1st international conference on management and organisation – SAM, The Slovenian Academy of Management

THE ORGANIZATION AS A SYSTEM OF DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIPS AND ITS APPLICATIONS

SAM 2010 Conference Highlights

SAM – established a few years ago with the main purpose of developing the knowledge on management and organization in Slovenian enterprises and other organizations – started to realize its mission by different activities: organizing a yearly Slovenian conference on actual problems of organization and management, publishing a Slovenian internet journal “Management Challenges”, organizing discussions on important managerial and organizational issues on internet, and organizing debate evenings on contemporary issues. Members of SAM thought that time is ripe to start some international activities in order to attract the cooperation of foreign scientists on management and organization on the one hand, and to spread the Slovenian ideas on organization and management abroad on the other one. It was the decision of the Executive Board of SAM brought in May 2009 and confirmed by the Assembly of SAM in March 2010 to start two major international activities: organizing the first International conference on management and organization, and publishing the international journal “Dynamic relationships management journal” (DRMJ).

Firstly, the preparations for the organization of the international conference started. The appointed program and organizational committee devoted quite some discussion to the selection of the general theme. Two criteria have been considered as important: the theme should be on important contemporary issues in organization and management, and the theme should be connected to the Slovenian ideas on organization. The committee found out that the area which perfectly fitted both criteria was the system of dynamic relationships between members of the social units and organizational relationships between social units themselves. The word relationship is probably the most important, spoken and written word today within and between organizations. Owing to the Slovenian professor and scientist Filip Lipovec, a consistent theory on organization as composed of dynamic rationality assuring relationships started already in 1980 and was further developed by some other Slovenian authors.

The announcement of the conference appeared on the web pages of SAM (www.sam-d.si) in October 2009, a month later in EURAM newsletter, and the information and invitation to join the conference was sent to authors known for their exploration of organizational relationships. However, information was sent also to the members of SAM and other Slovenian researchers in organization and management.

32 participants joined the conference, 9 of them from abroad. EURAM and its president Peter McKiernan supported the conference. Peter accepted to hold the introductory keynote speech. Prof. Oskar Grün from Vienna Wirtschaftsuniversität, prof. Andersen from Lillehammer University College, prof. Mihaly Görög from Budapest Corvinus University, Mary Soulsby from Nottingham University Business School, Ed Clark from Royal Holloway, University of London, as well as some participants from Swiss and India joined the conference. 20 papers have been prepared for the conference.

Proceedings of the extended abstracts of papers and a CD with full papers as well as some additional papers have been prepared. Tomaž Hovelja, Aljaž Stare, and Rudi Rozman as editors gave final glance to the mentioned materials.

Conference officially started on Friday, June 11, 2010 at Congress center Brdo, which was the place of Slovenian presidency of the EU in 2007 and which hosts most important Slovenian political, economic, and social events. The participants arriving a day earlier spent a nice Welcome cocktail evening a day earlier.

On behalf of the organizer – SAM – the conference was opened by Prof. Rudi Rozman, president of SAM and chairman of its Executive Committee. He most warmly welcomed all participants and explained briefly the purpose of the conference, the process of conference preparation as well as the program of the conference. Aljaz Stare gave a brief information on social events, coffee breaks and lunches, and offered the necessary support to all participants.

The first invited speaker was Prof. Peter McKiernan from St. Andrews University and President of EURAM. Peter talked about the development of managerial research in Europe from the viewpoint of the evaluation of the research and researchers. He explained the British approach to the evaluation into detail and showed its advantages and deficiencies. He warned from the quantitative evaluation of research based only on published articles in journals. The result is that there is a lack of people prepared to take over administrative duties at universities as well as lower quality of lecturing processes. Certainly, many lecturers would prefer to make research and publish articles as their main task. However, given the variety of actual tasks of a lecturer, an alternative evaluation of research, lecturing, and administrative work, as well, would provide a more balanced and fair evaluation of their efforts. The participants discussion revealed a high degree of agreement and showed the existence of the problem in all (participating) countries. The current system (also present in Slovenia) considers mainly the research, which might be a good solution for researchers, but not a suitable one for lecturers. Especially, as it is known that good researchers are often poor lecturers, and vice versa. So, either different evaluation models have to be developed for researchers, lecturers and others or a combined model considering characteristics of different areas has to be developed.

The next plenary speaker was Prof. Rudi Rozman. The title of his paper was “The Slovenian theory and its relationships with associated theories and sciences”. In the first part of his presentation he showed the development of grand organization theories in the past century until today and thus established the Lipovec or Slovenian theory as one step in their development. This theory claims that “organization is a system of relationships of members of a social unit which assures the existence, development characteristics of thus formed social unit and rational achievement of its goals.” Then he tried to prove the validity of the theory by showing that organization can be explained only by organizational elements; relationship representing the basic and smallest element of organization; comparing the theory with other theories and organizational sciences; and naming different applications of the theory to the areas discussed within organization science.

Quite some applications of this understanding of organization have been presented during the conference. They additionally showed the validity of the theory and gave new insight into the areas quite important and much discussed within the organizational science. Milena Kramar Zupan (“Relationship between management and leadership”) thus presented the relationship between management and leadership showing leadership as part of the actuation phase of planned organization, which triggers the start of the business process. Aleša Saša Sitar (“From individual learning to learning through connectivity in social units”) described the relationship between individual and social learning. She emphasized that the synergy of “learning of a social unit” derives from its organization. Vesna Vodopivec (“A model of knowledge management process”) discussed the knowledge management process starting with the general governance-management process and adapting it to knowledge management. She also looked at the process within Scania corporation. In the next paper (“Relationship between strategies and projects”) Milena Sedovnik discussed the followin important issue: why strategies are rarely implemented and projects rarely meet their goals. She sees the solution in understanding and implementing the developed theory of organization: the relationship between strategies (from business world aiming at effectiveness) and projects (from organizational world aiming at efficiency). Also in area of projects Aljaž Stare (“The problem of relationships between stakeholders in the project matrix organization”) discussed the relationships between different stakeholders which should assure a sound implementation of projects. The next application of the developed organizational theory was shown in the paper of Nadja Zorko (“The relationship between corporate governance and management”). She discussed the organizational structures of governance and top management organizational functions, their advantages and disadvantages. The last paper on application of the developed theory of organization was presented by Nina Tomaževič (“Improvement of excellence models through proper managerial process and corporate social responsibility with an emphasis on public administration”). She showed the present model of excellence as based only on experience and not scientifically proven, which hinders further development of the model. Instead, she proposed a proven understanding of management and the concept of social responsibility approach. She built a theoretically sound excellence model and showed its application in the area of public administration.

We can add two more contributions connected tightly to the developed theory of organization. Prof. Miran Mihelčič (“What organizational relationships are – in economic terms – especially relevant?”) discussed some other approaches also emphasizing the importance of relationships and very close to the developed theory of organization. These, too, claim that organization is a sets of dynamic, rationality assuring set of relationships. He discussed the relationships and showed the important influence of organization on economic results. He pointed out the necessity for correlation analysis of influence of relationships on the economic results. An example of such correlation analysis has been presented by Marko Pregeljc (“Measuring the quality of an organization and the organizational implications for achievement of the social unit’s goals”). In his contribution he showed how to measure the quality of organization, and how does quality of organization impact firm performance.

The other two plenary presentations have been very interesting, too. Prof. Oskar Grün (“Challenges for the future organization”) has explained the results of a Boston Consulting Group study, which surveyed more than 1000 managers and organization experts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The study shows that uncertainty, competitive pressure, and complexity shape the business environment today. Companies have to react faster, more flexibly and efficiently at the same time. The key to successful organization is the combination of two areas: effective foundation that is as stable as possible (hard dimensions of organization: simple and robust organizational structures, projects, costs, etc.) and excellence in the relevant soft organizational competencies (leadership, cooperation, and change management).

Prof. John A. Andersen discussed “Seven stupidities in organization literature”. He denied the existence of common goals in organizations. Instead, stakeholders have their own individual goals. He argued that organizations are not like humans, cannot learn, are not creative, and do not have any human characteristics. So far, there are no flat organizations. Some are flatter than the others, but they are all hierarchical. It is also not quite clear how big the contribution of managers to the success of the enterprises is. The goals and strategies are always set by owners.

Prof. Ed Clark and Prof. Anna Soulsby presented the paper “The social construction of organizational disintegration: identity dynamics and restructuring the post-socialist enterprise”. On the case of a Czech state owned enterprise they showed the relationship between an organization’s environment, the dynamics of organizational identities held by senior and middle managers in the organization, and the actual processes of restructuring that an organization undergoes.

Prof. Mihaly Görög (“What is beyond the myth of best practice in managing projects”) argued that for many reasons the best practice approach, which is often promoted, is rarely appropriate. Even more, it often represents the reason for higher rate of project failure. It also leads to the reluctance of practitioners to use the theoretical bases of applying the project management toolkit.

Oliver Tsuruta (“Organization of networks – the case of Swiss financial services providers”) discussed the characteristics of organizational networks and reasons for their development. Then, he tried to show the incorporation of Swiss banks into different types of networks.

Satya Brata Borgohain (“An integrated approach on industrial relations and employees’ learning perspectives – towards organizational excellence and experience sharing model of a Public sector enterprise in India”) showed the case of Power grid corporation of India, which was faced with the problem of managing employees from different locations and cultures. Due to its innovative and excellent HRM practices the corporation received various rewards.

The other participant from India, Surjit Bhujabal (“Management of tigers’ conservation in the wild in India – the case of Similipal Tiger Reserve”) discussed the problem of tigers’ conservation in India and showed the efforts at different organizational levels (state, country, and tiger reserve) to prevent the further decrease in the number of tigers population and possibly to achieve its increase.

Let me mention that papers have not been presented in this report in their order of appearance. All together, there have been two plenary sessions (90 minutes each) with 4 plenary speakers and 5 discussion sessions (90 minutes each). The time available was split between authors’ presentations and discussions. All sessions have been well organized and conducted. All participants were satisfied with the content and organization of the conference, the location selected, and with the accommodation, as well as with accompanying social events. Quite some of the participants expressed their satisfaction in a written form and their interest to participate at the next conference, too.

As far as the organizer – SAM – is concerned we share the opinion that the objectives of the conference have been met and we look optimistically to the next conference.

Rudi Rozman

Ljubljana, July 2010