The
Value Stream
Conveners:
Sarah Stookey,
stookey@verizon.net,
Craig Prichard,
c.prichard@massey.ac.nz
For managers the problem of
how economic value is created, appropriated and distributed
can be both problematic and taken for granted. For researchers
and scholars it is a core conceptual and empirical puzzle. In
recent times its profile in management and organization
studies has been raised significantly. It was the subject of
the most cited academic papers of the 1990s (Grant, 1996;
Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Huselid, 1995) and since then the
search for concepts that identify new value forms and the
dynamics of intangible, tacit and knowledge-based capabilities
and resources has intensified and been extended (Sollo and
Winter, 2002; Jacobies and Winter, 2005).
Outside academic circles
‘value’ has received even greater attention. A broad new
liberal movement has swept the western economies bringing with
it increased financialization of social and political life.
This new liberalism includes shareholder activism, the
development of the personal finance industry, new financial
tools and modes of assessment for organizations, and the
State-sponsored marketization and consumerization of most
social and political issues. All this has extended the
centrality of the consumer and the individual as become the
primary locus of responsibility over health, happiness and
wellbeing. How to ‘add value’ to one’s life, one’s
relationships, one enterprise and one’s nation has become
standardised vernacular. At the same time we have witnessed
corporate scandals, product recalls, state corruption, a broad
debt and housing crisis, and growing exclusion of many from
market society.
But the new liberalism has
not gone unopposed. Counter movements have sprung up under the
banners of ‘fair trade’, ‘anti-globalization’ and more
recently ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’. Under such
banners multiple groups and constituencies including farmers,
small business people and consumers have confronted world
leaders, corporations and supra-national bureaucrats.
Alongside direct action such movements are also contributing
to the debate on ‘value’, raising popular consciousness about
the social, political, economic and environmental genealogies
of food, clothing, shelter, technologies and energy use. In
some cases they have forced States, firms and individuals to
reconsider narrow definitions that simply identify value in
terms of prices, things and monetary units. They propose
redefining value to incorporate political, social and
ecological relationships between people and between people and
their environments. Some of this work challenges
institutionalized ‘governance' structures that organize the
distribution of economic surplus in the family, the firm and
the economy.
Management researchers’
response to these new relational definitions of value has been
mixed. For many the liberal definition of value is
unquestioned. The global sourcing of profits, the
neo-colonialism of expatriate management, the immiseration of
life in the intensive factory regimes in cheap labour
locations, and disparities of wealth between those at various
points in these global value chains are understood as global
strategic choices based on competitive resources and
capabilities, or as workplace cultural dynamics, or (when
things don’t go as planned) as issues of organizational trust
and commitment.
Of course many management
academics question this orthodoxy. Sumantra Ghoshal’s strident
call (2004) to overhaul the management curriculum in ways that
problematise the liberal shift, and re-establish the
legitimacy of the corporation as an institution is a
compelling example to the contrary. Other colleagues have
voiced similar concerns. Jay Barney, senior spokesperson for
the resource-based view, made the follow comment on the
incongruity of relations at the core of the firm to a
strategic management audience in 2006 (AoM Program Session #:
548, Atlanta, 2006).
"One of the strong features
of the resource-based view of the firm in strategic
management, which is moving to refine and develop its rigorous
engagement with the relationship between resources and
capabilities that firms develop and the profits that flow from
this, is [analysis of] the distributive processes involved.
This might be framed in terms of the question of property
rights. [Here] you recognise that when stakeholders make
investments in a firm, and the major investors are always
employees and suppliers, there is an anticipation of a return
on residual cash flow. You realize that employees are not
legitimately able to make a claim on this residual return."
What is Barney suggesting?
He is not calling for a reconsideration of the wage labour
relation. But he is asking his colleagues to extend far
greater theoretical and empirical sensitivity to those
institutionalized practices that direct economic surpluses in
some directions and not others. Another interpretation might
be that the problem of distributive justice, fuelled by new
liberalism’s contending movements, has begun to reach into the
work of senior researchers in management and organization
studies (see Mackey, Mackey and Barney, 2007).
Yet despite the connection
with the concerns of critical management studies
(exploitation and distributive justice) the problem of value
has been largely left to mainstream researchers. Critical
management researchers have tended to ignore the dramatic and
broad ‘rise of value’ in both its liberal or critical
formulations or to regard it as new modes of power relations
(exceptions include for example Levy, 2005). This workshop
stream is a response to this imbalance. It aims to advance
discussion, thinking and particularly writing that both
revisits existing critical approaches to value in organization
studies, and to extend these in new and engaging directions.
With this in mind we include here a brief list of possible
stream topics.
The stream would welcome
contributions that extend and refine, either empirically,
analytically, theoretically or politically, critical analysis
of:
References
Arvidsson, A (2005)
'Brands, A critical perspective' Journal of Consumer
Culture, Vol 5(2): 235-258
Coff, R (1997) 'Human
Assets and Management Dilemmas: Coping with Hazards on the
Road to the Resource-Based View', Academy of Management
Review, 22(2): 374-402
Coff, R (1999) 'When
Competitive Advantage Doesn't lead to Performance: The
Resource-based View and Stakeholder Bargaining Power',
Organization Science, 10(2): 119-133
Collins, D (1995) 'A
Social-Political Theory of Workplace Democracy: Class
Conflict, Constituent Reactions and Organizational Outcomes',
Organization Science, 6(6): 628-643
Fleetwood, S (2001) 'What
kind of Theory is Marx's Labour Theory of Value? A Critical
Realist Inquiry', Capital and Class, 73:41-77
Fraad, Harriet (2003)
'Class Transformation in the Household: An Opportunity and a
Threat', Critical Sociology, Volume 29 (1): 47-65
Ghoshal, S (2004) ‘Bad
Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices’,
Academy of Management Learning & Education, 4(1):75–91
Grant, R M (1996) ‘Toward a
Knowledge-based Theory of the Firm’, Strategic Management
Journal, 17:109-122
Hairong Y (2003) 'Neoliberal
Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow
through Labour Recruitment Networks, Cultural Anthropology,
18(5):493-523
Harney, S. (2006)
'Programming Immaterial Labour', Social Semiotics,
16(1):75-87
Harvie, D. (2006) ‘Value
Production and Struggle in the Classroom: Teachers within,
against and beyond Capital', Capital and Class, 88:1-32
Huselid, M. A. (1995) ‘The Impact of Human Resource Management
Practices on Turnover, Productivity and Corporate Financial
Performance’, The Academy of Management Journal, 38(3):
635-672.
Jacobides M. G. and
Winter, S. G. (2005) ‘The
co-evolution of capabilities and transaction costs: explaining
the institutional structure of production, Strategic
Management Journal, 26:
395–413
Jones, Campbell and André
Spicer (2005) 'Outline of a genealogy of the value of the
entrepreneur' in Guido Erreygers and Geert Jacobs (eds.)
Language, Communication and the Economy. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Levy, David L. (2005)
“Offshoring in the New Global Political Economy”, Journal
of Management Studies Vol. 42(3)
Lowendal, B and Revang, O
and Fosstenlooken, S (2001) ' Knowledge and Value Creation in
Professional Service Firms: A Framework for Analysis',
Human Relations 54(7):911-931
Mackey, Mackey and Barney,
(2007). ‘Corporate Social Responsibility And Firm Performance:
Investor Preferences And Corporate Strategies’ Academy of
Management Review, 32(3): 817–835.
Nahapiet, J and Ghoshal,
S. (1998) ‘Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the
Organizational Advantage’, The Academy of Management Review,
Vol. 23, No. 2, 242-266
O'Donnell, D, Tracey, M,
Henriksen, L B, Bontis, N, Cleary, P, Kennedy, T and
O'Regan, P (2006) 'On the "essential condition" of
intellectual capital: labour!' Journal of Intellectual
Capital, 7(1): 111-128
Prichard, Craig (2007)
'Responding to Class Theft: Theoretical and Empirical Links to
Critical Management Studies', Rethinking Marxism, 19:3,
409- 421
Sirmon, D G, Hitt, M. A.
and Ireland, R. D. (2007) ‘Managing Firm Resources in Dynamic
Environments to Create Value: Looking Inside the black Box’,
The Academy of Management Review, 32(1): 273 - 292
Sorensen, A B (2001) Toward
a Sounder Basis for Class Analysis', American Journal of
Sociology, 105, 6: 1523-58
Stookey, S (2006) Doing
Money: The Social Construction of Money in Management Theory
and Organizational Practice. Unpublished dissertation. UMASS
Amherst.
Tsai, W and Ghoshal, S
(1998) 'Social Capital and Value Creation: The role of
interfirm networks', Academy of Management Journal,
41(4):464-476
Zollo, M. and Winter, S G
(2002) Deliberate Learning and the Evolution of Dynamic
Capabilities, Organization Science, 13(3):339-351
The
motivation for the workshop is simple: neither the PDW nor the
main program events at the AOM give us enough opportunity to
engage in in-depth discussion of papers in critical management
studies. So the workshop will be organized as a series of
parallel streams (working groups). Each stream will consist of
people who have contributed papers on a well-defined topic
(perhaps with some invited discussants), and the group will
work together over the course of the day-and-a-half, going
around the room discussing the papers in turn. In order to
maximize discussion, authors will not present their own
papers, but rather participants will be asked to present and
discuss each others' papers. We will also arrange a couple of
plenary sessions and some social time where all the
participants come together.
We are
yet to finalize the cost of the workshop, but based on present
estimates, we anticipate that the workshop will cost between
$400 and $550 for each participant, depending on whether they
choose to stay for two nights or three, and whether they
choose single or double rooms. The fee will include meals
(lunch and dinner on 7th and all 3 meals on 8th). We will
finalize the details quickly on this front.
If you
wish to be part of this stream, please submit a 250 word
abstract to
stookey@verizon.net, and
c.prichard@massey.ac.nz by
January 15th, 2008. Please note that submissions
can be concurrently on review at the regular AOM 2008
conference as well. The submission of an abstract constitutes
a good-faith agreement to submit a full paper for the stream
by June 1, 2008 if the paper is accepted. The final paper
should be less than 8000 words in length.
NEW
DATES (as of 30 December 2007)
Feb 20: Abstracts of papers submitted to stream conveners
March 10: Submissions accepted/rejected
June 15: Full papers submitted by this date for inclusion in
the Workshop.
