Reinventing Hierarchy And Bureaucracy

This volume brings together leading scholars in the field of organisation studies to reflect on the universal phenomena of hierarchy (vertical organisation of tasks) and bureaucracy (rule-bound execution of tasks), resulting in a colourful kaleidoscope of thought-provoking, critical and refreshingly non-mainstream analysis.

EURAM's Book of the Year in 2020, Hierarchy takes readers on a journey which traverses how this idea has evolved, is understood in various disciplines, and is applied in practice. Referring a wide range of sources, the book provides an inspirational introduction to understanding what is perhaps the key idea in business and management. As a fundamental organizational principle, hierarchy is everywhere. Perhaps because of its ubiquity, the significance of hierarchy has become under-analyzed in view of the growing strains on society imposed by organizational inequality. This book analyzes the advantages and disadvantages that hierarchy brings as a form of organization, providing an accessible overview of this fundamental idea within both business and society. This concise book provides a useful overview of existing research, for both students and scholars of business.

This timely book features rich examples of students and teachers, defined as learning partners, disrupting hierarchy in education by collaborating on social change projects. At the book’s core is Paulo Freire’s theorization of students and teachers working together toward co-liberation. Co-written by learning partners, each chapter in this collection highlights a social change project that puts Freire’s theories into action. Projects span a range of academic disciplines and geographical locations from K–12, university/college, and non-formal educational contexts. Appropriate as both a textbook and a primer on collaborative social change-making, Disrupting Hierarchy in Education offers inspiration and models of community-engaged learning programs from across the globe. Topics include community education, public writing, using media for popular education, adolescent and youth development, climate change education, peace and justice leadership development, revolutionary nonviolence, literacy teacher education, citizenship education, development of Latin American studies, palliative care, reflections on identity and subjectivity, anti-racism education, trauma-informed pedagogy, wellness, and art curation. Contributors include Gilberto Q. Conchas, Sarah Diem,Nyna Amin, Chief Baba Neil Clarke, Ute Kelly, Grácia Lopes Lima, Jing Lin, Matt Meyer, and Ashley Visagie.

With contributions from 22 scholars and empirical material from 29 countries within and beyond Latin America, this book identifies subtypes of populism to further understand right-wing populist movements, parties, leaders, and governments. It seeks to examine whether the term populism continues to have any validity and what relationship(s) it has to democracy. Part 1 is an exploration of populism as an analytical concept. It asks how populism can and should be defined; whether populism can be broken down into subtypes; and whether the use of the term within and beyond Latin America in recent scholarship has been consistent. Part 2 focuses on political economy, and specifically whether political economy explanations of both the causes and consequences of right-wing populism fit recent cases in Latin America, Europe, and the Philippines. Part 3 examines institutions, and in particular institutions of coercion and digital communication. It contains chapter studies on various aspects of populism in Brazil, Spain, India, and Italy. Part 4 concerns the coronavirus pandemic and the specific case of right-wing populism in Brazil. It examines the Bolsonaro government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and how that response exacerbated the health crisis and reduced the government’s popularity. Right-Wing Populism in Latin America and Beyond is a timely and socially relevant contribution to the understanding of contemporary challenges to democracy. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners eager to understand the rise in right-wing agendas across the globe.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing use of projects and similar temporary modes of organising in the public sector of nations in Europe and around the world. While for some this is a welcome development which unlocks entrepreneurial zeal and renders public services more flexible and accountable, others argue that this seeks to depoliticise policy initiatives, rendering them increasingly technocratic, and that the project organisations formed in this process offer fragmented and unsustainable short-term solutions to long-term problems. This volume sets out to address public sector projectification by drawing together research from a range of academic fields to develop a critical and theoretically-informed understanding of the causes, nature, and consequences of the projectification of the public sector. This book includes 13 chapters and is organised into three parts. The first part centres on the politics of projectification, specifically the role of projects in de-politicisation, often accomplished by rendering the political “technical”. The chapters in the second part all relate to the reframing of the relationship between the centre and periphery, or between policy making and implementation, and the role of temporality in reshaping this relation. The third and final part brings a focus upon the tools, techniques, and agents through which public sector projectification is assembled, constructed, and performed.

A Sociological Perspective on Hierarchies in Educational Institutions bridges the gap between theory and practice, drawing together research from different perspectives without losing comprehensiveness, accuracy, and in-depth coverage of hierarchy and educational institutions - a novel contribution to Organizational Studies.

This book explores the hospital via organisational ethnography (OE), an approach that involves a mix of fieldwork methods designed to analyse the hospital which also includes participatory observation, qualitative interviews and shadowing. One way to define a hospital is by its high level of formal organisation, resulting in written or digital communication as the main source of communication in patient journals, minutes and medical and quality guidelines. In contrast, in this book, the aspects of the informal organisation will be the focus. In spite of the many formal regulations of healthcare, hospitals are also chaotic organising places where many different groups of people interact in order to negotiate, to practice and to make sense of daily work tasks. The underlying argument is that, in the mundane everyday life of hospitals, frontline workers and their interactions with patients and local managers remain at the core of organising hospitals. The overall purpose of this book is to report stories back from the field of healthcare, demonstrating how people, spaces and work (as examples of events) become important elements of organising hospitals. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in and across healthcare management, organisation studies, ethnography, sociology, qualitative methods, anthropology, service management and cultural studies.

Most people take the conditions they work and live in as a given, believing it to be normal that societies are stratified and that organisations are hierarchical. Many even think that this is the way it should be - and are neither willing nor able to think that it could be otherwise. This book raises the awareness of hierarchy, its complexity and longevity. It focuses on a single but fundamental problem of social systems such as dyads, groups, organisations and whole societies: Why and how does hierarchical social order persist over time? In order to investigate the question, author Thomas Diefenbach develops a general theory of the persistence of hierarchical social order. This theory interrogates the problem of the persistence of hierarchical social order from very different angles, in multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary ways. Even more crucially, it traces the very causes of the phenomenon, the reasons and interests behind hierarchy as well as the various mechanisms which keep it going. This is the first time such a theory is attempted. With the help of the theory developed in this book, it is possible to interrogate systematically, comprehensively and in detail how mindsets and behaviours as well as societal and organisational structures enable the continuation of hierarchy