The Organizational View of Strategic Management

The organizational view of strategic management views strategic decisions as outcomes of organizational goals and environmental influences. Central research streams are institutional theory and network theory on environmental influences, and learning theory and resource dependence theory on organizational interaction with the environment. Currently active research topics are centered on how societal groups influence organizations, intraorganizational individuals and groups pursue their own goals, and organizations pursue their goals by choosing strategic actions that maneuver societal constraints. Research is beginning to crystallize a view of environments and organizational structures interacting closely with strategy, with organizations learning to shape their interorganizational networks and surrounding institutions to their benefit. Comparison of performance and aspiration levels on multiple goals helps organizations time and direct strategic changes. The organizational view is a prominent part of strategic management and has enough unanswered questions to spur significant future research.

Self-organization of power at will

We challenge and extend Ainslie's top-down view of willpower as a dual function, resolve and suppression. Instead, we propose an alternative self-organizational view of the motivational system as a network of urges, incentives, drives, and so on that interact dynamically. With such a view, resolve, suppression, and other functions emerge under certain environmental and social conditions for certain personality profiles.

Do Functions Explain? Hegel and the Organizational View

In this paper I return to Hegel's dispute with Kant over the conceptual ordering of external and internal purposiveness to distinguish between two conceptions of teleology at play in the contemporary function debate. I begin by outlining the three main views in the debate (the etiological, causal role and organizational views). I argue that only the organizational view can maintain the capacity of function ascriptions both to explain the presence of a trait and to identify its contribution to a current system, for it is the only view that considers teleology as a natural cause. To establish how teleology can be considered as a natural cause, advocates of the organizational view return to Kant's analysis of internal purposiveness. However, while Kant identifies the requirements that an object must meet to satisfy the demands of teleological judgment, I suggest that he denies that we can know whether they are truly met. I argue that Hegel's philosophy of nature is better equipped to determine how internal purposiveness can be considered as a natural cause, for it grounds organization in a form of purposiveness that is more fundamental than a designer's intention.

Influence of Organizational Factors in the Sustainability of E-Government

The majority of e-government implementations and their subsequent use, particularly in developing countries, have resulted in high rates of failure. These failures of e-government implementation have been caused by a plethora of organizational, human, financial and infrastructure challenges that mostly result from organizational factors such as lack of resources, political commitment and poor collaboration. These commonly result when government organizations try to sustain their e-government facilities alone and have insufficient resources, competence, and legitimacy to do so. This study is an attempt to understand how organizational factors shape the sustainability of e-government implementation within a local government context. A case study of local e-government implementation is presented and then analyzed from perspective of organizational view. Our construct is based on organizational factors that are commonly found to influence information systems implementation. Our findings show that organizational factors such as organizational and employees' professionalism, commitment, coordination and cooperation, and responsibility sharing among local government institutions have influenced the sustainability of e-government implementation within the local government. Our findings also show that e-government is a complex project that requires coordination and cooperation among actors as well as the need to share responsibility among the actors to support the sustainability of the project.

Patterns of accountability: an organizational approach to community engagement in museums.

This paper considers the divergent and often contradictory registers of ‘community engagement’ in contemporary UK museum practice. The paper draws on an organizational study of a large local authority museum service and focuses on how community engagement is constructed across a range of museum professionals who use it for different purposes and outcomes. I argue that different departments make sense of community engagement through four patterns of accountability, each with complimentary and divergent logics reflecting a wider range of museum functions, demands and pressures. The tensions that arise are discussed. In the final part, the notion of ‘relational accountability’ (Moncrieffe 2011) is introduced to re-settle these divergent logics in order to argue for community engagement work that is grounded in a relational practice. The paper contributes to further theoretical and practical engagement with the work of participation in museums by bringing forward an organizational view to highlight the ways in which museum practice is mediated within organizational frames.

The Retreat, York: an Organizational View of an Applied Group Analytic Approach

This article explores the discourse of care at The Retreat, York by examining its birth within moral treatment, Quakerism and the birth of asylums. I develop this further by linking these discourses into subsequent movements, namely group analysis and the therapeutic community movement. Through problematizing this history, I offer a new register for considering care in communities and groups by suggesting the use of the pedagogical concept of ‘figured worlds’. By doing so I aim to offer a contemporary view of moral treatment and suggest this is more important than ever given the nature of austerity in our current socio-economic paradigm at the possible end of British neoliberalist politics.