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Power, Authority, and Leadership: A Proposal for Organizational Theory in the Post-Bureaucratic Era

2022 , Ciardi, Lucía , Scalzo, Germán

Organizations are privileged structures in contemporary society given that they contain and manage a large part of individuals' activities. This is so much so that a company's success depends on an adequate organizational structure. As such, this chapter studies the depths of organizations' political dimension with a conceptual, philosophical-political, and historical investigation on the development of the relationship between power and authority within organizational theory. It does so with the aid of Spanish author Juan Antonio Perez Lopez's organizational management framework. Starting from the crisis of the modern bureaucratic model, in which rationalization continually increases, and power is separated from authority, this chapter maintains, to the contrary, the hypothesis that, in the post-bureaucratic era, a new paradigm for organizational theory is needed for studying the relationship between power and authority. This paradigm has the advantage of reflecting a healthy way of governing organizations focused on human development. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

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Autonomy and subordination: virtuous work in light of aristotelian practical knowledge in organizational theory

2021 , Pinto-Garay, Javier , Scalzo, Germán , Ferrero, Ignacio

This paper aims to integrate the concept of autonomous and subordinated work into Aristotelian organizational theory by enhancing the epistemological framework of neo-Aristotelianism and by adding a Thomistic interpretation of organizational practical knowledge. We sustain that, in order to advance our understanding of the firm in terms of excellence and the common good, the concept of practical knowledge applied to organizational theory requires reflection on the nature of work in modern organizations. For this, we will explain (i) how an organization that aims for excellence is most appropriately defined as a community of autonomous work, (ii) how practical knowledge in organizations must be defined considering work as deliberative production and, finally, (iii) how productivity in organizations is best described when work is envisioned in terms of autonomy and subordination. ©2021 Business & Professional Ethics Journal.