Business Management Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

Business Management - Research Paper Example While costlier than the previous method, the experiment demonstrated promising results, only to be shut down by company executives (Beer, 9). An overemphasis on top-down management forced ASDA’s mid- and lower-level managers to abandon their entrepreneurial spirit and to quit providing upper-level management with valuable insight from the customer and store levels. This is evident in one manager’s quote, â€Å"†¦the stores were full of people who did care, and who knew how to run a store, but were not allowed to do it,† (Beer, 6). The behaviors and activities of executives that led to this culture within ASDA are best stated by the terminology ASDA store employees chose for ASDA’s corporate headquarters: the Dream Factory. As one store manager stated, â€Å" †¦ASDA House never bothered to find out whether their policies had realistic time scales or even whether they were achievable at all,† (Beer, 9). Clearly, top executives had become so focused on the corporate lifestyle they created, complete with â€Å"hunting and partying,† that they were actively choosing to ignore advice from store-level management that could have potentially saved the company (Beer, 6). A human resource manager captured this environment best, stating, â€Å"The top managers at ASDA knew the company had lost focus, but they didn’t seem to care,† (Beer, 6). Clearly, important decisions were waiting on Archie Norman in the winter of 1991 that would affect the future of the company. The important question is what is to be done? How should ASDA turn itself around? I believe the most important lesson new ASDA executives could learn is that top-down, dictatorial management failed in ASDA. The Perry Barr experiment demonstrates the potential impact skill teams and compensation based on skill can have not just on productivity and morale, but on changing the toxic culture at ASDA. Skill teams show employees that upper-level management doesn’t care

Mixed Feelings - Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism Essay

Mixed Feelings - Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism - Essay Example In exploring the politics of sensationalism and affect, I presume that the process of naming and assigning social and cultural meanings to bodily responses, such as "sensations," has a history. My project is thus part of the larger enterprise of producing a history of the body and of physiological experiences such as affect and sexuality. Recent scholarship in this area has been profoundly revisionist because it has provided histories of phenomena that had previously been considered natural or outside the work of culture. The importance of Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, for example, resides not just in its specific details, but in its claim that sexuality has a history and is not a natural or prediscursive entity. 1 Tracing the cultural construction of the body or sexuality has revealed how ideologies are naturalized by the often invisible work of attaching meanings to physical processes. I have studied the sensation novel and the politics of sensation in order to parti cipate in this broader project of exploring the political consequences of constructing the body, sexuality, and affect as "natural." Thus, I am less interested in offering a descriptive history of the sensation novel than in considering how a discourse about the "sensational" or affective serves as a vehicle for the promulgation of ideologies of gender and mass culture. And I have found in Victorian criticism of the sensation novel an opportunity to examine how and why "sensationalism" acquired its new meaning and a bad reputation. What I have uncovered points to a more general theory of the politics of sensationalism.