This page contains materials intended
to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from readings,
outlines of issues, links to resources, etc.). The
materials are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page is subject
to revision as the instructor finalizes preparation.
(Last revised
2/12/02
)
Preliminary Class Business
Web-authoring workshops next week:
Monday, 11:30 - 2, South Hall 2509
Thursday, 2-4:30, South Hall 2509
Bring a diskette or Zip disk & the file with
your paper
The railway corporations and the"vertically
integrated" and vertically managed
organization
GM in the 1980s
II. The Age of Smart Work
Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart
Machine (1988) [beginning excerpted
in Trend]:
"It was
almost midnight, but despite the late hour
and the approach of the shift change, each
of the six workers was at once animated
and thoughtful. 'Knowledge
and technology are changing
so fast,' they said, 'what will happen to
us?' Their visions of the future foresaw
wrenching change.
They feared that today's working assumptions
could not be relied upon to carry them through,
that the future would not resemble the past
or the present. More frightening still was
the sense of a future moving out of reach
so rapidly that there was little opportunity
to plan or make choices. The speed of dissolution
and renovation seemed to leave no time
for assurances that we were not heading
toward calamity—and it would be all
the more regrettable for having been something
of an accident.
. . . The
group concluded that the worker of the future
would need 'an extremely flexible personality'
so that he or she would not be 'mentally
affected' by the velocity
of change. They anticipated that
workers would need a great deal of education
and training in order to 'breed flexibility.'
'We find it all to be a great stress,' they
said, 'but it won't be that way for the
new flexible people.'"
(pp. 126-27 in Trend)
How did work get "smart"?
"Creative Destruction":
The Theory of Change Underlying Smart Work
Business Week, Special Double
Issue on "The 21st Century Corporation"
(21-28 Aug. 2000):
From concluding editorial, "The
21st Century Corporation":
"Innovation builds profits . . .
In an information economy, companies
can gain an edge through new ideas and
products that increase in value as more
people use them. . . .
But the emphasis is on "temporary."
Knowledge-based products and networks
can quickly disappear in a burst of
Schumpeterian creative destruction.
So corporations must innovate rapidly
and continuously."
Joseph Schumpeter,
the prophet of "creative destruction":
Business Week, Special Double
Issue on "The 21st Century Corporation"
with lead article titled "The Creative
Economy," 21-28 Aug. 2000
Manuel Castells, The Rise
of the Network Community, Vol. 1 of
The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture (Blackwell, 1996)
William H. Davidow and Michael S.
Malone, The Virtual Corporation:
Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation
for the 21st Century (New York: HarperCollins,
1992)
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991)
Alan Liu, "Knowledge in the
Age of Knowledge Work," Profession
1999: 113-24
Armand Mattelart, Mapping World
Communications: War, Progress, Culture,
trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen
(Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 1994)
[originally pub. as La Communication-monde.
Histoire des idées et des stratégies (Paris:
Editions La Découverte, 1991)]
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge,
The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the
Management Game (New York: Times Books,
Random House, 1996)
Robert B. Reich, The Work
of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century
Capitalism (New York: Random House,
1992) [first pub. 1991; new Afterword in
1992]
Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual
Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations
(New York: Doubleday, 1997)
Michel Vilette, L'homme qui croyait
au management (Paris: Seuil, 1988)
Restructuring,
Reengineering, and Downsizing
Michael Hammer & James Champy,
Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto
for Business Revolution (New York: Harper,
1993)
Robert M. Tomasko, Downsizing:
Reshaping the Corporation for the Future,
rev. ed. (New York: American Management
Assoc., 1990)
Team Work
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith,
The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance
Organization (New York: HarperBusiness,
1994) [first pub. 1993]
Mike Parker and Jane Slaughter,
Choosing Sides: Unions and the Team Concept
(Detroit: Labor Notes / South End Press,
1988)
Diversity
Management
Lee Gardenswartz and Anita Rowe,
Managing Diversity: A Complete Desk Reference
and Planning Guide (Burr Ridge, Illinois:
Irwin, 1993)
William B. Johnston and Arnold H. Packer,
Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for
the 21st Century, prepared for the U.
S. Department of Labor (Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hudson Institute, June 1987)
R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., Beyond
Race and Gender: Unleashing the Power of
Your Total Work Force by Managing Diversity
(New York: AMACOM, 1991)
Corporate
Culture
Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy,
Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals
of Corporate Life (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1982)
William G. Ouchi, Theory Z:
How American Business Can Meet the Japanese
Challenge (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1981)
Thomas J. [Tom] Peters and Robert H.
Waterman, In Search of Excellence:
Lessons from America's Best Run Companies
(New York: Harper and Row, 1982)
William Henry Leffingwell and Edwin
Marshall Robinson, Textbook of Office
Management, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1943)
Business in the Fifties
C. Wright Mills, White Collar:
The American Middle Classes (New York:
1951; rpt. Galaxy, 1956)
William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization
Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)
The
Information Technology "Productivity Paradox,"
c. 1979-1995
Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble
with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and
Productivity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1995)
Stephen S. Roach, Technology
Imperatives (New York: Morgan Stanley,
1992)
Paul A. Strassman, Information
Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the
Electronic Age (New York: Free Press
/ Macmillan, 1985)
Information as Symbolism
J. Feldman and J. March, "Information
in Organizations as Signal and Symbol"
(1981)
Andrew J. Flanagin
"Internet Use in the Contemporary
Media Environment," Human Communication
Research, 27 (2001): 153-81
"Social Pressures on Organizational
Website Adoption," Human Communication
Research 26 (2000): 618-646
Information Technology "Prophecies"
Michael
Dertouzos, What Will Be: How the
New World of Information Will Change Our
Lives (New York: Harper, 1998)
Bill
Gates, The Road Ahead, rev. ed.
(New York: Penguin, 1996)
The Increase
in Hours of Work
Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked
American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure
(New York: HarperCollins, 1992)
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The
Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home
Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt,
1997):
In studying a paradigmatic business where
middle managers and others increasingly
give up home time for work time, Hochschild
observes: "In a cultural contest between
work and home . . . the workplace is winning."
Herbert S. Dordick and Georgette Wang,
The Information Society: A Retrospective
View (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993)
Manuel Castells, The Rise
of the Network Community, Vol. 1 of
The Information Age: Economy, Society
and Culture (Blackwell, 1996)