Culture: The Efficacy of Different Modes of Consultation

Comparative Management Theory: Jungle, Zoo or Fossil Bed?

Earlier reviews of the state of comparative management theory are considered and summarized and lead to the following conclusions: the literature suffers from an excess of simple empirical reportage; theoretical development is weak in the middle ground and at higher levels; there is a bias away from ethnographic work; perspectives tend to be narrow and partial. Some progress is visible as a result of the unifying work of Hofstede but its contribution also entails new avenues of enquiry about the determinants and consequences of culture. Some middle-range theory building is now occurring in specific fields such as expatriation, leadership, and HRM techniques, but it remains tentative. Dilemmas stemming from altern ative frameworks of meaning and complex causation pose severe epistemological challenges and require new approaches to comparison. The economics-based positivist paradigm is seriously inadequate for such challenges, but dangerously imperialist. A new, more theoretically sophisticated, approach is advocated and outlined as a route for progress.

Achieving Excellence in Indian Organisations: New Opportunities for Psychologists

This article presents a meta-analysis of organisational development (OD) efforts in India, by examining OD outcomes at the organisation/system level as well as at the societal/national level. Intervention reports have shown that OD has been used in India in a variety of contexts and with a variety of organisations in the public, private, rural and voluntary sectors. The extent ofsuccess of such interventions has been measured in terms of organisation-level and individual-level outcomes, and the extent of institutionalisation, which is a result of the first two. Using clinical assessment metbodology anchored to qualitative criteria it was found that the organisational outcomes were positively assessed in 60% of the cases and the national-level outcomes were positively assessed in 31 % of the cases. Qualitative observations indicated that interventions which utilised the socio-technical mode were based in urban industrial settings. Further, interventions lacked built-in evaluations, there was a decrease in OD efforts after the 1970s, thechangeachieved was not sustainable in the long-term and the cultural context was often ignored. The implications of these findings are also discussed.