Do managers take decisions for the good of the organisation or do they Essay

Do managers take decisions for the good of the organisation or do they behave the way they do for other reasons - Essay Example In the process of evolution, it is highly likely that the business developed from a one man enterprise or family business to a partnership, then to a public limited or private limited company. Ultimately it branched out from a local to regional and regional to international undertaking. It is highly probable, even inevitable, that the evolution and change in outside form also bring about changes in the internal handling of business decisions and operational practices. This becomes necessary as the tasks of managing the different aspects of the business become too complex and heavy for one man or a number of partners to manage alone. Ultimately as the business expands, it has to reinvent itself as a model of modern business enterprise. This will invariably involve the assignment or scheduling of tasks to professionally hired managers, with expertise in production techniques, Human Resources, marketing and sales, finance and accounting etc. Each departmental head becomes a prized resou rce, responsible for meeting his departments and workers goals and assignments. Authority and responsibility become interlinked, but seldom has it been seen that the upper management is taken to task for targets not achieved or a failed project. Rather, more often than not it is the middle and lower management and supervisors/ workers that are made to bear the brunt of the axe and the shame associated with it. This state of affairs often makes one stop and think- do managers take decisions for the good of the organization or do they behave the way they do for other reasons? This paper will argue that the interests of the organization are not always uppermost in the minds of the managers, rather, as they gain and wield power- managers tend to collude with each other for their own collective benefit, while in many cases insisting that failure was because of the ineptitude of people on the lower rungs of the ladder. I would rather state that managers keep their own interests uppermost in their mind at every turn. They are interested in their own survival, going as close to the top as they can, and toppling others who they consider as competition. The lower management or their subordinates are just pawns in the game (Rosen, 1988). The Evolution of the Modern Business Enterprise If we look at the evolution of a modern business, we see that it is quite likely to have its beginnings as a sole proprietorship or family business, in which every family member has a share of responsibilities. Or it could have started as a partnership, where two or more partners pooled together their skills, resources and business acumen to offer products and services to the general populace or those that needed their wares. The disadvantage here was that of unlimited liability, or cases where even their personal property could be attached to repay debts if the business failed. In time this led to the evolution of the corporate form of business ownership. As the Industrial Revolution swept through Europe and the Americas, investment was needed from both public and private sources to raise capital for infrastructure and the laying of railroads, transport and communication, factories and warehouses. The beginning of assembly line production at the Ford Motor Company meant that things could now be mass produced after breaking down the process into a series of steps. Then F.W.

Post-Keynesian and Austrian criticisms Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Post-Keynesian and Austrian criticisms - Essay Example The Neoclassical perspective of competition narrates the determination of prices, output and income distributions in markets via equality of supply and demand. This theory is based on three fundamental assumptions: 1. People have rational preferences defined over all variables that can be identified and associated with a value. Rationality in this context refers to the fact that each agent’s objective to operate in self-interest and maximize their individual benefits. This naturally leads on to the next assumption. Based on these assumptions, neoclassical theory of competition essentially is a doctrine that postulates the allocation of scare resources by firms to maximise profit which in turn, leads to a wide range of economic activity. Equilibrium is the result of individual optimization procedures. Utility maximization by consumers provides individual demand functions or correspondences which can be aggregated under certain assumptions to form the market demand function. Similarly, the market supply function is obtained from the optimization exercise by firms. The equality of these identifies the set of prices and quantities that are optima for producers and consumers alike and this is the competitive equilibrium. It should be convenient for future reference to note here that profit maximization requires a firm’s marginal cost is equal to its marginal revenue (MC=MR) since this corresponds to the maximum point on the total profit curve. Under perfect competition there are a very large number of firms in the market, each selling an identical product. Consequently, each firm caters only to an insignificant share of the market and is thus only a price taker. The profit maximization leads to P=MR=MC. There can be supernormal or positive profits only in the short run. In the long run, there is free entry and as a result, only zero profits can be sustained. In contrast, the monopolist can make positive profits both in the long run as well as the short