Making Light Work: Rethinking the Service Organisation - Couverture souple

Johnson, Peter A.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0992831407 ISBN 13 : 9780992831400

Editeur : Fairday Books, 2014

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

For most of the 20th century the consensus around organisational configurations was dominated by ideas of control: for example, as embodied by scientific management and systems thinking. These gave us workplaces based on the idea that management-knows-best, and of measurement, targets, goals, and best practice. They also helped to cement the pervasive metaphor of the employee as a mechanism, as a sub-system; one who simply follows orders and who is a deterministic component in a non-human model. The end of the last century and these early years of the current one, have brought a tide of argument in favour of employee autonomy framed in various ways such as freedom, decision latitude, chaos, complexity science and even anarchy. Certain theorists, along with humanists, anarchists and those politically aligned to workers, strongly advocate these ideas. Their arguments to enterprise owners are that the benefits of greater staff freedoms would include innovation, novelty, agility and responsiveness. However in the work of these theorists a persistent concern can be detected one which is sometimes laid bare by the advocates themselves. It is that on the other side of the positive and desirable outcomes of autonomy and chaos, lurks a darker sibling: destructive novelty. Free your employees and the result may not be agility and creativity rather sloth and destructiveness. Without control, many fear that there would be no tools via which to manage such malevolence. This may be one of the important reasons why the paradigm of work has resisted the call to chaos. In this book, a new approach is outlined; one which continues the flow of the arguments in favour of employee autonomy. However the author acknowledges the reality of the fear of destructive novelty, and incorporates a key concept from work psychology which he believes interacts with chaos in such a way as to reduce the risk of destructive outcomes. The theory in sum is a triptych; it describes an approach by which control, chaos, and values can be integrated in a way such that organisations could scale back the use of control and reap the myriad benefits of chaos without fearing the worst.

Revue de presse

The ITSM industry is struggling to adapt and solve today's business IT challenges because it is seeking answers from inside the very structure it needs to rebuild. Peter's pragmatic, radical and yet practical approach is exactly what ITSM needs to drag itself into the 21st century of business technology. --James West, ServiceDesk360.com

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Fairday Books
• Date d'édition: 2014
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0992831407
• ISBN 13: 9780992831400
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 140
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible