The Vampire Lovers and Hammer's Post-1970 Production Strategy

This article firstly examines the artistic and commercial merits of The Vampire Lovers, which was adapted from the Sheridan Le Fanu novella Carmilla. The production of the film was subcontracted by James Carreras at Hammer to Fantale Films, a company established by Harry Fine, Michael Style and Tudor Gates. The article then proceeds by examining various different and competing artistic judgements that have been made about the film, and also the construction of its unusual dreamy atmosphere. It documents both its UK and US box-office performances and goes on to examine Hammer's post-1970 production strategy in more general terms and in relation to the overall financial performance of the company in the period 1967–72, just before and after The Vampire Lovers. Finally, it examines Hammer's receipt of the Queen's Award for Industry in 1968, the effect of its rolling production-line (or ‘pipeline’) model of film-making on the company's general level of profitability, and some of the consequences of Michael Carreras's assumption of managerial control at Hammer after 1970.

A study of the labor process from a technology transformation perspective: the case of internet virtual teams

This article presents an empirical study of the labor process of internet virtual teams. It argues that organizations with a “horizontally virtual and vertically real” structure face a dilemma in the virtual team labor process. While a culture of engineers, which embodies equality, liberty, and cooperation, is the cultural basis of the virtual team, management is bureaucratic, emphasizing individual interests and hierarchical features. The coexistence of the two leads to cooperation and division of labor in virtual teams. Essentially, this is a compromising institutional arrangement adopted by corporations to triangulate technology culture and managerial control to obtain surplus value. Based on the preceding discussion, this paper ends by proposing a new theoretical framework for studying the labor process under the technological conditions of the internet.

Remote Working in a Public Bureaucracy: Redeveloping Practices of Managerial Control When Out of Sight

This article examines managerial control practices in a public bureaucracy at the moment of introducing remote work as part with a new ways of working (NWW) project. The qualitative study builds on 38 interviews with supervisors and subordinates conducted before the advent of COVID-19. By interpreting interviewees’ conversations about current and anticipated future work practices in the changing work setting, we reveal tacit and hidden practices of managerial control that are currently prevalent in many organizations introducing remote working. Three constitutive moments of the organization’s transformation to NWW are analytically distinguished: (i) how implicit becomes explicit, (ii) how collective becomes self, and (iii) how personal becomes impersonal. Our findings emphasize that the transition to NWW must take into account prevailing institutional logics and must reconnect to a fundamental and often neglected question: What does doing work mean within the particular organization? Negotiating this fundamental question might help to overcome supervisors’ uncertainties about managerial control and provide clarity to subordinates about what is expected from them while working remotely. Finally, we discuss how the transition to NWW may serve as both an opportunity and a potential threat to established organizational practices while highlighting the challenge supervisors face when the institutional logics conflict with remote working.

Evaluation of the Financial Performance of the Municipalities in Slovakia in the Context of Multidimensional Statistics

In some studies, only financial aspects are emphasized, but we also see cases of assessing the financial health of municipalities through socio-economic indicators. Public organizations worldwide have had to increase their financial performance by adopting management practices. Nonetheless, financial performance might be mostly predicted by contingencies that are not within direct managerial control. The purpose of this paper is to identify clusters of municipalities on the basis of agglomerate cluster analysis, the results of which will point to the financial situation of the municipalities in the selected region. The main aim of this contribution is to identify the location of the municipalities of the chosen self-governing region of Slovakia using the clustering method by selected financial indicators. Individual clusters have similar properties and they differ from the characteristics of businesses in other clusters. The results show that organizational and environmental contingencies affect financial performance, but a significant amount of variation in financial performance is unexplained—indicating that management creates better financial health in the municipality and creates a clearer budget for the management, employees, and residents of the municipality.

Semiotic vagueness as a tool for goal fulfilment

Over the past 15 years, ‘platform of values’ texts presenting core values have become common in most Swedish public authorities. This article presents a study of how this genre is understood and used in professional practices. The aim is to show how semiotic vagueness in such texts serves a number of previously under-researched purposes in public organizations, including, rather paradoxically, concrete goal achievement. The framework of critical genre analysis enables the analytical process to move from text to practice, and further to the superordinate level of professional culture. Three different data sets are analysed: 47 ‘platform of values’ texts; a focus group discussion with seven senior civil servants/managers; and a quantitative questionnaire study answered by civil servants from three public authorities. The findings suggest that vagueness serves as a means to exercise managerial control through the promotion of interpretative work and continuous, identity-related dialogues on value related issues. The article argues that even though such uses of the ‘platform of values’ genre may be functional in neo-bureaucratic organizations, it is also problematic when semiotic vagueness is used as a tool for concrete actions such as internal promotions.

Strategic Robustness in Bi-level System-of-systems Design

Robust designs protect system utility in the presence of uncertainty in technical and operational outcomes. Systems-of-systems, which lack centralized managerial control, are vulnerable to strategic uncertainty from coordination failures between partially or completely independent system actors. This work assesses the suitability of a game-theoretic equilibrium selection criterion to measure system robustness to strategic uncertainty and investigates the effect of strategically robust designs on collaborative behavior. The work models interactions between agents in a thematic representation of a mobile computing technology transition using an evolutionary game theory framework. Strategic robustness and collaborative solutions are assessed over a range of conditions by varying agent payoffs. Models are constructed on small world, preferential attachment, and random graph topologies and executed in batch simulations. Results demonstrate that systems designed to reduce the impacts of coordination failure stemming from strategic uncertainty also increase the stability of the collaborative strategy by increasing the probability of collaboration by partners; a form of robustness by environment shaping that has not been previously investigated in design literature. The work also demonstrates that strategy selection follows the risk dominance equilibrium selection criterion and that changes in robustness to coordination failure can be measured with this criterion.

A Discursive Shift - Commissioned Reports in Swedish Health Care Governance

Background: Over the course of several decades, the organization of health care in Sweden, as in many other countries, has changed, from a dominant logic of professional dominance and political control towards managerial control through market mechanisms. A crucial motive was to increase cost efficiency. The Swedish government, as well as regional-level agencies, regularly commissions expert reports that are supposed to form the basis for decisions regarding governance, organization and control models of the health care system.Aim: The aim of this study was a) to perform a descriptive mapping of commissioned reports on Swedish health care governance and b) to perform an in-depth content analysis of a strategic sample of such reports.Method: Initially, 106 reports from both national and regional levels were gathered and analysed. A matrix was constructed, consisting of questions on who had commissioned the report, who had produced it, what problems the report set out to solve and what solutions were suggested. Further, questions were posed on whether the report was research-based and whether ethical assumptions and arguments were presented. Thereafter, a strategic sample of 36 reports was selected for an in-depth analysis, using thematic content analysis. Results: The mapping showed that the aim of the reports varied from giving an overview and to investigating effects and consequences of new steering forms, to more concrete goals, such as suggesting improvement measures. Most of the authors involved were administrators; only in rare cases were they from academic disciplines. Experts with academic degrees were in most cases from economics or business studies. The content analysis resulted in an overarching theme, Dominant discourses, and three categories: Equity as geographical sameness, Knowledge-based management and Management based on trust. Discussion: The analysed reports varied in form and content. They were mostly produced by administrators, but in some cases with input from academic researchers. The contents mirrored dominant discourses of the time but could also express conflicting values and goals. The analysis revealed examples of standardization in care, characterized by requirements to follow national guidelines, but also examples of requests for increased respect for professionals’ competence and experience.Conclusion: The great number of reports implies that the system risks requesting more information than it can handle. Further, it might result in reports where the same message is repeated in different documents, or create conflicts of interest and value tensions between different suggestions. In sum, our analysis showed a discursive shift of two trends or dominant discourses in the analysed reports, from increased standardization to arguments for trust in the system.

Workplace regimes: a sociological defence and elaboration

This article defends and extends the concept of workplace regimes, understood as the existence of identifiable systematic patterns of managerial control. In doing so a conceptual framework is developed for explaining both patterns in control and the dynamics of workplace politics. Specifically, this article elaborates on the approach of Michael Burawoy and extends it through an engagement with Science and Technology Studies (also known as Science, Technology and Society Studies) (STS) and Economic Sociology. The core of Burawoy’s framework is identified as the use of ideal-typical ‘workplace regimes’ to represent historically distinct positions upon a continuum between legitimation and coercion. This core is defended and it is argued that granular firm-level variations in the use of legitimation and coercion would only invalidate the theory if they were to make the identification of shifts in historical tendencies at the macro level of world systems impossible. In fact, it is claimed that once fully elaborated the resultant framework is able to explain commonalities and regularities across seemingly divergent contexts as well as variations within regimes. In the course of making this argument, an important distinction, that has not previously been fully recognised, between workplace regimes and workplace politics is highlighted. Finally, the potential explanatory power of this workplace regime approach is illustrated by drawing on recent qualitative research in the retail sectors of the UK and the US.