Organization Theory For General Motors

Organization Theory For General Motors Organization theory is a sociology branch that focuses on the structure, systems and processes within an organization. Organization theory is thus applied by firms and states the activities and goals of that firm. General Motors Company was established in 1908 in Michigan by William Durant. By then it was a parent company for Buick. Later that year, it acquired two motor track companies i.e. the Reliance motor company which was based in Owosso, Michigan and Pontiacs Rapid motor company. However, General Motors Company came to be the market leader in Motor industry in the early 1980s.It started with employing 349,000 employees and had 150 assembly plants. Currently, General Motors produce tracks and cars in over 34 countries worldwide. It sells the vehicles through such brands as Cadillac, Buick, GMS, Chevrolet, Holden, GM Daewoo, Wuling and Vauxhall. The United States is the largest national market for General Motors. Other markets include the China, England, Germany.Russia, Canada and Brazil. Daewoo Auto and Technology Company of South Korea is the main shareholder of General Motors. It has power training and purchasing collaborations with Isuzu motors Ltd and Suzuki Motor corp of Japan. The genuine General Motors accessories and parts are normally sold under GM Goodwrench, GM performance, ACDelco brands and GM brands with the assistance of parts operations and GM service. The GM transmissions and engines are sold via GM power train (Frederick, 1995). General Motors Organizational Structure With regards to its organizational structure, General Motors have transformed form a traditional model to a modern one. The change in the organizational model has had an impact as far as the customers and the local communities of General Motors are concerned. The traditional General Motors Organizational model consisted of a hierarchy with executive or the president on top, then senior managers or vice presidents. Followed by managers and finally the employees. The jobs were usually grouped into departments. The General motors were composed of various independent automakers and each automaker operated differently and competed with each other. The transformation of the organization model saw General motors unified and centralized whereby several individuals work towards achieving a common goal. The corporation is now run in a streamlined manner and the several departments have been abolished (The University of Virginia, 1993). Multinational Company With operations in 34 countries all over the globe, General Motors is a multinational company. Multinational companies refer to those organizations which have operations in many countries. The ability of the General motors to operate in many countries is enhanced by globalization. This entails an ongoing process through which societies, regional economies and culture become integrated as a result of execution and globe network communications. This is usually driven through the combination of technological, political, economic and biological factors. Organization design Managers at General Motors have encompassed the application of the organization design. They have created processes, roles and reporting relationships in order to match the organizations form very closely. It is through the organization design that the company is able to improve probability that members collective efforts will be successful. The General Motors Company have been designed in a beauracratic manner whereby responsibility and authority have been arranged hierachically.This has enabled specialization and grouping of people who performs similar or related tasks in clusters. The bureaucracy in the General Motors have enhanced logic, rationally and most important, the efficiency. It has also had some demerits as far as rigidity and inflexibility are concerned e.g. slow decision making process e.t.c. (Salmon, 1989). Divisional Structure The General Motors Company uses divisional structure. Each organizational function is grouped into divisions. A division which is within the divisional structure usually has all the necessary information and resources within it. The General Motors can thus make a distinction based on geographical aspects e.g. the Russian division and the United Kingdom division and also on its products such as SUVs and another one for subcompact cars with each division having its own engineering, sales and marketing departments. This organizational structure have its own demerits which includes difficulty in product integration i.e. each GM divisional manager concentrates on delivering his or her products and fails to focus on integration and also the employees usually feel a bit affiliated towards their department only and they lacks sense of being a part of the organization. Divisional structure also inhibits the career growth of specialists as technical people may feel alienated from their colleag ues in other divisions and also may lack some exposure to major developments taking place in the organization (Cook, Woollacott, 1995). Organizational Culture The strategic leaders in the General Motors should are vested with the responsibility of creating the organizational characteristics that encourage and reward collective effort. The organizational culture is the most fundamental characteristic as it enables the organization to cope well with its environment. For General Motors to survive individuals must be integrated into a whole and also the organization must adapt effectively to the environment in which it is operating (Lung, 2003). GM External environment General Moors just like many other organizations does not operate in a vacuum. The organization has to be conscious about what happens outside its factory and office walls. These factors that occur outside the business boundaries are known as the external environment. They usually influence the organizations main functions, objectives and strategies. The main factors include the competition i.e. the extent to which other firms competes with the General Motors automobiles. The main competitors of the General Motors ifs the Ford Company. Ford was established in the 1920s by Henry Ford. It has been struggling to overtake General Motors Company using such strategies as lowering prices. Despite these, General Motors have been the market leader due to its variety and good management. To effectively deal with the competition threat from Ford and other automobile makers such as Toyota, the management should aim at improving the quality of the products so as to add the value to their customer s. The company also needs not to flounder in the accounting practices such as derivatives and pensions which have brought huge costs in the General Motors. To improve its management, the General Motors Company has been reshuffling its executives over the years (Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, 1994). The other factors that affect the General motors are; social i.e. how the consumer and communities at large behave with reference to the companys products. The other external factor is legal i.e. the manner in which the legislation affects the organization e.g. the change of the laws regarding employees working hours. Economic is the other external factor which affects an organization. This relates to such issues as taxation, interest rates, government spending, global economical factors and general demand. The other external factor that affects the business is the technology. For instance, the General Motors have to move with the current trends in the motor industry as far as its production processes and product innovation are concerned. Others are ethics i.e. the morality aspect of doing a business (Bordenave, 2003). The Stakeholders approach The General Motors should adopt the stakeholders approach in which case all its stakeholders will be able to know well how the business is being operated. Stakeholders are those people that have an interest in an organization and are affected by the companys omission or commission of its duties. The managers are required to decide on which views from the stakeholders are necessary to listen. The General Motors Company is currently undergoing through some significant transformations as it strives to become more competitive and so there could be several key things that the company could be involved with without the know-how of the companys management. In an aim of maintaining its competitive status, it is important to enquire from some of its more insightful people who may be experts in the industry about the things that should be done by the GM management so as to make the organization healthier, stronger and a more competitive one. To achieve this, the managers can adopt stakeholders approach which believes that the managers in any organization should consider the views from all the companys stakeholders and not relying only on the owners views. This inturn enables the stakeholders to have active interest as far as the business welfare is concerned. Some of the stakeholder approach and the potential benefits that can be achieved by business include offering the customers excellent after sale services and also good value products so as to create customer loyalty, social corporate responsibilities such as providing the locals with sports facilities so s to create good relations with them which may inturn help to increase sales.Also,a company should provide the workforce with good wages so that the employees can feel motivated and perform their duties enthusiastically and effectively( Rothstein,2005). To stay healthier and stronger, the General Motors needs to keep away from its historical tendencies of being in its comfort zone and regarding itself as the greatest. It should focus on achieving and sustained the momentum so as to bring change and improvements.It needs to borrow a leaf from Toyota which is away ahead of GM (Coetzee, 2001). The General Motors needs to innovate and be ahead of regulation i.e. it should take the opportunity and re-establish itself as a leader in Enviromental technology and avoid being regarded as resistant towards progress on emissions and fuel efficiency. This will enable the company to overtake Honda and Toyota which is deemed as leaders as far as this area is concerned (Greenberg Baron, 1995).

Peter I (The Great) Essay -- essays research papers fc

Peter I, was born to Alexis Romanov and his second wife Natalia Naryshkina. Peter grew up in a turbulent period of Russian history. His father’s early death at the age of thirty-one left a bitter struggle for power between the family of Alexis’s first wife’s family, the Miloslavskaias, and Peter’s family. A brief period of reign by Peter’s half brother Fedor (1676-1682) was followed by his half sister Sofia assuming control of Russia as regent from 1682-1689. During this time Peter and his half brother, Ivan V, waited as co-Czars until they came of age. Meanwhile Peter spent many of his formative years in the country estate of Preobrazhenskoe, just outside of Moscow. It was here that Peter fostered his love of warfare, and had his first contact with Westerners. Rather than being educated in the traditional manner, Peter was allowed to play war games. From an assortment of commoners, courtiers, and foreigners Peter formed two regiments, the Preobrazhenskii and Semenovskii, which he outfitted with real weaponry and drilled into what would later become his imperial guard. Also during this time, Peter developed two other passions. The first was sailing, which he first came in contact with by discovering an old English sailboat. The second was the love of all things Western, which came from his frequent visits to the nearby foreign quarter of Moscow. By 1689 Peter had grown to the towering height of six feet seven inches, and was armed with a quick mind and boundless ambition. At...

Review: An Inconvenient Truth

Review : An Inconvenient Truth An Inconvenient Truth is a provocative documentary on global warming by director Davis Guggenheim. The film, based on the multi-media presentation given by former Vice President Al Gore in over 1,000 cities around the world in recent years, presents a disturbing picture of the destruction that global warming is doing to the earth and the horrific future that we are facing if global warming is not addressed.Despite some serious weaknesses, anyone who is concerned about the future must see this film and join in discussion, debate, and action over what is needed to save the planet. At a time when believing in scientific truth is under attack, and when the Bush administration is gagging government scientists from telling the truth, censoring official reports, and sabotaging international treaties, An Inconvenient Truth defends, popularizes and makes accessible to millions the basic science of global warming.Because of this, the film has come under attack. R ight-wing talk show host Glenn Beck compared An Inconvenient Truth, to Nazi propaganda. Holman Jenkins wrote in the Wall Street Journal: â€Å"Mr. Gore’s narrative isn’t science, but science fiction. † The movie presents scientific concepts and evidence about global warming in a clear, concise and often entertaining way. It features great nature photography, graphs, and animation to visually express complex evidence. It even has a clip from Futurama. I can’t think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror, but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling,† A. O. Scott writes in the New York Times review of the movie. In the movie Gore shows a graph that demonstrates a link between CO2 levels and temperature over the last 600,000 years as revealed by samples from polar ice cores. 1 During this en tire period CO2 levels have varied between 180 and 280 parts per million (ppm).The level today is nearly 400 ppm, well above anything that has been seen in over a half million years. And Gore points out that the CO2 levels will rise to 600 ppm if something isn’t done quickly. Gore describes the dramatic changes taking place in the world as a result of global warming. He shows pictures taken 15 to 30 years ago of glaciers that have existed for the last 10,000 years or more and compares them to pictures taken in the last year or two. It is shocking to see the rate at which the glaciers are disappearing!The film shows the famous â€Å"snows of Kilimanjaro† in 1970. A picture from 2005 shows only a tiny sliver of ice remaining. The movie describes how many new scientific studies are confirming that warmer water in the top layer of the ocean caused by global warming is producing more powerful hurricanes. While it is not possible to attribute any specific storm, like Katrina , to the effects of global warming, an MIT study indicated that as a whole major storms spinning in both the Atlantic and the Pacific since the 1970s have increased in duration and intensity about 50%. And all of this means hardship and suffering for the people. While in the world as a whole it appears that global warming has contributed to a 20 percent increase in rain over the last 100 years. However this increase in precipitation is not uniform, and some areas of the world have suffered from drought. It was striking to see the role this drought plays in the horrors now going on in Africa, which are generally written off in the imperialist press as the inevitable nightmares of â€Å"uncivilized† people that the West has no responsibility for.Famine is killing many children and putting millions of lives at risk in the Niger area. In Darfur, a horrific genocide is being carried out. While the causes leading to the genocide and famine are complex, a contributing factor to thes e nightmare situations is changes brought on by global warming. Lake Chad, once the sixth largest lake in the world, which has shrunk to one-twentieth of its former size, with sand dunes covering its bed. The disappearance of the lake has led to collapsed fisheries, lack of irrigation and crop failures, and millions displaced by hunger.While the climate changes produced by global warming are beginning to show themselves today in shocking ways, these are just a glimmer of the changes that scientists predict may come about due to global warming: mass extinction of species, flooding in coastal areas due to melting polar ice, spread of infectious diseases, and the destruction of coral reefs caused by rising CO2 in the ocean’s water. The destruction of glaciers due to global warming does not mean only that our children may never be able to see a glacier.The Himalayan glaciers, which provide more than half of the drinking water for over 40% of the world’s population, are amo ng the most affected by global warming. Within the next 50 years these people may face a massive drinking water shortage as well as food shortages due to lack of irrigation. This is a one scary movie, made all the more so because the threats it depicts are real. And, unlike so many summer blockbusters, no superhero is going to come to save the day.

A Historical Look At The Concept Of Juvenile Justice

1. Chapter 13 is a historical look at the concept of juvenile justice. What did you learn from reading this chapter? At the beginning of the nineteenth century delinquent, neglected, and runaway children in the United States were left with very little guidance and help from the government and the court system. Unlike today there was no voice for those kids who were neglected and left to find there own ways of survival which most likely ment that they would have to turn to crime to survive. If that wasn’t bad enough if these delquient kids were caught there was no sympathy and they were given punishments to the same extent as adults. Rapid growth of urban areas left more kids at risk, which scared the upper classes of society, that lead†¦show more content†¦Like a small crime such as stealing or vandalism would have a child sent to either a community home or asylums. If a child were to commit something more serious they could be put to death which is extreme incase of a child. The beginning of the juvenile justice system began in 1841 when Massachusetts decided to put kids on probat ion to help kids avoid imprisonment and make the system more humane for kids. There were multiple events from that point on that lead to what are juvenile justice system is today. First off urbanization was a high factor due to the fact that so many people were moving into cities to find work in factories and so on. Populations in cities were growing massively and overwhelmed the job market. Families could no longer provide for there kids and they would have to fend for themselves which lead to more crime. Because of this issue people became concerned with welfare of these kids and prominent members of society started an organization that was a real start to getting things in line for kids activities such as the drinking, vagrancy, and delquiency. This group of people realized poor children would end up becoming a massive burden on the countries finances which lead legislatures to pass laws to take children and place them in specialized institutions. Many organizaions opended such a s reforms schools, children’s aid society, orphan trains, and society for the prevention of cruelty to children.