Organization Studies

"It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or “Pockets of Effectiveness” in developing countries.
Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential to trigger more comprehensive reforms and state-building? This book provides surprising answers to these questions, based on detailed case studies of exceptional public organizations and state-owned enterprises in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. The case studies are guided by a common analytical framework that is process-oriented and sensitive to the role of politics. The concluding comparative analysis develops a novel explanation for why some public organizations in the developing world beat the odds and turn into pockets of public sector performance and service delivery while most do not.
This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, development, organizations, public administration, public policy and management."

This paper investigates managerial tactics of visualisation when a need to know and manage employees' values and attitudes is expressed. Using the Danish public school as a case study, we explore how school managers use teachers' emotions to render visible presumably invisible information about their 'true' attitudes and values. The paper draws on theories of affect as well as actor-network theory to analyse three incidents where managers turn their interpretations of teachers' emotions into such information. These incidents suggest that the efforts to render employees' attitudes and values visible install a normative emotional scale where an ideal employee displays emotional investment and self-control. This has implications, not only for employees who are expected to exhibit the 'right' emotions, but also for management, which comes to depend on transient emotions and co-presence in situations that cannot be planned for.

The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments – is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.

This qualitative study examines the role of clients in petty corruption by analyzing actual corrupt exchanges between ordinary citizens and low level public and private employees in post-communist Hungary. Using a grounded theory approach, interviews reveal how clients from different social strata deal with low-level agents in corrupt situations. Findings suggest two contrasting forms of low-level corruption: transactions where the client and the agent do not have a prior relationship and where external factors dominate the relationship; and cases with stronger social ties between the actors, where the client has more freedom to structure the transaction. However, a client's social background frequently determines the form of corrupt transaction and the form of resources illegally exchanged in the deal.

""ABSTRACT: This study provides an empirically based analysis of corrupt governmental networks. We conducted 45 interviews in Hungary with different organizational actors who were actually participating in corrupt transactions or at least had first-hand
experiences of corruption. Given the secret nature of the topic, this article provides a unique insight into the phenomenon. Our findings show that corrupt elite cliques consciously design and coordinate multilevel structures of corrupt networks within and among organizations that involve a large amount of people. We identified the major network elements and their functions in corrupt transactions. The article also provides a typology of corrupt networks. The networks have different structural characteristics based on location of the ‘‘cash cows,’’ points from where the system is fed, and the actors’ positions of power. Our findings are compared with the already existing literature on dark networks, terrorist, and organized crime formations.""

"""Purpose – The paper systematically reviews boundary related challenges of online ethnography in the field of organization and management studies. We especially focus on how researchers deal with drawing space boundaries, setting time boundaries, and crossing them to engage their online field.

Design/methodology/approach – We perform a systematic review of extant literature. We identify 189 journal articles that perform some form of online ethnographic research. Among those, 59 papers are identified in 40 different journals as online organizational and/or management ethnographies. We perform both open coding and quantitative analysis on collected papers.

Findings – We identify how researchers deal with the issue of defining space and time boundaries and how they cross them to engage their online field. We illustrate that some of the advantages of online ethnography actually prompt researchers to favor the same research designs over others and we suggest that some relatively underused designs offer methodological opportunities for future research.

Research limitations/implications – We focused only on articles adopting online ethnography in organization and management studies that are listed in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database. Online ethnographies in other research fields and indexes are not studied in this paper.

Practical implications – The paper provides concrete examples and suggestions for researchers who undertake online organizational ethnography.

Social implications – The paper contributes to the maturation of online organizational ethnography. More generally, it contributes to our understanding of how organisations and individuals engage with online phenomena.

Originality/value – The paper provides a comprehensive and systematic overview on past and current practices of online organizational ethnography, with a wide array of examples from various disciplines."""

This article concerns the extent to which corrupt behavior is dependent on the organizational power structure and the resources available for illegal exchange. This qualitative study is based on 42 in-depth interviews with organizational actors in different organizations in Hungary. Four core themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (a) isolated corruption at the bottom, (b) the middle level’s own corruption, (c) “technicization” when middle-level professionals and expert groups are used to legalize the corruption of the dominant coalition, and (d) “turning-off controls” when organizational elites intentionally deactivate internal and external controls to avoid detection.

""Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology.""

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The aim of this work is an attempt to better understand and analyze the system of public administration in Greece, to see its structure and the way it works through the analysis of its component parts. In order to understand whether it is effective and whether the public service meets the requirements of the society and achieves its objectives. The aim is also to know the actions that the European Union promotes contributing in the creation of a flexible administration system, the programmes being proposed for the creation of a modern public administration, and eventually to see how the structures of the European Union work as far as the public administration is concerned. An attempt will be made to present all these data in order to understand the European model, the European way of thinking about the Administration and overall the European reality. In this work we will also present the problems that already exist and are being caused, the problems will be analysed and we will try to give some solutions that I hope will help towards the reorganization and reconstruction of the public administration, not in titles, but in its real meaning. What is being said lately about the modernization of the public administration, the reform of the evaluation system, the reform of the system of selecting officials, the objective, the efficiency, the reduce of the administrative burdens and more. All these are said, but made it act? Are they being applied? Are they being implemented? Do they become a reality?  At this point I would like to express my doubts about whether they are really being applied and whether there is an improvement, including a series of other issues that are going to be analyzed as well. In this work the Administration in general will be discussed but also the public administration in particular. We will talk about the public administration within the European Union and in European countries but also for the public administration particularly in Greece, for the concerns, the possible improvements, the weaknesses, and recommend solutions, hoping that the result will correspond to the actual situation and help to its improvement.
In recent years worldwide there have been major and significant changes in areas such as economics or technology, entrepreneurship, international market, the labour market, culture and political culture, but also changes in society in general. Of course the Administration and especially the Public Administration could not stay out of these changes or significantly get influenced by the structure of the changes that were made. One basic characteristic of these changes that occurred recently is the significant presence and domination of the market, or else the economy of markets and the passing of many functions, procedures and programs from the public sector to private industry and as a consequence to increase the role of the private field in the gears of government. The principles of competition, the concept of expectations, and the relationship between quality and service, which existed in the market, in the free economy, and the individuals, seemed to pass in a special position in the public sector, constantly seeking expansion of benefits, results, but also demanding quality, choice, and comparison to what is now offered and provided by the private sector. This situation has created, in my opinion, an expectation for a certain model of operation of public services or I would say a “trend” that must receive special attention from the existing management system. During the activity of the above mentioned model a continuous trend for comparison between the private and public sectors has been created, the need of assessment, the need for new proposals for improvement, the need for new management models, or at least the need to adapt management models in a modern way of thinking, in a modern public administration that responds to today's society, which has many demands but at the same time it also has many expectations. This thought is reinforced by the existence of the European Union, the free trade, the borders and the lack of simultaneous free movement of the citizens, as well as its free installation and professional activity in any country that every citizen of the European Union wants. One of the consequences of these actions is the fact that the services of the public sector should meet the increased needs and requirements of the citizens of the European Union as it will ever become the subject of comparison and evaluation of a daily changing and competitive environment that is trying to become attractive to the people for whom it has been designed to satisfy. The public services and the staff should thus, acting in the context mentioned, compete in everything that has to do with the private sector and competing with the needs of citizens regarding the level of demand but also the provided and offered services. The public sector should also stop being presumed as a sector that has the concept of supply or benefit, but to acquire the concept of efficiency, participation, good administration, meritocracy, and have as a main aim and object the servicing of the citizens.
In all the changes that should be made in order for the public administration to become “competitive”, there should also be an adjustment, some kind of maintenance, modernization and a total redesign in order to be an update on the role and services that are being provided. At this point, there should also be a right scheduling of the services, a right and meritocratic way of administration, of finding executives, correct and effective management tools, proper evaluation of the effectiveness and the parallel implementation of the notorious reduction of administrative burdens particularly the clear wording of actions, clear instructions for completing these actions, and the complete treatment of excessive legislation by simplifying it. There should also be an update and some kind of simplification, not through the transfer of jobs to other sectors and employees, loading in this way the system and making the citizens suffer once again. “Loading” tasks and responsibilities to employees is totally different from reducing the administrative burdens, which is really beneficial for the citizen but for the servant, and eventually the whole system of administration.
Thus, an important parameter must be the abandonment of the concept of a centralized state and the adaptation of a real and substantive decentralized model, not a decentralization of “titles” and services as a paper exercise but a real decentralization and in this sense more functional, giving exactly what is probably the issue in the whole process of public administration, that means the efficiency and quality of services provided. The need to deal more with the public administration and to contribute as much as I can with my project in the improvement and modernization of public administration, led me to choose this theme and this field in my master’s dissertation and completion of my graduate program. The period of writing my work coincided with major changes in the public administration of my country and literally subversive changes in the economy and labour market.
I think it would be very important to see if this effort really reflects the expectations of the citizens, and why not the public servants themselves, whether the goals of the reform are achieved, and whether the implementation of changes is consistent with concepts like the one of the famous reduction of administrative burdens and the simplification of procedures.

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