Daniel M.G. Raff and Philip Scranton (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198787761
- eISBN:
- 9780191829857
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198787761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition. These are ...
More
This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition. These are subjects of the greatest interest to students of entrepreneurship and organizations, as well as to business historians, but the academic literature is in fact thin. The chronological settings of the book’s eleven substantive chapters are historical (unlike the breaking-news style of Harvard Business School case studies), reaching as far back as the late 1800s and as far forward as the 1990s, but the issues they raise are evergreen and the historical perspective is exploited to advantage. The chapters are organized in three broad groups: one examining the emergence of order and routines in initiatives, one studying the same subject in ongoing operations, and a third focusing specifically on phenomena of transition. Their subjects range from the Book-of-the-Month Club to industrial research at Alcoa, from the evolution of procurement and related coordination practices at the Ford Motor Company as it settled into mature mass production to project-based industries such as bridge and dam building and the governance of defense contracting, and from the development of project performance appraisal at the World Bank to the way the global automobile industry collectively redesigned the internal combustion engine to deal with environmental regulation. The chapters are vivid and thought provoking in themselves and, for pedagogical purposes, offer excellent jumping-off points for discussion of relevant experiences and cognate academic literature.Less
This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition. These are subjects of the greatest interest to students of entrepreneurship and organizations, as well as to business historians, but the academic literature is in fact thin. The chronological settings of the book’s eleven substantive chapters are historical (unlike the breaking-news style of Harvard Business School case studies), reaching as far back as the late 1800s and as far forward as the 1990s, but the issues they raise are evergreen and the historical perspective is exploited to advantage. The chapters are organized in three broad groups: one examining the emergence of order and routines in initiatives, one studying the same subject in ongoing operations, and a third focusing specifically on phenomena of transition. Their subjects range from the Book-of-the-Month Club to industrial research at Alcoa, from the evolution of procurement and related coordination practices at the Ford Motor Company as it settled into mature mass production to project-based industries such as bridge and dam building and the governance of defense contracting, and from the development of project performance appraisal at the World Bank to the way the global automobile industry collectively redesigned the internal combustion engine to deal with environmental regulation. The chapters are vivid and thought provoking in themselves and, for pedagogical purposes, offer excellent jumping-off points for discussion of relevant experiences and cognate academic literature.
