Values at Work: Ambivalent Situations and Human Resource Embarrassment

The Manchester School brought with it a fundamental methodological heritage that continues to be generally relevant today and may be particularly pertinent to the study of business organizations, a field often described by narrow instrumentalism and an implicitly management-centric perspective. In t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social analysis 2010-12, Vol.54 (3), p.126-138
Main Author: Krause-Jensen, Jakob
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ambiguity
Anthropology
Audio equipment industry
Business management
Business structures
Companies
Consultants
Corporate culture
Corporations
Cultural anthropology
Cultural differences
Cultural heritage
Cultural values
Denmark
Enterprises
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Field study
Human resource departments
Human resource management
Human Resources
Legacies
Management
Professional standards
Role distance
Schools
Television sets
Theory
Turner, Victor Witter
Values
Water management
Work Values
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The Manchester School brought with it a fundamental methodological heritage that continues to be generally relevant today and may be particularly pertinent to the study of business organizations, a field often described by narrow instrumentalism and an implicitly management-centric perspective. In this article, through an ethnography of the Human Resource Department of the Danish firm Bang & Olufsen, I argue that the legacy of the Manchester School can be used as an analytical vantage point to open up a rich field of inquiry. I further suggest that we need to move beyond both managerialism and Manchester in order to analyze adequately the pervasive ambiguity in the experience of consultants working as middlemen in value-based corporations.
ISSN:0155-977X
1558-5727
DOI:10.3167/sa.2010.540308