James A. Waters's research while affiliated with Chestnut Hill College and other places
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Publications (14)
This study tracks the strategies of a retail chain over sixty years of its history to show how that vague concept called strategy can be operationalized and to draw conclusions about strategy formation in the entrepreneurial firm that grows large and formalizes its structure. The conclusions focus on patterns of strategic change and on contrasting...
This exchange of views on the study of decisions and change in organizations was prompted by the question, 'Does decision get in the way?', which is asked in the opening piece by Henry Mintzberg and James Waters. They distrust the concept of decision itself; so does Richard Butler, but he tries to prevent any throwing out of the baby with the bathw...
Based on analysis of interviews with managers about the ethical questions they face in their work, a typology of morally questionable managerial acts is developed. The typology distinguishes acts committed against-the-firm (non-role and role-failure acts) from those committed on-behalf-of-the-firm (role-distortion and role-as-sertion acts) and draw...
When managers use moral expressions in their communications, they do so for several, sometimes contradictory reasons. Based upon analyses of interviews with managers, this article examines seven distinctive uses of moral talk, sub-divided into three groupings: (1) managers use moral talk functionally to clarify issues, to propose and criticize mora...
The lack of concrete guidance provided by managerial moral standards and the ambiguity of the expectations they create are discussed in terms of the moral stress experienced by many managers. It is argued that requisite clarity and feelings of obligation with respect to moral standards derive ultimately from public discussion of moral issues within...
Descriptions of how managers think about the moral questions that come up in their work lives are analyzed to draw out the moral assumptions to which they commonly refer. The moral standards thus derived are identified as (1) honesty in communication, (2) fair treatment, (3) special consideration, (4) fair competition, (5) organizational responsibi...
Based on the results of open ended interviews with managers in a variety of organizational positions, moral questions encountered in everyday managerial life are described. These involve transactions with employees, peers and superiors, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. It is suggested that managers identify transactions as involving per...
How do strategies form in organizations? Research into the question is necessarily shaped by the underlying conception of the term. Since strategy has almost inevitably been conceived in terms of what the leaders of an organization ‘plan’ to do in the future, strategy formation has, not surprisingly, tended to be treated as an analytic process for...
It's hard to plan your career development or oversee that of your subordinates if there is no clue to finding the path. This company, while recognizing that such matters cannot be laid out with precision, has tried to help its junior managers and its mentors by developing a detailed description of the abolities and qualities required for each senio...
Ensuring that all employees are operating in their organizations according to the highest ethical standards can be a difficult challenge for senior managers. Conventional internal control systems have been and will continue to be inadequate for this purpose. Concern for the dangers of possible illegal and unethical practices must be built into ongo...
Citations
... El enfoque de este artículo abarca también la Teoría de la Planificación Estratégica del autor Mintzberg y Waters (1982): ...
... "Tomt prat" Mönstret som tecknas i intervjuerna visar att Svenska kyrkans tystnadskultur skapas och förstärks av normer och strukturer som beskrivs i termer av kyrkans kram-och förlåtelsekultur. Enligt Bird och Waters (1989) är kännetecknet på en tystnadskultur att det finns outtalade normer som inte får ifrågasättas eller synliggöras. I intervjuerna är det dock flera som uttrycker en önskan och förhoppning om att tystnadskulturen och "den gamla ordningen" ska brytas och ersättas med en jämställd och maktmedveten kyrka. ...
... Even the most ethical and well-intentioned senior managers would face a challenges in determining how to best control and demonstrate the managerial integrity in their organizations [18]. A tool they typically employ to respond to this challenge is through the internal controls. ...
... Similarly, we are well-equipped to test student knowledge through examinations of facts, what Anderson (1985) called declarative knowledge. Although critically important within a program of assessment, declarative knowledge measures focus heavily on cognitive-type learning (Bartels, Bommer & Rubin, 2000;Waters, Adler, Hartwick, & Poupart, 1983) to the exclusion of affective and skill-based learning (Kraiger, Ford & Salas, 1993). Here again, we are not suggesting that evaluation of students' "technical skills" (e.g., database management, financial calculations, etc.) is not important; rather, they are more readily measurable through traditional assessments and represent a great deal of declarative knowledge. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/278813322825751-1443485684557_Q64/Nancy-Adler.jpg)
... Decision-making is considered as the most important and most frequent activity of managers, in which a wide range of management researches have tried to shed light on all its dark dimensions, factors, and aspects. Decision-making is also known as the root of many other important and popular areas of management, including strategy formulation (Mintzberg & Waters, 1990), and has a decisive place in the success or failure of any organization. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/296087945531393-1447604275191_Q64/Henry-Mintzberg.jpg)
... In this perspective, to plan means adapt the organization to the environmental contingencies (Donaldson, 2015). Adaptation is essential because organizational environment can have low, temperate or high uncertainty (Mintzberg, 1982(Mintzberg, , 1990Mintzberg & Waters, 1990). There is a type of planning and therefore a particular organizational structure (Mintzberg, 1982(Mintzberg, , 1990Mintzberg & Waters, 1990), based on the uncertainty faced by the managers. ...
... Strategising during the planning phase was described by participants as largely deliberate and integrated with the policy from corporate head offices. This observation confirms research on strategizing models by Mintzberg and Walters (1985). The focus was placed on conservative, defensive strategies such as cost-cutting and meeting the contractual requirements of existing clients in a global economic recession: "We sort of focus internally on that [contracts]. ...
... Those cultural and "traditional" traits of moral standards, in turn, raise the question of whether they can be deliberately created, extinguished, or managed in organizations or groups of people. The answer from Waters and Bird (1987) to this question favors a social interactional perspective that, at least at first glance, denies the possibility of straight management of moral standards without a deeper and wider effort toward organizational cultural change. According to them, moral standards, as conventions, …are not made by fiat; they grow and develop initially as individuals openly or tacitly agree to be guided by specific standards, as they act in keeping with these standards, and as they renew this agreement by their willing deference to them (Waters and Bird 1987, p.19). ...
... Conversely, many scholars have observed that human behaviour may not always reflect self-interest and that people are also motivated by affective and normative commitment (Meyer & Allen, 1991), trust (Colquitt & Rodell, 2011) and social exchange (Blau, 1964). Waters and Bird (1989) were among the early scholars in the behavioural ethics field to differentiate between unethical actions as 'for the firm' and 'against the firm'. They opined that-although all actions can be argued as eventually furthering self-interest-some actions are primarily carried out to benefit the firm, at least in the short term. ...
... For example, in a software engineering context, a user of an application who values inclusiveness can expect this value to be present in the application (Figure 2). Social sciences have proposed several models that identified human values and divided them into several categories [78,11,18,83,84]. Among those models, Schwartz's model [83] is considered the most complete as it covers the largest number of values compared to other models [18]. ...
