This paper surveys the history of an alternative view of value creation to that associated with industrial production. It argues that technical breakthroughs and social innovations in actual value creation render the alternative - a value co-production framework - ever more pertinent. The paper examines some of the implications of adopting this framework to describe and understand business opportunity, management, and organizational practices. In the process, it reviews the research opportunities a value co-production framework opens up.

Value co-production: intellectual origins and implications for practice and research

In this article, the author explores the nature of contemporary organizational controls, the extent to which they can be said to colonize employee subjectivity, and the types of resistance which they generate. Labor process, psychoanalytic, critical theory, and Foucauldian perspectives are juxtaposed and a number of similarities and divergences are noted. It is argued that many of these perspectives prematurely lament the end of employee recalcitrance and exaggerate the magnitude and totality of organizational controls, generating over-managed and overcontrolled images of individuals, organizations, and societies. It is proposed that a rapprochement of psychoanalytic and labor theory approaches can lead to an appreciation of unmanaged and unmanageable terrains in organizations, in which human agency may be rediscovered, neither as a class-conscious proletariat nor as a transcendental subject, but as a struggling, feeling, thinking, suffering subject, one capable of obeying and disobeying, controlling and ...

Beyond Happy Families: A Critical Reevaluation of the Control-Resistance-Identity Triangle

We introduce the concept of identity workspaces, defined as institutions that provide a holding environment for individuals' identity work. We propose that institutions offering reliable social defenses, sentient communities, and vital rites of passage are likely to be experienced as identity workspaces. The fluidity of contemporary corporate environments and the movement toward individually driven careers has generated an increased need for identity work, while concurrently rendering corporations less reliable as spaces in which to conduct it. As a result, we posit that business schools are increasingly invested with the function of identity workspaces. The conceptual framework presented here provides a lens to better understand how and why business schools are called upon to fulfill a function of growing importance—developing management education that goes beyond influencing what managers know and do, and supports them in understanding and shaping who they are.

Identity Workspaces: The Case of Business Schools

Public management is an internationally recognized field of research, teaching, and practice owing in significant measure to the leading role played by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and its journal, the Journal of Public Policy and Management (JPAM) for over 30 years. The term “public management” had been familiar in, although not central to, the field of public administration for decades—the cognate term in public policy schools was “policy implementation.” The contribution of APPAM’s public management scholars was to add a “strategic, political” dimension to the concept of public management, in effect negating the dichotomy between “politics” and “administration,” which had dominated the older field. As Richard Elmore was to put it in his classic article (discussed below; Elmore, 1986, p. 69):

公共管理 = Public management

Methodology is a central issue in the theory and practise of information systems development. Structured methods, for instance, have been widely championed as providing a way of improving the quality of software systems. In this paper a case study is presented in which a mail order company made an attempt to implement a well-known methodology, Structured Systems Analysis and Design Methodology (SSADM). Far from facilitating the development process, SSADM encouraged a rigid and mechanical approach in which the methodology was applied in a ritualistic way which inhibited creative thinking. The argument is thus, that methodology, although its influence may be benign, has the potential to operate as a 'social defence', i.e. as a set of organizational rituals with the primary function of containing anxiety. The grandiose illusion of an all-powerful method allows practitioners to deny their feelings of impotence in the face of the daunting technical and political challenges of systems development. By withdrawing into this fantasy world the learning processes that are critical to the success of systems development are jeopardized. Methodology, whilst masquerading as the epitome of rationality, may thus operate as an irrational ritual, the enactment of which provides designers with a feeling of security and efficiency at the expense of real engage- ment with the task at hand.

The fetish of technique: methodology as a social defence

This article explores a maladaptive response organizations are making to the great uncertainty and turbulence they face. The authors describe the ways in which management and leadership are split apart, with one aspect idealized and the other devalued, as a "social defense" against confronting the adaptive demands of contemporary operating environments. Two variants of this social defense are examined: "managerialism" which looks to the magic of technique and "heroism" which focuses on the heroic leader. Responding effectively to current conditions requires linking what has come to be viewed as leadership, the visionary and mission setting aspects of executive action, with management, the apparatuses and tools for achieving organizational purposes.

The Splitting of Leadership and Management as a Social Defense

A consensus is emerging that contemporary organizations are in critical need of leadership with compelling vision. Often this leads to an overemphasis on the personality or character of the leader....

Lessons from the Field: An Essay on the Crisis of Leadership in Contemporary Organizations:

Increasingly, public sector executives are using ad hoc groups and processes—what we term “parallel processes”—as a vehicle for innovation. The central question is, however, when parallel processes are developmental and when they are bypasses that avoid critical issues. This paper reviews some potential weaknesses in the use of such groups by examining several cases that show how they can impede the actual implementation of the innovation. We propose a transitional perspective that regards parallel process as scaffolding, enabling new ideas and behaviors to grow strong enough to eventually allow their transfer to the permanent structure.

James Krantz

Papers

The Splitting of Leadership and Management as a Social Defense

Lessons from the Field: An Essay on the Crisis of Leadership in Contemporary Organizations:

Innovation in the public sector: Dilemmas in the use of Ad Hoc processes