New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc
THE ‘LEARNING BUREAUCRACY’: NEW UNITED MOTOR MANUFACTURING, INC. By Paul S. Adler Downloaded from http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~padler/ THE ‘LEARNING BUREAUCRACY’: NEW UNITED MOTOR MANUFACTURING, INC. by Paul S. Adler School of Business Administration University of Southern California Los Angeles 90089-1421 Tel: (213) 740-0748 DRAFT 3.1 April 1992 Forthcoming in Barry M. Staw and Larry L. Cummings (eds.) Research in Organizational Behavior, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Acknowledgements: The research on which this study is based would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of managers, workers and union officials at NUMMI. Gary Robinson helped transcribe taped interviews with them and discern the key points. This article has benefitted from the comments of several NUMMI people and from the responses of many friends and colleagues: Chris Argyris, Joel Beinin, Christian Berggren, Bob Brenner, Clair Brown, El Buffa, Bob Cole, John Ettlie, Steve Frenkel, Don Gerwin, Meg Graham, Jan Hopland, Sandy Jacoby, Ed Lawler, Ann Majchrzak, Ruth Milkman, Michael Reich, Dick Scott, Bill Simon, David Stern, Steve Wheelwright, Bob Sutton, Lowell Turner, and Stephen Wood. My thinking has also been stimulated by the reaction of colleagues to presentations at the USC, Harvard Business School, NYU, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. My thanks to all these people, many of whom still disagree. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 3 RESEARCH METHODS.........................................................................................
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