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Auditing firms tend to promote rule-bound orthodoxies about management based on the fiction that the world is more predictable than it is. Managers in INGOs find that long-term planning requires endless readjustment. This article explores what happens when these conflicting knowledge regimes clash during auditing. It draws on Bourdieu’s ideas to illuminate how different forms of social capital come into play in conflicting versions of management and control, whether centralised and prereflected or distributed and adaptive. In this case, a conflict during audit was resolved through negotiation and the establishment of alliances, showing how being audited requires complex political skills.

It is important to think critically about how we develop leaders, particularly in highly unpredictable countries like South Sudan. This article gives an account of a yearlong reflective and experie...

This article points to the potential of methods derived from group analytic practice for making management education more critical. It draws on the experience of running a professional doctorate for more experienced managers in a university in the United Kingdom over a 16-year period. Group analysis is informed by the highly social theories of S.H. Foulkes and draws heavily on psychoanalytic theory as well as sociology. First and foremost, though, it places our interdependence at the heart of the process of inquiry and suggests that the most potent place for learning about groups, where we spend most of our lives, is in a group. The article prioritises three areas of management practice for which group analytic methods, as adapted for research environment, are most helpful: coping with uncertainty and the feelings of anxiety which this often arouses; thinking about leadership as a relational and negotiated activity, and encouraging reflexivity in managers. The article also points to some of the differences between the idea of the learning community and psychodynamic perspectives more generally and the limitations of group analytic methods in particular, which may pathologise resistance in the workplace.

Group analytic scholars have a long history of thinking about organizations and taking up group analytic concepts in organizational contexts. Many still aspire to being more of a resource to organizations given widespread organizational change processes which provoke great upheaval and feelings of anxiety. This article takes as a case study the experience of running a professional management research doctorate originally set up with group analytic input to consider some of the adaptations to thinking and methods which are required outside the clinical context. The article explores what group analysis can bring to management, but also what critical management scholarship can bring to group analysis. It considers some of the organizational difficulties which the students on the doctoral programme have written about, and discusses the differences and limitations of taking up group analytic thinking and practice in an organizational research setting.

Most managers experience paradoxes and contradictions as an inherent part of their daily practice. This has been recognised by various management theories for some time, although mainly with the aim to dissolve the paradoxes or at least balance contradictory issues in order to regain control over organizational realities. We argue for a different and more critical perspective. Paradoxes, contradictions and tensions are part of the everyday experience of working together, are impervious to being ‚managed’ and will certainly not disappear. This is particularly obvious in the social, education or health sectors where professionals work with and for vulnerable people, having to act sensibly and exercise practical judgment in unpredictable, uncertain and fast changing circumstances. However, managers and their staff can find ways to work together productively by looking at the enabling and constraining factors of their co-operation and competition. Confronting oneself with the paradoxes of management and being able to share and discuss these with others as peers is a key element of what has evolved as ‚reflective management practice’ in our executive trainings. We see a need to further rethink and reorient management education in general and non-profit management education in particular.

This article offers a critical review of the way in which some scholars have taken up the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship. I argue that there is a tendency either to over-claim or under-claim their importance because scholars are not always careful about which of the manifestations of the complexity sciences they are appealing to, nor do they demonstrate how they understand them in social terms. The effect is to render ‘complexity’ just another volitional tool in the evaluator’s toolbox subsumed under the dominant understanding of evaluation, as a logical, rational activity based on systems thinking and design. As an alternative I argue for a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences, which understands human interaction as always complex and emergent. The interweaving of intentions in human activity will always bring about outcomes that no one has intended including in the activity of evaluation itself.

The rise of modern corporations has been accompanied by an expansion of salaried executives who have replaced owner-managers. With this expansion, the new class of managers/executives came to regard themselves as stewards of large and complex corporations, and not principally or exclusively as agents for the owners. Emerging as a self- styled ‘profession’, there was a continuous debate around the necessity for the corporation to be responsible to the collective and to its stakeholders. During long parts of the twentieth century the professed intent was to balance and synthesize a plurality of interests in order to ensure the long term survival and success of the corporation, pursue national strategic interests, create employment, support networks of suppliers, develop new technology as well as create an adequate or satisfactory return for shareholders. The rise of agency theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s challenged this understanding of management. Arguing that markets rather than managers provide an efficient allocation of scarce resources, it pushed an agenda in which the corporation had to pursue one single goal – the maximization of shareholder value (MSV) and that managers should be incentivised to respond to (financial) market forces. This idea has today become a highly influential doctrine which infuses senior executive thinking, investors thinking, corporate governance theory and public policy and regulatory decision making. Backed by this belief, many managers now act on the basis of a folk wisdom that shareholders are the only important constituency, which leads them to deliver short-term strategic decisions, high executive remuneration, and offshoring strategies with regard to manufacturing and finance. This comes at the detriment of broader and longer-term perspectives on the purpose of the firm in modern societies and has created worse management and less competitive companies. It is ironic that the obsession with MSV has actually destroyed long-term shareholder value and that it has significantly decreased the average life span of corporations during the past 30 years. We provide this Summary of certain fundamentals of management in an effort to help prevent analytical errors which can have severe and damaging effects on corporations.

In this article I argue that the means and ends of development are constitutive of each other. If means appear to have become separated from the espoused ends of international nongovernment organisations (INGOs), then it may be because other ends, the corporate aspirations of INGOs often expressed in grand strategies and plans, have come to dominate. However, in recognising that in development management particular methods that privilege the abstract and instrumental have come to dominate, this does not close off all possibility of critical reflection, discussion and negotiation, through the exercise of practical judgement or phronesis. Wholesale schemes for doing good, no matter how idealised and abstract, must be functionalised in particular contexts with particular people and can still be negotiated, affording the potential for the emergence of greater mutual recognition between those engaged in development. This negotiation and exploration of difference is often uncomfortable as each of the parties, and their power relationships, is made more visible to the other, but, this article argues, it is a prerequisite for continuously appraising our ethical engagement with others and for keeping means and ends in view. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this article I engage with some orthodox theories of the management of innovation and change, which take for granted the idea that they can be predicted and controlled. Organizations are thought to be systems with boundaries, which managers acting as engineers, or doctors, can ‘diagnose’ and restore to ‘health’, or order differently. As an alternative, and by drawing on an experience of working with health service managers, I argue instead that change and innovation arise as a result of the interweaving of everyone’s intentions. Organizations are sites of intense political interaction and contestation, and exactly what emerges is unpredictable and unplannable, even by the most powerful individuals and groups.

This article offers a critique of the dominant ways of conceiving of, managing, and evaluating development. It argues that these management methods constrain the exploration of novelty and difference. By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, particularly the theory of emergence, the article calls for a broadening of our understanding of how social change comes about. Arguing that the domain of development is not a narrow technical discipline, but an intensely social and political practice of mutual recognition, this article calls for a greater focus on power and processes of relating as they affect local interaction between people.

PurposeIn the last five years more and more scholars have drawn on insights from the complexity sciences as a way of understanding the process of managing and organising in the NHS differently. This paper aims to describe working methods derived from the theory of complex responsive processes, a more radical interpretation of these insights, used by a consultancy team in one NHS setting.Design/methodology/approachThe authors were invited to undertake this intervention over a two year period to bring about service improvement. The paper sets out a critique of systems theory, which underpins most management literature, as well as offering a critique of some of the ways that complexity theory gets taken up in the health literature. As an alternative it explores the theoretical underpinnings of complex responsive processes and gives practical examples of methods that the authors believe are more suitable for understanding the complex environment NHS staff work within.FindingsWorking with ideas of ambiguity, paradox and complexity are not easy for staff educated in a Western tradition of linear cause and effect. However, as a result of this intervention managers and staff pointed to a much greater confidence and skill in dealing with the complex daily process of organising, which they attribute to the methods used. Although the authors make no claim that service improvement arose as a direct consequence of the methods employed, significant, observable improvements in service provision did occur during and after the consultancy intervention.Originality/valueThe description of working methods based on reflective and reflexive group processes, alongside more empirical data‐gathering methods, is offered as a radical alternative to more orthodox ways of understanding, and attempting to work with change in the NHS.

Definitive article can be found at: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/ Copyright John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

‘The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Wiley [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Values are an important theme in discussions in international NGOs, helping to create the conditions for solidarity among staff. But at the same time they are also frequently a source of demoralisation and destructive conflict. This is because the prevailing perceptions of values as instruments of management or as elements in some inchoate mystical whole render the power relationship between staff and managers undiscussable. Values need not be thought of as an instrument of management, and they are above all idealisations. An alternative theory of values is that they are emergent and intensely social phenomena that arise daily between people engaged in a collective enterprise. They are idealisations, but they must be discussed in the everyday context. Conflict is inevitable, but the exploration of the nature of this conflict in daily practice is the only way of ensuring that the discussion about values is an enlivening process.

This article argues that there is a growing convergence between development INGOs and private sector organisations in the way that values are taken up as an instrument of management. Rather than promoting the exploration of difference, managers encourage employees to set aside their concerns and have faith in the organisational mission. In this way they exercise control without appearing to do so, and avoid dealing with the day to day difficulty of undertaking the work. Instead managers feel obliged to promise transformation, because of the increased marketisation and professionalisation of development. The article offers an alternative understanding of values as a profoundly social phenomenon requiring reflection and negotiation through and with others. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Risikomanagement ist ein sonderbarer und paradoxer Begriff. Er suggeriert, dass etwas auf eine bestimmte Art und Weise ‚gemanagt‘ werden kann, so dass es nicht mehr oder nur in einem deutlich weniger bedrohlichen Mase existiert. ‚Risiko‘ impliziert dabei immer die negativen Auswirkungen einer bestimmten Handlung oder Entwicklung, deren Eintreten im Gegensatz zur positiven ‚Chance‘ grundsatzlich nicht erwunscht ist. Aus okonomischen Uberlegungen heraus kann es jedoch durchaus lohnenswert sein, Risiken einzugehen, wofur auch eine besondere Belohnung (Pramie) in Aussicht gestellt wird. Wahrend also etwa bei Finanzoperationen Risiken bewusst in Kauf genommen, ja gesucht werden, sind sie bei Herzoperationen oder auf Bergwanderungen eher zu vermeiden („keine unnotigen Risiken eingehen“).

Objective: To evaluate the impact of attending an aphasia therapy centre on quality of life and communication skills in people with stroke and aphasia and their relatives. Design: Before and after study, six months duration. Setting: Community-based aphasia therapy centre in the United Kingdom. Participants: Thirty-eight men and women with aphasia following a stroke, and 22 of their relatives. Mean time since stroke was 33 months (SD 24.1). Interventions: A range of group therapies for people with aphasia and their relatives and counselling for individuals and couples. Outcome measures: Quantitative outcome measures were ratings of quality of life and communication for people with aphasia, and relatives' independent ratings of communication and coping with caring. Qualitative outcomes were perceptions of quality of life and communication skills using semi-structured interviews. Results: Improvement was detected on all outcomes at six months. There were significant changes from baseline on the quality of life measure, mean difference 0.14 (95% confidence interval 0.02, 0.26); and the communication measure assessed by people with aphasia and their relatives, mean difference 12.8 (4.0, 21.5) and 9.7 (3.6, 15.7) respectively. The changes on the coping with caring measure were not significant, though the direction of change was positive. Qualitative interviews revealed a similar pattern of benefit in terms of increased levels of self-confidence and changes in lifestyle and levels of independence. Conclusions: The results suggest that this therapeutic approach has an impact on quality of life and communication for people with aphasia and their relatives.

Orthodox theories of consultancy address power relations between the consultant and their contractors. However, they can suggest that either the consultant should manipulate those they work with 'for the good', or they should give up their power 'for the good'. This article offers an ethical critique of these points of view and argues for an alternative understanding of power and the role of the consultant. Drawing on a profoundly social understanding of the dynamic between the self and other, the author argues that consultants should engage with others in processes that privilege the exploration of similarity and difference, continuity and change in a shared discovery of the good. Drawing attention to the daily relationships between staff and their own participation, consultants can offer a different opportunity for sense making and a different and temporary form of leadership, where all participants in the process make themselves more accountable to each other.

This article sets out to characterise the nature of the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, and to show the ways in which it afflicted, and continues to afflict, the lives of ordinary Lebanese and Palestinians. For it must be borne in mind that Israel still maintains up to a thousand 'military advisers' to direct and support Antoine Lahad's South Lebanon Army (SLA) in the 12 kilometre buffer zone. It is not within the scope of this article to investigate why the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, or what they thought they were achieving during the occupation that followed. An analysis of Zionist plans for Lebanon is a treatise in itself-Ben-Gurion's strategy is by no means the earliest.3 Nor was the 1982 invasion Israel's first military incursion into Lebanon. The motives and military-political logistics of the Israeli invasion have been adequately covered elsewhere.4

This paper develops the notion of a project war room as an innovation practice in companies. We argue that the consistent use of a project war room, in which customer and user research serves as a background for design work, improve the qualityof product innovation. We describe our experiences from a project with four Danish medium-sized manufacturing companies aiming tobecome more competitive in the European export market. In the project, one challenge was how to convey results from customer interviews and user studies from the researcher team (which in all instances included a company manager) to the development team in each company. We chose to collaboratively build a ‘war room’ in each of the companies to make sense of research materials and establish design principles for products that would better align with customer needs.