Monthly Archives: September 2004

Novices and experts

It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was “commenting”:http://www.petersmith.org/diary/archives/2004/07/27/on-becoming-a-critically-reflexive-practitioner.html on a recent edi­tion of the “JME”:http://​www​.sage​pub​.com/​j​o​u​r​n​a​l​.​a​s​p​x​?​p​i​d​=​181 (well actu­ally it was a couple of months). Any­way, I’m just read­ing the latest edi­tion 28(5), that is a spe­cial edi­tion on _problem based learning_. The edit­ors’ intro­duc­tion, Cit­ing Gij­selaers and Woltjer, talks about the dif­fer­ent ways of …

09/23/2004 – 09:13 | By Peter | Posted in Teaching | Comments Off

Leadership and Supermen

I had a really good class in MGMT 101 this morn­ing, they were anim­ated and talk­at­ive (in a good way). I won­der how much that was a con­sequence of hav­ing them all sit together at the front of the class. “Marie Wilson”:http://staff.business.auckland.ac.nz/mwilson once reminded me of the dif­fer­ence that occurs in class dynam­ics as a …

09/22/2004 – 13:47 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 101 | Comments Off

Confronting the brutal truth

I think one of the most power­ful read­ings of the course, *par­tic­u­lar at this point in time* (with the Com­merce Comis­sion, take-overs, insolv­ent firms, firms who are just real­ising that they might not win) is the one that is indic­ated in the Black Book (and in the Red Book?) by: _Also see web­site– “http://www.jimcollins.com”:http://www.jimcollins.com (Con­front­ing …

09/21/2004 – 21:25 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 302 | Comments Off

The buck stops where?

In a thought­ful “comment”:http://www.thereflectivepractitioner.org/armi/archives/000514.html CR says: bq. …stu­dents in the course can’t really be reas­on­ably expec­ted to have a detailed know­ledge of com­pet­i­tion law and hence we rely on what DPE say… and I would agree with that; it would be unreas­on­able of DPE to expect stu­dents (com­merce stu­dents?) to have detailed know­ledge of the …

09/18/2004 – 12:47 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 302 | Comments (1)

A variation on the prisoner’s dilemma

Let us sup­pose there there exists a small town, which has two bakers. Cur­rently, the bakers sell their bread for $1.50 per loaf. Both bakers have been in the busi­ness a long time, and their cost struc­ture for bread is pretty much the same. It costs them $1.00 to pro­duce a loaf. So, their profit …

09/17/2004 – 23:04 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 301 | Comments Off

Commerce Act 1986

Some rel­ev­ant law bq.. *27.Contracts, arrange­ments, or under­stand­ings sub­stan­tially lessen­ing com­pet­i­tion pro­hib­ited* # No per­son shall enter into a con­tract or arrange­ment, or arrive at an under­stand­ing, con­tain­ing a pro­vi­sion that has the pur­pose, or has or is likely to have the effect, of sub­stan­tially lessen­ing com­pet­i­tion in a mar­ket. # No per­son shall give …

09/13/2004 – 20:58 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 301 | Comments Off

Who’s afraid of Virgina Woolf

Lisa and I went to the “Maid­ment Theatre”:http://www.maidment.auckland.ac.nz/ last night, and saw _Who’s afraid of Vir­gina Woolf_. I enoyed the “movie”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061184/ when I saw it, but I enjoyed the play even more. Whilst the whole caste were good, I think that Hera Dun­leavy deserves a spe­cial men­tion. She gave an power­ful per­form­ance in the role …

09/12/2004 – 10:32 | By Peter | Posted in The Arts | Comments Off

Politics and the English Language

I was talk­ing with “Nigel Haworth”:http://staff.business.auckland.ac.nz/nhaworth today, and he poin­ted me towards an essay on improv­ing our use of the Eng­lish lan­guage by George Orwell. As far as I can tell, the piece is long out of copy­right, so I have repro­duced it here.

09/09/2004 – 20:58 | By Peter | Posted in Readings | Comments Off

Western and Eastern thought

I sub­scribe to a num­ber of email lists, which is prob­ably passé in this era of “RSS”:http://​www​.xml​.com/​p​u​b​/​a​/​2​0​0​2​/​1​2​/​1​8​/​d​i​v​e​-​i​n​t​o​-​x​m​l​.​h​tml, but any­way, one of the lists I reg­u­lar read is MG-ED-DV, the “man­age­ment edu­ca­tion and devel­op­ment list”:http://aom.pace.edu/lists/l-mg-ed.stm of the “Academy of Management”:http://www.aomonline.org/. Last week, one of the post­ings was by “Fred Nickols”:www.nickols.us and poin­ted me to a “review”:http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev294.htm …

09/07/2004 – 22:07 | By Peter | Posted in Readings, Teaching | Comments Off

Some notes on institutional fields

Defin­ing a field: “identify com­munit­ies of organ­iz­a­tions that par­ti­cip­ate in the same mean­ing sys­tems, are defined by sim­ilar sym­bolic pro­cesses, and are sub­ject to com­mon reg­u­lat­ory pro­cesses” (Scott, 1994, 71) “those organ­iz­a­tions that, in aggreg­ate, con­sti­tute a recog­nized area of insti­tu­tional life: key sup­pli­ers, resource and product con­sumers, reg­u­lat­ory agen­cies, and other organ­iz­a­tions that pro­duce …

09/07/2004 – 15:32 | By Peter | Posted in Readings | Comments Off

Strategic management and the philosophy of science

Paula Jar­z­ab­kowski (2004) has recently had one of art­icles pub­lished in Organ­iz­a­tion Stud­ies. Her art­icle is based on an earlier “work­ing paper”:http://research.abs.aston.ac.uk/working_papers/0212.pdf she wrote a few years ago. Good on her for get­ting it in to a tier-one journal. As it hap­pens, Paula will be vis­it­ing the “department”:http://www.business.auckland.ac.nz/comwebcontent/1/7/122/3579.html in Novem­ber and will be giv­ing a …

09/07/2004 – 14:47 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 301, Readings, Strategy | Comments Off

Discussion forums

As reques­ted, I think it was by Helen, I’ve opened up a dis­cus­sion on Cecil to allow you to exhange ideas with one another about the up com­ing writ­ten case ana­lysis of Carl Zeiss Jena (CZJ). I hope you find it use­ful. If it is use­ful, I was won­der­ing if you would like me to …

09/01/2004 – 19:50 | By Peter | Posted in MGMT 302 | Comments Off