Organisation

This study examines a “critical case” of one school district’s efforts to develop and implement a standards-based curriculum. The study was conducted from two competing perspectives that have dominated organizational analysis in education: the rational and the institutional. The findings demonstrate that the district took an expressly rationalistic approach by using standards and a corresponding criterion-referenced test to focus teachers’

This paper proposes a conceptual model for assessing information culture. It aims to define more specifically what is information management and to enable evaluation of an organization's information culture. Factors pertaining to both information and organizational culture are highlighted, ...

A comprehensive set of evaluation criteria for District Health Information Systems (DHISs) in South Africa (SA) have been developed. The criteria are organised in the following eight categories: philosophy and objectives, policy and procedures, functionality, facilities and equipment, DHIS management and staffing, user/patient interaction, staff development and education, and evaluation and quality improvement. A handbook of evaluation criteria has been

This paper is based on an ethnographic study of corridors in a large university building, originally built to house local government in the early 20th century. By attending to their huge physical presence in the everyday culture of an institution, the paper shows how corridors matter. Too often invoked as iconic, intangible metaphors, the presence of corridors as cultural materials can be forgotten. Conversely, as incidental – or even detrimental – remnants of past design trends, they are perceived parts of a divisive, hierarchical organisation of space. As the open-plan office, indoor street, forum and atrium displace them in a new design for ‘openness’, the study focuses on the mobilisation of corridors in the daily, sometimes momentary re-arrangements of meaning in an organisation. In conclusion, I discuss how the new architecture of ‘openness’ might be reconfigured through mobile understandings of everyday ‘openings’ and ‘closings’.

In diesem Beitrag werden Aspekte aufgezeigt, wie Personzentrierte Supervision die aufgabenkonforme Reflexion beruflicher Situationen als Balance zwischen personaler und organisationaler Ebene realisieren kann. Ausgehend von einer spezifischen Auffassung des Personzentrierten Ansatzes, die konstruktivistische und systemtheoretische Aspekte berücksichtigt, gestaltet sich das Aufgabenverständnis des Personzentrierten Supervisors als das eines hilfreichen „Facilitators“, der mit weitgehendem Vertrauen in die Selbstorganisationsfähigkeiten der Person oder des Teams für manche Aspekte zeitgemäßen Managements lernförderliche Vorbildwirkungen und konstruktive Entwicklungsprozesse entfalten kann. Rund um diese Thesen wird zunächst das Interventionsfeld und der Aufgabenbereich von Supervision in Organisationen in einer Skizze dargestellt und dann einige ansatztypische Kernpunkte in ihrer Bedeutung und ihrem Potenzial für supervisorisches Handeln in Organisationen beleuchtet. Konsequenzen für die Ausbildung personzentrierter Supervisor/inn/en werden angedeutet.

The objective of this paper is to explore howthe current interest in Business Ethics can be locatedwithin an analysis of contemporary society which takesinto account the prevalence of moral uncertainty along with the concomitant desire to(re)establish some form of normative order. As such,Business Ethics may be seen as a socially constructed“field” of study which reflects broaderchanges and controversies within society. Yet as a body of knowledge,Business Ethics articulates epistemological doubts. Twodistinctive themes in Business Ethics discourse areconsidered — the modernist/rationalist and thepostmodernist/relativist. It is argued that in different ways, each canbe seen as both an expression of, and a reaction to, theincreasing incidence of anomie in society. Theimplications for organizational practices are thenconsidered through the example of Corporate Codes ofEthics and the problem of establishing consensus wherethe grounds for any claim to moral authority areproblematic.