The Corporation Of The 1990s

One of the most pathbreaking and influential business books of the 1990s is The Corporation of the 1990s by Michael Scott Morton. Its expert view of how information technology would influence organizations and their ability to survive and prosper in the 1990s has become the benchmark of thinking about information technology. Now, in a supporting companion volume, Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s makes available the research on which The Corporation of the 1990s was based. The research was conducted at the Sloan School of Management at MIT by the Management in the 1990s program. The program was funded by a group of 12 industrial and government sponsors from the United States and Britain which included American Express, Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak, British Petroleum, MCI Communications, General Motors, U.S. Army, ICL Ltd., Internal Revenue Service, Ernst & Young, BellSouth, and CIGNA Corporation. Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s aims to disseminate ideas on how organizations can manage the impact of information technology, and also to raise issues and stimulate further thought by both academics and professionals. The book is divided into three sections which cover the information technology revolution, strategic options, and organization and management responses. It incorporates the work of many important scholars including Charles Jonscher, Michael J. Piore, Thomas W. Malone. JoAnne Yates, Robert I. Benjamin, Gary W. Loveman, Eric von Hippel, Edgar H. Schein, Stanley M. Besen, Garth Saloner, N. Venkatraman, Akbar Zaheer, John C. Henderson, Jay C. Cooprider, Kevin Crowston, Jeongsuk Koh, Gordon Walker, Laura Poppo, John S. Carroll, Constance Perin, Brian T. Pentland, John Chalykoff, Lotte Bailyn, D. Eleanor Westney, Sumantra Ghoshal, John D.C. Little, Thomas J. Allen, Oscar Hauptman, Lisa M. Lynch, Paul Osterman, Thomas A. Kochan, and John Paul MacDuffie.

This is the final report of a major research programme conducted by MIT, which was initiated in 1984 to explore the influence of information technology on the way that organizations will be able to survive and prosper in the competitive environment of the 1990s and beyond.

High-Speed Management and Organizational Communication in the 1990s provides a unique, systematic, and practical treatment of the role communication plays in the new organizations. It treats organizational integration, coordination, and control as central communication processes and explores their transformation of traditional organizational topics such as leadership, corporate culture, teamwork, and continuous improvement programs. The central thesis of this analysis is that increasing the speed with which products get to market helps to make an organization more productive, develop better quality products, become more responsive to customer needs, and generate more profits for investors. Why and how this takes place as well as the central role communication plays in the process is treated here in detail.

Housing Policy in the 1990s explores the deluge of Conservative legislation of the late 1980s and examines what its effects will be during this decade and into the next century. The contributors discuss and clarify the main aims of the government re-structuring of social strategy and assess its effects on British housing.

The restructuring of most European industries may have taken an irreversible turn. However, is this a turn in the right direction? Is European industry becoming more competitive? This book evaluates what has been accomplished to date and what the key remaining policy and managerial tasks are for the 1990s.

This volume contains research studies that were conducted during a project at the Sloan School of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. The contributors focused on three areas: the information technology revolution, strategic options and the organization and management response.