The study ranges across economic history and theory, assimilating such contemporary business practices as teamwork and total quality management. While fairly general, it offers a summary review of some current ideas about business management. Suitable for comprehensive business collections serving general readers and undergraduate students. Choice Postmodern management, according to Wallace, moves beyond the shortcomings of the bureaucratic management style pervasive in American business today. Bureaucracy, the standard model of organizations, is too inflexible, cost-rigid and job defensive to survive in a postmodern world.
Bureaucracies rely on paying workers rigid rates to do specific jobs.
According to a postmodern management model, a partnership between employees and stockholders would lead to more productive work by relating pay to corporate performance and by encouraging more flexible and cooperative teamwork. Wallace provides a workable guideline to ease the transition from the bureaucratic form of structure to postmodern partnership. His argument, that dependence on hired labor for permanent staff is at the root of dysfunctional bureaucracy, will provoke discussion and interest among corporate executives, teachers and students of management and organizational behavior, and others interested in today's workplace. Wallace begins with a history of how bureaucracy first arose as a natural response to coercive work. Exploring the consequences of the bureaucratic model on the economy, Wallace shows how the rigid labor costs played a role in causing the Great Depression.