Job hours may be determined in part by positional striving to keep up with or outwork others in one's organization. A prisoner's dilemma in which employees have an incentive to work more than a socially optimal level of hours may arise from positional competition. This article uses survey data to estimate how much positional striving increases job hours, and considers how it may contribute to workplaces more in accord with men's than women's hours preferences.

As workplaces become more demographically diverse, there is an increased need for an overarching civic culture that explicitly addresses relations and interactions among various identity groups within an organization. Despite differences in the level of analysis and the standpoints of organization versus subgroup, both the integration and differentiation perspectives on organizational culture are inadequate to address cultural conflicts associated with demographic diversity. Based on a literature review of works by philosophers, political scientists, and educators, the authors suggest that civic culture, which focuses on relational values such as equality and a respect for differences rather than on substantive values such as product quality and timeliness, is an appropriate framework for multicultural organizations. An empirical study found preliminary evidence that people in demographically diverse organizations are more likely to emphasize relational over substantive values and that values proposed for diverse organizations emphasize both differentiation and integration.

Abstract:Donaldson and Dunfee (1999) suggest in a brief discussion that a manager may in some cases rely on his or her own values in making organizational decisions. Our paper examines the role of diversity in values in an organizational context. Our central contention is that value diversity among managers, employees, and other stakeholders on dimensions such as prudence-boldness, clarity-flexibility, and rigor-mercy is highly useful for an organization. We introduce nontechnical models of individual and board decision-making in which value diversity cuts across group interests that would otherwise control the decision. In these models, decision-makers who are influenced by values such as prudence or boldness as well as by their group interests are more likely to avoid suboptimal decisions, because their weaker but not their more intense group interests are likely to be overridden by their cross-cutting value inclinations.

In this paper, we provide an account of past trends and future possibilities in management theorizing that sharply departs from Barley and Kunda's (1992) powerful and troubling “cog in the clock” metaphor. In their important recent historical account, they interpret managerial theory as an ideology designed to uphold managerial control. The current paper extends Barley and Kunda's (1992) inasmuch as it shares their methodology of explaining developments in management theory as ideological responses to underlying contradictions. However, our history departs from theirs in several important respects that, taken as a whole, constitute a challenge to their work.

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