Overview
Despite Recent Positive Reforms, Professor Deetz demonstrates that continuing political and economic changes necessitate a more radical rethinking of the practices of management and decision making in major corporations. Increasingly corporations are becoming understood as complex public/political sites of decision making. This includes both a rise in concern with diversity of the work force and a perceived right of competitive groups to participate in decision making. These concerns converge in the development of new stakeholder models of corporate decision making. Stakeholder models challenge the more typical views of organizations by demonstrating multiple forms of ownership and advantages accruing from the inclusion of a wider group of interests and goals in decision making. To fully realize the potential in this new situation, however, richer conceptions of communication, management, negotiation, and social decision making are necessary. Transforming Communication, Transforming Business considers current economic and social problems in the U.S. (and common to most economically advanced societies), develops a stakeholder model of corporate decision making which could help address these problems, explores growing diversity and the need for attention to everyday negotiation processes, reviews control systems within corporations that hamper stakeholder representation and organizational learning, and explores new conceptions of interaction that are likely to improve collaborative, creative decision making within corporations. Professor Deetz's own research on knowledge-intensive work as well as innovations in decision making at Saturn Corporation are used as case examples.Synopsis
Despite Recent Positive Reforms, Professor Deetz demonstrates that continuing political and economic changes necessitate a more radical rethinking of the practices of management and decision making in major corporations. Increasingly corporations are becoming understood as complex public/political sites of decision making. This includes both a rise in concern with diversity of the work force and a perceived right of competitive groups to participate in decision making. These concerns converge in the development of new stakeholder models of corporate decision making. Stakeholder models challenge the more typical views of organizations by demonstrating multiple forms of ownership and advantages accruing from the inclusion of a wider group of interests and goals in decision making. To fully realize the potential in this new situation, however, richer conceptions of communication, management, negotiation, and social decision making are necessary. Transforming Communication, Transforming Business considers current economic and social problems in the U.S. (and common to most economically advanced societies), develops a stakeholder model of corporate decision making which could help address these problems, explores growing diversity and the need for attention to everyday negotiation processes, reviews control systems within corporations that hamper stakeholder representation and organizational learning, and explores new conceptions of interaction that are likely to improve collaborative, creative decision making within corporations. Professor Deetz's own research on knowledge-intensive work as well as innovations in decision making at Saturn Corporation are used as case examples.