\"What are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?\" So began Douglas McGregor in this 1960 management classic. It was a seemingly simple question he asked, yet it led to a fundamental revolution in management. Today, with the rise of the global economy, the information revolution, and the growth of knowledge-driven work, McGregor's simple but provocative question continues to resonate-perhaps more powerfully than ever before. Heralded as one of the most important pieces of management literature ever written, a touchstone for scholars and a handbook for practitioners, The Human Side of Enterprise continues to receive the highest accolades nearly half a century after its initial publication. Influencing such major management gurus such as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, McGregor's revolutionary Theory Y-which contends that individuals are self-motivated and self-directed-and Theory X-in which employees must be commanded and controlled-has been widely taught in business schools, industrial relations schools, psychology departments, and professional development seminars for over four decades. In this special annotated edition of the worldwide management classic, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Senior Research Scientist in MIT's Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, shows us how today's leaders have successfully incorporated McGregor's methods into modern management styles and practices. The added quotes and commentary bring the content right into today's debates and business models. Now more than ever, the timeless wisdom of Douglas McGregor can light the path towards a management style that nurtures leadership capability, creates effective teams, ensures internal alignment, achieves high performance, and cultivates an authentic, value-driven workplace--lessons we all need to learn as we make our way in this brave new world of the 21st century.

The Human Side of Enterprise.

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED. Steven Pinker, Penguin, New York, NY 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3.There's been a shooting in a Sikh Temple this morning. A lone gunman entered a Colorado theater and opened fire. Syrians are now engaged in civil war. Faced with daily news stories of death and destruction, it is easy to believe that things are getting worse. Not so, explains Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker in his new work, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.Pinker combines in-depth historical research with rigorous psychological research to argue the case for a decline in global violence. As Pinker aptly points out, many people look at our age as one of unprecedented violence and terror to be viewed with pessimism. Drawing on historical analysis, psychological research and findings from related sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and economics Pinker argues that the data paint a very different picture. In the first chapter, Pinker takes the reader on a quick journey through the history of the world pointing out that the ancient and medieval worlds were very different than the world we live in today. Numerous prehistoric skeletons bear evidence of very violent deaths. Ancient people destroyed entire tribes. Romans carried out violent executions. Medieval Knights led lies of violence and other Europeans meted out horrendous punishments for acts which might not even be judged worthy of condemnation in today's democracies. Finally, the early 20th century saw two World Wars before the long peace ensued. In light of that history, Pinker argues that perhaps we should reconsider our assumptions about our own world.In the first section of the book, Pinker identifies six historical trends which could have led to declines in violence. The first trend he calls the Pacification Process by which people gave up nomadic hunting and gathering lives for lives of agriculture in cities. Competition and anarchy in the prehistoric world made violence necessary for survival. The development of agriculture called for greater cooperation between individuals and the formation of governments to impose order created a world where violence was not always in one's best interest. Statistical analysis supports the idea that the emergence of states lead to a decline in violence. The second trend, the Civilizing Process, is an idea he developed from the work of Norbert Elias. In the late medieval and early modern periods, etiquette and social norms began to be important in social interactions, economics and technology began to advance, and governments began to become more centralized. This trend was also accompanied by a decline in violence. The third trend is the Humanitarian Revolution during which people began to increasingly find practices, such as torture, capital punishment, war and slavery, morally questionable. Empathy, compassion, and peace became important characteristics. The fourth trend is the Long Peace, which stems from the realization that since World War II no two major world powers have gone to war and, in spite of predictions to the contrary, nuclear weapons have never been used. …

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

The Human Organization: Its Management and Value.

Music as Cognition.

The transformation of energy systems is influencing economic policy agendas all over the world, particularly in industrialized countries. In this process, Germany has taken a pioneering role, and hence the technical innovations, legal frameworks, and business models established there are also of interest for other countries trying to achieve broader use of renewable energies. Energy cooperatives have been an important building block in the energy transition in Germany, although their practical importance is neither quantitatively nor qualitatively reflected in the academic literature. Drawing on recently collected data, this paper presents an overview of German energy cooperatives in terms of organization, financing, and membership. We then review literature from economics and the social sciences that has been used to analyze cooperatives on various levels in other fields. We discuss how these theories could be applied to create a better understanding of energy cooperatives, and we derive a preliminary research agenda for their analysis. We also assess the scope for interdisciplinary work among economists, sociologists, and other disciplines.

Renewable energy cooperatives as gatekeepers or facilitators? Recent developments in Germany and a multidisciplinary research agenda

This study explores to which extent the members’ assessment of their cooperatives’ degree of success are related to various member attributes, with special reference to the members’ perception of their participation in the governance of the cooperatives. Three categories of member attributes are identified: Satisfaction with the profitability of farm operations, Age, and Experience from board work. The cooperatives’ degree of success is measured as members’ commitment towards cooperatives, and members’ trust in the board of directors. The data originates from a mail survey among Swedish farmers. A total of 2,250 farmers received a questionnaire. The response rate was 52%. The results indicate differences in members’ cooperative commitment and their trust towards directors to be due to farm operations profitability, age and experience as directors. After adding members’ perception of their participation in the governance as a covariate, most of the other differences are explained by this variable. Age is still to some extent associated with trust towards directors, as older farmers have less trust in directors.

https://emnet.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/conf_EMNet/2007/papers/Oesterberg_Hakelius_Nilsson.pdf

Members' perception of their participation in the governance of cooperatives: the key to trust and commitment in agricultural cooperatives.

It is proposed that to reach a state of generative learning, an organization requires a “generative learning manager”: a person who understands the importance of development and directing of knowledge. The purpose of this study was, therefore, both to explain mechanisms like knowledge distribution, goal setting and symbolic convergence from a cognitive psychological perspective on organizations, as well as to reach conclusions on a hypothetical model for the function of generative learning management. The study was accomplished by a theoretical analysis. The results suggest that a goal setting manager – who has the ability to help the organization communicate more as a network, where procedural and declarative knowledge, as well as multi‐intelligent aspects of knowledge can move in a more widely distributed procedural fashion between co‐workers – has the potential to become a generative learning manager.

Generative learning management: a hypothetical model

The purpose of this study was to examine how shifting attention from the experience of music listening or body movement can work to overcome functional fixedness, i.e., to make people improve on ideational fluency the ability to combine knowledge objects, or fragments of these, to form new concepts compared to a traditional workplace meeting. The basic assumption was that music and body movement influence emotions to make people improve on ideational fluency compared to traditional meetings. The result, presented in this report, indicated that music listening suppressed functional fixedness to greater extent than a formal meeting, which in turn was a better choice compared to physical activity.

The Influence of music experience and body movement prior to ideational fluency.

Schools are institutions responsible for teaching children new skills and knowledge, the ability to think about future targets, and, when problems become complex, how to apply explorative thinking ...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07303084.2020.1866719

Peter Österberg

Papers

Members' perception of their participation in the governance of cooperatives: the key to trust and commitment in agricultural cooperatives.

Generative learning management: a hypothetical model

The Influence of music experience and body movement prior to ideational fluency.

Dancing: A Strategy to Maintain Schoolchildren’s Openness for Idea Generation

Creative Learning in Vida AB: A Case to describe organizational learning as a function of management style