Search Results

This book explores the paradoxical effects of globalization on young Indians employed in the outsourcing industry: they are reaping the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labor but also shouldering the weight of the global restructuring of work. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India and the United States, the book highlights the cyclical humiliations and joys of life under transnational capitalism by focusing on factors such as managerial styles, workplace culture, and family and social relations. It argues that while Indian workers receive relatively high wages (in India), they are also subject to what Karl Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” and the forms of discipline and surveillance issuing thereof. It also considers the culture of the economy and the economy of culture: the strictures and structures by which social life and human creativity are hedged.

Although some companies would indeed assert that knowledge creation is an essential in their processes, especially companies focused on innovation and high-technology firms, experiencing conflicts and tensions within the company is unavoidable, as supporting and sustaining such knowledge creation is, without a doubt, an arduous task. Because traditional management techniques may no longer be appropriate in dealing with the process of knowledge creation, organizations and their members are bound to encounter several different barriers to sharing knowledge. Regardless of the managerial style imposed within a company, barriers to knowledge will still occur as the processes involved will concern various degrees of intellectual capabilities and human relationships. This chapter sheds light on such barriers, which can be classified into two interrelated categories — individual and organizational.

This chapter narrates the emergence of competing discourses among BBC creative workers over how to implement its 2006 interactive multiplatform initiative. Debates over the roles which multiplatform was supposed to play within the BBC's strategic mission often reproduced assumptions about what makes BBC content appealing to its audience. The shift to multiplatform commissioning and production strategies not only attempted to merge the disparate production cultures of television and digital media, but did so in a setting with a strong broadcasting heritage. Drawing on a range of work on production cultures, particularly Philip Schlesinger's study of managerial style, the chapter asks how these varied production cultures have managed the meanings and possibilities of multiplatform production itself.

This chapter focuses on the clash of management styles among Union Pacific Railroad officers, with particular reference to Ike Evans's managerial style. Outside presidents always posed a problem for Union Pacific officers. They came to the company from an entirely different culture and brought with them strange ways and concepts. Robert G. Flannery had been a railroad man, but he served largely as a caretaker. Mike Walsh succeeded in selling many of his ideas to the railroad, while Ronald J. Burns failed to do so. Although many of Walsh's reforms endured, so did the attitudes and problems that confronted him when he arrived in Omaha. Although Union Pacific's organizational culture had evolved in many respects, it retained a strong flavor of its unique style. Like the cultures of many other corporations, it was caught in an ongoing transition complicated by having to meld the differing styles of so many merger partners.