The conflict between professional and bureaucratic models of behaviour has long been recognised. Evidence provided in the professional/bureaucratic literature indicates that this conflict will impact on the effectiveness of management control systems when dominant professionals, such as...

This article examines the construction of systems of meaning at two levels: the writing of the history of the corporation; and the role of annual reports in constructing a system of meaning about the experiences of individual corporations.We argue that the transaction cost explanation of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of the co-alignment of structural variables on innovation, wherein Bogotá-based SMEs, belonging to the industrial, commercial and services sectors, were used as samples. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted using a...

The process of scanning the business environment is reconceptualized on the basis of a critical analysis of Aguilar’s pioneering work on scanning, as well as that of Lawrence and Lorsch’s contingency theory. Concepts of general systems theory, entropy and communication theory are utilized in...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand how employees make sense of a structural change in a public organisation, in order to understand which practices form this change and how individual elements (rules, understandings etc.) may shape the process of such changes....

Publication No. 49 of the Association of College and Research Libraries entitled Restructuring Academic Libraries: Organizational Development in the Wake of Technological Change states “the swift advance of computer networking has disrupted print‐age organizational structures in higher...

This article focuses on the use of activity‐based management (ABM) theory for the control and the redesign of the centralized units of a large multinational company operating in the chemical sector. To this aim, ABM has been adapted to the peculiar characteristics of support services. In...

Examines the relationship between business process re‐engineering (BPR) and human resource management. A number of propositions relating to aspects of human resource management are derived from the literature, and examined by interviewing senior managers in UK organisations where business...

Purpose – Top management commitment is considered a significant factor in improvement programmes, and many papers have been written about the role of top management commitment in implementing a quality management system. However, not considering other management levels’ commitment, such as...