Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Strategic Organisation Lecture 1
...


Have a look at the module handbook it tells you what each lecture entails – do reading on
these before you come to class
...


You must participate on VITAL in order to confirm you have contributed to group work
...


Your discussion board will get checked every day… Put any questions you have on there he
can answer you
...


Organisations:
Oxford English dictionary – it is a development of coordination of parts
...
Organised systematic ordering or arrangements
...


Cooper and Burrell (1988) – a bounded social system
...
This term is quite
scathed; it probes into the question of organisation
...


Is it difficult to say where an organisation starts and stops? (Do they work within
boundaries) – People part of an organisation are hard to control
...
Scott 1988 –
exploring worker’s resistance to certain schemes
...


Rational/non-rational organisational behaviours? (Do they act rationally) – an organisation
should have an overall framework for organisational behaviour and the process of decision
making
...


Decision makers are usually not the people who make the decisions – form of goals and
hierarchy are sometimes not the case within organisations
...
The inclusion of an idea from a different domain
into the present domain
...
Machine serves quite well as a metaphor
...
Complex device consisting of a number of integrated devices to
perform a certain kind of work
...
Organisations don’t just exist they may emerge and decay
...


Strategy
Strategos – general in command of an army (stratos meaning army and ag meaning to lead)
– The ancient Greeks began with this theory
...
Those who sit
back and ponder cannot have any strategic possibility
...


Everything is a strategy – if you want to lose weight you need a strategy, if you want a
career you need a strategy
...
What makes a
student strategic vs
...
It is not just for
one thing it is for everything
...
Strategist
is someone who thinks in the long-run, not in specifics, doesn’t just do and is a thinker
...
This is not concerned with a specific encounter is
depicts the entire battle
...


Rationality means not just to have a map, but to abstract from the map in a quantitative
way
...
Brodie (1959), Von Clausewitz –
most intelligence is false, intelligence reports in war are contradictory even more false and
even more uncertain
...
“To be modern”
...
Technological transformation of the entire world
...
Strategists handcraft the modernist ideas
...
Porter is modern, he thinks in a modernist spirit that we should be
abstract, and think long-term and make decisions rationally, he believes in the grid
...
2 opposite views from very different ends of the spectrum
...
What does it mean if one is
sociological driven and one is economically driven? Try to prepare for the 1st session
...
So, the economist
(modernist) quantitative tries to simplify business strategy, whereas, the sociology (postmodernist) qualitative looking too in-depth and over-complicates it
...

From a sociological perspective, the concern moves up a level, to consider strategy
as a broad field of social activity, whose practices are important to society as a
whole
...

From a managerial perspective, the concern shifts down a level, to get inside firms’
overall strategy processes to the actual activities of strategy’s practitioners
...

FROM A MANAGERIAL PERSPECTIVE, WE CAN NOW GET INSIDE A FIRMS OVER ALL
STRATEGY UNDERSTANDING THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ORGANISATION
...

KNIGHTS AND MORGAN (1991) SUPPORT WHITTINGTON, SAYING THAT STRATEGY
EFFECTS ARE FELT THROUGHOUT SOCIETY
However, the economic idea is powerful, Whittington doesn’t agree by taking
blinkers off and seeing the cogs
...

Rather than just meeting targets, they can focus on establishing interactions with
stakeholders and the strategy
...
Economic will
understand it as a quantitative knowledge,

Porter (1996)
•
•

•
•
•
•
•
•

The conception of strategy is nice simple picture (5 forces)
...

Ackoff, Ansoff, Drucker and Steiner developed new ways of doing strategy, based on
deep experience with American corporations such as Lockheed, General Electric and
General Motors
...

Operational effectiveness is necessary but not sufficient
...
It is all about being competitive and sustainable
...
Porter’s main idea is competitiveness
...
You need
to adapt to other strategies
...
Using social media to show
their high quality positioning
...
What is exciting, is that his approach towards activity systems looks a bit
more like left-field post-modernist approaches
...
Yet, despite their
ubiquity, it is rather difficult to ‘define’ what an organisation is
...
Such a theory must not only be an observation
of facts
...
It needs to entail the construal of those facts to show how the

human mind can understand the swirl of all these things, people, artefacts, and processes
that we invoke what we mean by ‘organisation’
...
Where, for instance, does an organisation start and end? Take
the University of Liverpool – is it enough to include the lecture theatres, classrooms, and the
offices of academics to sufficiently describe this organisation? Doesn’t ‘it’ also extend to the
certificates that students earn, their biographies and careers propelled by such a prestigious
degree, and therefore their work-lives, their families, and son on? Moreover, what about
lecturers? Do we have to include their past experience, and their future ambitions, their
publications and so on? As you can see, it is quite difficult to draw a fixed ‘boundary’ around
this phenomenon we call ‘organisation’
...
But what is such
organisation like? Is it about doing the exactly same thing every day? For instance, can we
really speak of the same organization at two points in time, say in 1983 and 2013? While the
University of Liverpool, for instance, has been there much longer, is it really the same
organisation thirty years on? There are new buildings, new lecturers and professors,
different students, and I suspect you would be quite bewildered if I tried to teach you in the
same way in which students were taught 30 years ago
...
Academics have, for
instance, investigated organisational ‘routines’ and found that, quite often, there are
substantial variations in the seemingly fixed ways we work every day, because life always
brings new problems and challenges, so that one fixed approach doesn’t get one particularly
far
...


Early thinkers in what is now called ‘organisation and management studies’ have come up
with a number of metaphors to capture such patterns; the most widely used one being that
of the organisation as a ‘machine’
...
He
identified the task of organisation as combining, or assembling many trades and many skills,
the most logical way to do so was by analysing each process scientifically and find out what
works best and is most efficient
...
Here, rationality, logic
and scientific rigour play a key role in steering the organisation
...
This is, of
course not only an unrealistic picture of the human being (we are not really cogs or other
parts of a machine) – it is also potentially dangerous
...
You can already see from the terminology that BPR refers to a machine-like

conception of how organisations work, as there is an assumption that they can be reengineered in the same way as for example a motor or any other mechanical contraption
...
To manage these units, portfolio planning methods were developed (such as the BCG
matrix, for instance)
...
BPR, which was promoted and also
conducted through the involvement of management consultancy companies, led to largescale redundancies in the wake of improved efficiency and more streamlined organisational
machines
...
We will encounter such rational bases of organising, and also
of steering the organisation strategically, throughout this module, in particular when we will
discuss the predominantly North-American approaches to understanding and prescribing
strategic courses of action
...
First, there is the work of the German
sociologist Max Weber who, in the 1920s proposed ‘law’ to be the basis of modern
organisations
...
One interesting
aspect here is that, in addition to an affinity with the image of the machine, there is a clear
top-down tendency; ‘thinking’ is left to senior managers and ‘doing’ to lower ranks
...


However, in particular since the 1990s academics have started to replace the rather stale
and static image or metaphor of the machine when speaking about organisations
...

Organisms are, of course, living systems and as such they interact with their environment
and some are better adapted to the particular contextual demands than others
...
They may face
extinction, for instance when they are not able to adjust to new demands, for example
when markets change (think of the European Union, for instance) or when technological
breakthroughs require new ways of operating (think of the book market before Amazon,
music before Apple, information before Google, or photography before the digital age)
...
It is also clear that
viewing the organisation as an organism means that the ‘boundaries’ between the outside
and inside are less clearly demarcated
...
To ‘manage’ an
organism is a very different affair to managing a machine and, depending on what view one
subscribes to, very different ideas about what it may mean to ‘organise’ may ensue
...


There are many more ways of understanding organisations and you may want to read
Gareth Morgan’s book: ‘Images of organization’ (Sage, 2006, London) for an overview, or
you refer to the work of Barbara Czarniawska who has written much on organisations as
action nets, or you may find the publications by James R
...
g
...
van Every; Routledge, 2001, Abingdon,
Oxon) about the communicative basis of organisations interesting
...


11
...
2 Strategy
This brings us to the term/concept of strategy, which is equally subject to a diverse and
often co-existing set of worldviews, theories and positions
...


We can get a sense of these views when we look at the emergence of the term “strategy”,
stemming from the Greek ‘strategos’
...
e
...
Later it came to denote a
board of generals occupying political functions more generally
...
There are of
course other military connections; most famously perhaps the ancient military treatise ‘Art
of War’ by Sun Tsu, or von Clausewitz’s recollections of his military expertise ‘On War’
...


It is not only the language that has retained a military tone; also the modus operandi is
often reflective of military planning processes
...
In
military as well as in business contexts there are therefore particular demands placed upon
leaders to not only be able to analytically survey a scenario, but to also gain the support of
followers and to deal with the day-to-day situations that disrupt and endanger carefully laid
out plans and idealized scenarios
...
In addition to
(or as an alternative– depending on the particular school of thought), there are researchers
suggesting that military-style planning is not an ideal means of dealing with a world that is
continually on the move; where the only seeming stability is that of continuous change
...
One of the
most famous of these is his claim that ‘all things flow’ (you may have heard of a number of
variations of this saying, such as ‘one cannot step in the same river twice’ or ‘the only stable
thing is change’)
...
Henry Mintzberg, an often
cited strategy researcher, calls this the ‘fallacy of predetermination’ – referring to the
difficulty of making reliable, long-term predictions about the future so as to develop plans of
action
...
You see, nouns make us think in static ways; about fixed
entities when, really, what we talk about are many different processes that continually
change because ‘all things flow’
...
We start with the structure of the industry within which a firm
operates and investigate its implications for the possible performance of a firm and the
strategic directions necessary to attain abnormal returns
...
In this
module we will therefore look at both the more rational (and often predominantly NorthAmerican approaches) to marshalling the business environment, as well as the more critical
(and often more European) approaches that have come to understand strategy from
sociological, philosophical, critical or ecological perspectives
...


This module contains six lectures
...
We then move
towards the ‘inside’ of the firm, where we discuss resource bases, competences and
capabilities of the firm
...
1
...
As early as 1956, Administrative Science Quarterly, a
top-tier American journal (above, I have suggested you look at the ABS list to find out how
journals are ‘ranked’, that is, how highly they are regarded by academics and how often the
ideas published therein are cited), has focused more exclusively on issues of organisation;
Organization Studies, a top European journal was founded in 1980 with a similar focus
...
This split has also been
evident in academic groups, and quite often, it seems, there is not too much discussion
between them
...
Organisation
Studies, on the other hand, often draws on sociology and even philosophy, which has led to
some fundamentally different and partly incommensurable ideas about how to understand
and guide organisations strategically
...
You can see from more recent
journals like ‘Strategic Organization’ that both areas may very well be dealt with together
...
We will encounter this work towards the end of or lectures, when
we investigate strategy as practice research approaches

---