Management Practices
Management Practices Fellows
The research will explore the realities of managing in the creative industries from different stakeholder perspectives. Managing is conceived as a series of activities with the aim of producing a performance in organizational and artistic terms.
The mainstream literature on management practices tends to focus on the bright side: “best practice”, “promising practice” and “world class techniques” that lead to positive organisational outcomes. However, management practices will inevitably produce a dark side: secondary outcomes that are unexpected and potentially harmful to organisations and society.
To be internationally competitive, organisations develop competitive strategies for existing and new markets. One way that organisations are achieving this is through the development of new business models. Business models are used to structure business networks, transactions, money making and knowledge sharing activities, as well as to define and select markets to serve.
The creation and dissemination of new management practices has been shown to be central to improving productivity and economic growth by enhancing business efficiency. Often depicted as the R&D wing of innovative management practice, the management consulting industry has been central to the co-creation of innovations such as BPR, TQM, eBusiness and outsourcing and embedding them in client organisations.
Management practices are accepted recipes, methods or techniques used to achieve organizational goals. Much previous research has focused on practice adoption, i.e. the emulation of practices that already exist. However, when environments change rapidly, 'best practices' often do not exist and organizations have to create new practices.
My research experience to date has led me to question from an Operations Management perspective the content and design of Lean as its use is being transferred from a manufacturing to a public sector environment. In particular, the research over the past few years has led to questioning if organisations have viewed themselves as being ready to engage with Lean or, have merely implemented the concept as a response to policy through the use of some of the tools and techniques.
This AIM Fellowship looks at management practices in project-based environments. The UK government is investing in major infrastructure projects and programmes. These include the £45 billion Building Schools for the Future Programme, £16 billion CrossRail and £9 billion London 2012 Olympics.
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