can flatten reward schedules, as they solve the “principal-agent” problem. The paper also identifies and explores a new tradeoff: supervisors may provide information to principals, but create rifts within the workforce and reduce employees ’ intrinsic work incentives. We motivate the theory with examples from the classic sociology of military and civilian organizations.

During the summer of 2000, the government will introduce a new system of pay and performance management for teachers. The Centre for Economic Performance is conducting a ‘before-andafter’ panel study of teachers and schools to ascertain its effects on motivation and performance. This paper reports preliminary findings from the first wave of the survey, before the introduction of the new system. The likely effects of the new system, on the basis of these results, are examined from the point of view of motivation and work behaviour, and potential recruitment. The danger of widespread de-motivation is a serious one, and it is essential that the new scheme be seen by teachers to operate fairly and to provide the necessary support to teachers wishing to pass the ‘Threshold’. A key role is envisaged for the teachers ’ unions in building teachers ’ confidence that the scheme will be operated fairly, and this, it is argued, fits with the government’s views on the benefits of labour-management partnership. This paper was produced under the ‘Future of Trade Unions in Modern Britain ’ Programme supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The Centre for Economic Performance acknowledges with thanks, the generosity of the Trust. For more information concerning this Programme please e-mail

This is a chapter about power in groups and organizations. In the following pages, we suggest that the analysis and exploration of the complexities of organizational power by managers and workers is both necessary and useful. We begin by discussing three of the prominent theoretical perspectives on power from the literatures of social and organizational psychology and critical management studies. We then outline some of the dilemmas and challenges faced by executives, managers and workers around empowerment, disempowerment and organizational democracy. Then, building on the seminal works of Follet, Deutsch, Tjosvold, Clegg, Mumby and others, we offer a framework of organizational power which views power as a multifaceted phenomenon; as thoughts, words and deeds which are both embedded within and determining of a complex network of relations, structures and meaning-making processes at different levels of organizational and community life. Such a framework enables us to understand the relational aspects of power and authority within the context of the macro structures and ideologies that give them meaning. It can also help identify those domains in organizations where the potential for sharing cooperative power is, in fact, not

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This paper presents an analysis of institutional influences upon knowledge creation within professional service firms whose main business is the provision of consultancy services. Such firms, we argue, provide an important setting for examining such influences because their survival depends on their ability to mobilize and synthesize professional bodies of knowledge. They, therefore, directly confront the constraints that institutionalized professions pose for processes of knowledge creation. By exploring the influence of the institutional context, the paper extends earlier work on professional service and knowledge-intensive firms which has tended to adopt an organizational-level focus on knowledge creation. In such work, knowledge creation has been viewed in broad, taxonomic terms (for example, contrasting tacit and explicit forms of knowledge), which has tended to neglect the heterogeneous nature of knowledge and its embeddedness in different institutional contexts. A comparative analysis of two firms located in different institutional contexts (science and the law) seeks to establish some of the major mechanisms through which professional institutions influenced knowledge creation. Specifically, our study focuses on three major arenas in which

An initial version of this paper was first presented at the 2 nd

This paper explores the link between organizational identity (OI) and strategy in an analysis of data from an organization actively engaged in a strategy development process. It strengthens the findings of Dutton and Dukerich (1991) and Glynn (2000) by supporting the idea that OI and strategy are linked, but it also extends their work by showing that the OI-strategy relationship is important not only in the “crisis” situations they discuss. Moreover, the preliminary findings we gathered during a series of workshops with this firm directly implicate imaginative processes in representing OI, akin to the concept of national “imagined communities ” proposed by Anderson (1991). We suggest that “imagining OI ” can therefore improve strategy, just as it appears to have done for the 3 business divisions discussed in this research. As a result, this research is the first to discern a close relationship among OI, imagination, and strategy.

Note: The authors wish to thank the participants of the Group of Management Education Researchers seminar group at Washington University in St. Louis for their helpful comments. This paper refines and extends research on organizational control, justice, and trust by examining the actions managers take regarding three critical managerial functions: control, trustbuilding, fairness-building. Whereas past work has primarily evaluated responses to managerial actions, this paper introduces and develops a theory of the determinants of three types of managerial actions: task controls, trust-building activities, fairness-building activities. Specifically, we focus on how the presence of various forms of superior-subordinate conflicts (concerning goals, tasks, and interpersonal issues) stimulate managerial concerns around subordinate task performance and their own managerial legitimacy. We argue that managers attempt to address these concerns using particular combinations of task control, trust-building, and fairness-building initiatives. The paper concludes with a discussion about how the theory we pose here refines and extends research on organizational control, organizational trust, and organizational fairness. 2

We thank the contact persons and participants who made it possible for us to gather field data in their respective organizations. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences

Fueled by and fueling a larger cultural trend toward consumerist notions of social relationships is a hot management fad: celebrating the power of brands and recommending marketing concepts and branding practices as tools for general organizational management. An initial wave of advice on expanding branding as a marketing tool (e.g. Pine and Gilmore, 1999), is now giving way to arguments for organizations themselves to become brands. Under the rubric of “Living the Brand ” (Ind, 2001; Pringle & Gordon, 2001), these arguments go beyond advising organizations on how to create brands to recommend that organizations apply branding practices to themselves (Davis & Dunn, 2002). By presenting branding practices as tools for general management, marketing rhetoric is largely appropriating long standing knowledge about organizational socialization and culture, repositioning it, and renaming it organizational branding. What’s new here is the way that marketing rhetoric is being used to reposition the desirable relationships between an organization, its products, and its members (Hackley, 2003). Marketing rhetoric tells managers to “treat employees as customers ” by “selling ” the organization to its employees and treating employees ’ evaluation of their organization as a kind of “customer satisfaction ” (Cardy, 2001).