Explores how people participate in public life through organizations. The authors examine three organizations and show surprising similarities across them.

In recent decades an extensive array of changes and innovations have taken place in and across work organizations and networks of organizations and workers, facilitated by new technologies and technological forms. This has initiated an interest in technological change as one of the conditions for organizational action and researchers have begun to draw inspiration from a wider spectrum of conceptual issues, perspectives and theoretical traditions. This book is interested in the level of praxis and how this might be understood and theorized. It brings together a comprehensive collection of empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed research projects from studies of organizational practice which explore a number of technological changes in a variety of contexts. These are informed by contemporary debates within and across theoretical approaches including the sociology of technology, work and organizations, actor network theory, technology as text and metaphor, processual and political perspectives, social and business network-based approaches to the analysis of technology and innovation, and the social construction and shaping of technology. This book will be essential reading for researchers and advanced students within the field of technology, work and organizations and also organization studies and management studies.

Quick introduction of new technology is essential to America's competitiveness. But the success of new systems depends on their acceptance by the people who will use them. This new volume presents practical information for managers trying to meld the best in human and technological resources. The volume identifies factors that are critical to successful technology introduction and examines why America lags behind many other countries in this effort. Case studies document successful transitions to new systems and procedures in manufacturing, medical technology, and office automationâ€"ranging from the Boeing Company's program to involve employees in decision making and process design, to the introduction of alternative work schedules for Mayo Clinic nurses. This volume will be a practical resource for managers, researchers, faculty, and students in the fields of industry, engineering design, human resources, labor relations, sociology, and organizational behavior.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are major forces shaping our current age. ICT affects many areas of human existence and influences the both human wellbeing and human evil. The nonprofit sector is already heavily involved in technology both as a way to pursue its mission and as an influential factor in the evolution of the sector. This article examines how technology affects the sector and how the sector uses technology in its work. The article begins with a discussion of how the emerging information society will change the nonprofit sector. The sector that we know is grounded on our experience in the agrarian and industrial periods in the United States and Europe. We then explore how technology evolved in the sector. This is followed by an examination of technology and nonprofit organizational behavior. Technology changes the organizations that make use of its capacities. Next is a discussion of the types of technology that nonprofit organizations use. The final three sections deal with technology and social change, technology in nonprofit settings, and issues and trends. This article provides the reader with a current appreciation of the scholarly and professional literature on ICT in the nonprofit sector.

Jannis Kallinikos analyzes the recent spectacular growth of information and the self-propelling processes through which technological information is increasingly generated out of the reshuffling and recombination of available and interoperable information sources. He argues that information is no longer simply a resource but a pervading element of socio-economic life that is crucially involved in the redefinition of a variety of organizational practices and modes of economic action. Academics and students in a variety of disciplines, including information studies, information systems, manageme.

What the Book Is About This book is about the problem of organizational learning, that is the analysis of organizations conceived as learning systems. In order to survive in a period of a rapid change, organizations must innovate and than to develop and exploit their abilities to learn. The most innovative organizations are those that can respond with great efficiency to internal and external changes. They respond to and generate technological change by acting as effective learning systems. They maximize the learning potential of ongoing and "normal" work activities. The organizational structure and the technology allow members to learn while the organizations itself learns from its members. So organizations reach high levels of innovation when structured to take advantage of the social, distributed, participative, situated processes of learning developed by its members in interaction with the technological environment. Organizations should consider learning as an explicit "productive" objective. They must create integrated learning mechanisms, that encompass technological tools, reward and incentive systems, human resource practices, belief systems, access to information, communication and mobility patterns, performance appraisal systems, organizational practices and structures. The design of efficient learning organizations requires cognitive, technological and social analyses. All the computer-based technologies (e. g. office automation, communication and group decision support) not only those devoted to and used in training activities, have to be considered as tools for organizational learning and innovation.

Action research is a term used to describe a family of related approaches that integrate theory and action with a goal of addressing important organizational, community, and social issues together with those who experience them. It focuses on the creation of areas for collaborative learning and the design, enactment and evaluation of liberating actions through combining action and research, reflection and action in an ongoing cycle of cogenerative knowledge. While the roots of these methodologies go back to the 1940s, there has been a dramatic increase in research output and adoption in university curricula over the past decade. This is now an area of high popularity among academics and researchers from various fields—especially business and organization studies, education, health care, nursing, development studies, and social and community work. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research brings together the many strands of action research and addresses the interplay between these disciplines by presenting a state-of-the-art overview and comprehensive breakdown of the key tenets and methods of action research as well as detailing the work of key theorists and contributors to action research.

This book explores factors which impact the viability and growth of business enterprises. In particular, the role of entrepreneurship, organizational learning, and business strategy — including licensing strategy — are considered in some detail. It presents fundamental thinking about business organization and provides the conceptual framework that scholars need to understand complex business organization, managerial processes, and competitive strategy.

This book views change as an ongoing process that should not be solidified or treated as a series of linear events. In drawing on data collected from over 40 years of research, it highlights the theoretical and practical value of using a processual perspective. Illustrative examples from a range of organizations including: Micro-X, General Motors, Pirelli Cables, BHP Billiton, Royal Dutch Shell, British Rail, British Aerospace, Hewlett Packard, Laubman and Pank and the CSIRO make the approach understandable and accessible to both researchers and practitioners. In a theoretical exploration of temporal context, sociomaterial relations and power-political processes the dynamics of changing organizations is brought to the fore and the implication for reshaping change examined. On the practice of engaging in longitudinal research, study design, data collection and processual analysis, as well as the write-up and dissemination of findings, are all considered. This is an innovative and highly practical research monograph that captures the truly complex processes of changing organizations and illustrates how these are best understood from a processual perspective.