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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Nascent strategic entrepreneuring as a complex responsive process

Thomson, Thane Ogilvie 05 August 2012 (has links)
Following the call of recent authors for an improved process-oriented model of entrepreneurship, this exploratory research study sets out to understand the process of entrepreneurship, or “entrepreneuring”. It uses perspectives from the process-oriented view of reality, social constructionism and the complexity sciences. The aim of this study was to construct new questions, using the theoretical lens afforded by these perspectives, which would fuel further research toward developing a process-oriented model of entrepreneurship ‒ or point out the intractability of such a problem. Eleven individuals, who were considered to be early-stage entrepreneurs, were selected for qualitative interviews. A narrative analysis of these interviews was performed which showed, within the context of the process of entrepreneuring, that the emergent themes could be understood from the alternative theoretical paradigms covered in the literature. Several important questions for future research emerged, alongside the understanding that an alternative to the mechanistic/systemic perspective is to be sought, and that the process of entrepreneuring might be better understood within the broader context of power and social influence dynamics. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted
2

The cult value of quality improvement in healthcare : complex social processes of working with targets

Brown, Shona January 2008 (has links)
There has been an ongoing debate on quality and what constitutes quality improvement in healthcare for several decades. Several authors identify that defining quality is an important part of that debate, yet recognise that quality is defined differently by different interests (Caper, 1988; Harteloh, 2003). Harteloh's distinction between quality as a property (a descriptive approach) and quality as a category of judgment (a prescriptive approach) has influenced the conception of quality as a property of participation emerging in this research. This is in stark contrast to the wide spread prescriptive approach set out in published accounts of quality and quality improvement. In the mainstream management literature, conventionally organisations are understood as systems and this conceptualisation underpins many published considerations of quality. In this way of thinking, those involved in leading quality improvement are thought to operate as autonomous individuals who design improvement tools and control improvements according to plans. It is taken for granted that it is possible for a powerful individual to step out of the organisational system and treat it as an object for manipulation and change, following the diagnosis of problem areas and gaps. Yet at other times that autonomous individual becomes part of the system and is subject to manipulation and change by others. As with much of the literature of change management, this approach sets "thought" before "action". In other words, "thought" is understood as the formulation of a plan and "action" is the implementation of that plan. In this thesis, it is my contention that this way of thinking leads to a privileging of the more mechanical and cybernetic elements of quality improvement - such as tools and techniques of waste elimination and fault detection, and, of particular interest in this thesis, the use of national targets in the public sector. My research is underpinned by a complex responsive processes perspective (Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000). Central to this theory of human interaction is the importance of understanding everyday experience from the perspective of inquiring into “…just what is it that we are doing in our groups or in our organisations that leads to emergent patterns that are our experience…” (Stacey, 2003c: 32). In this thesis, I take up a key question raised by Stacey (2006) concerning how those working in the public sector institutions are operationalising central government governance requirements. I explore my experience of working locally with nationally determined performance targets for access to emergency care. I argue for consideration of quality improvement as a cult value along the lines defined by Mead (1923). In conceptualising quality improvement in this way, my inquiry focuses on what happens as we try to make sense of the ways in which our daily activities are being influenced by competing ideologies, by power relations that are played out, and by the enabling and constraining aspects of going on together in patterns of conversation. These are the complex social processes of working with targets I refer to in the title of this thesis. It is my contention that this perspective draws attention to quality as a property of our own participation as managers, rather than the more usual exhortations to look for the next tool for instilling quality into the organisation. As such, I argue that this research makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on quality, as well as managerial practice. I propose that the participative and socially reflexive nature of the qualitative methodology involved provides a practical example of Mode 2 research, addressing what MacLean, MacIntosh and Grant (2002) identify as a current gap in the literature. Finally, I posit a potential contribution to policy making seeking to address a growing recognition from some policy makers regarding what is now being seen as an increasing problematic reliance on traditional, modernist assumptions of programmatic change.
3

Change and continuity through mergers & acquisitions

Azadegan, Farshid January 2013 (has links)
I have lived through nineteen mergers and acquisitions and without moving companies, have signed eight employment contracts, all following M&As. Only two of the eight companies still trade, the others went bankrupt or shut down. My roles have been in engineering, sales, middle management and more recently a contributor at meetings where M&As were discussed and advisors attended. Despite professional advice, these M&As rarely turned out as planned including the envisaged growth and improvements. Often matters got worse, even for top executives. Yet, in both the literature and the way that people talk, businesses and individuals are portrayed as separate entities, M&As are aimed at changing only the businesses and are routinely associated with growth and improvements. My experience of M&As includes confusion about power and powerlessness, a sense of loss of valued relationships, identity issues and idealization of merged businesses. Using a narrative methodology and taking my experience seriously (Stacey and Griffin, 2005), I explore change and continuity through M&As and the experiencing of organizational upheavals. I also explore change in the idea of M&As and how we think of them. Drawing on complex responsive processes theory, I argue that we can enhance our understanding of change and continuity through M&As by exploring our experience of local interaction. Combined organizations as patterns of local interactions between people where these patterns emerge and evolve in the interplay of intentions, plans, actions and choices of all involved includes those between members of the merged organizations and between them and advisors, mediators, shareholders, competitors, customers, regulators and the media. To say that combined businesses emerge in this interplay is to understand change and continuity in terms of these evolving patterns of local interaction. These patterns include interpretations and conversations reflecting our ideologies, power relations, identities, idealizations and expectations about M&As. My expectations and reflections were influenced by and influence the discourse about M&As which I argue as social object evolves through our complex responsive processes of relating. Idealization of merged businesses, professional advice, the mainstream view of M&As as growth and improvement which amounts to ‘putting thought before action’ (Griffin, 2002: 25), all emerge and evolve through local interaction validating reflexive exploration of experience to enhance our understanding of change and continuity through M&As.
4

A reappraisal of the involvement of an internal consultant in processes of culture change in a public transport organisation

Visser, Mathilde January 2012 (has links)
In the dominant management discourse, managers and consultants are credited with the ability to move their organisation in a planned, controlled way towards an idealised future. The assumptions underpinning this discourse include the following: organisations are thought of as systems that can be designed and steered in an intended direction; culture is seen as a control system to align employees’ conduct in support of the organisation’s strategy; consultants are viewed as experts in designing and implementing effective and efficient interventions, being on top of the process. These assumptions are grounded in the natural sciences of certainty, in which rational, formative and linear causality are presumed. I argue in this thesis, through a reflexive enquiry of my own practice, that these assumptions do not sufficiently resonate with my experience as an internal consultant on leadership and culture change. I am offering a critique of the dominant way of understanding organisations, culture and control, with the implication of coming to reappraise the involvement of a consultant in processes of culture change. In understanding organisations to be self-organising patterns of human interaction, culture is a social phenomenon, as it continually emerges as social control in the day-to-day local interactions of people making sense of experience. Using webs of significance, present in one’s personal history and in society, people interpret and give order to their life as they negotiate and evaluate their engagements together. In their engagement, participants will negotiate how to functionalise general values in particular situations that involve differences and can cause anxiety or even conflict. In this process of negotiation and evaluation, they are forming and being formed by each other. In this interaction no one is in control, determining in a predictable way what will happen. The participants have an influence that impacts on potential next steps in their interaction. An internal consultant’s involvement is in facilitating these processes of local interaction, enabling participants to have the conversations they tend not to have themselves, perhaps due to the anxiety of the interaction being unpredictable and predictable at the same time while no one is in control of the process or the outcome. A consultant is, as fellow participant, involved in the interaction while forming and being formed by it. He is at the same time detached: by inviting participants to work with and reflect on their experience of engaging, he enables reflexive awareness of what they are involved in together. The internal consultant, through temporary leadership, facilitates the conversation by focusing on the present, and working with differences, allowing the potential for novelty and change to occur. This temporary leadership is not a designated role or the authority of being the expert, but emerges in social interaction, through recognition and acceptance of participants acknowledging the consultant as leader in having a stronger influence than others. I propose that this alternative perspective does not offer a set of techniques, a causal framework to improve organisations in an intended and controlled way, as supposed in the dominant discourse. Rather, the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating enables a better understanding of human interaction processes; of culture emerging as social control and consulting as a social process, within the paradoxes of predictability and unpredictability, of being and not being in control, and of stability and change at the same time. It requires an internal consultant to assume a form of temporary leadership by enabling participants, through reflexive understanding of their experience, to be responsible in a critically aware manner of the ways in which they influence the next steps of engaging.
5

Acting into the living present : taking account of complexity and uncertainty when leading consultancy teams in international water projects

Iversen, Leif January 2017 (has links)
This thesis addresses how leaders find themselves doing something even when they don't know what to do. It is based on my own practice as an experienced team leader and it deals with questions of action, time, identity and leadership. A classic understanding of action usually reflects an expectation of a rational means-ends relationship where actions are designed and applied by individuals to reach well-defined goals within a certain context and within a certain time. In contrast, in this thesis, I describe acting as a much more complex process, as something becoming, as a patterning of activities involving multiple actors in a continuous and complex interweaving of relationships. I describe my experience of leading a team of consultants in international development projects where I inquire into how we often find ourselves acting into uncertainty even when we are not at all sure what to do. Adopting the theory of complex responsive processes of relating, which combines insights from the complexity sciences, social psychology and process sociology, I have come to see acting in our projects as complex, unpredictable, emerging themes and patterns of dialogues between colleagues, clients and other actors, rather than as an activity undertaken by an individual such as a team leader. I do not have an outside position to acting in a project as I am fully involved in the process while this paradoxically influences me at the same time. I argue that acting is related to identity, which can be understood as a sense of self, a person's moral self-interpretation which has a narrative structure and which is continuously being formed by (and is forming) one's acting. I argue that my experience of our practice may be explained by the pragmatists' understanding of acting based on actual lived experience where the means paradoxically become our 'ends-in-view' and vice versa, meaning that we do not just try to maintain a theoretical, future goal but move forwards towards what is practically possible, what we find useful and what makes sense in the present. Acting happens in a living present, meaning that we understand the present through our interpretation of the past as well as our expectation of the future, and we construct this living present as something that works for us when we pursue our collective aims and interests. In the process of acting, there is an arrow on time, meaning that what has been said cannot be unsaid, wherefore it is important to reflect on the perspective of 'ends-in-view' and to understand how acting into a situation may reveal new opportunities. The thesis contributes to knowledge within my profession as an original invitation to think differently about two aspects: first, seeing acting in a project with a much more processual, temporal and encompassing understanding where action is not located in an individual; second, understanding how acting is influenced by one's identity, a sense of self, which is paradoxically being formed by the acting at the same time. Further, the thesis identifies sociality, being different things at the same time (Mead, 1932/2002), as a new aspect in the theory of complex responsive processes of relating (Stacey, Griffin, & Shaw, 2000), recognising its significance in the process of understanding of how novelty occurs. The thesis contributes to my practice in terms of an increased reflexivity and acceptance that a team leader cannot determine outcomes in advance; that leadership is a complex process involving many actors; and that observing ends-in-view may create new and surprising ways forward. I find that these insights can lead to an increased acceptance of how we can act under conditions of uncertainty.
6

Power and narrative in project management : lessons learned in recognising the importance of phronesis

Rogers, Michael David January 2014 (has links)
A component part of modern project management practice is the ‘lessons learned’ activity that is designed to transfer experience and best practice from one project to another, thus improving the practice of project management. The departure point for this thesis is: If we are learning lessons from our experiences in project management, then why are we not better at managing projects? It is widely cited in most project management literature that 50–70% of all projects fail for one reason or another, a figure that has steadfastly refused to improve over many years. My contention is that the current rational approach to understanding lessons learned in project management, one entrenched in the if–then causality of first-order systems thinking where the nature of movement is a ‘corrective repetition of the past in order to realise an optimal future state’ (Stacey 2011: 301), does not reflect the actual everyday experience of organisational life. I see this as an experience of changing priorities, competing initiatives, unrealistic timescales, evaporation of resources, non-rational decisions based on power relations between actors in the organisations we find ourselves in; and every other manner of challenge that presents itself in modern large commercial organisations. I propose a move away from what I see as the current reductionist view of lessons learned, with its emphasis on objective observation, to one of involved subjective understanding. This is an understanding rooted in the particular experience of the individual acting into the social, an act that necessarily changes both the individual and the social. My contention is that a narrative approach to sense making as first-order abstractions in the activity of lessons learned within project management is what is required if we are to better learn from our experiences. This narrative approach that I have termed ‘thick simplification’ supports learning by enabling the reader of the lessons learned account to situate the ‘lesson learned’ within their own experience through treating the lessons learned as a potential future understanding .This requires a different view of what is going on between people in organisations – one that challenges the current reliance on detached process and recognises the importance of embedded phronesis, the Aristotelian virtue of practical judgement. It is an approach that necessarily ‘focuses attention directly on patterns of human relating, and asks what kind of power relations, ideology and communication they reflect’ (Stacey 2007: 266).
7

Exploring uncomfortable situations in the practice of a Swedish leadership consultant

Lundquist Coey, Åsa Margaretha January 2015 (has links)
This research examines the practice of process consultancy in Sweden with a particular emphasis on working in disturbing and uncomfortable situations. The managerial discourses that consultants are working in are dominated by an abstract language with a relentless eye towards imaginative futures in the form of visions, missions, strategies, and goals (Stacey 2011, Mowles 2014). Based on linear casuality thinking that comes from the natural sciences, the assumption is of predictability and control. Therefore, disturbing, uncomfortable, or conflicting situations arising in practice are generally overlooked, avoided, or suppressed as they - per definition - are neither predictable nor controllable. Although process consultancy in many respects gradually has changed from delivery/expertise of ready made concepts into more of conversational facilitation, speaking partnerships, inquiry and coaching, disturbing and uncomfortable moments are still generally being avoided or overlooked. This research is a narrative-based inquiry that has served as a basis for engagement in literature, reflections, reflexive inquiries, and conversations with fellow researchers, members of faculty, and other practitioners. Out of this iterative and intese process, the arguments have emerged and developed. In describing a multitude of uncomfortable and disturbing situations from my practice, and while paying close attention to them in local context, a view of these situations as problematic and avoidable has moved into a wider and deeper understanding regarding what might be taking place among us. Interpreting directives, policies, and strategies - what to do and how to do it - in order to find the most functional ways forward is imperative in organisations. Hence, corrigibility and definite inquiries into worlds of practice and relations are necessities. As ideologies and intentions among people differ, problems and disturbances are inevitably encountered in processes of particularising (making concrete in specific contexts) generalised plans and strategies, which, in turn, creates different and new generalisations (Stacey 2011, p. 358). Utilising process consultancy in order to 'deal' with the above situation may, however, paradoxically enhance anxiety and disturbancies even more. In drawing attention to disturbances as central, 'normal', and generative (normforming), I have come to think of the actual process in process consultancy as having felt dissolving qualities. As 'states' of body/mind are temporary, shifting, and changing when we are being influenced and influence others and ourselves (constrain and enable) at the same time as we speak, a sense of solution often occurs in the process. Rather than solving or resolving issues - a more traditional approach, intentionally aiming at fixing something - acts of conversations and reflexive inquiries are not aiming anywhere in particular. They are explorative and mind-moving and make us re-identify or re-form our sense of self. Hence, in the process of 'loosening up or breaking apart' identity, a sense of solution (I refer to as dissolution) is felt to emerge. This process can be disturbing per se, and the newly gained thinking - also of a temporary kind - can be felt as 'better' or 'worse' or neither, as movements and outcomes are unpredictable. In process consultancy, the understanding of people as an elusive science - changeable, fluid, and plural (messy and needy rather than tidy and rational) - is helpful in order to understand 'stuckness' and enable movement by taking experience seriously rather than engaging in excessive quantification or being futuristic and idealising.
8

Professionalism, evidence and power : key themes influencing the management of a mental health programme in the National Health Service in England

Hope, Roslyn January 2012 (has links)
This thesis critically examines a national programme in mental health which has been driven by the implementation of National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance. Assumptions which underpin research method, drawn from the natural sciences, are critiqued in terms of their adequacy in accounting for human relating and expert therapeutic practice. The work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) is problematized in how they account for proficiency and expertise as intuition and the leap that they make from calculative to deliberative rationality. An alternative source of understanding, based on non-linear causality and complex responsive processes, is developed, building on the work of Stacey (2001, 2005, 2007). The ineffability of expert practice (or clinical judgement) is contrasted with competence based, rule governed practice, which necessarily underpins the early stages of learning. It is argued that because research practices undertaken in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) must be describable, measurable and focussed on predictable outcomes, then these cannot account for expert practice, therefore the assertion that the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme (IAPT) is wholly based on research based, evidence based therapies, cannot be substantiated. The work explores professionalism and specifically considers the role of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychological therapists in mental health and in increasing access to psychological therapies. The role of managers and managerialism are explored, specifically how the NHS has sought to manage 3 professional staff and multi-disciplinary teams in adopting corporate and new ways of working (NWW). This includes the importance of and difficulty in countering professional identity using competence based approaches. The performance management processes in the NHS are recognised as an equally relevant source of evidence (to that of NICE), despite there being a poor (traditional) evidence base for it (Stacey, 2010; Seddon, 2008). Power relating in human relationships is identified as immanent, using the context of a management group, and it is argued that Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power (1994) can account for what is considered to be knowledge and truth, drawing on specialist expertise based on science and research, with a forceful potential for rendering others silent as well as pervasively self-silencing, in processes of inclusion and exclusion (Elias, 1978). It is argued that these on-going processes of relating influence policy decisions at national and local levels and how these policies are implemented in practice. The inevitability of unpredictable outcomes is highlighted, despite strong centralised programme management along with the provision of an explicit blueprint for implementation.
9

The social character of organizational change : strategizing as emergent practice

Burger, Martinus Charl January 2010 (has links)
Increasingly, researchers on strategy are turning away from the highly abstracted and de-humanized components that seem to typify the macro approach to strategy. This movement is at least partially brought about by a philosophical recognition that the emergent and unpredictable nature of organizational life is fast exposing the constraints of an approach to strategy that is based on the values of rationality, predictability and control. In this thesis I argue that organizational change in general and the act of strategizing in particular can be thought of as a social, transformative and emergent process as opposed to the overly orderly, rational, formative and/or humanistic views on strategy presented by systemically oriented theorists. I draw on the theory of complex responsive processes of relating as espoused by Stacey, Griffin and Shaw (2000) and specifically on Stacey’s (2003, 2007) substantial contribution to the field of strategic management. By utilizing a reflexive research methodology I describe the arduous social and emergent process of transformation in my practice and identity (observable in subtle changes in disposition, language and assumptions) as I begin to act into the understanding of strategizing as an ongoing, incomplete, social process. In doing this, I am suggesting that the narrated accounts of our shifts in practice due to us knowing differently are important contributions in the process of transforming our theories on and beliefs around strategy. These accounts should not be seen as premature attempts at methodological frameworks, but rather as explorative participation in the emergent transformation of a radical, social approach to strategizing. I engage critically with the notion of strategy-as-practice and suggest a review of the fundamentally rational and formative assumptions still prevalent in the work of researchers like Johnson, Melin and Whittington (2003) and Samra- Fredericks (2003). Whilst acknowledging the role of culturally mediated dispositions in the ongoing transformation of organizations advocated by Chia and Holt (2006) and Chia and MacKay (2007), I argue for the paradoxical and therefore simultaneous occurrence of habitual and mindful actions by people strategizing as opposed to the authors’ suggestion of a predominantly mindless experience of organizational change. Finally, I turn to Stacey’s (2007) question as to why people continue to make long-term forecasts if their usefulness is so obviously limited. Whilst understanding his frustration, I argue that there is value nevertheless in engaging in strategy making albeit not for the rationalist reasons usually stated. In my view the real value of strategising is to be found in two areas: first in the social activity that goes into creating these documents, and second: the documents not only serve as markers in an ongoing process of strategising; they also give us a way of ‘going on’ and taking the next step.
10

Practice as role enactment : managing purposive sophisticated cooperation

Charlebois, Cameron January 2009 (has links)
This doctoral dissertation proposes a fuller, more inclusive account of practice than that which dominates current discourse on organizations, which typically turns upon occupations, professions and jobs as manifestations of publicly recognized roles or functions within organized activity, established as a function of prescribed divisions of labour and the application of skills and techniques, and assumes that people interact in the ways that their assigned roles and functions are planned to work as interrelated parts of a shared task. The approach here is a reflexive process akin to what Lévi-Strauss characterizes as ‘bricolage’, using ready-to-hand materials linking narrative, literature and argument, adding pieces iteratively in an open-ended building process over the course of the dissertation. The reflexive process entails (a) the act of writing narratives (derived from the author’s own management experiences in the private, public and voluntary sectors) so as to produce insights and themes of interest in relation to the broader theme of practice; and (b) readings of certain key works of the literature on organizations and organized activity (including Sarbin and Allen, Denzin, Wiley, Collins, Elias, Mead, Habermas, Stacey and Mintzberg) so as to expose practice-related themes relevant to the construction of an alternative account which proposes the following: (1) Practice in organizations is communicative in nature and entails the enactment of roles. Conventionally, enactment is taken to mean that the role-incumbent meets expectations set by decision-makers and premised on conformity to preset structures within a metaphorical organizational space. In an alternative account of practice, however, enactment can be more accurately framed as a dialectical process of co-emergence of role and organization by virtue of the local social interaction of the persons involved. (2) In active life the mutually-exclusive emergent process and the spatial organizational metaphor necessarily co-exist. Reframing role enactment opens a path to new understanding, such that role enactment and practice thus become problematized in that practitioners can be seen as holding a paradoxical position of some considerable relevance to practice. Today’s predominantly objectivist management thinking primarily stresses accountability for the communicative interaction of others within the organizational space. The reflexive processual approach contests the adequacy and exclusivity of this position, because managing as an emergent practice is more comprehensively communicative and open-ended. (3) The co-presence of both the objectivist and emergent accounts thus requires the manager paradoxically to hold both these views of role and organization at the same time in his or her experiences of managing. As paradox cannot be resolved, it is instead taken up by the manager-practitioner by virtue of the reflexivity central to all processes of communicative interaction. (4) It follows that acknowledging processes of enactment and the centrality of reflexivity in the practice of managing and bringing that to the attention of managers and management educators will enhance how managing sophisticated cooperation is understood and carried out.

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