Constituting Management

Roughly half of all project managers have to lead customer projects as profit centers on contractor side with two big objectives: making the customer happy and bringing money home. Customer projects are a high-risk business on both sides, customers and contractors, but the dynamics of this business have so far been mostly ignored in literature. The book is intended to fill this gap. The book helps project managers better understand the dynamics of customer projects under contract from business development through handover and find solutions for common problems. A central aspect is international contract laws, an often underestimated factor in projects.

In the past, contingency and neo-Marxist theorists of culture reduced culture to an effect of something other than itself and, as they made culture metaphorical, they constituted its object of inquiry — a somewhat impossible pretension. This book extends the debate considerably. It does so through considering the work of Foucault in the context of the analysis of culture. While Foucault has had a considerable impact on organization studies, up to the present no text has systematically addressed what happens to organization culture when it encounter a Foucauldian gaze. Read this book and you will find out.Stewart Clegg, UTS, Sydney

This title was first published in 2000: This text focuses on developments in social work and its management. In doing so, it is of necessity multi-disciplinary: research and literature from the fields of management, organization and social policy, as well as social work, are drawn upon. The major theme of the book is change, which, paradoxically, appears to be the major constant. Change is everywhere and living with change is part of the "modern condition". As the various transformations of social work are articulated, their influence becomes apparent. Each process will constitute a theme around which the content of this book is introduced. Although these processes are interdependent, each will be dealt with in turn.

International political economy is both a discipline and a set of global practices and conditions. This volume explores how the two are related, illustrating the changing character of the global political economy, as well as changing perspectives on that character.

The institutional ethnographies collected in Under New Public Management explore how new managerial governance practices coordinate the work of people doing front-line work in public sectors such as health, education, social services, and international development, and people management in the private sector. In these fields, organizations have increasingly adopted private-sector management techniques, such as standardized and quantitative measures of performance and an obsession with cost reductions and efficiency. These practices of “new public management” are changing the ways in which front-line workers engage with their clients, students, or patients. Using research drawn from Canada, the United States, Australia, and Denmark, the contributors expose how standardized managerial requirements are created and applied, and how they affect the practicalities of working with people whose lives and experiences are complex and unique.

Countries, governments, and organizations devise constitutions to reflect their visions of governance and rules for their leaders. They vary considerably in both formats and consequences. Disputes over constitutions can lead to fights, contests, debates, and more. Vincent Ostrom is one of America's leading scholars on constitutions and has spent a lifetime researching, analyzing, and writing about constitutions in America and overseas. He provides methods to judge and to implement constitutions as citizens struggle with their formulation. In this book, scholars from around the world add to this intellectual quest of massive scholarly and practical importance. Using the research and methodology pioneered by Ostrom, they identify and analyze the criteria for successful constitutions in both theory and practice.