LEAN AND AGILE ORGANISATION

Lean and Agile Orgnization



The Management of Lean and Agile Sainsburys

SECTION 01

Introduction

A new mode of development has emerged which has new and better qualities. It involves a post-Fordist government of growth, a neo-liberal style of growth and a corrective government that has been described by the term 'society of control'. The study of organisation now has a history of around a hundred years. Although there has been some level of stability in central interest and approaches taken to address them, a lot has also changed over this period. The cultural theories of organisation generally focus on making sense and deconstructing forms of meaning and social constructions of reality used in organizational behavior. In line with this approach, Luhmann emphasizes the important role of distinctions and semantics for the production and orientation of organizations. However, producing organizations is, in his view, not just a matter of reality construction. (Middleton, 2003, 20)

Although the resource trust perception also considered social norms as environmental factors that needed managing, it was neoinstitutionalist views that brought into organizational analysis the notions of institutional environments and institutionalization with important implications for the causes and consequences of organization structures and actions. (Godin, 2000, 34)This paper first shows that Luhmann's writings are helpful to identify the constitutive distinctions for organization as a specific type of social system. Relating Luhmann's theory of organization to his theory of functionally differentiated society, it identifies, second, the specifying distinctions that are responsible for the specific problem orientations characteristic of modern organizations. In a third step, it shows how the distinctions and method used in organizations fit into and contribute to a general functionalist culture of modernity. (Middleton, 2003, 20)Although there is a new mode of capitalist development, we are living in a phase of social disorder, instabilities and global crisis. More and more people in the world have to live under prestoresious conditions, even in the western-industrialised countries. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that “this structural crisis leads us into a dark period of struggle over what kind of system will succeed the existing one (Hamel, 2003, 52-63). We can think of this as a bifurcation, and therefore the beginning of a chaotic period, within which no one can calculate the outcome, which is naturally undefined. There will be a new structure, a new order, but it may be either better or worse than the existing one. It depends on what we all do in the period of keen struggle and how clearly we understand the forces at work“.(Middleton, 2003, 20)

The research states the best way to understand such phenomena is through a dialectical theory of social organisation. For organization theory the merging of science and practical problems of management was character forming in a number of important ways, shaping features and strains that have since come to characterize the field, perhaps more so than other areas of business studies. The move towards the natural science model although integrative in one sense, ironically, was potentially divisive in two ...