Richard Daft's Organization Theory - Assignment Example

Things have never moved so fast and threats and opportunities have never been so immense. Competitors have to be efficient and different to survive and stay on the top. Daft continues and presents the most recent developments in organizations' design - structures and management methods that have only emerged lately in response to the turbulence in the environments and competition worldwide. The rise of an emerging managerial philosophy of efficiency, system, and process is, according to Daft, reflected in the forms of internal communication that serve as mechanisms for managerial coordination and control.

These have developed as a product not only of changing organizational needs but also of the technologies available to support them. Forms of organizational communication can thus be organized into specific and recognizable 'genres' such as letters, memorandums, meetings, agendas, proposals, etc. These technologies as used by principals and senior managers within colleges not only to account for but also to promote and disseminate, specific leadership visions and objectives. The overflow of more general managerial philosophies into the realm of globalization in recent years has included the need to demonstrate competence, compliance, and effectiveness to a variety of audiences.

Going with Daft's idea1, the purpose of my study would suggest that this need for visible competence is now a dominant theme, driven by external inspection, funding and governance mechanisms as well as the service culture expectations of users and other stakeholders. Such 'audit cultures' (Strathern, 2000) are increasingly common in both public institutions and private enterprises, reflecting the need to perform a new kind of accountability based around the twin goals of economic efficiency and good practice.

The concept of the audit, previously constrained within financial applications, has now expanded to become a ubiquitous element of daily life, with the learning and skills sector being no exception. The result is a raft of 'technologies of accountability'. The pan-national corporation, with its inherently complex structure, is the organizational form most severely affected by globalization. It is therefore important for the management of such corporations to improve the control and coordination of the corporations' spatially dispersed subsidiaries.

Information technology (IT) has been hailed as an important tool in changing traditional control and coordination processes in complex environments. IT is being used for changing the nature of the relationship between headquarters and subsidiaries in a manner that makes the pan-national corporation more global in orientation. This is occurring as operations and decision-making processes in subsidiaries are redesigned in order to improve global management and local responsiveness