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Having promised a blog post on management’s perspective of global issues, I still haven’t found the right articles to help me. Unable to clearly articulate how management as a discipline would approach a global issue, I thought it was mainly because management deals with organisations – therefore actors in its ontology are well defined and my issue of the global digital divide to a certain extent involves the non-existence of organisations, and a system that transcends other organisations. Having done a bit more thinking I now believe that management as a discipline would not directly tackle the issue of the global digital divide, but focus on the actors who were actively involved in trying to achieve something to do with the global digital divide.

This is where the idea of strategy comes into play. And to find more information on that I looked at chapter 8 in Boddy’s introduction to management.

Boddy defines strategic management as that which ‘enables companies to be clear about how they will add value to resources, even though much is changing in their world. Strategy links the organisation to the outside world, where changes in the competitive (micro) and wider (macro) environments bring opportunities and threats.’ There are two main aspects of strategy – its process and its content, and both exist in a context. Boddy states that ‘whatever their context, strategists hope that their work will enhance performance by clarifying and unifying purpose, reducing uncertainty, linking short-term actions to long-term goals and providing control – since setting goals provides standards again which to measure performance’.

There are three perspectives on the strategy process – planning, learning and political. The planning view involves a formal process based on a vast amount of information. It is based on the assumptions that events and facts can be observed objectively and that people respond rationally to information.

The learning view sees strategy as an emergent or adaptive process, more suited for businesses in rapidly changing sectors or environments which require a more flexible approach.

In the political view, the notion of power, conflict and ambiguity are introduced, where strategic management is ‘not a scientific, comprehensive or rational process, but an iterative, incremental process, characterised by restricted analysis and bargaining between the players’.

After finding various organisations that actually work on addressing the global digital divide, I believe I will be able to provide a sound discussion on how the discipline of management would approach such a topic, the results of which will be found in my report in January 2013.

References

Boddy D. (2010) Management: An Introduction, 5^th edition, Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall